Judy was blundering on. ‘What Donald and I have discussed is giving you a few weeks’ leave of absence to get yourself together. Provided – and this is university policy, I’m afraid, so it’s not negotiable – you get a note from your doctor and some help. GPs are very good these days with depression.’
Depression. That word. ‘Two lousy days off, and you’re shovelling me into the nuthatch.’
‘Manda, you’ve been awol for longer than that, mentally if not physically. Just look at yourself. Apart from anything else, you’ve been sat here in the car park for almost an hour. I have been watching you.’
‘Get that note to the central office ay-ess-ay-pee, Manda, and you’ll find we’re very understanding. Trust me. But we need you to work with us.’ Judy was closing up her file now. I could see she wanted to get out of the cramped space in the back of the car, but she’d have to wait for Don to get out for that, and he wasn’t finished. The car had grown cold while we had been sitting there. My refuge, my sense of security, blown away in the cold wind.
‘Manda, I want you back, back the way you were. I need you back, OK? So do this thing for me, please?’
I held his gaze, wanting to believe him. I took a breath. Maybe I’d let things slide a little. Maybe he was right.
‘Manda?’
‘OK.’
They both shot out of the car like rabbits, as fast as they could. I watched them cover the distance back to Don’s office, never once looking back. Swiftly I put the car into reverse, craning my neck round, eager to get away. Judy’s mention of the central office had reminded me of something and I needed to get there before she did.
The admissions section was in another part of the campus. News of my new pariah status hadn’t travelled this far and as usual my face was my pass into the back office. One of the admin secretaries obligingly booted up her system and gave me access to the student database.
‘We’ve had a couple of problems with the accounts so I’m just verifying some details,’ I said vaguely, and she waved me to her chair, probably worried that I was going to say something technical she wouldn’t understand. As she wandered back with a cup of coffee, I chose a couple of accounts at random, scribbling notes on a piece of paper, paging through the student mug shots and home addresses. I knew David’s official student account – he’d logged enough calls with us in the past couple of weeks that I had it memorized – and casually called that one up too.
Even the sleepy-eyed secretary noticed as I sat up sharply when the details came up on screen. A round-faced red-haired boy stared into the camera, his face stark and pale in the flash. ‘Found the problem?’ she asked, peering over my shoulder.
‘Yes, the, er, image concordance may be out,’ I improvised. ‘Are these the right details for David Harrison? Doing Computer Science?’
She shrugged. ‘they’re all just students to me.’
Another secretary leaned over. ‘The name’s familiar, though. I think he went on long-term sick, last year it was. Leave of absence. I had to take his name off all the entries. I remember that.’
‘Do you think that’s the problem?’ asked the first secretary. ‘Is the system broken then?’
‘No, I’ve sorted it now.’ I didn’t want her calling the help desk to get it fixed. ‘I’ve re-indexed the widgets and unbaffled the registry. It shouldn’t happen again.’ They both nodded slowly at this nonsense, mouths open.
‘Nervous breakdown, he had,’ said the second secretary, stirring her coffee. ‘No wonder, doing computing like that.’
Another morning, another car park, another set of rain-stained concrete buildings. Why did all healthcare facilities have to look alike, I wondered. This time I managed to get out of my car and as far as the reception. Arranging an appointment had only taken a couple of days, and I was a few minutes early. I was motioned to sit among the plastic chairs and torn magazines and wait until I was called.
I’d brought nothing of my own to read, and month-old Sunday Times magazines didn’t appeal so I just waited, scanning the signs on the walls, casting a few glances at the other patients. They all seemed to be the sort of people you’d expect to see in a health centre – a mother with a baby, an old woman, two old men seated side by side ignoring each other. Apart from an annual visit to have my blood pressure taken and to get my prescription for the pill, I hadn’t troubled our practice much since signing up with them years ago. And now with Gareth gone, I had had even less reason to visit. I couldn’t even remember my GP’s name when I rang for the appointment, agreed with a shrug when they told me what it was. Signs on the wall told me not to smoke, to ask for help quitting, to attend the diabetes clinic regularly. Older signs, peeling off the wall, told me I’d be barred if I was abusive. One of the old men started coughing, subsiding in a series of dry heaves that set the other one off hacking quietly in turn. The baby cried, in staccato interrupted bursts as its mother tried to soothe it, jiggling it on her knee. She looked tired, depressed if you will. I felt a fraud, healthy, taking up valuable resources.
I stopped reading the signs, stared at the ceiling, waited, reasoning with myself. I knew – from casual conversations, newspaper stories, snippets of information – that depression these days was treatable, easy. The new drugs actually worked. Doctors handed them out like candy.
‘My niece went in for a chest infection,’ Janet had said once indignantly over the phone to someone who’d only called to get space allocation on their email account increased, ‘came away with Prozac. Doctor seemed to think she was making excuses to see him. Anyway, it worked . . .’ There was no stigma, any more. People weren’t incarcerated, sectioned, shocked, brought back stumbling and slurring and confused for weeks afterwards. People didn’t have to drink to numb the pain, or spend their days staring at walls, or weeping, or kill themselves. I folded my hands under my arms to hold them down, to stop myself fidgeting. People walked into the doctor’s and walked out again with a piece of paper. They didn’t disappear. They weren’t dragged off like my mother was. The drugs worked.
Once, Zannah had tried to stop them taking my mother away. I never did. I would be relieved when the crises broke and they came for her, against her will or not. It meant an acknowledgement that things were wrong, that days spent lying in bed, weeping at nothing and at everything, were not normal, that we could stop pretending things would be OK. It was just that Zannah was better at make-believe than I was. My father had come into the sitting room of one of our short-term rented flats one day – towards the tail end of a dreary Easter break – and sat beside me on the broken-backed sofa where I was watching some old film on television. I would have been thirteen then, Zannah just eleven. I didn’t acknowledge him, too sunk in my own misery, my disappointment in another ruined holiday.
‘I can’t cope, Manda,’ he said. ‘She’s got to go back to the clinic. But she can’t bear it.’
‘She’s not exactly happy here.’
‘It frightens her,’ he said. ‘She loses her memory of what happens, and then that makes it worse.’
I’d looked it up since, in idle moments, on the internet. Treatments for depression. Back then they hadn’t much option if the old drugs didn’t work, which they often didn’t; still used the old voodoo of the ECT, still do for that matter. But only now as the last resort, surely? If the drugs don’t work. . .
My father went over to the phone and paused. ‘Am I doing the right thing, Manda?’ I think at the time I just shrugged. I wanted to tell him to put her away for good, get out while he still could and take me with him. I didn’t want to be asked, to take responsibility for anything. On the television, two men danced, happiness in every line of their bodies.
When Zannah came out of the kitchen and saw the discreet van pull up outside our building she ran and bolted the door. She knew the drill as well as I did. When the doorbell rang she shouted at them to go away
‘She’s better. I’m making her a cup of tea.’
Outside there was tolerant laughter.
My father put his hand on Zannah’s shoulder but she batted him away.
‘Come on, love, let us in.’
‘She’s better. She hates you. Go away.’
‘Zannah . . .’ Zannah fought my father with all her strength, biting and kicking as he pulled her away. She looked to me for assistance but I ignored her. When he reached to unbolt the door she wrenched herself free from his other hand and launched herself at the knees of the first of the men through the door. Behind them, I could see a nurse, boot-faced, arms folded. I turned back to the television. Zannah didn’t give up the struggle, not in the tiny hallway, not across the sitting room, not down the corridor where my mother lay. A dreadful keening started up – Zannah and my mother together – interspersed with the low soothing voices of the men. The nurse waited in the sitting room, still unmoved, between me and the television. I had to lean to see around her to keep sight of the screen. My father went and sat back by the phone, his head in his hands. The keening stopped as though it had been switched off. Neither my father nor the nurse moved. Laughter poured out of the television, then swelling orchestral music. The credits would be rolling soon, the Hollywood happy ending. After a moment the nurse went into the bedroom and re-emerged with my mother leaning on her arm while Zannah trailed behind her, all defiance gone. Even so I noticed the orderlies kept a cautious distance as they took leave of my father, told him to ring in a while when my mother would be ‘settled’.
‘Quite a girl you’ve got there,’ one of them said, smiling, as he left. Zannah threw herself into my father’s arms and he held her close, stroking her hair, not looking at them but at her. When I turned to watch them he held an arm out for me, too, but she turned and glared at me, eyes narrowed. I turned back to the neat certainties of the world on screen, and turned up the volume to drown them both out.
I realized, snapping back to the present, that my name had been called, once or twice. I looked around. The receptionist was looking straight at me. ‘Ms Brooks?’ she asked. I shook my head. ‘Manda Brooks?’ She waited a moment or two then spoke to one of the others behind the counter. One of them shrugged. She spoke into the phone, nodded, put it down, addressed the waiting room once more. ‘Mrs Johnson? Amy Johnson?’ As the mother stood up and gathered her baby’s things I stood up too and slipped out into the rain, revelling in the feel of the cold fresh air on my face after the fug of the health centre. Sod HR and their sick note, their policies, their job. I knew what depression was, and this wasn’t it. That wasn’t the problem. My problems were other people.
The story I had told Don was a simple one, a straightforward, everyday tragedy, the truth as far as it went. But I hadn’t told all of it, for how could I? I hadn’t the words that could take him there, could make him understand. Just the bald facts were enough. My father had arrived unexpectedly, the day she died, to take us out from school, to take us all on a surprise day out. I don’t know why he chose that day particularly, that weekend. Maybe, feeling the days lengthening, spreading his shoulders in the new warmth, he had let the bright hopefulness of spring get to him, get under his skin. He was prone to these little bursts of doomed optimism, especially towards the end. Even though anyone could see my mother was locked in the same struggle with drink and depression that she’d always been, he would let some bright spark of a doctor or some few weeks of mild improvement talk him into finding a hope for the future. It had been a long and unrelenting winter that year. Every time he’d settled her somewhere and made plans to return to Dar alone, to get on with his work and his life, she’d relapse in some way, forcing him back to her. The longer he stayed in England, the worse he seemed to look, grey and drawn, as though the cold and damp were eating him away. I was seventeen, locked into the trajectory of A-levels and university applications, my own freedom finally within reach. I looked at him fading away, still caught in her dead grasp, and wondered why he didn’t make his own escape, now, while he had time, before she dragged him under. I had made my own plans, only tentatively shared with him, to take a year off, spending it with him in Dar, maybe helping him out with some of the students. It was a dream I clung to in the idle moments between classes, during the long evenings, while trying to get to sleep at night. I thought we could build a real relationship that way, father and daughter, finally making up for lost time.
This day out must have been a last-minute thing, because he didn’t phone ahead, didn’t warn us, just turned up one Saturday morning while we were all idling in the day room staring out the window with the blank boredom of a term-time weekend. When I saw the car pull up and my father emerge, I thought for a minute that he was on his own. All I saw was him springing out of the car with new energy, smiling, his jacket hooked loosely over his arm. The thought came to me, unbidden, that he was coming to take us away, and the old childhood longing for rescue flooded back undimmed, catching me unawares, like a jab under the ribs. But it was only a moment, and then I saw her, slumped in the passenger seat, and I realized it was just another one of his fantasy days out, us together as a family, pretending to be happy, pretending to be whole. I wished fiercely for a moment that I could refuse to go along with the whole charade, that I could plead pressure of revision, slam the door in his hopeful face and storm up into the solitude of the dorms and be alone. But he was smiling as he approached the door and though I hated him for it, for his delusions, his blindness in the face of reality, I knew I couldn’t be the one to break his spell. She would be doing it herself, soon enough.
I sighed and stood up, grabbing Zannah out of the junior common room, hurrying to forestall the gloating announcement of their arrival. People left me well enough alone these days, mostly just pretending I wasn’t there, but I’d heard the stifled muttering as someone mentioned my mother, a suppressed laugh and then a silence as eloquent as a dozen taunts. A few years ago I would have risen to it, would have challenged them, but now I no longer cared. Another few months and I’d be out of the school, free to return to Africa and out of their reach forever.
‘Come on,’ I said, snatching the door open in my father’s face. ‘Let’s get out of here.’ I fidgeted with impatience as he went through the formalities of signing us out. Next door in the common room I could hear a muttered comment, a laughing reply, the words muffled by the door but not the sense. My mother had made it out of the car before, had once got as far as the dorm, drunk and rambling. They still remembered that occasion. I pushed my father backwards through the door, away from the sound of stifled laughter.
‘Come on,’ I repeated through gritted teeth, dragging him back down the path too while Zannah trailed behind us, buried in her headphones, oblivious to everything. We scrambled into the car and I saw the curtain swinging at the window as we drove away.
‘A little sea air,’ Dad announced. ‘Spring has sprung, after all.’
Zannah sat back and blew her fringe sarcastically out of her eyes. ‘Marvellous.’
I caught his eyes glancing at mine in the rear-view mirror, pleading for someone to play along with him, but I was in no mood to. My mother remained slumped in her seat. I could see only the back of her head. Zannah was playing her tape again, withdrawn into her own world. My father chattered on, not letting any of us break his light-hearted mood, doing the talking for all of us. It was as though he thought he could make us all happy single-handedly, erase the past, return us to the family we never were.
We started off in Brighton but that was too much, the bustle and crowds bothering my mother, and she clung to Dad’s arm and turned her face to his jacket. Peacehaven was better, quieter, but despite the early promise of the day, the sea mist hadn’t lifted here. As we walked along the promenade we seemed to be alone in the world, walking on endlessly with no destination ahead of us, the way we had come disappearing into the mist behind us. The cliffs rose steep above us, white against white, fading out gradually with no visible end. There was an eerie sensation of silence. Even the sea’s hollow roar against the pebbles seemed muffled by the fog.
&nbs
p; My parents walked on ahead together, saying nothing. Zannah lost herself in her Walkman, disassociated herself from us all by trailing as far behind as she dared. I held the gap in the middle thinking my own thoughts, trivial teenage things: wishing my mother just wasn’t there, wasn’t clinging to my father in that obvious, feeble way, wasn’t ruining my life, all our lives.
We walked too far, as though hypnotized by the strange atmosphere, the sea mist luring us on. We stopped at a set of steps and Dad decided to run back and get the car and meet us in the car park at the top of the cliff.
‘Manda, you wait with your mother.’ I felt the huge unfairness that I had to be the one to do this, while Zannah got to go smugly with my Dad. She only wanted to claim the front seat, hog the tape deck and inflict her music on us all. My mother slumped theatrically onto a nearby bench. It was only as I joined her that I realized she’d been drinking.
I didn’t need this, any of it: the recriminations and the crying, the pleading and cajoling that it would now take to get her up the steps, Dad’s silent disapproval at our – my – slowness, the ruined weekend. The tide was high, sucking at the stones as each wave withdrew, throwing its scummy harvest of polystyrene and plastic bottles onto the shore. My mother let two tears slide down through the foundation on her face.
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