After The Fall

by Sarah Goodwin

  There was a pause, and I could feel Nate weighing up the particulars of the situation. After a moment he brought my tea over, then went and ate his own breakfast. I heard him getting ready in the bathroom, then he came back into the main room and picked up his keys.

  “I’m off out, do you need anything?”

  “No. I’m OK.”

  “See you later then.” He went out, and I stayed in bed, rising only to drink my tea.

  A few hours of dozing later, I felt I should make an effort to do something, anything, so I put on Nate’s dressing gown (which smelt like him, and made me feel better) and did the washing up at the tiny sink, tidied up the flat, and then got back into bed and slept for three hours.

  I was woken up by Nate returning, though he opened the door quietly. Paper rustled, and a bacon roll from the café was deposited at my side, on a plate.

  “Thanks for washing up,” Nate said, and I heard him making tea, one for him, one for me. Then he sat down on the sofa, and I watched him go through the job pages in the paper, eating his own roll, and then making phone calls to all the companies who’d placed job adverts. Just watching him made me feel tired.

  Nate spent the late afternoon and early evening putting together our dinner, a stew with beef, onions veggies and dumplings. He had a DVD on Oliver Cromwell, and mostly left me alone. I was grateful, oddly enough. I didn’t know how to justify my mood, or my actions, and I knew Nate was giving me the time to get my shit together after what had happened at Emma’s.

  I got up for dinner, catching the end of Nate’s DVD while we ate stew and drank lager. We got an early night, and Nate stoked my back, and the backs of my thighs.

  I think that was the first time I really thought about me and Nate as more than just mates who did other things together. Like I said, I was grateful to him, I knew he wanted to understand what was going on with me, that he cared. And I cared about him, I didn’t want us (that nebulous ‘us’) to be hurt by what was happening with me.

  Still, the next morning I couldn’t make myself get up. I felt just as tired when I woke up as I had when I went to bed. I couldn’t force myself to do more than shuffle to the bathroom for a wash. Once again Nate went out job hunting while I stayed home and lay in bed, or on the sofa watching TV and not caring what was on. I didn’t want to do anything, that was what worried me. But even the worry was flecked with exhaustion. It took too much effort to care about why I didn’t care.

  Nate brought me a plastic take-away box with some pasta bake inside. We watched television and Nate hunted for jobs in the paper. That evening I noticed a pile of paper clippings and printed sheets in the odds-and-sods draw in the kitchen, while I was looking for a spare lighter. Job searches, with ‘application sent’ written under each job. Nate had been looking on my behalf, and filling in my job centre diary. At least that took some of the pressure off. Still, it made me feel guilty.

  It went on for over two weeks. I couldn’t sleep, barely wanted to eat anything that wasn’t saturated in fat or salt and I gave up on reading entirely. Every morning I’d want to get up and get things done, but in the end I’d just lie there. I did less and less as the days went by, until I wasn’t even getting up to take a shower in the morning. I’d use the toilet, eat whatever food Nate had in that day, and slouch on the sofa or in bed.

  One morning, the fifth since I’d given up going out anywhere, I was making a cup of tea and accidentally knocked my mug with the kettle, sending it down onto the vinyl floor, where it cracked in half. The half cup of hot water seeped out over the floor, teabag marooned between the two splintered bits of cheap china.

  I stood over the fractured mug, still holding the kettle. My brain caught up with the accident, and I dropped the kettle onto the counter with a clatter. I could feel myself hitting the edge, soaring out into nothing. The broken mug had taken with it the last ounce of my ability to cope, and the knowledge that the prickling in my eyes was caused by a mug, only made it worse.

  I left the mess where it was, and crawled back into bed.

  A few times I got up again and even got as far as looking for the dustpan and brush. But I couldn’t summon the energy to do anything beyond that. The thought of picking up the cold teabag made me start to tear up again, and I got angry with myself, throwing the dustpan against the wall, which brought the kitchen clock down onto the floor.

  The kitchen was a mess. I was a mess, and neither was sorted by the time Nate came home.

  He came through the door, shucking off his jacket and looking over to where I was, hunched up on the bed in his dressing gown and my jogging bottoms and thick socks.

  “Had a bit of trouble at the library,” he said, “bastard behind the counter wouldn’t let go of this stain I’d got on one of the books. A cookbook, for fuck’s sake. It’s not going to stay clean if it’s being used is it? But he starts going on about it being a ‘fineable offence’ so of course I say ‘No, it’s beef borg-in-yon’, and he goes right into one...” he stopped midstream and really studied me. “What’s wrong?”

  For a second my voice was too dried up to answer, but I summoned it from somewhere and with an effort said, “I broke a cup.”

  Nate looked confused. “S’no big deal, I got the lot from ASDA anyway, you look like someone’s died.”

  “It’s still on the kitchen floor.”

  Nate’s chipper, terrier attitude was knocked down a notch, and it was almost as if he had an actual tail that had stopped wagging, ears that had lost their curious points. He glanced into the kitchen.

  “What happened to the clock?”

  “I threw the brush at it.”

  Nate snorted a laugh.

  I burst into tears.

  His weight made the bed sink when he jumped onto it next to me.

  “Aww, c’mon, it’s only a stupid market clock, it’s got two seven’s for crying out loud,” his hand slid up my arm, patting my back and then wrapping around me, meeting his other arm halfway. “Hey, it’s not a big deal.”

  I nodded against his chest to signify that I knew it wasn’t a big deal, that was why I was upset. What grown man was reduced to tears by a broken cup? But Nate held me firmly, and kissed the top of my head noisily to distract me.

  After a while I calmed down, listening to the thud of his heart under the thick wool of his jumper, and breathing in the smell of smoke and pub that clung to him at all times.

  “C’mon, I’ll clean up the kitchen, won’t take long, and then we can have cheese on toast while I watch the footie.”

  His hand rubbed up and down my back, ruffled the hair at the nape of my neck, like I was a lot younger than him instead of being roughly the same age.

  Nate went and picked up the broken mug, swept up the glass from the clock and hung it back on the wall. He was right, there were indeed two seven’s, one stuck in place of the five. I hadn’t noticed before.

  I grated the cheese while Nate fiddled with the grill. I was embarrassed by my own crying, and ignored the fact that my eyes were red, my face tacky with tears. I acted like everything was normal.

  Even so, when Nate put the game on the TV and settled down to watch Arsenal get battered by Man.U, he pulled me over until I was leaning on him, and absently stroked his fingers down my chest, running them over to tickle my side. Despite my wanting to act OK, I could tell he wasn’t fooled for a second.

  The thing was, I wanted to do things, to find myself a job and tidy up the flat a bit. But the will to do was a weak one, and I found myself sapped of motivation at the tiniest hurdle. Once, I fully intended to go to the job centre, but the lace in my trainers broke as I was tying them, so I kicked them into a corner and watched three old episodes of Quincy instead.

  Nate was good about it for a while. He took care of me like I was ill, doing my job searches for me, not commenting that I never did anything around the place. He didn’t talk about it to me, but I knew he understood how hard finding out about Simon had hit me. It was almost like I’d had another accident, l
ost a limb or something. I just couldn’t function. It got to the point where the idea of having to do something as basic as make a cup of tea made me want to crawl away under the bed, and where the thought of putting food into my mouth made me want to be sick. I could barely choke down dinner without crying.

  Nate tried, but everyone has a breaking point, and his came at the end of the second week, when he snapped the sheets off me at seven in the morning and throwing a dressing gown at my naked back.

  “C’mon, up.”

  I scrunched up under the toast-scented robe, avoiding the cold air.

  “Come on, I’ve got the shower running, and I got bacon and sausages for a proper breakfast.”

  The smell of cooking bacon confirmed this, making my stomach churn, but I reluctantly dragged myself out of bed and towards the bathroom. I washed as quickly as I could, but somehow I spaced out, and took far longer than I’d thought. Breakfast was already on the table when I came out, wet haired and wrapped in the dressing gown.

  Nate plunked a cup of tea down by my plate.

  “I want you to do something for me today,” he said.

  My stomach tightened, as it did at any indication that I might have to pull my shit together and achieve something – like the days when I knew I’d have to take a shower, or when I finally couldn’t stand the itch and had to shave off my stubble.

  “I want you to go down to the drop-in.”

  I hadn’t been expecting that. The drop-in was advertised at the job centre, and on a poster stuck up in the internet café we’d been going to. It was for medical advice, and mostly dealt with supplying birth control, abortions, and ear syringing.

  “What for?”

  Nate shoved a crinkled sheet of printer paper over to me. Depression – The Warning Signs.

  “You realise I just found out that my wife’s a liar, and my lover’s dead.”

  “I know.”

  “So why am I not allowed to be sad?” I glared at him. “I would think it would be normal to be fucking depressed.”

  Nate looked me levelly in the eye. “I’m worried about you.”

  I couldn’t sustain my irritation, mostly because I was too tired. In the end, I ate half my breakfast, before my throated stopped up and I couldn’t swallow anything else, then I let Nate hustle me into jeans and a hoody.

  The drop-in centre was crowded, even that early in the morning. Six mothers with prams, babies and toddlers, a selection of men in anoraks or denim jackets, two teenage girls sitting side by side and sharing a copy of Hello! and an old woman with a plastic rain bonnet on.

  Nate sat next to me while I filled out forms and waited for two hours. He read a crinkled magazine about running, then a copy of Good Housekeeping, knowing that I didn’t have the energy to talk, that just being in a room with strangers was draining me.

  When they finally called my name, I got up, and Nate didn’t. I looked at him, wondering if he’d come if I asked. He raised an eyebrow, waiting to see if I would. In the end I went in alone, and I felt better for it.

  I saw a nurse with a high blonde ponytail and gold hoop earrings. There was a toy rabbit in dungarees tucked into a pocket of her uniform and a bright pink stethoscope looped around her neck. I sat down on a plastic chair and she smiled at me.

  “So, what seems to be the problem?”

  “I, uh...don’t really know. I just can’t do anything, anything other than lie around and try to sleep.”

  “Mmmhmm, and how are you sleeping?”

  “Like a log, but I’m still tired when I wake up in the morning. Too tired to get dressed or have a shower most of the time.”

  “Any big changes recently?”

  I snorted and she looked at me weirdly.

  “Sorry,” I said, “it’s just, I lost my job and I left my wife for another man, and I’ve had retrograde amnesia since the car accident I was in a few months ago. So, yeah, pretty much everything’s changed.”

  For a moment she seemed stumped, then she produced a piece of paper with a short list of questions on it. “Answer these from one to five in terms of severity.”

  The questions were all things like ‘have you been having suicidal thoughts?’ with five being ‘a lot’ and one being ‘hardly ever’. I was surprised how many fours and fives I had down. The nurse added my score up and showed me that it was well above average.

  “I’d like you to see someone, to talk about how you’re feeling. That will be at the GP’s surgery. In the meantime, do you think you need some kind of immediate solution?”

  “Like?”

  “Antidepressant tablets,” she showed me another piece of paper with different kinds of medication explained on it. “I can start you on a low dosage of Citalopram, which might help you to cope. I’ll also need to take some blood to check for a chemical imbalance.”

  I hadn’t realised until that point that I was scared of needles. In the hospital, most of the tests had been done while I was unconscious or barely lucid. In the end, after several failed attempts, where I jerked away from the needle and went rigid, the nurse asked if I’d come in with anyone. She brought Nate in from the waiting room, and, embarrassed, I held his hard hand in mine and squeezed as the needle went into my vein. It seemed to take forever, and I couldn’t look while she took the samples, even though I could feel the tiny plastic tube trembling as the blood went in.

  Afterwards, with a ball of cotton wool pressed into the crook of my elbow, I took a prescription for a month’s worth of tablets from the nurse and left with Nate. My knees felt like someone had smeared Vaseline in between the joints.

  “Feeling OK?” Nate asked.

  “Just like I really need to sit down, maybe eat something.”

  Nate steered us down the high street, which was grey as a weekday morning and peopled only with the unemployed, as everyone else was already at work. There was a Wetherspoons next to the cinema, or what had been a cinema, judging from the outside and the faded posters for Jamanji, it had been gone for a while.

  I couldn’t remember ever having been in a Wetherspoons before, but the heavily air-conditioned part pub, part club wasn’t overly welcoming. There were a handful of other people sitting at tables near the door or right at the back of the long room. Middle aged men with grey almost-beards and pints of IPA near the door, old women with whiskers and copies of Woman’s Own at the back drinking tea.

  Nate steered me to a table in the middle, with leather booth seats that sighed when we sat down.

  “Yes it’s dark and kind of depressing, but, it’s also dark, and cheap,” he said, and handed me a menu.

  He wasn’t wrong. Even though I was torn between hunger and the anxiety that i wouldn’t be able to eat the food I was paying for, I got a burger with chips, bloody mary relish and onion rings, with a coffee. Nate had a steak and chips with mushrooms. Cost less than a trip to Maccy D’s, and the drinks were free.

  “So, you need to go get those tablets. There’s a Superdrug on the corner, and I’ve got your JSA book, so it’s free.”

  I nodded. “She said it might make me worse for a while. They take two weeks to kick in.”

  “Chance you have to take.”

  “I know I can’t carry on like I have been,” After trying my hardest with the food I slid him over some onion rings, and most of my burger, picking at my chips. “Thanks, for taking care of things.”

  Nate shrugged. “You’d do the same.”

  “I would.”

  A hand clapped me on the shoulder. Gregory, and Marg who came around the other side, from behind Nate.

  “Mind if you sit with you?” Gregory asked, already pulling out a chair for Marg, then one for himself. Marg looked nice, in a light brown jumper covered in silky gold hair, with black leggings on. Gregory was in a brown cord jacket lined with cream fleece.

  “Heard you two moved in together,” Marg said, flicking open the menu and sharing it with Greg.

  “Who said?”

  “Cashier at ASDA, said she was covering
for someone whose husband had anaemia, who’d run off with a bit of rough from his AA group. Put two and two together.”

  Nate snorted. “Anaemia. No wonder the slag’s working at ASDA.”

  “Better than you though, still one of the great unwashed,” Gregory said, toasting him with a half pint of IPA. “And we’re happy to have you on side.”

  “So, you haven’t been back to group then?” Marg asked me.

  I shook my head.

  “I bumped into Cora at the garden centre, she’s got a second job there now. Alternate weekends. She said she’s changed schools, now she’s at the new academy they opened just off the bypass.”

  “Really? Good for her.”

  “Yeah, and I’ve seen her around by the social club with one of the blokes from the tattoo parlour. They seem to be getting on well.”

  Gregory went off to order them some food, and Marg sighed, took out her pocket diary and pointed out a day ringed in red.

  “Have to go back to AA next week.”

  “Why?” Nate asked.

  “You haven’t got a letter yet? Me and Greg both got ours yesterday, basically says they’re offering more support if we actually go to the group. Hypnotherapy, help tracking down relatives...”

  Nate rolled his eyes.

  “A cash incentive, ten pounds a session.”

  “We’re there,” Nate grinned, “I can put that into my redecorating fund, get myself a new electric shower installed. There really isn’t enough hot water now there’s two of us.”

  Gregory appeared again, carrying two hot chocolates and looking nervous.

  “Isn’t that your ex over there? I saw you two in ASDA once.”

  I looked in the direction he nodded his head, and saw Emma, and two other women who I’d never seen before over at one of the other tables. Emma’s face was stiff and white as wax, and she looked sick.

  “Shit,” Nate muttered.

  I couldn’t look away from her, and I don’t think she could help staring at me either. I felt guilt sit heavily in my stomach like a squatting frog on top of my lunch. Emma’s eyes moved slowly, like they were rusted into the machine of her mind, eventually landing on Nate. Her face darkened, and the pretty woman who had taken me in from hospital turned suddenly ugly. She looked like a stranger.