When Cynthia’s third boyfriend in four years left, it didn’t set off alarm bells. She’d just turned 50 and was at an age when suitors (a funny word she thought), could come and go as she pleased. If men felt uncomfortable in her presence, that was their problem. She liked the word ‘presence’ because it connoted an aura but she wasn’t sure what sort of aura she was projecting. Cognitive Behavioural Therapy taught her that she shouldn’t be a slave to her emotions. If bad things happened, such as a boyfriend storming out the door and calling her a fucking witch, she would remain calm and remember they were only thoughts and they too would pass. Besides, she was at the beginning of her second Saturn return and the lessons she was learning now about her true self would be carried like spices across the infinite sands of time in to old age. And if that meant men retreated from her charms like the Romans before Hannibal’s elephants, so be it.

For the last six years, Cynthia quested through psychiatry, psychotherapy, Buddhism and an immersion in all things esoteric and spiritual, to find the secret of self. If was her belief – no, ‘belief’ was too weak a word – it was her conviction, that her Ur self, her Eve, lay nestled, awaiting, at the core of her mind. Her mission – a much better word – was to peel back the onion layers of neurosis, which had grown over time. She used Jung, Freud, Laing, indeed all the explorers present and past, whose theories sought to map the mind, to backhoe in to her unconscious.

Cynthia was childless and a romantic. She’d read William Wordsworth’s poetry at school and the line in the ‘Ode: Intimations of Immortality’, how infants “trailing clouds of glory do we come”, apart from the appalling grammar, always fascinated her. As if new-borns arrived on earth from heaven, pure, simple, untouched, covered in ambrosia rather than shit, piss and embryonic fluid. Cynthia’s feminist principles countered this romanticism, knowing that while William was working by candlelight in his Windermere study, Mrs Wordsworth was changing nappies, feeding, burping and rocking the cherub back to sleep at 11.00pm, 1.00am and again at 3.00am. The quest for the essential self was noble. Men were a distraction.

Her bedside dream diary (a Collins 168 page hard cover), which sat on top of Arthur Janov’s, The Primal Scream and Jung’s Mandala Symbolism, told her otherwise. In a dream the night before, she had an orgasm when a man tied her wrists together and made love to her while she stood with a mirror between her legs. He was rough, brutish and looked like a young Michael Caine. His cockney animal lust confused her because it ran contrary to the current precepts of sexual orthodoxy. She liked being forced to look down. She liked him kissing her neck. She didn’t like the fact he smelt of Brut 33, but it wasn’t enough to stop her coming like Krakatoa. Men were a necessary distraction.

She’d lost her job two years ago. She called in sick 34 days in one year citing mental exhaustion, stress, period pain and in one instance, a sense of prescience that if she caught the 7:34 bus down Ono Street as she did every work morning, something terrible was going to happen to her and her employer, a highly regarded investment bank. Her HR Manager sympathised and knew the stresses the ghost train ride of market fluctuations had on staff and shareholder morale, but Cynthia had become ‘unreliable’. This was good fortune because Cynthia was about to undergo 12 months of intense Jungian analysis. She’d squirrelled enough money away to last three years and then she’d sell the apartment.

Why did Cynthia Harrowgate commit psychosurgery on herself? In her 30’s, she had a pleasant circle of girlfriends who she drank heavily with on Friday and Saturday nights and took men home and had unprotected sex. She spent three weeks a year travelling through European cities by herself. She liked her own company but then a mental cloud slowly, almost imperceptibly, moved over the sun and her lust for life faded. She could divine no single cause like a pebble she could pluck from her shoe. It inhabited her like a tenant who drank, stank and didn’t pay rent. She wanted him gone.

In retrospect, Cynthia should have talked about this pall with her mother but Judy Harrowgate drank. She was one step away from being certified a babbling loony. She lived the motto: cognition ergo alcohol. She loved Cynthia but wondered, sometimes aloud, whether or not if she hadn’t got pregnant with her, whether she could have scored that plum role in the Stephen Poliokoff film, although she admitted when sober, she was too old for the part.

She could have talked to her girlfriends but they were so preoccupied with men, shopping, political correctness and gossip. Injecting a serious subject like the root cause of existential alienation, would go down like a lead balloon. It was a downer.

So Cynthia dug in to her unconscious through various talking therapies. It was slow going at first. Her mind resisted interrogation. She was like a sailor leaving port without a compass. In which direction should she go? Most of the therapists wanted her to talk about why she was feeling what she was feeling. Did she feel depressed? Sometimes. Did she have dreams? Often but not always. Did she enjoy socialising? Not much. Did unemployment get her down? No. Did she feel less of a woman without a man in her life? No. Did she masturbate? Yes. Did she watch porn and masturbate? Yes.

Some therapists lasted longer than others. From Cynthia’s point of view, sitting on top of her mental backhoe, she could easily peel back the top layers of the onion. She lived alone and was sometimes lonely. But she knew, having shared her apartment with various calibre of boyfriends, that one could be just as lonely sitting on a couch with a stoned monosyllabic idiot who never did the dishes. She excavated old loves – one in particular. Ken broke her heart when she was 24. They’d been together three years and she thought – no, she knew – he was the one. He bought her small presents: chocolates, an amber necklace and a small white gold brooch in the shape of a Scottish thistle.

Ken managed seven figure investment portfolios and left on a work trip to Prague and Geneva. That was the last she heard of him. ‘Investment banker disappears with $17 million of client’s money’, the newspapers hawked. No phone calls. No emails. It was as if he’d never existed except for the amber necklace and the gold brooch. She stayed in bed for a month. Her mother cooked her food: Indian curries, Spaghetti Bolognese and casseroles which tasted predominantly of salt.

Cynthia unearthed the ‘Ken experience’ and lifted it high in to the air. She got out of the backhoe and examined it as it sat in the bucket. Ken was a conman who ripped people off. She loved him but at the time, as she didn’t have other men to compare him with, except her predominantly absent father, it was hardly her fault she’d picked a man who made Ronald Biggs look like Mother Theresa. Ken was an absolute fucking cunt. Another onion layer fell away.

She moved effortlessly through Freudian-based therapy, Jungian therapy, Behaviour Therapy and added transcendental meditation. It was while she was trying to quieten her mind sitting cross-legged in a community hall, she realised she needed to peel her relationship with Paula, her best friend from school. They’d hooked up together in Mrs Bainbridge’s economics class in Year 11 and had become inseparable. Paula had a passing resemblance to Linda Evangelista but with buck teeth and acne. She smelt faintly of tuna. Cynthia kept peeling while everyone was focusing on their mantra. Paula loved her and she loved Paula. They wrote each other secret notes in code and fell in to bed whenever Paula’s Mum did night shift at the hospital. One evening, her Mum came home early and caught them in bed. Cynthia was sent home. The shame burned deep. Cynthia was moved to a new school, a bus and a train trip away and banned from seeing Paula again. She looked her up when Ken disappeared but she’d died in a car crash.

They’d done nothing wrong. They were slaves to their parents morality and the punishment far outweighed the crime. She turned the adolescent lesbian love affair over in her mind. It was so innocent it could have been written in to the Famous Five – minus the cunnilingus. It was a teenage crush, nothing more. Another onion layer fell away.

A job is not worth doing unless it’s done well, her father used to say. He also said things such as, “in the fullness of time” and “in the final analysis”, which made no sense at all. While she was drilling, peeling, exfoliating and excavating her past, it struck her that she needed to make changes in the present. What was the point of doing all of this hard work on herself, only to be reborn in to a world where friends didn’t return calls and where the spiders of social media, were waiting to sink their fangs in to her new found equanimity?

Cynthia cancelled all of social media accounts, changed her email address and mobile phone number. She eliminated whole sets of friends and acquaintances, which she’d built like molecular models over the years. If she was honest – and now was the time for brutal honesty – most of her friends rarely returned calls and were not on hand in a crisis. If she was honest, truly honest, without the scaffolding of excuses, she was so busy travelling to the centre of her psyche she forgot them.

There was one hiccup. A former friend told her about a Dr David Daltry, an Existential Psychiatrist. She attended five sessions with Dr Daltry, who was a little too young and handsome for her liking. She described how in her 30’s, she felt buried alive in a coffin like in that movie, who’s name she couldn’t recall. How her hunger for adventure had waned. She described her quest in intimate detail. The unexamined life wasn’t worth living. She wanted to return to a time when childish enthusiasm coursed through her veins as she drank deep from the well of happiness.

In her final session, Dr Daltry put his notebook down and sneezed.

“Hayfever” he said. “Get it every August. I’m impressed with your dedication. If half the clients I see showed your commitment to throw off the shackles of depression, I’d be a happy man.”

“Depression? I can assure you Dr Daltry, it is far more than that,” Cynthia said. “I came to you because you know about essence and existence; about the search for our authentic natures. You’ve just written me off as a depressive”

“Yeah, the authentic bit is a stretch isn’t it? Far from writing you off, I’m writing you a script for some SSRI’s, which I want you to start taking immediately. Then I want you to go to your local pool or ocean and swim for 20 minutes three times a week. Breathe, look up at the light, exhale, swim and breathe again. I’d like to see you in two weeks time”

Cynthia got up, walked past the receptionist and threw the script in the bin. She was insulted. She was a soul miner for truth and no shrink with a prescription pad, jet black hair and high cheek bones, would dissuade her from her mission.

It was in the sixth year of deconstructing herself, when Cynthia hit pay dirt. She knew this layer was coming much like a geologist knows there is oil below certain shale bearing rocks. This one promised to be the mother load. She hired a psychologist from the Yellow Pages who specialised in Repressed Memory Syndrome (RMS). Dr Agnes Pitjoy had appropriated the honorific ‘Doctor’ after attending an expensive three month course on unearthing repressed memories in adults at a retreat in Big Sur in California. She had various adjunct certifications from the Myer Briggs Association and the Ponds Deep Diving Institute. Cynthia lay on a blue velvet chaise lounge with a comfy pillow under her head. The sound of whales gently booming to each other came through metal speakers perched on the bookcases. Dr Pitjoy’s office sat above a feminist bookstore and her books spoke of the inner strength of the unregistered she-wolf, which was waiting to be released.

Dr Pitjoy sat next to Cynthia and held her right hand. She asked her to journey back to her earliest memory. Cynthia knew this game. She was four years old and she had pulled the head off her Barbie doll and buried it in the sandpit. She said a small prayer for Barbie’s head and then made mud pies in the rain.

“That’s good,” Dr Pitjoy said. “Very good. Now let’s pretend its bed time and you are safe and warm under the sheets and blankets. It’s dark. Can you remember anything about being in bed at night?”

“I’d sometimes pretended I was a tiger, walking through the jungle”

“Does anyone come in to the room, like your father?”

As a child, her father was rarely home. He worked as a technician in a weapons research laboratory in the northern suburbs. He specialised in missile guidance systems. She would sometimes see him at breakfast and on the weekends. He tried to avoid her mother. They would fight at night. She remembered that.

“I see,” Dr Pitjoy said. “Any uncles?”

“There was Uncle Ben but we rarely saw him,” Cynthia said. “At Christmas, we’d visit him at the Howhouse Mental Hospital. I bought him a Santa Clause I’d made out of pipe cleaners when I was six. I liked Uncle Ben although he cried a lot.”

“Any brothers?”

“There was Tim.”

Dr Pitjoy smiled and squeezed her hand. Cynthia noticed that Dr Pitjoy had childhood pictures on the walls. There were images from Wind in the Willows. There was Tigger and Piglet too.

“Tell me about Tim, did he ever come in to your room at night?” There was something there; a faint memory, more like a disparate hologram which wouldn’t cohere. But there it was. It was Tim, leaning over her with blonde hair and a smiling face. Her lovely big brother who always looked out for her and bought her small bags of lollies. Timmy, Timmo, Timby.

“And what is Timmy doing to you?”

“He’s touching me”

“Where?”

“He’s unbuttoning my pyjama top and touching my chest”

“Go on Cynthia. I know this is difficult for you. Go on”

“He’s telling me how much he loves me”

“Go on, we’re almost there”

“Then he gives me a kiss on the cheek and tells me to turn on the light”

“Is he naked? Does he have an erection?”

“I turn on the light and scream and scream. There’s a jar of red back spiders on my chest and he’s bent over laughing like clown as Mum and Dad burst in to the room”

Dr Pitjoy dropped Cynthia’s hand and walked to her desk.

“Let’s leave it there for today. We’ve made some progress. Repressed memories are often camouflaged by other scenes as part of a defence mechanism, although they’re usually more benign and pleasant than that. Come and see me in two weeks time and we’ll continue”

Cynthia did not make another appointment because her childhood, as far as she could remember, was happy. Tim played with older boys but he would always make time to play with her. He would dink her on his pushbike and take her to the movies. When she was 11, he wrote her a letter which said she was a golden nugget in his life, which he’d carry forever.

A week later, he hung himself in the garage of their new house. No one knew why. He’d got good grades in year 12 and wanted to go to university to study history. She’d gone in to garage to look for a basketball. She was scrounging around in the sports equipment cupboard when she looked up and saw Tim dangling there. He’d worn his school uniform even though it was a Saturday. His polished shoes turned a little to the left and then back to the right.

Cynthia did some of her best and deepest thinking in the shower. As the hot water ran over her neck and back, a thought chipped away at her, much like a miner deep underground, hunting for a seam of gold bearing quartz. Much of the happiness she had gained in the last three or four years had come from excavating and peeling back the layers of neurosis. Two thoughts struck her almost at once. If she kept deconstructing her past, what would be left of her ego? For surely, experience, no matter how bitter, was the mortar of character. The examined life held a paradox. In the fine fold of neurosis lay one’s character. The two were not divisible.

The other thought was how far could she go on this HG Wells-like quest to the centre of her being? Surely, like that miner, with pick in hand and headlamp, sooner or later, she would chip at the blackened rock face, only to find instead of truth and enlightenment, she’d broken through to her Id and let loose a reptilian monster from the back of her brain, who would eat her alive – and not in the way Michael Caine armed with a mirror and wrist ties would eat her alive. There would be no return. Like the words written on the edge of medieval maps, “Monsters dwell here”. She was on the edge of the map. Her quest ended in the shower that fine October morning.

The following Sunday, she painted her nails red, popped some mascara on and scoffed a carrot and celery juice. She hadn’t visited Tim’s grave for many years. Something always got in the way, like reordering her LP’s, scrubbing the bath or going to art therapy classes. But today, she bought a small bunch of flowers at McCorry Florists, caught the number seven bus to Tintern Cemetery and stood at the foot of his grave. It was a peaceful plot, under a poplar tree. A light breeze blew. Timothy Harrowgate. The year he was born and the year he died. Below etched in italics, “Here lies one whose name was writ in water”. Not very original but true enough. She placed the flowers on the grave and started crying. Sobs rose up from deep within her and she struggled to breath as another avalanche of convulsive weeping fell over her and then another. Timmy, Timmo, Timby.

“Why did you leave me? You were meant to look after me. Writ in water bullshit.”

She looked around. She was alone. The anger subsided replaced by a stillness. The onion peeling had led her to this moment, to stand weeping at Tim’s grave on a Thursday. She wiped her eyes and walked to a small bench which faced a rose garden. Each rose had a small bronze plaque for a much loved pet. The mid morning sun fell on her face. She felt resolution rise within her. She’d sell the apartment and get a job somewhere in the Pacific. She didn’t care where. It was time to go.