by Amy Lloyd
Though my appointment with Dr Isherwood is still four hours away I decide to leave before all the others get up. I stop in the kitchen to get rid of last night’s uneaten dinner and when I look there’s a woman at the end of the long table, a cup of coffee in front of her, a balled-up piece of kitchen roll in her fist. We look at one another; she sniffs. I run my empty plate under the tap and feel tingles up my spine from her presence behind me. When I leave I look back and see she has her face in her hands.
Outside, I walk without purpose, knowing only that I want to avoid the underpass. The roads are quiet and the shops won’t be open for ages. I find myself at the lake; the swans are sleeping with their heads tucked under a wing. I sit on a bench and watch the water, the surface dead still. A man picking litter says good morning but doesn’t smile. Soon, the dog walkers begin to pass, throwing chewed-up tennis balls down the path; Labradors slosh in the shallows. I have always wanted a dog.
I get up and start to walk towards the high street, passing cyclists on their way to work and vans unloading boxes on to the pavement. Hungry, I look for a café amongst the hairdressers and the Chinese takeaways, ignoring the coffee chains that are too expensive. I can smell the café before I can see it: bacon and fried bread. ‘Kelly’s’, the sign says. The window is covered in fluorescent cards advertising breakfast and lunch specials. Inside, there are men in overalls and paint-splattered jeans, who eat with one hand while they turn the pages of newspapers with the other. I scan to see if anyone is reading about me, but it doesn’t look like it.
The woman at the counter (Kelly?) takes my order and asks me where I’m sitting.
‘Um,’ I say. I am not yet sitting anywhere. ‘Can I sit … by the window?’ I point to the free table by the window, four yellow seats and a tomato-shaped sauce bottle in the middle.
‘If you’re on your own, can you sit at a smaller table.’ It’s a question but it doesn’t sound like one.
‘Oh,’ I say. I look around. By the toilets there is an awkward table meant for two people. ‘There?’ I point, uncertainly.
‘Table nine,’ she says. She rips the ticket off the top of the pad with my order and disappears behind a beaded curtain.
When I sit down my face is hot and I’m wishing I hadn’t ordered anything so I could just leave. The radio is playing tinny-sounding pop music and a man laughs loudly in the corner at something his friend has said. Sometimes I feel like everyone is looking at me, or thinking about me, or laughing at me. I feel it now. As if every time I look up they have just looked away. What are they reading? And what if—
‘Tea,’ Kelly says, putting down a metal teapot and a mug with a blue rim. ‘Breakfast will be out in five.’
‘Thanks,’ I say to her back as she leaves.
Two sugars. Maybe I’m hungry, maybe my blood sugar is low, because I shake as I hold the spoon, little white granules scattering on the table like hail. We have talked about this, Dr Isherwood and I, how a healthy body is a healthy mind. All those mornings that I woke up with a head thick with drink, too sick to eat, trembling and weak. Three meals a day, exercise, no alcohol. I promised I would try.
Breakfast arrives after five minutes, just like Kelly had promised. I eat quickly, though it’s too hot and I burn my tongue. When I’m finished I order some bread and butter so I can mop up the yolk and the beans left on the plate. A man returning from the counter stops at my table and says, ‘I wish I could eat like that and stay so thin!’ He pats his round stomach like a shopping centre Santa Claus and shakes his head, laughing. By the time I finish my second slice of bread the plate is as clean as if it has been washed.
Kelly doesn’t ask if I’m finished. As soon as I rest my knife next to my fork she takes my plate away and returns with a cloth to wipe the table. I leave what’s left of my tea and thank her.
There is nothing left to do except walk. I walk around the lake a few times, stopping to sit and watch the people go by.
Bored, I decide I will make my way to Dr Isherwood’s office early. The whole street is big Victorian townhouses that have been converted to solicitors’ offices and dentists and dermatologists. I sit on the low wall outside her building, next to the burgundy sign that reads ‘Glennwood House, Dr Evelyn Isherwood (MRCPsych, MD), Child and Adolescent Consultant Psychiatrist’.
I’m even earlier than expected and I kick my heels against the wall and imagine what I will say to Dr Isherwood today. That I am lonely, that I do not like living in the halfway house, that the intrusive thoughts are back and they are strong and I do not have time to breathe before they happen. They come quickly, like a bag thrown over my head, and I’m unable to think of anything else.
I hear someone say hello. I look up and down the pavement but a hand touches my shoulder from behind and I jump. ‘I didn’t mean to scare you,’ Dr Isherwood says, her face kind. ‘You’re here early, even for you.’
‘I didn’t have anything else to do,’ I say. I wish she would leave her hand on my shoulder but she takes it away.
‘Do you want to come in?’
‘Don’t you have another appointment?’
‘I thought you might be early,’ she says. She smiles and looks at me over the top of her black-framed glasses. ‘I kept my morning free just in case. Come in.’
I can feel the tears in my eyes and when I blink they roll down my cheeks. I catch one with my tongue, salty and hot, and my nose tingles like I just jumped into deep water. Dr Isherwood walks ahead of me up the stairs to her office. The carpet looks as if it used to be salmon pink but now it’s greyed and patchy. I push a finger into the patterned wallpaper that bubbles and peels behind the bannister.
‘This isn’t as nice as your old office,’ I tell her.
‘It’s a work in progress,’ she says. At the top of the stairs she turns. ‘I mean, I’m decorating. We’re still getting everything moved in.’
We go into her consulting room and she slides the sign on the door to say ‘Occupied’.
‘Right,’ she says. She always says this, always. I smile. ‘How have you been?’
I sit on the high-back armchair. Around us, there are still boxes full of her books that she hasn’t put on the shelves. It doesn’t look like there are enough shelves for them all.
‘OK,’ I say. I am not OK. She knows this. Even after all these years it is not easy to say what I am when we start.
‘I’m just trying to find …’ she says, moving things around on her desk. I look at the backs of the photo frames on her desk and as usual I long to flip them around, to see who she keeps with her all day. ‘Ah! Here it is.’ She waves a file. My file. ‘Now, we saw each other back at the unit before you moved into the home and at the time we discussed that, though you were nervous, you also felt quite positive about the steps you were taking. How have your first two days been?’
I clear my throat. ‘Um,’ I say. I clear my throat again because it feels like there’s a hand around it, getting tighter.
‘Oh dear,’ she says. She sits down on the chair opposite, crosses her legs and tugs her bright flower-print skirt below her knee. ‘Let’s start from the beginning. Are you all moved in?’
‘Yeah,’ I say, thinking of the single suitcase that contains everything I own.
‘Tell me how you spent your first evening in the home,’ she says, patiently.
‘I unpacked. Sarah was there; she helped. Then after I’d unpacked she took me shopping.’
‘And you feel comfortable enough to travel to the shops by yourself?’
‘Yeah,’ I say. ‘Well …’
‘Well?’
‘It’s not really the travelling,’ I say. ‘It’s more … when I get there.’
‘Can you explain?’
‘You know,’ I say, because she does. ‘I feel like everyone is looking at me. Like they think I shouldn’t be there.’ My cheeks are hot again. I look at the window.
‘But you know—’
‘It’s not true. I know. But it’s what I feel.’
Drinking. Drugs. Only leaving the house after dark, in the hours when everyone became somebody else, so that I could be whoever I wanted, too.
‘No,’ I say.
‘It’s hard to remember, now,’ she says. ‘But you felt this the first time you were released. It took months but eventually the feelings subsided. At the time we discussed …’ She licks a finger and flicks through pages of my file, back to when I was first released. Dr Isherwood knows me better than I know myself. ‘Firstly, we discussed that your desire for independence outweighed your anxiety in those scenarios. Is this still true?’
I nod.
‘Good, I’m glad. We decided that in these situations you would break your outings down into tasks. So walking to the bus stop would be the first task, the bus journey would be the second part, entering the supermarket would be the third part, et cetera. Now, at each of these points we decided to rate your anxiety on a scale of one to ten …’
Now I do remember. Those endless routines and exercises that calm the mind. I remember the day I realised it was no more than a trick, a distraction, and it stopped working the same way it does when you see an optical illusion clearly for the first time.
‘It helped for a while but then it stopped,’ I say.
‘Oh,’ she says. She seems hurt and I regret saying anything. ‘OK, well, shall we talk about the home? We decided that last time you were released, when you lived alone, you felt a little lonely and you missed the company of the unit. How has living in shared accommodation been?’ I feel my nose wrinkle and she starts to talk again, quicker than before. ‘It’s not a permanent solution! But we wanted to start you somewhere you could feel safe and with other women who are … starting afresh.’
I can’t help smiling. There is a sweetness and an optimism that has never worn down in Dr Isherwood, even after eighteen years with me. I remember her at the beginning when she assessed me before the trial. I remember how she smiled and the smile didn’t end when Miss closed the door behind her. I remember a rough green carpet and a pile of toys in the corner. When she caught me looking she told me I could just play if I liked, whatever I wanted to do. I had heard this before, with social workers who knelt on the floor next to me as I brushed the hair of a doll that had seen too many sad children. They never wanted to play, only to talk, and to ask trick questions that made you say things that they used later to tell the story they wanted to hear.
So back then I didn’t play. I sat in my chair and she sat in hers. I slid down and folded my arms and stared at the wall. Dr Isherwood didn’t stop smiling, but it stopped being a smile with her mouth and just became something in her eyes, a softer face than I was used to by then. My eyes filled with tears, then more tears came, because I knew she would say what everyone else said: ‘Crocodile tears.’ Or, ‘Here we go again.’
Instead, Dr Isherwood got out of her chair and her pen rolled to the floor. She knelt on one knee and she rubbed my arm and that made me cry more even though it felt good and she got me tissues and made me blow my nose. When she screwed up the tissue and threw it in the bin she grabbed another and dabbed under her own eyes and I realised she was crying a little bit, too, but not as much. She asked if I was OK; I nodded. When I exhaled a snot bubble grew from my nostril and popped and I looked at her and she laughed, so I laughed too and it had been so long since I laughed that it made my face ache.
Eighteen years, and all the places she’s moved so she can ‘work with’ me, as she says, from children’s unit to adult unit to my first release to here. Eighteen years is longer than I have ever known anybody. She is all I have.
I’ve wondered whether she has family, or whether I am all she has, too. But I can only see the backs of the photographs and the face of the psychiatrist that she is with me. However close I feel to her, I have to remind myself that I am only as close as anyone can ever be to their doctor.
‘And does it work?’ she’s saying now.
‘Um,’ I say.
She laughs. ‘You weren’t listening, were you?’
‘No,’ I say. ‘Sorry.’
‘That’s OK. What were you thinking about?’
‘A memory,’ I say. ‘I’m getting them again. They’re very …’ I try to remember the word she uses. ‘… vivid. Sometimes I can lose track of everything around me. I missed my bus stop yesterday.’
‘Really?’ she says, sitting higher in her chair. I know what she wants to ask, but she won’t ask right away. ‘We said this might happen again. When you’re in the unit they keep you busy, busy, busy. Morning till night. No time to think. But when you’re on your own, your mind will wander, and the things you have suppressed …’
‘I know,’ I say.
‘What kind of memories?’ she asks, adjusting her pen so she can write.
‘About the trial, about the last time I was out. About Sean.’ I stop and think. I don’t want to lie but I know what will happen if I say what else I remember. About the echoes and footsteps. ‘A little about Luke,’ I say eventually. Her eyes widen and she leans forward. I already know what she is about to ask me and I feel guilty because I know I won’t be able to answer.
‘Do you remember what happened?’ she asks, trying not to sound too forceful.
‘The underpass,’ I say quickly, knowing I have disappointed her. ‘Nothing after the underpass.’
Her shoulders slump but she smiles that warm smile and her brown eyes are shining with forgiveness. She is beautiful, I think. Even more now than ever. The way the lines on her face show you how much time she has devoted to smiling, to being kind.
If I could remember what happened that day, I would tell her. I want more than anything to be able to tell her what she wants to hear: that it wasn’t my fault, that it was Sean who … But what if it wasn’t Sean? Maybe it’s better to have forgotten.
‘What about the job?’ she asks. ‘Does that help take your mind off things a little? Last time, we felt that being unemployed contributed to negative feelings, and that a job might give you a sense of purpose and the opportunity to socialise. Has it helped?’
‘Kind of,’ I say. ‘But … they made me work with someone old all day so I didn’t get to make any friends.’
‘Someone old,’ she says back to me, laughing a little. ‘You’re a very harsh critic! I dread to think of how you might describe me!’
I blush. ‘She’s older than you. Lots older. And she was miserable, she moaned all day.’
‘But it was just your first day and you haven’t met everyone yet. Perhaps you’ll be working with someone else tomorrow. What about the women in the home?’
I wrinkle my nose and she laughs again.
‘What’s wrong with the women at the home, then?’
Everything, I want to say. You name it.
‘They’re just …’ I start but I can’t find the words. ‘I don’t think any of them would be good friends.’
‘And what is a “good friend”?’ she asks.
I want to tell her about laughing until you fizz over, about falling and falling and never hitting the ground, about not having to think your own thoughts when they’re with you. But I can’t, because I’m not supposed to feel like that. Not about Sean.
‘Do you think you ought to give people a chance before you judge them?’ she says. ‘Maybe you’ll find out things about someone that you would never have guessed until you talked to them.’
But, I want to say, how can I become friends with someone if I don’t know who I am? How can they be friends with me if they don’t know who I am? And what I am? And …
I start to cry and, just as she first did eighteen years ago, she slides out of her chair and rests one knee on the floor. She does it slower now, lowering herself to my level, and something pops as she crouches, but she still puts her hand on my arm and rubs. My skin is cold. I wish she would hug me, I have always wished she would hug me but she can’t.
‘It all feels to
o much right now,’ she says, her voice like honey and lemon. ‘It’s only your first forty-eight hours. It’s so much change and you’re doing great! You are! I am so proud of you. Listen, can I tell you something?’
I nod. I accept a tissue when she reaches behind me and holds out the box.
‘We all feel like this. We do. I do! This morning I had to register at a new dentist’s and when I got there I’d forgotten to bring a letter as proof of address and the receptionist was so rude to me that when I got back in my car I started crying. It wasn’t really the receptionist, or that I’d gone miles out of the way in school-run traffic, that made me cry. I just felt completely overwhelmed for a minute. I had to have a cry, get my frustration out and get on with it. Do you see what I mean?’
She looks at me, wanting me to feel better, but I don’t. Now I feel worse. That she has moved again, all to stay with me, and I have repaid her by being unhappy, ungrateful.
‘We all have our moments,’ she says. Her knee cracks again as she stands. ‘It’s about learning to deal with them, that’s all. Give it a chance. Places don’t feel like home until you’ve built some memories there.’
But I have tons of memories and I have never felt at home. Anywhere.
8
Her: Then
We can see the shapes of two people behind the bendy glass. They knock again.
‘Shit,’ Mum says. I put my hand over my mouth. ‘Sorry,’ she tells me and she brushes my head with her hand; my hairs float for a second as if they are reaching out and saying, Don’t go.
She opens the door and they say her name, which is always weird because I only call her Mum. I am not supposed to listen because I am too little for grown-up conversations but I am six now and not a baby any more, so I try and listen but I can only hear Mum because she is talking so much louder than the other person.