Growing Season

by Seni Glaister

  Now looking back at the various steps that had led her to her blog, the whole process seemed unavoidable and the conclusion inevitable. Sam had started to write soon after returning to work, confident that she would quickly re-engage with her career after her long-term absence for surgery. Initially, she had floated on a cloud of infallibility that came, unbidden, with her return to health. She could still recall the sense of shocked euphoria after her physical recuperation.

  Sam’s initial diagnosis was a stage three ovarian cancer that was rare enough in a woman of her age to cause a barely disguised ripple of envy amongst the doctors who hadn’t had the opportunity to get their hands on it. It was in fact so rare that the doctor responsible for identifying it, and the care team that had been poised to treat it, had ultimately been required to stand aside while, knight-like, the senior consultant oncologist had sailed in through the pale green corridors to take Sam under his own watchful eye. The requirement for surgery had been urgent and the whirlwind of doctors’ appointments, each one resulting in an escalated version of the earlier prognosis, had left the newlyweds feeling that they were hurtling headlong, out of control, towards an inevitable, dismal conclusion.

  At the time, it seemed that the entire episode had been swiftly dealt with but of course it had taken a number of months. Immediately after her diagnosis she’d had six weeks off work for treatment. Being ill took time, it filled your day with appointments regardless of how you felt. And she’d felt surprisingly well throughout that period. She had then required a further six weeks off work after surgery and during this time of recuperation she had been astonished each day by her body’s willingness to repair itself. Sometimes she could feel herself becoming stronger even when her mind lacked the motivation she thought recovery would require. Her tidy scars were an unobtrusive reminder of her body’s resilience and there was no other evidence of the brutality of the surgery she’d undergone. She’d of course anticipated deep emotional trauma (everyone had told her to steel herself for it) but she and Danny had been so delighted by her survival that any other demands she might make of her body, or any sense of longing for the parts she’d lost, felt really quite churlish.

  Sam had surprised herself by coping with the physical surgery extremely well. Each day had provided a new obstacle to overcome but each of these hurdles she’d stepped over, unthinkingly. She had been quietly thrilled by the praise her consultant heaped on her and eagerly did everything asked of her, including making a full recovery. And when she felt too apathetic to heal herself, she knew she could rely on Danny’s devout belief in her to carry her forward without any real impulse of her own.

  Sam knew that Danny had been terrified by the process and knew he’d had to find his own way to cope but she’d been so focussed on the role she’d been required to play, she’d not had the additional mental capacity needed to ask what that coping mechanism might be. Whenever she’d reached for his hand, he’d been there, and that was all that she had required. His calmness had been a source of great strength to Sam, who sometimes believed it was his faith in her that was helping her recovery because she wasn’t certain she’d ever quite mustered her own self-belief that people seemed to think would help.

  When they’d found themselves, three months after her diagnosis, in a position for Sam to return to work, they were both elated. Sam had tried to raise the issue of her unambiguous infertility to Danny, but he had quashed the conversation rigorously.

  ‘Sam,’ he said, holding her by both shoulders and looking so deeply into her eyes that she couldn’t tell whether the blurred vision was from his tears or her own. ‘I nearly lost you. I would much rather spend the rest of my days celebrating your life than mourning the non-existence of beings I have never met.’

  That was enough for Sam. She felt emboldened by her survival, inviolable even. She’d never felt more alive, or more capable than the day she returned to work. She’d swaggered into the office, imaginary club in one hand and dragging the corpse of her disease behind her with the other. ‘Look,’ she said to herself as she wandered through the office, hugging her colleagues and accepting their congratulations, ‘the fierce warrior returns, and she is officially immortal!’ Sam took the warm welcomes in her stride, loving the feeling of power her survival had imbued her with. But, to Sam’s surprise, the congratulations had barely lasted as long as the flowers on her desk. Instead, they were quickly replaced by pitying glances, by conversations that halted abruptly when she walked into a room and by the drying up of invitations to office get-togethers. Sam’s leave of absence had been quite short, considering the gravity of her illness and yet within the time she’d been away her colleagues had apparently all become pregnant or parents and now she was back amongst them, she found there was no place for her in this huddle of excited expectation. Bewildered by her change in status amongst her peers, a repositioning that left her feeling awkward and without purpose, she’d floundered then faltered and had eventually been invited for a meeting with her line manager, accompanied by their head of HR. Delivered with textbook compassion, the HR director offered Sam additional time off for the therapy she undoubtedly required to come to terms with her loss, which whilst offered with the very best intentions, simply served to make Sam realise, unequivocally, that nobody believed she was cured. Instead they thought she was fatally flawed.

  She had seen a therapist. She was curious to understand why she didn’t feel the impairment as keenly as her colleagues appeared to feel it. Sam began to wonder if she had some shortcomings she’d not yet identified. This therapist also suggested that she had not yet come to terms with her true suffering and that she should start to prepare for it, perhaps go as far as to invite this new wave of pain to show itself and to welcome it head-on as part of her healing. Sam left the session even more confused and sought a new therapist. The second therapist suggested Sam keep a diary of her feelings to be shared at the next meeting. This therapist was also certain that Sam was withholding her true sadness, perhaps out of shame. Sam didn’t honour this therapist with a second visit either, but she did begin to keep a journal.

  After a month of diary writing, she read her words back to herself and was shocked by the vehemence of her own feelings. She hadn’t realised how incredibly angry she had become but she was rather pleased with her ability to express these deep feelings, and there was little held back to ulcerate. Contrary to everyone’s prediction, the anger was not directed at herself, at her loss of her uterus, at her disappointing ovaries or her inconvenient fallopian tubes but solely at the people who had felt those losses and disappointments more acutely than she had. A conversation with herself that began, ‘I’ll show them,’ ended with, ‘No, really, I will actually show them,’ and she wrote her very first blog piece. Entitled ‘Why other women mourn my womb more than I do’, it was both angry and eloquent. She had paused before she posted it publicly, though, realising that this sort of truth, whilst therapeutic for the writer, could be cataclysmic for Danny. She feared his colleagues might read it and judge him, and that this might impact his career and, even more truthfully, she feared Danny might read it himself and conclude she was unhinged, or certainly in the process of becoming unhinged. She was about to delete the blog but ashamed at her weakness, berated herself, telling herself – as she’d often done in times where she lacked conviction – her old university friend Libby would just publish it, regardless of the consequences.

  Libby Masters!

  Libby Masters had been on Sam’s English course for the first year and Sam, an immature eighteen-year-old compared to some of her more worldly peers, had immediately admired her, although always from a safe distance. Libby had been everything Sam hadn’t at university – a passionate advocate of every cause, campaigning loudly, picketing when necessary, sleeping out in a tent to protest some new atrocity performed by the government or bureaucracy or by the university establishment or capitalism or whoever or whatever had offended Libby the previous week.

  Libby had been prepared
to challenge everyone and everything and was frequently absent from class because of some injustice being served elsewhere on campus. When she returned from these political jaunts she would have already caught up with her work and this made her beyond reproach from her tutors and out of reach of mere students, such as Sam. Libby was not only politically active, she was diligent. Sam was in awe of this feisty young woman who had the confidence to stand up for every wrong served upon the oppressed and she recognised that Libby was both her intellectual and moral superior. Sam was often tempted to befriend Libby but was terrified of being rejected, ever since she’d heard Libby publicly brand a mutual friend as a ‘bourgeois phony’. Sam felt quite certain that she had the predisposition to be bourgeois and she had absolutely no doubt that she was a phony, so the fear of denunciation made an approach in the direction of friendship out of the question. Libby’s brand of activism had always made Sam feel quite inadequate. But that same activism had been powerful enough to leave a lasting impression.

  For years Sam had used Libby as a silent moral compass, often asking herself ‘what would Libby do?’, and now, with her first blog written and with her finger poised over the delete button, she knew exactly what she’d do. Taking her thought process through to a wholly unnatural conclusion, Sam found an old picture of Libby and using some crude Photoshopping tools had added a hat (one she’d taken off a picture on the front of a novel) to disguise any recognisable features. Sam then used this as her profile picture and, empowered by this assumed identity, felt more enabled to access some of Libby’s political fervour, using it to channel her own frustration through the filter of Libby’s synteresis.

  Admitting she had neither her own audacity or conviction, she now wrote her articles from the liberating perspective of this fearless young woman who Sam knew would willingly have jeopardised her partner’s career in pursuit of justice. When writing in Libby’s name, Sam became gracefully irate, focusing her attack on both the smug stay at home mothers and the working parents who believed they could have it all (who Libby argued were merely slaves to the opiate of a creativity-stifling parenthood). Out of respect for Danny she had covered her tracks carefully, making sure that nobody could link the choleric ramblings of Libby Masters with the pleasant young wife of the successful actuary. Sam had become quite artful in her disguise and now, through the complex backstory she had imagined for Libby, Libby was no longer recognisable either, so both women were safe from discovery.

  In this guise, Sam had written increasingly provocative opinion pieces. Falling on it quite by chance, she had cultivated a strategy whereby she deliberately engaged with those she thought would disagree with her views. Her notoriety spread rapidly until, almost accidentally, she had amassed a dedicated following of nearly 100,000 readers around the world, all of whom either passionately agreed with her or who vehemently despised her and her views.

  Her writing had become her therapy and the confidence it afforded her bolstered her enough to enable her to leave the office job she loathed (and the co-workers she loathed more) to find work in a florist. And the job in the florist made her realise her life was a sham, represented as it was by twenty-five square metres of countryside within a cement-filled metropolis and she’d decided to reignite her campaign to leave for the countryside. She vowed to leave her blog behind her once her mission had been accomplished. She had invested a lot of hope in the rural idyll, believing it would mark a new, more tolerant chapter in her life, so it had been unsettling to be immediately asked to confront, once again, the stigma attached to childlessness.

  Sam looked outside and despaired. The raindrops seemed to be hitting the window with renewed force, occasionally landing in a clattering rush as if thrown from below not above. Using its full force, the rain refused to allow Sam to find any solace in the outdoors, forcing her to look instead at her screen. To Sam, the rain felt personal, so she submitted and addressed her readers once more, in a deliberate provocation of a pain she believed she deserved to feel.

  Chapter 18

  The rain in London had stopped, and Danny was eating his packed lunch on a favourite park bench, one among a number that lined a diagonal path that bisected a small square near his office. He watched a woman walk a dog on a lead, talking to the animal in an encouraging voice as she passed by. He couldn’t make out the words, but he believed the tone to be conversational. He cursed himself for his cowardice. Of course they should get a dog. Sam would love a dog. It would die. She would be sad. They would get another dog. That is what people like Sam and Danny did all the time.

  He knew his allergies were spurious. But his phobias were real and even they could be overcome if he put his mind to it. Look at him, he didn’t like green, but each day he would voluntarily board a train that hurtled towards it. He didn’t like woods and trees either and here he was, the owner of a house at the very end of a lane right by a wood.

  He thought about the many things he didn’t like or couldn’t tolerate. Perhaps his aversions just weren’t as great as some people suffered. Perhaps his were just measures he took to cope. It was coping he struggled with. He thought about Sam. She had coped. Look at her. She had been through so much and continued to be so effortlessly resilient. He didn’t really know how she managed. Next to her he was just a jangle of no hope.

  He chewed his lip as more people walked past him. He feared witches, but that fear was born of a childhood nightmare. And he associated nuns with the death of his mother. The nuns had always been there at the hospital and he knew they were allowed to visit her when he was no longer able to. It was so unfair. So in many respects those were two quite rational fears. Frogs. Danny remembered that was another phobia. He shivered just thinking about them. And because he didn’t like frogs, he didn’t like pots in the garden, or any mess at all that might give safe harbour to frogs. Their garden was perfect as it was. No obstacles, no hiding places.

  Did phobias have to be irrational to qualify? His fear of frogs was rational. It had a root and he could trace it. He’d once killed a frog accidentally as a child. He’d shut the front door and it wouldn’t quite close and he’d tugged and tugged at it, not understanding what was causing the resistance. And then he saw it, a frog right at the base of the door, stuck now in the hinge, and he’d been pulling and pulling at the door, nearly sawing the poor thing in half. And it was clearly dead and yet its eyes looked at him with such surprised hurt.

  Was that a real phobia? Or did frogs just remind him of his innate ability to cause harm when all he was doing was minding his own business?

  There wasn’t a person he’d loved that hadn’t either died or been close to death. He was too rational to believe he caused it but sometimes he wondered if he and disaster were inextricably linked. As a precaution, he wanted to protect Sam from himself and thought he ought to warn her, but he didn’t know where to start. She didn’t like to talk about her cancer, she said it mustn’t define her, and that made it very easy to justify his silence. Besides, talking about things sometimes made them materialise and he couldn’t risk that. And what if talking opened the floodgates, and once he started, he couldn’t stop? He’d held things from her, things that had the potential to make her hate him. No, he couldn’t risk that, either. His job was to mitigate risk, that was what he specialised in.

  Another dog and its owner ambled by, companionably. The owner had a baby strapped to her chest. He felt the pang of loss. No. He couldn’t have a dog. What if he hurt it in the way he’d hurt that frog? Accidentally, mindlessly, repeatedly? He watched the woman walk confidently away from him. Fraying straps crossed her back and were tied in a careless knot at the side. The fabric that suspended her baby above the ground seemed insubstantial but the mother, apparently unconcerned, moved with a surefootedness that reminded him of Sam. He scolded himself for his timidity. He could never admit it to his wife, but he knew he was not cut out to be a father. Before shame could engulf him he checked his phone and reminded himself of his reassuringly busy schedule that afternoon
.

  Chapter 19

  Grief was new to Sam. Having tried a number of different mechanisms she’d settled on a means of earthing her pain by sharing it angrily with strangers. Danny, however, had been coping with the immense sadness of loss all his life. His self-taught method ensured he felt as little as possible and this lack of outpouring simulated success in his mind. Any aspect of his life that veered from a managed path could be boxed up, locked up and put into long term storage while he focussed his attention instead on those things he felt able to control.

  And his move to the countryside was one of those things.

  With many successful journeys under his belt Danny was well on his way to establishing a satisfactory routine and was beginning to feel confident that there was ample predictability to allow him to master and then excel at this lifestyle. On Friday morning he had exchanged a brief conversation with a fellow commuter and on Friday evening he had followed the same two cars out of the station car park as he’d noted on both Wednesday and Thursday. In fact, his transition to commuter had been so smooth that it was actually the weekends he feared and as he had hurtled towards the next one he’d come to dread the arrival of those mornings at home with no framework to which he could anchor himself.

  But, much to his surprise, he had enjoyed the early hours of his first Saturday mornings. This morning he had accepted a cup of coffee in bed gratefully and had been buoyed by Sam’s enthusiasm for the weekend ahead of them. He had luxuriated in the slow start to the day in a way that he’d never entirely achieved in London. He lay in bed, flicking his phone to catch up with the headlines, idly wondering what there had been to fear.