The Ghost of Potlatch Past

      Miss Jacobs, retired psychoanalyst, heard a scrabbling at her door at five o’clock one Christmas Eve and found a young woman folded on her doorstep, weeping. All around, fallen from her hands, were carrier bags from department stores, out of which tumbled glittery gift-wrapped packages of all shapes and sizes, many of them awkward. Miss Jacobs, although she had never seen the girl before, asked her in, and moved her many possessions inside the door, out of the rain. The girl was in her early twenties, clean, well-dressed in the contemporary fashion, and pretty enough. She had a ring through each nostril and twelve in one ear. Miss Jacobs, fascinated, counted them while the girl, who said her name was Clarissa, drank the tea Miss Jacobs offered. She drank it black, without sugar. Milk, Clarissa said, was known to contain organophosphates and possibly wrongly-folded prions, the source of BSE, and sugar was empty calories. Clarissa stretched her white damp disfigured fingers – string from the heavy carrier bags had bitten into them – and advised Miss Jacobs never to eat dairy products if she valued her health and sanity. She sat across the table from Miss Jacobs and sipped the unkind liquid and spoke.

      ‘I was going to knock on your door like a proper person,’ said Clarissa, ‘but when I came to it I couldn’t. I didn’t have the strength to knock and didn’t have the strength to leave, so I stayed where I was and cried, and rescue came. I was surprised. Rescue so seldom comes.’

      ‘But why my doorstep?’ asked Miss Jacobs.

      ‘My mother was once a patient of yours,’ replied Clarissa.

      ‘She would point out your door while we passed, usually by taxi, and would tell me how much you had helped her.’

      ‘I am happy to hear that,’ said Miss Jacobs. ‘What is your mother’s name?’

      ‘Juliet Penrose,’ said Clarissa.

      ‘I have seen many patients in the course of my working life,’ said Miss Jacobs. ‘I’m sorry. I don’t instantly recall the name.’

      ‘I expect it happens much as it does in a family,’ said Clarissa. ‘A child has only one mother, and is conscious of her all the time, but a mother can have many children, and is conscious of each only a little of the time.’

      ‘Quite so,’ said Miss Jacobs, relieved. ‘But tell me, why are you quite so exhausted?