‘I didn’t imagine you would have, Ellie,’ she replies. ‘When your mum phoned to cancel the last appointment, she said you’d been finding things hard.’
‘Did she tell you I can’t leave the house? I mean, at all?’
‘She did.’
‘I have tried but I really can’t do it and now I’m at rock bottom. Did she tell you that?’
‘Something along those lines. Have you spoken to your GP about adjusting your medication?’
I might have known this would come up. ‘The medication wasn’t working.’
‘You stopped it?’
‘Look, I know you’re going to say I’m not meant to change anything without consulting the GP but I was feeling rotten well before I stopped. The tablets were making me feel worse. I’m convinced they were contributing to how bad I felt.’
I can sense her disapproval. ‘All right. But you need to speak to your doctor about an alternative. In the meantime, if you want to see me, I will squeeze you in tomorrow.’
I feel a wave of sudden optimism.
‘Colette, that would be great. I honestly think that if anyone can help me it’s you. Thank you.’
‘Two-thirty?’
‘Yes. Absolutely.’
‘Just so we’re clear, Ellie. The appointment is here, at my office.’
I suspected she might say that but I still feel as though I’ve been winded. ‘But I… my mum told you. I told you. I cannot leave the house. I’m just not able, Colette. I understand that you had that policy when I was slightly bad. You made that clear and I respect that. But this is far worse.’
She pauses long enough for my hopes to rise. ‘Ellie, you know you can get yourself here because you did it for weeks.’
‘Everything was different then,’ I say, my voice cracking. ‘Look, I understand it’s a pain for you.’
‘That’s not the reason.’ There is empathy in the way she speaks, and hesitation. She’s thinking about this, I can hear it.
‘If you were just willing to make an exception, just once, I swear it would be worth it. One session. That’s all I’m asking. I will cover your petrol… in fact, I’ll pay double time.’
There’s a pause. ‘Ellie, I’m sorry, but I’m not coming to you,’ she says finally. ‘The appointment is in the diary. I’ll see you tomorrow.’
No, you fucking won’t, I think, as she ends the call and I throw the phone at the wall, watching as it bounces off my Farrow and Ball French Grey and leaves a pebble-shaped chip in the plaster.
I sit on the edge of my bed, fury racing though me. Then I stand, pick up my phone and walk to the living-room window, clicking on the camera. I don’t open it. I don’t need to. Even through the glass you can see the mess, the debris, the decay. I remove the lens cover, point and shoot. I capture everything: the saturated leaves that have piled into the corner. The soggy stems that have wilted into the ground. I capture the mud and the mess, the chaos, the dead and the dying.
Then I sit on the sofa, with Gertie curled up on my feet, and compose an Instagram Story, uploading picture after picture and adding a paragraph to each one.
If you’ve been following me for a while and stumbled across the pictures in this Story, you’d be forgiven for wondering what’s going on.
Where are all the winter flowering shrubs and vibrant berries, the neatly arranged pots and the hanging baskets filled with winter foliage? The answer, I’m afraid, is that they don’t exist. Not this year.
These pictures, I’m sorry to say it, were taken today. All of them.
As you can see, there are no winter cherries, no evergreen viburnums. Nothing but a mess. I haven’t touched the garden for weeks. And the reason for that is that I haven’t been able to step outside my front door.
As most of you are here for the gardening pictures and advice I won’t bore you with the detail, except to say that, mentally, I have not been in a good place. I have suffered with agoraphobia for all of my adult life and, while there are long periods when it’s under control, at other times it’s so severe I can’t even leave my bedroom. That’s where I spent most of the last few weeks.
During that time, I did something I’m not proud of. I continued posting pictures about sunshine and flowers, pretending everything was tickety boo. I reasoned that if I could keep one part of my life in order – this, which means so much to me – the rest would follow.
It amounted to a big fat lie. It disrespected anyone who has taken the time to follow me.
To me, Instagram has never been about filters and Photoshop, but community. So there’s no defence for what I’ve done.
All I can say is, I’m sorry. I really am.
I publish picture after picture, caption after caption. It occurs to me only briefly to question why I’m doing this. Perhaps I want to do something brave and real, something true to myself. Perhaps I am feeling so self-destructive that this is the fastest way to undo everything I’ve achieved in the last couple of years.
An icon appears below the story to show that someone has read it. Then another. As the number of views rises, it strikes me that if this really is my aim – to show people the real me – then I’ve only half-done it. What, after all, is the point in having lots of followers if the person they think they’re following doesn’t actually exist?
I go to my bedroom and open the wardrobe, standing on my stool to take down the photo of Tabitha and me. I take a copy on my phone, then head back to the sofa.
ELLIE HEATHCOTE
I want to tell you a little bit about me. Not gardening me, or Instagram me, but the real me. The name I was given when I was born was Elena Balan. I spent the first years of my life in Bucharest, Romania, and this picture, taken in 1990, is one of the few that exist of me there. I’m on the left, next to a little girl called Tabitha. Those rusting beds are where we slept in the orphanage and like tens of thousands of children, we’d been there since we were babies. Tabitha ran away shortly after this, while I was adopted by a British couple.
For those of you old enough to remember the news stories about Romania’s orphanages, you probably don’t need me to describe what they were like. For anyone else, you might consider Googling the subject. I will simply say that they were the last places on earth where any child should be raised.
I have spent much of my time since I moved to the UK not merely trying to forget this phase of my life, but to deny its existence. I refused to accept that it would ever be allowed to influence the person I went on to become. That turned out to be a fruitless task. Human beings are shaped by our past whether we like it or not.
Acknowledging this is one of the reasons why this feels like a good time for me to bow out of here. It might be just a break, it might be for good. Either way, I want to end on two important notes. First, thank you for your friendship, your loyalty, your chats about peat and fertiliser, worms and wisteria. People who don’t like social media will never understand this side of it. But for those who know, you have helped me enormously and brought a lot of support and friendship into the life of someone who otherwise would have had none. Most of all though, I’m sorry. I’m sorry for all kinds of things but mainly this: that I am not the person I let you believe I was.
#thisgirlgardens #autumngardens #gardenistas #orphanagenumber3 #bucharest #romanianorphanage #mentalhealthmatters #romania #LaCentruldePlasamentTrandafirGalben
I publish the post and for a moment afterwards, I watch. The first response arrives within a minute. It’s from someone called @RamseyLad, who says:
Priceless. You filthy Polish fake.
I can feel every tiny blood vessel in my body constrict. Part of me wants to wait for my followers to respond, to leap to my defence. But no matter how hard I stare at the screen, nothing comes.
I click on @RamseyLad’s profile and see that he’s a follower of mine though I don’t remember him ever commenting before. He has a biblical quote in his biog and a Britain First hashtag. Another comment appears from him.
You’r
e not fit to clean my fucking shoes
My heart begins to flap. I scroll up to the settings and, before I can change my mind, I log out of my account on my iPad and uninstall the app. For good.
Chapter 59
It takes until the first week of November for something to change, on a morning that begins with glimmers of pale sun filtering though the gap in my curtains. Gertie sees me rouse and jumps on the bed. I snuggle into her fur and consider closing my eyes again, when I hear something outside. Banging. Voices. I pull the quilt up to my face and listen.
Someone is in my shed. I sit up sharply. Who the hell is in my shed?
I leap out and wrestle on my dressing gown, before opening the bedroom door. Gertie scuttles behind to the window, where I am confronted with a sight that makes me think I’m hallucinating at first.
My sister has a spade in her hand. Dad is holding a rake.
Instinctively, I bang on the window. They both look up, register me and reply with two pleasant waves, as if we’re in a parallel universe in which this kind of thing ever happens. Then Lucy bends to a flower bed and jams the spade in the ground, while Dad tugs the rake over the grass. I run to the front door and unbolt the lock, inhaling deeply before I open it. The cold air hits me like a firecracker. Everything is too bright, too sharp, too outside.
‘Morning,’ they chime.
‘What are you doing?’ I demand.
‘Have you got any gardening gloves?’ Lucy asks, apparently not hearing me.
‘We’ve decided to give you a hand, just sort out the worst of the mess,’ Dad explains.
‘It’s not a…’ But I don’t finish my sentence, because it is. For a moment I don’t entirely know what to do, other than retreat into the house and sit at the window, watching.
It would be funny if it wasn’t so painful.
Lucy handles the leaf blower like it’s a weapon in an armed shoot-out, her brow squished in furious concentration. Despite this, she’s useless with it, repeatedly clogging up the netting with leaves, at which point she unplugs it before manually attempting to unblock it. I tap on the window on her fourth attempt and she turns to me, testily.
‘There’s a knack,’ I shout through the glass.
The brow furrows again. ‘What?’
‘There’s a knack to it,’ I repeat. ‘A. Knack.’
She drops it to the ground and walks to my door. She knocks. I brace myself and go to open it.
‘Are you trying to tell me something?’
‘I’m just saying that there’s a knack to it. You don’t have to do it too hard, you just have to hold it in the correct position. Treat it with respect.’
‘Why would I do that? It’s an absolute bastard.’
‘Oh, it’s not bad,’ I say defensively. ‘I got it free for a sponsored post. It does work as long as you know how to do it.’
‘Well, perhaps you could come and show me.’
I cross my arms and step back. ‘I did not ask you to do this, Lucy,’ I say. I can see irritation billow up behind her eyes. ‘But… for the record, I appreciate it.’
This is a lie. I know it should be true. But as I watch them hack away at shrubs, yank at perennials and, in the process of clearing, make far more of a mess than nature alone would, it feels like a violation. Like someone giving a bed bath without prior warning, let alone requesting consent – convincing themselves they’re doing you a favour when they shove a wet sponge in your most intimate parts.
They continue for another hour, my sister muttering angrily under her breath, Dad coming over to inspect, Mum appearing at the door carrying three steaming mugs. They all stop for a jolly tea break before she joins in too. I watch with a knot in my chest as she begins lobbing the heads off my Honeybun roses, presumably in the belief that this constitutes deadheading. When Lucy emerges from the shed brandishing a hedge trimmer, I can take no more. ‘Stop!’
She looks up and gives it a little rev. ‘Everything all right?’ she asks, proving once and for all that she is a psychopath. I step away from the window and grab my boots.
* * *
The first time I go outside I can only stand it for a few minutes before I excuse myself to go back inside to the toilet. I am mainly dying for them all to just leave so I can smoke a cigarette in peace and return to bed. I don’t know how it is that I end up drifting outside again. It almost comes as a shock to realise that I am on my knees, with cool winter sunshine on my back, my hands deep in the cold soil.
After that, time passes without me fully registering it. When I eventually do look at my watch, it tells me that I’ve been outside for nearly two hours, though that hardly seems possible. I accumulate three garden bags of waste, as the soundtrack of blackbirds and song thrushes competes with my family’s chatter.
It happens in a blur, momentum building as my lungs burn with clear air. As the sun goes down, my fingers are numb, my thighs are beginning to ache, my feet throb. All four of us pack away the tools and head into my parents’ house and although I feel tired, it’s in a different way from the last few weeks. There is a hot glow on my cheeks. And although I’m still dying for a cigarette, the thing I want most is to sit by the stove in my parents’ kitchen and eat a bowl of thick, home-made soup.
Chapter 60
I spend the next few days in the garden, heading out each morning for reasons I can’t fully explain beyond some kind of muscle memory. It doesn’t feel good to be outside, but staying in feels worse.
It seems fairly sudden – a recognition one day when I walk out of my front door that there is an energy in my limbs that definitely wasn’t there a few weeks ago. My thinking feels sharper, my heart lighter.
‘Thought you might like some tea,’ Dad says, placing two cups on the bench. ‘Wow, this really has had an overhaul. Should I take some pictures for you?’
This is how we did it when I first started my Instagram account. Before I’d bought a tripod or a proper camera, I’d rope Dad in to help out, insisting that he didn’t need to know anything about light or composition, just to press the button.
We take lots. Some are pretty good. My favourite is one that he captures when I’m off guard, of me kneeling beside the vegetable patch, soil smeared on my forehead.
‘Do you remember joining the synchronised swimming team?’ Dad asks, randomly.
‘Vaguely,’ I say, because it can’t have been for more than a couple of weeks.
‘You’d been in England for eighteen months and, although we’d taken you to a pool, you’d never been taught to swim formally – weekends were usually packed with English lessons and other activities. You could manage a doggy paddle, but that was it. Synchronised swimming was all the rage at the time and your pals at school were trying out for a squad. You were determined to join in.’
‘Oh dear. Oh God yes…’
‘You went to the first sessions and the idea was that after a month they’d pick the best. There were fifteen girls and fourteen places.’
I smile. ‘And I was The Chosen One. I must’ve been terrible.’
‘I was furious that they hadn’t let you in.’
‘To be fair, you probably do need to be able to swim to be in a synchronised swimming team, Dad,’ I say.
He pulls a ‘meh’ face, refusing to concede the point. ‘I thought you’d be upset, but you just shrugged it off and asked Harriet to start taking you to the pool at weekends, so you could try again at the end of the year.’
‘So the moral of this story is that I should take up synchronised swimming?’ I put my camera back in its case.
‘I think you know the moral of the story. You were never the kind to just give up. So how about going back to Colette?’
‘Very subtle. I think I’ve probably been blacklisted by Colette after all the missed appointments.’
‘I doubt it, Ellie. Have a think about it anyway.’ He mooches into the house and about a minute later I hear the gate open.
‘Can we go on a worm hunt?’ Oscar yells, sprinting towards
me, stumbling in his wellies.
‘Oscar! Don’t go off ahead! And don’t run in the house!’ Mandy appears at the gate, sweating in exasperation. ‘Thank God. I had visions of him redecorating your carpets with all that mud.’
‘He’s fine, honestly,’ I say, ruffling his hair.
‘Do you want me to keep this one in the house with me?’ she asks, lowering her voice conspiratorially. ‘Your mum told me you haven’t been… feeling well lately.’ She accompanies the last three words with a slightly embarrassed expression.
‘Er, there’s no need. He’s fine to hang out here.’
‘Can we grow another sunflower?’ he asks.
‘It’s four degrees and forecast to snow tomorrow, so probably not. But we’ll find you something to do.’
‘Well, as long as you’re sure,’ Mandy says, already heading into the house.
‘Is it really going to snow tomorrow?’ he asks, following me to the shed.
‘So I believe.’
‘I hope some polar bears come and visit. But Mum says the only pet we’re allowed is a guinea pig.’
‘Oh, you like polar bears, do you? Wait until I show you a book I’ve got.’
I pop into the house and take my copy of Danny och isbjörnarna from out of the drawer. As I’m heading back outside I flick it open and see the message Jamie wrote, back in the summer after our conversation about my first day at school.
For Ellie. Bravest girl I ever met. Jamie Dawson. Oh, the irony.
I hand it over to Oscar. ‘Someone I know drew those.’
‘Is that the man who can moonwalk?’ he asks.
‘Yes, how did you know?’
‘He told me he drew books,’ he says. ‘I don’t understand any of this.’
‘It’s all in Swedish, but you can look at the pictures. Plus it will be available in English soon. Jamie’s having a book launch in London – you should ask your mum if you could go. He’ll be doing drawing workshops. I’m sure he’d love to see you.’
The World at My Feet Page 28