Weeks in Naviras

by Wimpress, Chris

  ‘Mummy!’ yelled Bobby as the right wheels of the car came up against the thick rumble strip at the side of the carriageway, making a grinding sound and causing the car to shudder. Instinctively I put both hands back on the steering wheel, guided the car back into the inside lane. A few seconds later I realised what I’d done, or tried to do. It was horrifying, the idea that I could murder anyone, particularly my own children.

  We had a quiet night in the hotel at Lisbon, the kids amusing themselves with videos on my phone while I watched the news. The power shortages in Britain were the top story on all channels, the disruption to travel rippling around the world and prompting questions about whether it could happen to other countries. James popped up at one point, making all the usual reassuring noises. He wasn’t just pretending to be calm, I could tell from his face he was quite enjoying the crisis, there was a levity to him.

  Once again I barely slept, my thoughts trapped in some kind of feedback loop. Obviously the mess I was in was directly attributable to James, who’d destroyed the sanctity of our marriage with Rosie. But how much of the rest was my fault? It was hard to assess, but still I kept trying as I got the kids ready for the flight. As we walked through the entrance to Lisbon airport I saw the queues at the ticket sales offices of the UK airlines, people angry with the helpless staff there. No such frustration for the three of us, who went straight to the first-class check-in, dropped our bags and picked up our boarding passes. I saw the looks of envy from those in other queues, felt like telling them they’d no idea what it was like on the inside, how it felt to be me at that moment.

  How did it feel, exactly? Like I’d ceased to function as a normal person, had become a different species, one that looked like a person and acted like one but really was something else. A charlatan, perhaps, some kind of shapeshifter. Later I’d realise that I’d been caught up in it for a long time, but the night after we landed I couldn’t sleep a wink. The insomnia continued all weekend and by Monday morning I was exhausted and couldn’t face going to work. Paula took the kids to school in Eppingham because I was lying on the floor in the bathroom. ‘Bad sardines,’ I called through the locked door. When they’d gone I called my GP surgery, asked for an emergency appointment.

  When I arrived there and went through to the consultation room the doctor immediately looked concerned. I asked for sleeping tablets and she was reluctant to prescribe them, asked me what was causing the lack of sleep. I explained how I’d been unhappy for years, how I’d wanted to crash the car on the way from Naviras to Lisbon. Then I began to cry, unable to speak for several minutes. They were tears of guilt at my own selfishness, at the thought I might’ve killed my kids. She didn’t comfort me, she just waited.

  ‘You’re depressed, Mrs. Weeks,’ she said, finally, when I’d recovered some semblance of composure and explained about my Dad, the death of Lottie and the impact James’s job was having on my family. ‘You’ve been having suicidal thoughts,’ she re-affirmed, ‘I’m signing you off work for two weeks, and I want to start you on a course of antidepressants immediately.’

  Of course I’d considered that course of action before many times over the years but had always resisted, had hated the idea of admitting defeat. I explained as much.

  ‘The brain’s just an organ, same as any other,’ said the doctor gently. ‘Your brain is unfortunately not working properly, and needs medicine. That’s how you must see it.’

  I said I was worried it would leak out that I was taking anti-depressants, explained how the press would turn it into something political. She just nodded, and hand-wrote the prescription. ‘This is rather unorthodox, nowadays,’ she said as she filled it in. ‘But this way it stays off the computer. That should allay your concerns?’

  I drove twenty miles out of Eppingham to a pharmacy; I didn’t want to get the antidepressants from the one I normally used. When I got home I immediately swallowed down my first pill and within half an hour was comatose on the sofa. When Paula came over that afternoon I dragged myself up to the bedroom and shut myself away, after asking her to contact James’s parents to see if they’d look after the kids. I didn’t want them to see me in such a catatonic state.

  James never came home that night, he was still up to his eyes in the brownout crisis. It took a week for me to get used to the effects of the pills, but I never went back to work; I resigned. When James asked why, I said I’d been struggling to cope with my caseload, the constituency duties, the kids. ‘Lottie dying, it’s been eating me up inside,’ I said, which wasn’t in itself a lie.

  ‘I wish you’d told me it was all getting on top of you, L,’ he said, clearly a bit surprised that I’d taken the decision without consulting him. ‘I’ll have to advertise for someone.’

  ‘Maybe it’s just temporary,’ I said. ‘I might be able to go back to it in a few months.’

  ‘Oh I wouldn’t worry about that,’ said James. ‘I have a feeling things would’ve changed soon enough, anyway.’

  After a month of taking the pills I stopped feeling utterly miserable, started to feel quite free of Naviras, of Luis and Lottie. I’d just turned 39 and had become a family manager; Bobby was at a reasonably good primary school, Sadie still too young to be at nursery but about to start at one. Women all over the world would’ve killed to be in my position, I told myself. That’s not to say I was happy; one thing people don’t tell you about antidepressants is they’re just that. They stopped the worst thoughts but I came to realise they blocked the best ones, too. They kept me inside imaginary tramlines of emotion, good and bad.

  Then things changed again, one August morning when all of us were in Eppingham. The night before I’d gone to see Dad, who’d been convinced the radio was on when it wasn’t, shushing me every time I spoke because I was apparently interrupting his programme. While hospitals and schools were exempt, places like nursing homes were subject to the usual power restrictions, enforced by a system of self-policing. Anyone catching their neighbour using power when they weren’t supposed to was urged to call a hotline, which was so popular it sometimes took ten minutes of holding before people could get through, apparently. One of Rav’s ideas.

  With things so febrile a holiday was out of the question for us, which suited me fine, I certainly didn’t want to go to Naviras given the way things were with Luis, with whom I hadn’t spoken. I worried he might angrily tell my husband about our relationship, or perhaps my secret about Casa Amanhã.

  ‘Of course Drake’s going to have to go,’ James was on the phone to Rav, who was working at the crisis unit within the Home Office. ‘He’ll have to take the wrap for this.’

  A video of the chancellor kissing his intern had surfaced, and was being replayed on a near-constant loop on the morning news as I was trying to get the kids to finish their breakfasts.

  Bobby pulled a funny face. ‘Is the prime minister going to be rapping, mummy?’

  James didn’t see the funny side of this and got up from the table, walking through to the living room where he could talk undisturbed.

  ‘Not quite, darling.’ I couldn’t quite see how the public embarrassment of the chancellor equated to the need for Drake to step down. The whole country was hot and irritable thanks to the on-going power restrictions, which affected air conditioning and even desk fans. A lot of sensible people saw the brownouts for what they were, with Drake just being in the wrong place when the music stopped. Unfortunately not everyone was sensible, far from it, and irritation at little things mounted up. Washing machines stopping mid-cycle, printers going silent half way through a job, such things were bearable as a one-off but quickly became a daily bugbear for the sorts of people in swing seats, the kinds of voters who genuinely chose governments.

  James had been broadly praised for managing to get a grip on the disorder. Labour found themselves flip-flopping over his policy of allowing the public to form neighbourhood teams to patrol the streets after dark. Crowdsourcing to the nth degree, some called it, but it had worked in part. To give hi
m credit, James knew how to wield political power, saw it not through the narrow prism of passing laws or having meetings. He understood how behaviour – mass behaviour – could be influenced. ‘Best of all it hardly costs a bean,’ he’d say. It was becoming obvious publicly that he was withholding full support for Drake, saving up his best ideas.

  James headed off to work and I took the kids to playscheme. When I got back I was bemused to find Rav and Rosie in the house, James had given them a key. They’d turned the dining room table into a little office with computers, phones and screens. Rav looked up at me. ‘Sorry for the intrusion, Ellie, but James said we could set up here.’

  ‘The war office,’ Rosie smiled. ‘We’re calling up backbenchers, gauging support for a leadership challenge.’

  ‘Oh my God,’ I said, and went upstairs to lie on the bed in the spare room.

  Eventually Rav came upstairs and called me from the landing.

  ‘In here,’ I said.

  He wanted to see if I was okay, perplexed at how I’d stormed out of the dining room. ‘You must’ve known this day would come, sooner or later,’ he said, sitting down on the bed next to me.

  ‘I think I’m having a migraine,’ I lied. ‘And yes, I’d always wondered, but not like this, Rav. Not so soon, I thought Drake would just lose the election, or maybe resign. Then James can make his move.’

  ‘If he doesn’t do it now, someone else will,’ Rav put his hand on my leg.

  ‘And what happens to you, I suppose you’d become chief of staff?’

  ‘Well, I wouldn’t speak for James, obviously.’

  ‘No, that’s Rosie’s forte, isn’t it?’

  ‘Why do you dislike her so much, Ellie?’ He spoke quietly. ‘She’s just doing her job.’

  I spluttered. ‘Of course she is. But what’s my job, exactly, Rav? Every time I get used to things being a certain way, they change. It’s frustrating.’

  ‘You’ll be able to make it whatever you want it to be,’ he gave me one of his reassuring grins. ‘Within reason, of course.’

  More people came to the house that afternoon, a few of James’ young parliamentary and constituency staff. A grid was drawn up of those MPs likely to support James and those who were in the camps of potential rivals. I came downstairs as they were putting the finishing touches to it. ‘Looks good, doesn’t it?’ said Rav.

  ‘What’s James doing?’

  ‘He’s at the Home Office, trying to act as normal as possible.’

  I went into the living room and turned the TV on to find the Chancellor had resigned. Putting his family first, apparently, no word on who’d replace him. Drake was said to be mulling over his options. James’s mother brought the kids home, I saw them pull up in the driveway and went outside to greet them. ‘There’s a lot of cars here,’ she said. ‘Is something the matter?’

  ‘A few staffers are here, having a meeting,’ I said. ‘So I’ll see you on Thursday?’ I didn’t want her adding to the overcrowded house.

  As I went inside Sadie produced a picture she’d painted of me. ‘Mummy, why is Rosie here?’ She said it mercifully quietly.

  ‘They’re helping out Daddy with something important,’ I would have said more, but then the news flashed on the TV. Enough Tory MPs had publicly expressed lack of confidence in Drake, triggering a leadership contest. Minutes later Ralph Sinclair threw his hat in the ring. The noise in the dining room grew louder, a short time later the news confirmed that James would also join the contest.

  The preceding few months had often felt like watching a car crash in slow motion, but then at the moment of impact everything went into double speed. It seemed grossly unfair to me that Ollie Drake would cop it, he’d been trying to galvanise energy production, fast-tracking nuclear power stations and even taking on core supporters by insisting on more wind farms. Every government before Drake’s had been calcified, some blamed coalition partners, others the vested interests. Build a power station here and hope the greens won’t go mad, extract some shale gas, but only where backbenchers who couldn’t cause trouble lived. There was no strategy to it, no long-term thinking.

  James was cheerful when he came home that night, coldly practical about things. ‘Get it done at the end of August, unite behind the new leader at conference. For the best, don’t you think?’

  I was quite surprised when Drake was eliminated in the first round of voting. He’d remain PM while his successor was determined, it was James and Ralph Sinclair in the final round. I immediately assumed, privately, that James would win, the party had never really liked his rival. It was partly the name, some people should just change theirs if they want to be prime minister. Ralph insisted his name be pronounced without the L, which annoyed the working class members, but the aristocratic side disparagingly called him Ralph, not Rayfe, since they considered him bourgeois. It was difficult for him to tap into any obvious constituency of the party. In the absence of anything better most voted for James. Not a ringing endorsement, more of a shrug. All the oh-so-clever commentators saw it as obvious after the event.

  He assumed power on a cloudy morning in the first week of September. It’d rained a lot overnight, looked like it wanted to rain some more. ‘Hope it holds off long enough for the speech,’ James said, facing the mirror but looking behind himself to the shower clouds out the window. ‘I’ll look daft with someone holding a brolly behind me.’

  He’d slept ridiculously well under the circumstances. I’d been lying awake, worried about the photo call in Downing Street we’d face later that day. There was a lot riding on it for James, obviously; how to sound, what tone to convey, but for me it felt more difficult because I had to just stand there, a few feet to his left and about a foot behind. It seemed impossible for me to work out how I should stand. Obviously I should be looking at him at all times, that bit I’d worked out for myself. But what about my legs? Feet touching or slightly apart? I didn’t want to seem like a harridan. What should I do with my hands? Unfortunately we’d all agreed Sadie and Bobby wouldn’t be part of the tableau. They would’ve given me something to focus on.

  I decided I’d need a fairly large purse to occupy my hands. That was out of character, I found them old-fashioned and cumbersome and could never hold everything I needed. But at least that way, I thought, I could clasp the purse to my midriff then just keep the other hand to my side. Earlier in front of the full-length mirror, wearing a Highland green pencil dress and an understated, unadorned clutch in my hands, I practiced standing. On the TV in the reflection behind me I could see the old PM’s car meandering from Downing Street to the palace. It didn’t seem to be in any hurry. Perhaps Oliver Drake had told the driver to take their time, savouring the final minutes of his premiership, clinging on for dear life.

  From the helicopter shot I watched him and his wife get out of the saloon and enter the palace as I put my makeup on. The car disappeared and was replaced by an anonymous navy blue one. About ten minutes later they emerged through the same door and got in, and that was them; off into relative anonymity and - I’m sure he felt - oblivion. He might’ve gone on to be one of the better PMs of this century, had events not conspired against him.

  Unfortunately he’d gone slightly mad towards the end, having quickly discounted the notion that someone else might do the job someday. He didn’t have a preferred successor because he didn’t think there’d ever need to be one. Drake won his election when he was forty-two. That had made him the youngest PM for centuries. Then of course James trounced that by getting in at forty-one.

  I pushed the chair from underneath me and finalised my appearance. In some ways I felt similar to how I’d felt on my wedding day, standing in my bedroom in silence as an envelope of noise floated up from the hallway downstairs. Making sure every tress of hair was correct, all creases smoothed out, every dark circle painted over. To impress whom? News editors, also chasing a younger audience of course.

  ‘Let’s go, L,’ James called from the landing.

  On the way downs
tairs I kissed Bobby and Sadie on their heads. They were sitting at the top of the staircase, where they were being kept under virtual arrest by Paula. ‘Next time I see you two, we’ll be living in Number Ten Downing Street,’ I told them. Bobby was old enough to know what that meant, but didn’t seem at all excited.

  There was a coterie of noisy advisers in the hallway; it was hard to tell the Tories and the civil servants apart, all of them talking to either each other or into some device. At the bottom of the stairs I went to the dresser to pick up the housekeys, opened my purse to drop them in, before Rosie walked over. ‘You won’t be needing those, Ellie.’ She’d enjoyed correcting me, perhaps it still seemed to her that we were fighting over something. ‘We’ll lock up the house when the press have moved on. I can look after them if you’d like?’

  ‘No, it’s fine thanks,’ I didn’t snap. ‘I’ll leave them here on the dresser. You’ll let them know where to pick them up?’ I walked past Rosie and joined James at the front door. Rav was there to open it, so we could step out into the street to the unctuous crowd of reporters waiting for us outside.

  That was the first time I’d ever come close to losing my temper with Rosie. It was bad enough Rosie was taking the kids to Downing Street, but I was damned if I was going to give her the keys to my house. What Rosie didn’t know, what nobody knew, was what one of those keys could open. It had been on my key-ring since the night Luis walked out of Casa Amanhã. When I saw Rosie was distracted I picked up the keys and stuffed them into my purse, before walking to the front door where James and Rav were waiting.