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she set the timer clock to start
Die Schöpfung
on the record player about the time I was expected home. Then she emptied a bottle of Tomazipan tablets and half a bottle of gin. When I got there she’d been dead for about three hours and the chorus were belting out
‘Und es ward Lichf.
She was a very methodical person.’
    ‘I’m sorry.’ Then, after a few moments of silence, ‘Do you know why she did it? Was there a note?’
    ‘No. She was a mystery to me, and as time passes I know less and less about her. I think about her all the time; now that I have no words in my head I see her face and I talk to myself. I was never her kind of person; she liked to go out and I like to stay in; she liked parties and I like to work. I got her by being a good wooer but I never properly recognised the uniqueness of her. She was a handsome woman and tall. People wanted to be thought well of by her.’
    Dr DeVere paused for another sympathetic silence, then he said, ‘Any children?’
    ‘No. She had two miscarriages, then a hysterectomy.’
    ‘Was she very depressed after the hysterectomy?’
    ‘Very. Actually she never got over it.’
    ‘You’ve been alone since she died?’
    ‘There’ve been women from time to time but nothing that lasted. I’ve never been a whole lot of fun to be with except at the beginning when I was courting Hannelore. What I had with her only happens once.’
    ‘How do you feel about your life right now?’
    ‘I’m afraid I might lose control altogether.’
    ‘And do what?’
    ‘Touch the woman ahead of me on the escalator in the Underground, or start making indecent proposals.’
    ‘Do you think you’re a danger to the public at large?’
    ‘More to myself. As you see.’
    ‘I know this is a difficult time for you, Mr Klein. I can’t really imagine what it’s like to live without the constant companion of an inner voice but it must be a terrifying kind of aloneness. And I can understand how frightened you are of what you might do or say. What we categorise as normal behaviour is an unbelievably complex and fragile system ofthe most intricate checks and balances. I’m always amazed that it doesn’t break down more often than it does. Let’s go back to the moment when you lost your inner voice: can you remember the very last thing it said? After you read the
Times
piece, did it say something before it went silent?’
    ‘It said, “O God, what would happen to me if I lost my inner voice?”’
    ‘Some might say that your It wanted to plunge you into inner voicelessness.’
    ‘My It?’
    DeVere opened a desk drawer, took out
The Book of the It
by Georg Groddeck, and handed it to Klein.
    Klein held the book in his hands. It was a hardback, small and compact, heavy for its size. There came into his mind the Big Little Books of his small-town childhood in Pennsylvania. He used to buy them at the local Woolworth’s, called ‘the five-and-dime’. They were perfectly square little hardbacks about six by six inches and three inches thick with board covers. They were printed on coarse paper with text on one side and a black-and-white picture on the other of each spread:
Mickey Mouse at Blaggard Castle; Terry and the Pirates; Dick Tracy.
Unlike modern comic books, they had only the occasional speech balloon. He recalled the feel of them in the hand: pleasantly chunky.
    ‘Have you read this?’ said DeVere.
    ‘No, I haven’t.’ He turned the pages, came to
LETTER II,
and read:
    I hold the view that man is animated by the Unknown, that there is within him an ‘Es’, an ‘It’, some wondrous force which directs both what he himself does, and what happens to him.
    ‘OK, I’m animated by the Unknown,’ said Klein as he closed the book. ‘What else is new?’
    ‘Groddeck was contemporary with Freud and Freud was so impressed by the It idea that he developed his theory of the Id from it. It’s the sort of book that got passed around when Ronnie Laing was doing his thing and lecturing