While doing his usual circumnavigation of the playroom, Conor had stopped at a large basket of Lego on the floor. He paused and pushed the cat’s nose into it. Reaching in, he then picked up a little Lego person. He studied it carefully. “Here is a man. With black hair and yellow shirt.” Putting the man into the same hand as the stuffed cat, he bent down and looked into the box again.
“Garden things!” he cried with unexpectedly delighted surprise. He lifted up some Lego flowers.
“You sound happy that you have found some flowers,” James said.
Conor bent back over the box. “And trees. Flowers and trees. Things for a garden.” He rooted energetically through the basket.
Astonished by Conor’s sudden animation, James leaned forward to watch.
“Many trees. See?” Conor said. He didn’t make eye contact but he was definitely interacting with James. As he took them from the basket, he set them up on the edge of the bookshelf.
“Yes, there are lots of trees in there and you are finding them.”
“There are trees on the moon,” Conor replied.
This was said with equanimity, slipped in quickly as if it were nothing more than another descriptor. “Three trees on the moon.”
As the toy trees ran out, Conor’s cheerfulness waned. He pawed through the Lego, just in case one had been missed but said nothing more.
Finally he straightened up and began arranging the ones he’d found in a very straight line along the bookshelf. He counted them, not aloud, but with his finger.
“What’s this?” he asked. It was the plastic road sheet, folded up on the shelf where he was lining up his trees.
“That’s the plastic sheet with roads drawn on it,” James said. “Remember? We’ve looked at it before. When it’s laying out on the floor, children often like to drive toy cars along the roads or make houses from Lego and create neighbourhoods.”
Clutching the cat to himself with one hand, Conor used the other to gingerly pull the sheet off the shelf and let it fall to the floor. It was heavy-gauge plastic, so it fell open easily, but it fell upside down. This seemed to mesmerize him. He bent and straightened the upside-down sheet out.
“The roads are on the other side,” James commented.
Conor rocked back on his heels and looked at it. “I think it’s the moon.”
James recalled Conor’s previous encounter with the plastic sheet and his odd echolalic comments regarding the moon landing. It had seemed a bizarre response. James could see no connection between the white sheet or, indeed, the plastic Lego trees and the moon.
Taking the Lego man from his other hand, Conor attempted to stand him up on the sheet. The plastic wasn’t quite flat, so the toy fell over. He tried again. Again it fell over. Frustrated, he shoved the little man under the sheet until it disappeared completely from view.
This pleased him. Conor pulled it out and then put it under again in a way that reminded James of his earlier fascination in covering up toy animals with tissues. However, as with so many other things Conor had done in the playroom, an intensity then began to overtake his actions and he repeated the behaviour several times obsessively.
Obsessive and compulsive behaviour is normally associated with anxiety and James noticed the way the boy’s muscles were beginning to stiffen with anxiety as he moved the figures. Conor brought a hand up and flapped his fingers frantically.
“Ehhh-ehhh-ehh-ehh-ehh. Ehhh-ehhh-ehh-ehh-ehh. Ehhh-ehhh-ehh-ehh-ehh,” he cried.
“I hear your worried noise. You feel frightened when you think of the moon,” James ventured.
The boy began to rock back and forth. Bringing his hand up, he waggled his fingers in front of his face.
“Conor?”
“The cat knows,” the boy murmured.
James watched him. Knows what? What does that damned cat know?
When clarifying his therapeutic philosophy, James had come up with his mantra “in here you decide”. In his experience, people only made substantial and lasting changes in their lives when they themselves actively decided to do it, but even more importantly, if they felt they were in control of doing it. So many of the difficult issues people had with life were about control.
This was the cornerstone of his approach with children, who were by default powerless, but he found it equally important to apply this principle to his adult clients. Consequently, he tried to say nothing to Laura or Alan that might make them feel he was pushing them in one direction or another.
When Laura came in for her next session, James decided not to mention that he had read The Wind Dreamer in case it made her feel on show as a writer.
“I’m curious about this imagination of yours,” he said instead. “From what you said the other day, it’s clear you spent a lot of time with Torgon and her world. How did this work out in relation to other children? Kids at school, for example. Did you have many friends when you were that age?”
“All this stuff going on in my head probably makes me sound like I must have been a lonely, friendless kid but it wasn’t really that way,” Laura said. “I didn’t have a lot of friends, but I didn’t want that. I loved my own company. With my kind of imagination, I always had something fun and exciting to do.
“I did have one really good friend and I think this was because she loved pretending as much I did. Her name was Dena. I met her in first grade and we were absolute best friends from that moment.
“We were an odd couple in some ways. While I didn’t live in a conventional family setup, the Meckses were solidly middle class and everyone had solidly middle-class expectations of me. For instance, both my brothers were honours students all the way through school, so my dad expected to see straight A’s on my report card too. It was all so different for Dena. She was the middle child of seven and came from this brawling, beer-drinking cowboy family who were all packed into a dinky house on the alley behind Arnott Street. Every Friday night all her aunties and uncles and cousins would come in from the country and they’d spill out into the yard, playing cowboy music on their guitars and getting drunk. Dena was a dead loss at school. She could never understand math and was always in the lowest reading group, and yet she was perfectly happy. No one in her family ever cared what she got on her report card. Often as not she forged her mother’s name on it and they never even saw it. And they didn’t seem to notice.
“What Dena and I did have in common were our imaginations. When Torgon came, I told Dena about it straightaway. I knew she’d understand. And she did. She thought it was wonderful. Almost immediately we made up our own game based on Torgon. We played it in this enormous cottonwood tree on the alley beside Dena’s house. Shimmying up to great heights, we fought off hostile natives and tigers and bears and all the other fierce things we could think of, even though these things didn’t really seem to exist in Torgon’s world. Horses didn’t exist there either, but even so, in our game I gave Torgon the most beautiful grey horse to ride that was just the colour of her eyes.”
Laura smiled. “None of this was the real Torgon, of course. It was just our play version. Like pretending to be Dale Evans didn’t resemble the real Dale Evans’s life. It’s hard to express that – how the game we were playing was different to the real Torgon and her world, even though both of them were inside my head. But Dena always understood the distinction.”
James nodded. “She sounds like she was a very good friend.”
“Yes, she was. I lost touch with her when I moved away at twelve. I’ve always regretted that.”
The poignancy of other times, other roads not taken intruded. The small silence grew thoughtful as it lengthened.
“I suppose I