Transference

Transference is a psychological phenomenon where a person unconsciously redirects feelings, thoughts, and behaviors from one significant figure in their past to another, often a therapist. 

AI generated definition of Transference

Content Warning:

Threat

Transcript

Transference

After the terrible incident, daddy proposed a walk to smooth things over. I had felt very gloomy as I tied my shoelaces on the doorstep. But once we were on our way, to pick up organic fruit from a pre-arranged collection point as it happened, I began to perk up. 

As I would soon discover, the brown parcel of pears, apples, grapes, and a quince, was stowed, tied with string, in a place of safe deposit, among a number of named and alphabetically ordered hessian bags of vegetables. To boot, there was a crate of spares: bright, bulbous bell peppers, long, fat carrots, huge young onions, surplus lettuce heads, kale and celeriac bunches that people didn’t want. 

            It had rained that afternoon, and the streets were still wet. The sunshine, originating in the west but general in the sky over the estate, had about it a depressing radiance. The wet pavements and foliage reflected it eagerly. We walked up the quiet street, its stillness disturbed by no activity but ours, save for the occasional dripping from the wet oaks. I can’t be sure about what I was wearing. My blue raincoat and red scarf I think, one of my short-sleeved collared shirts, the one with “lots of spots” probably- to use my brother’s phrase. My jeans had a torn gusset, because of my recent weight-gain. My father was in his lined shirt-sleeves, trousers with braces, Chelsea boots.    

            He was telling me about the idea in psychology of Transference. In one sense, I heartily agreed with the idea that we “transfer” onto particular persons an idea we have of them, that we estimate erringly and react against what we estimate about a person based on their appearance. It's something in us we see staring back at us, something we cannot believe is not external. But part of me, a significant part, was also resisting the concept. I said that I believed people’s true nature was visible, that it was possible, at least to some extent, to read people, to tell what they are from the image they present. 

            Nearing the little cabin, or lockup, or shed, or whatever one wanted to call it where our fruit parcel was stored for collection, we noticed an unattractive man shambling towards us. He appeared from the moist luminosity, indistinct and spectral at first. As he came closer he took on a weight, a ragged realness. Even though his eyelids were puffy and red, and the jelly of his eyes was retreated, sunken, I could see that his eyes were glazed over with drink. He wasn’t especially dishevelled; leather jacket that was only slightly tattered, a concealed football scarf that bunched up in his jacket, (blue and white tones peeped out but not the team insignia), jeans and sneakers, close shaven, a short crop of hair just beginning to silver. But his whole being, his stiff trudge and his squished facial features, evinced this quality of disapproval, of grimness. He had in his hand a can of cheap lager. He did not sip from it. I wondered how long it had been since his last sip. 
 His hold on the can was tight enough that it had crushed it a little: a dent marked the unremarkable intensity of his clasp. 

            The man passed us. He seemed like he didn’t have anywhere he was going but wanted to look like he did. I turned my head once, just as he disappeared around the bend we had taken to get to where we now were. He did take a sip, reluctant and necessitated, of that beer. 

            “Case in point,” my dad said. “I take one look at that man and think he’s a reform-voting racist. Maybe he is, in actual fact, a youth worker with three black children. Do you see what I mean?”

            I didn’t.

            “Yes,” I said. “I see what you mean.”

The cemetery was in two parts, two gated, churchless plots either side of the main road, each densely populated with graves. I wondered how recent the most recent burial. I wondered who’s was the newest body to be buried there. I recalled a visit to this eerie place, some seven or eight years ago. I remembered reading the inscriptions. The headstones were generally mossy, and the stones themselves grey and sad with elemental decay. The inscriptions were generally faded and ill-defined but none of those I was able to read told of lifespans concluded later than 2003. 

            On the side of the road where we were already walking, was the cabin, a tiny building with a grey roof and a dark green door. 

            “In there?” I asked.

            “Yes,” dad answered.

            I found this all very peculiar. 

“This is very peculiar,” I said.

“It is?” dad said.

I said yes, yes it was. 

There was a little pin-locked cage which had the key inside it. Dad struggled briefly to punch in the code. 

“Did you cancel first?” I said.

“Yes,” dad said. “Code is 3147 by the way.”

“Okay,” I replied. “Why are you telling me that?”

“So you can collect the order yourself, you little prick. In future weeks.”

I hadn’t understood that this was to be an ongoing arrangement. 

The little safe was unlocked and the lid dropped open with a click. Inside was a single key on a single keychain, a single fish-fob dangling beside. 

Dad opened the door without comment. The cabin was fenced in by some railings and my dad had stepped back into a claustrophobic confinement, the face of the ajar green door in front of him, the crooked railings behind him. 

“Go in,” said dad.

“What?” I answered.

“Get inside, get our parcel…it should be under Driscoll.”

“Okay…” and I entered the tight, shelved space. 

I immediately felt the door closing behind me. For whatever reason, I didn’t resist it. Dad had to partly close the door, in order to escape from his confinement between the door and the railings. When I backed against the inside face of the door and felt resistance, I assumed, correctly in a sense, that he had suavely extrapolated his escape into a practical joke, or at least the beginnings of a joke. But before I quite knew how it had been effected, the resistance I then felt, tangibly, was not the press of my father’s embarrassingly superior strength, it was that of a locked door.

“Hey,” I called out. “That’s not…  seriously…  please…”

The turning of the key had made no sound at all. There I suddenly was, stuck, in almost total darkness, among a general stink of vegetables. There was one narrow window, out of which I could see the cemetery grass littered in a few leaves, but the angle of the sun was such that no light entered through it. 

            I heard the click of the small deposit box from which we had obtained the key to the shed. Then, a grunt of satisfaction issued from daddy and away he began to tread. I kicked the door once or twice, Receiving no response, I heard the sinister diminuendo of his footsteps. He allowed them, their fading scrunch, to teach me some kind of lesson. Daddy’s way of extracting satisfaction from acts of performative sadism was invariably deadpan. As such, it always was extremely difficult, as extremely difficult as I am currently finding it, to explain the humorous intention behind his actions, whether from his or my own point of view.

            I said something to the effect that I wasn’t bothered, that I could quite happily bide my time in this little box of darkness, nibbling on the produce if I got hungry, until someone else came to pick up their organic fruit or vegetable order. 

            There was still no response. A bird landed on the cabin roof, I think, and chuckled musically. I watched the way the light moved on the graveyard grass through the narrow window; that thin, meagre window was like the eye of the needle through which I needed to pass to attain salvation.

            “Come on,” I called out. “Seriously. This isn’t funny anymore…”

            Nothing. Not a syllable, or a sound, or a footfall. 

Time passed, and every minute was intensely felt and registered. It was hard to know when to panic. Still I continued to believe that it was a joke. The lengths to which he was going did surprise me, it surprised me that it was his wish to inflict this level of fright upon me. Even as I began pounding the door, punctuating my pounds with the occasional Help, I still believed I was a victim of humour, not malice. The space between the racks of shelving and the street-facing wall of the structure was that of barely a single body. I looked down at my feet, they occupied what space there was. I could manage a joyless spin, a morose twirl, but no more than that. No step was possible, in any direction. It was just like being on the tube, the central line perhaps, during rush hour. Except rather than perspiring, chattering bodies boxing me in, it was silence, and darkness, and bags of vegetables.     

            I tried screaming at first but embarrassment and poor technique stifled the scream. The front of my boot made a very decent, perforating sound on the metal door. It was quite apt to disturb the quiet of the streets. If I was persistent enough, someone would notice it, someone would come out and investigate. And the code! Yes, 3147. It suddenly came back to me, just when I needed it. 3147. I went into my pocket for my phone, to make a note of the code so I wouldn’t forget it come the time when the good samaritan did finally show. My phone! Of course, I could hardly believe how silly I’d been, I could just call someone. Mummy, for instance. Or the police. But, of course, the phone wasn’t there. I was so mixed up, I’d been thrown into such a flurry of confusion and uncertainty that I found myself quite unable to make rational decisions. My phone had something jammed in its charging port and was as good as useless until the detritus could be removed. Hence I’d left it at home. And even if I had it with me it wouldn’t have helped one iota. I felt glad that I’d left it at home; having it with me and being unable to use it would have been more agonising, it certainly would have rubbed salt into the wound of my current, my considerable predicament. 

            I still believed that at any moment daddy was going to come back, that I would hear his crescendo of footsteps, and the unlocking of the little key safe, and the unlatching of the metal door. And there daddy would stand in the melancholy evening, then my capturer, now my rescuer. Someone did soon come by, but it wasn’t daddy. It was a timid, weepy-voiced, elderly woman, with a stick. The third, different sound chimed in percussively among the slow tread of her footsteps. 

            “Hello!” I called out, as loudly and clearly as I could. “Hello! Can you help me! I’m locked in.” 

            I banged the door with my foot a few times. It took an age but I finally sensed her approach, and heard her reply.

            “Hello?” she said, creakily uttering it to the locked building. 

            “Hello, there…madam,” I think I said. “Someone locked me in here, as a joke, but I need you to…”

            “Pardon?” she said.

            “Madam. Please open the door. You need to open the little key safe using a pin-code and then unlock the door with the key. The pin-code is 3147. Just punch in to the pin-pad 3.1.4.7.”

            There was a protracted, pregnant silence. She had heard but hadn’t understood; so, to save elderly face, just pretended that she hadn’t heard.

            “Sorry?”

            I began to hate this woman more than I had ever hated anything in my life. I felt nothing towards my father; though he had been the one to lock me in this place, I felt no animus towards him at all. But this frail, timorous old woman with no ability to help me, with no ability to stand with her feet firmly planted on the ground and be a responsible fellow citizen, albeit a senior one, produced nothing but disgusting, scowling loathing within me. I imagined the hangdog look of consternation and regret upon her stupid little, bespectacled hedgehog face, and the wobbly deficits of self-assertion and self-pride she had probably never been able to put right, and all the inherited generational ills and harmful mores that had finally rendered her this whining, legally deaf, incompetent stick figure. 

            “Put the code in the keypad. Do you see a…a…thing, with little numbers on it, little square buttons?”

            “Erm…oh, yes.”

            “Okay. Punch in 3. 1. 4. 7.”

            “Sorry?”

            “Actually, you need to Cancel first. Is there a button marked C?”

            “I don’t know.”

            “Well, could you look?”

            There was an interminable silence.

            “What are you doing in there, anyway?” she said at last.

            “Maybe just try putting in the code, 3147.”

            “I just don’t understand what you’re doing in there.”

            “Someone locked me in. It was a joke.”

            “Sorry?”

            “It was a joke!”

            “Oh…who…who was it who locked you in?”

            “My father,” I mumbled.

            “Sorry?”

            “My father! Daddy!” I barked. 

            Just then, someone else came by and I was relieved. Through the door, I heard the conversation, the old pathetic solicits of help from whoever it was passing by. The voice that answered hers was rougher and more working class than the voices one usually associated with these parts. Through the layer of metal separating us, his words were not intelligible. 

            “Hello in there?” the man bellowed, approaching. His speech was a little slurred, the three separate words blended into a single utterance, a grunt. 

            “Hello?” I called out. “I’m locked in. Can you get the key out of the key place…do you see a little black box with a keypad?”

            “Yep,” he answered. 

            “Right, the code is 3147. You might have to cancel it first…”

            “Yep, I know what to do. I’ve got one of these on a lockup of mine; yep, very good 4 digit code-lock model. I use these around my business, zinc alloy 4-6 digit push-button locks these are if I’m not mistaken.”

            And with that, without fuss, he opened the little box with the key in it and the black lid fell open with a little cough, yawning wide, the keys gleaming inside. Or so I imagined.

            “Is there a set of keys inside?”

            “Well, there’s one key. One key on a single key ring, together with a single acrylic fob. Royal blue, shaped to look like some kind of generic fish.”

            I wished he’d shut up. His loquacity, slurred with whatever it was that pervaded him, (drink, weariness, imprecision), gave me an uneasy feeling. But he was my saviour, I depended upon him, and so I showed him nothing but perfect courtesy, not wishing to irritate, anger, or agitate him in any way. 

            The door opened. In an instant it was fully ajar, and the light of the sinking sun was so sudden and brilliant that I knitted my brows and covered my eyes. 

            The man who stood there, waiting to receive me, was not a total stranger. It was the man me and my father had passed on our way to the cemetery. I recognised instantly the bloated cheeks, the folded-away eyes, the alcoholic ruddiness, the ripple of lines in the forehead, the leather jacket, the jeans, the sneakers (which I now saw were Addidas- probably from the Sports Direct in town), and the blue and cream of the football scarf peeping out the top of his jacket without declaring the allegiance that the scarf signified. There was one major change. The can of lager, that had in some way coloured his entire being, was nowhere to be seen. Neither was any old lady as a matter of fact. I wondered if she hadn’t been real, if she had been some kind of angrily dreamed and actualised figment of my imagination. I decided that such a thing wasn’t possible. I didn’t ask my rescuer for confirmation either way. 

            The can of lager had been disposed of but the lager itself was in evidence. The man reeked of beer and fag-ash. 

            “Alright, mate?”

            “Yes.” I answered. All of a sudden, I started crying. There was nothing forced about, it occurred absolutely naturally, producing a mounting rain of organic tears that streamed from my eyes, down my nose, onto my cheeks, and shone in the evening light. I thanked the man. “Thank you,” I said finally, when I felt able, and fell into his chest. Cologne and sweat and male musk and alcohol and tobacco surrounded me but I didn’t mind. He was in need of a wash, but only just. I wrapped my arms around him so my hands touched at the centre of his back, on his lost, buried spine, and I pulled myself tight against his belly. It was so firm, so round, so certain in the luminous, imprecise evening, the dying sunlight upon the wet pavements and the glittering, dripping trees as angry and sublime as I had ever seen it.