The Unreliable Placebo Read online

  “So what’s with the Lara Croft outfit?” Simmsey says.

  “Oh,” I say, “I don't think I could compete with Angelina Jolie in that department but I’m flattered.”

  “Oh yes you could!” says Simmsey. I realise what he’s getting at.

  “Shame on you!” I say. “It just seemed suitable for coming on an internet date. You know. Unreal. You must understand when you sell virtual experiences. I couldn't take it seriously.”

  Simmsey nods. He understands. We are like brother and sister, grown up together, little between us. In the closed East Anglian community where we grew up, we probably share ninety nine point nine per cent of our DNA (though I feel vaguely that I may have heard the same thing about chimps and humans but no matter). Cut off for months by the fens and marshes, in former times before there were tarmac roads, there’s a good chance that significant interbreeding took place. An imperative for survival. If my ancestors and Simmsey’s hadn't done it, we probably wouldn't be here now at all, propping up a town bar and talking utter rubbish.

  There’s nothing he could say to shock me or put me off him. The same vapid inconsequential aims in mind and in common. I may be by day a serious solicitor tending to my clients’ needs and he may be an entrepreneur picking up business all over the world, but at our cores and our hearts we are sixteen year old kids still wishing we could be more attractive and that we got invited out more and had more fun, that our parents weren't such shits and that that certain someone of the opposite sex we were fatally attracted to would show some or any interest at all in us.

  After Jeremy’s departure we calmed down somewhat. If I hadn't been so high on Simmsey, I’d have realised that Jeremy was a good bloke for whom I should have shown more respect. I’m starting to wind down seriously and want to go home. To an empty bed of course but I’m not feeling so upbeat any more.

  “You always were a miserable little toerag,” says Simmsey looking at me half smiling. “You want to go home don't you!”

  “Yes,” I say.

  He sighs. “I’ll get you a taxi,” he says and, leaning across the bar, he talks to a tall responsible looking man. The man looks at me and I know he’s thinking “Pissed as a newt. Get her out of here as quickly as possible before she starts any trouble.”

  And the taxi comes and Simmsey shepherds me to it and deposits me into it and it drives off. I realise I didn't even get his company name or his website or email address and he didn't get mine and he won't know my married name which I foolishly assumed on marrying the Arsehole.

  But, when I get home and go through and empty my bag on the bed including the little open pocket at the front where I keep business cards, I notice a colourful expensive-looking plasticised card I haven't seen before emblazoned with pictures of medieval knights on horseback, prancing beasts a little like Milton’s ill-fated steed. Picking it up and, squinting at it more closely I see Simmsey’s full name and an email address and some phone numbers. The company’s called “Le Tourney”. Very posh. He must have pushed the card into the slot when I wasn't looking as my cape had no pockets. A bit risky since I might not have looked in there for another ten years. I giggle and fall on the bed and wonder what would come of a proper date with Simmsey, should I take up his implied offer.

  Chapter 5 The Placebo Effect & Probability - The Arsehole Wants A Divorce

  AS MY AUTUMN progresses and I continue to be semi-interested in principle in the idea of dating, I try to find examples of the way in which expectations may play a part in outcomes and how this works. I think about my own profession. The SRA in recent years have obsessed about outcomes focused regulation, but this doesn't help since how can you expect anything when you haven't got the slightest idea what the crap they’re talking about. They’ve invented positions called a COLP and a COFA and introduced terms such as “indicative behaviours” that are meaningless.

  When the poor souls in my firm unlucky enough to have been chosen to make sense of all this and try to put it into practice first attended seminars about it, they returned looking dazed and disoriented as though they were just walking away from a serious train crash. So actually I quickly decide to forget the SRA’s warped and twisted version of what might have a serious chance of affecting outcomes. I’ve long suspected that the real purpose is to provide jobs for a few more bureaucrats that we, solicitors, have to pay for.

  My mother has a friend who is quite nice, in fact a good laugh, but is a serial adulterer and has been married five times. My mother told me that this friend, let’s call her Madeline, hadn't been Christened and the family weren't Catholics but nonetheless her parents sent her to a Roman Catholic primary school because it was convenient, and when the subject of her non-baptised state came up, the nuns had been astonished and made no secret of the fact. In those days teachers and particularly nuns so I’ve heard didn't mince their words and Madeline at the age of eight was left having to cope with the fact that her soul was still stained with original sin and that on her death she’d go to limbo, as she was told in clear and unambiguous terms.

  I’ve often wondered if this certain knowledge had any effect on her and made her any worse in the sense of good or evil than she might otherwise have been, whether other children who were told they had been baptised and had had original sin expunged from their souls grew up to be better and less sinful than, say, Madeline who was told in effect aged eight that she would never get rid of this basic original sin. Maybe she felt there was no point in being good because it wouldn't get her anywhere whatever she did. It’s clearly a form of conditioning. If you’re told you’re being given a pill that’s going to make you feel ill and you do feel ill, I believe is called the nocebo effect and that it’s the dark ugly sister of the placebo effect. What’s to say therefore that someone with the conscious stain of original sin on their souls isn't going to turn into a bad person as a result? And become a serial adulterer.

  On the other hand, perhaps Madeline hugely enjoyed her extra-marital encounters, brought joy and variety into people’s lives, broadened her children’s horizons and toughened them up by their having regularly to get used to a new man in the house and changed circumstances. I used to think she was someone worth knowing with many anecdotes to impart though in fact I’ve quite gone off her actually since myself being dumped by the Arsehole and having personally had to come to terms with adultery being suddenly visited on me.

  This case study hasn’t helped so I go back to a work-related situation. If there might be something a tiny bit risky in a client’s case, legal practice today requires that we paint the most pessimistic picture possible to our clients just in case the worst does actually happen since it’s the profession’s perception at least that most people in the claims focused litigious blame culture which we now inhabit won't hesitate to sue the pants off a solicitor and, if a case gets to court, that the judge will necessarily find against the solicitor because all judges hate solicitors. Insurers are necessarily very keen on this defensive approach since if it works and deflects too many claims, then they can rake in huge premiums without having to make large payouts.

  Consequently it’s a miracle that any clients pursue any cases or any course of action at all or buy any property. It’s got me wondering whether the “dire warnings”, as one of my clients put it on her client satisfaction form, do actually influence how clients feel about a property later. Do these warnings burst the little love affair the client was having with the home-to-be of their dreams and make it somewhat less desirable. When they put the key into the lock for the first time, will they do so with trepidation? When they switch the lights on for the first few months will they stand back in fear of an electric shock because “that solicitor of ours had made such a thing out of the lack of a building regulations compliance certificate for electrical work?” As winter approaches will they, despite the triple glazing, worry that they’ll still experience condensation on the windows knowing that they were warned that the lack of a FENSA certificate might mean an insuff
icient insulation value?

  Before I could draw any conclusions, I think I’d have to do a little further research such as sending out a questionnaire to clients a year later or maybe just calling clients and asking things like: “Hey, are the windows misting up yet?” or “Has any member of your family died from carbon-monoxide poisoning?” On the whole I don't think the firm would really approve so I’ll try and think of something else.

  ONE TIME QUITE a few years ago I started to have trouble in the getting off department. It’s quite upsetting when that happens. It was before the Arsehole and I had started copulating for the EEC (as opposed to just England) in an effort to increase the population, so it wasn't as though the pressure of that particular potentially marriage-wrecking exercise had started to take hold. It just seemed to happen. Or rather not happen.

  One casts about for an explanation and what to do about it. When you have a problem these days, you look on the internet. No need any longer to hover guiltily in the biology section of the local library taking sneaky looks at likely chapters of home-spun family medical advice; looking vainly for “female sexual dysfunction” in the index; finding only veiled references such as “trouble making love” and suggestions to undertake marriage guidance. No. Now everything you could possibly want to know is out there googlable at your fingertips in graphic and often indecent detail. Though it still has to be done fairly furtively when you think no-one’s around to peer over your shoulder and go “Oooh!”

  Scouring the internet, there were an astounding variety of explanations and possible solutions from the very dubious stuff you read in these daft forums to NHS and similar guidance to highly complicated scientific papers with diagrams of chemical structures, formulae and references to numerous field and case studies.

  I have to go for the middle group that stands some chance of being accurate and comprehensible to someone like me. The possible explanations include depression, anti-depressants (a bit of a bummer that - you get so miserable due to your inadequate performance that you take anti-depressants and it makes it worse), psychological problems (whenever I read this I always think who hasn’t got psychological problems; I mean all the unsatisfactory little things not to mention the big things that have ever happened to you going back to your earliest childhood are bound to make you a mass of neuroses and phobias and psychological disorders), physical injuries, as well as all the stuff you might expect like inadequate foreplay, major worries about work etc, wrong time of the month, and whatnot.

  Apparently there have been studies into something called Bremelanotide, originally developed as a tanning agent, which helped significantly in a study when compared to a placebo being administered but there were side-effects. Really I didn't want to start taking substances with complicated-looking chemical structures and anyway I doubted if my GPs surgery would consider prescribing an experimental drug to me.

  Possible solutions included doing Kegel exercises or upping the frequency/quantity but I already did those in most suitable situations and some unsuitable ones too and there’s a limit to how many squeezes you can get in while attending a seminar or talking over the telephone to clients about boundaries and drains.

  Folic acid was mentioned and possible folate insufficiency. This as I say was before we started trying for a baby when I had no reason to be taking any folic acid supplement. So I thought: simple solution, no harm in giving it a go and ran off to Boots to get a supply of folic acid. And funnily it did seem to work. Or at least the problem went away. You never know of course if it was just auto-suggestion. That I thought the folic acid might work and therefore it did. Anyway I carried on taking the supplements as we subsequently started on the earnest and, as it turned out, frustrating, prolonged, never to be realised quest for a young Arsehole or a young Anna. Therefore of course I had to take the folic acid then and I’m still taking it. Now, if I ever get to the point of undergarment sharing with a gentleman and there’s no delightful, endorphin producing ultimate experience, or if it otherwise stops working (and we’ll say no more about that! she says coyly), I’ll know the folic acid business was all rot and that it was all in my head.

  I have to wonder how folic acid might affect men, or folate insufficiency, though the various sources suggested that men have very little trouble in that department usually, in fact quite the opposite sometimes and I don't need a medical authority to tell me that. Unaccountably I start to think about Dennis in this connection. Not the short fuse bit I hasten to add but just the doing it at all element. I don't know why. Perhaps because of the feel of his manly torso through his shirt as he guided me to his car and then to my front door at the end of our date, which experience thereby falls into the category of the nearest I’ve managed to get to kindly male bodily contact since the Arsehole took off.

  AS WELL AS THINKING about cause and effect and specifically the placebo effect, I’ve also been thinking about chance and probability. From what little maths actually sank in while I was wilfully wasting my education with the likes of Simmsey, I seem to recall that no matter how many times you toss a coin and it comes up heads, there is always the same probability of turning up a tails the next time. You’d think after, say, five hundred heads, that the probability of it being tails next time would be overwhelming but it’s just the same chance as on the first throw.

  This always seemed to me to be incomprehensible. I mean before the Arsehole and I moved to the village I’m in now, I’d spent years driving along the same stretch of dual carriageway witnessing other people’s accidents and thinking to myself that my chances of having one myself must be increasing each time I got in the car every morning and evening, but perhaps it remained the same like the chance of flipping a tails. Certainly the number of accidents one saw seemed to be increasing but I suppose that’s an extraneous factor you’d have to eliminate if you were to make a proper calculation. But maybe not since the quantity of traffic had also increased over the years and I was just one of the traffic. I don't know. As I’ve indicated I was never any good at maths.

  But what about one’s marriage? The longer it lasts, does it get more likely that the jerk you go to bed with every night would decide to jump ship, infiltrate other parts and make a mockery of the marriage? To make an accurate calculation, would you have to eliminate factors such as lack of money or parental interference or trying too hard to get pregnant as in our case?

  Perhaps if I decide to look up Simmsey again, maybe he’d help me out here. He’s a software writer; aren't they good at maths? To the best of my memory, he did maths at A’ level, while I opted for the softer history, English Lit and biology. Curious mix. I could have told Jeremy had it occurred to me that I had a biology A’ level. Should have stuck with it but instead I was led to believe that a career in the law would be a good thing, that lawyers earned a lot of money without having to make much effort. It wasn't true then and it isn't true now but curiously that’s still the perception despite cuts in legal aid, cut-throat competition, a proliferation of competing claims and conveyancing factories and people expecting cheaper prices along with twenty-four seven opening hours.

  So was my marriage, having lasted eight whole years, already into injury time when the Arsehole met the Backside? Was it bound to flounder soon anyway regardless of temptation? Or is it just as likely that the Arsehole would have left me in Year One as in Year Eight? If so, I wish he had buggered off then and saved us all a lot of trouble. Or even better in Year Minus One. Best of all would have been Year Minus Two then I’d never have met the lying, cheating bastard at all!

  AS I’M CHECKING the website of Le Tourney and pondering if I should make contact with Simmsey to pick his brains over the probabilities of marriage breakdown or otherwise, the doorbell suddenly rings and I wonder who it may be. It’s a Thursday evening and I’m not expecting anyone. Now I’m living on my own, I’m a bit leery of opening the door to unexpected callers. I ought to get one of those spyhole things you see in TV dramas and films, though they don't seem to do any g
ood. The fictional householders still get brutally murdered at some point. Or if they’re really lucky, the maniac high on drugs loitering outside merely puts his fist through the door and smashes their nose in. I employ a far better security system. I go upstairs and look out of a first floor window to see who it is. Thereby I’m not in danger of getting my face rearranged and also if I don't want to meet the person, I can lie on the bed reading and pretending I’m not in until they go away. So this is what I do.

  Would you believe it? It’s the Arsehole. He’s got the cheek to come here and….and….whatever it is he’s here for. I suppose he could have come straight in though. He must still have his keys and I haven't changed the locks. Though I might yet. However he is consorting with a lawyer. If they’re anything of a proper couple he’ll have told her he was coming here and she’ll have instructed him how to behave. Therefore I shouldn't necessarily give him points for acting properly.

  In my matrimonial lawyer days I had frequently to put it to the non-matrimonial home-occupying spouse, usually the miserable wanker who’s departed (though of course quite often also the poor soul whose been given their marching orders), that once you’ve vacated the home, you can't just expect to barge back in at any time. The person left, abandoned or otherwise, in the house gets used to living alone. Your noisy devil-may-care unexpected entrance could frighten the occupier. Especially in the evening. While you’re blundering about looking for that CD or paperback you’re certain you left behind, or loading up a Tesco carrier bag with all the family photos you suddenly feel you can't do without, you could be mistaken for an intruder.