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Lockdown: April

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April used the time on lockdown like she’d always done: she read and studied, listened to music, drank wine in the evenings. She sensed the slight edginess in the rest of the house but just shut it out, retreated behind her thoughts, and bunkered down with books, a bottle, and Bowie. That first one, six months in the ICU, had been the hardest but even then she felt like she’d coped okay… and that was before she’d added alcohol to her distractions. They frowned on that when you were fourteen. This one was only four days old, routine community contact trace, would probably be over tomorrow.

There were tests coming up at the end of term so she read back through her notes on the set texts. It was probably adding to the tension the others were feeling, particularly the scientists who rarely passed up an opportunity to point out the imbalance in workload between their courses and April’s. She was prepared to cede the point to Cora and Aps but not Leah. Surely Psychology didn’t count? Pseudo science at best. Leah had spent an hour after that comment trying to explore what had happened in her upbringing that might explain her suspicion of trying to understand the workings of the human mind. It hadn’t convinced April any more of the scientific basis of the discipline. She was content to tell her that spending six months in solitary in your formative teenage years was enough time inside of your own head to not need anyone else to try and explain it to you. She mostly believed it.

The tests didn’t bother her. They never did, she’d always excelled at them. All of them except the ones that had been carried out on her. Those ones she seemed to have consistently failed or how else to explain why they’d kept coming back to carry out more? She looked at the faded red lines across the inside of her arm, faint fractured traces of her time in containment. She knew they’d been looking for a vaccine. They never quite came out and said it but she heard enough snatches of conversation between consultants and doctors and nurses to piece it together. Her parents knew more than they were letting on, too. They just kept telling her that there was nothing to worry about, they just wanted more tests because they thought she was special, thought she might help them figure out more about the mutations. April had never asked them much about it after she was released – sorry, reintegrated – because she’d stopped believing they would tell her anything she hadn’t worked out for herself. She didn’t even blame them but when she was older she did wonder exactly what they had known.

They’d talked a lot about her scars in the few months after coming out. Once a week with a dermatologist and twice a week with a therapist. We need to heal your psychological scars as well as your physical ones. Maybe that’s why she was a bit dismissive of Leah’s academic calling. Too much time having her thoughts and feelings prodded and pulled by well meaning strangers. Why don’t you use these crayons to express how isolation felt to you? Have you tried writing a story to explore that? You can change how you’re feeling, April, tell me, what do you believe about yourself? She’d preferred the dermatology. Lie back and let them apply some balms directly to the surface of her skin. None of this scratching around under it.

There had been one therapist, when she was about seventeen, that had stuck at it longer than the others. She was never quite sure whether her parents moved her on to someone new or if, privately, they waved a little white counselling flag and gave up. She won’t talk about how she feels. You can’t administer talking therapy if someone won’t talk about how they feel. The persistent guy was called Dr Lau. Anthony. She liked him despite herself. He’d said to her early on that she was probably going to get fed up with him repeating the same questions, making the same points, regular as a metronome. She hadn’t known what that was and when he’d told her she’d said it sounded a bit like a drum machine; she’d just gotten into the Sisters and told him about the one they used, Doktor Avalanche. It’s settled then, I will be your drum machine and you may call me Doctor Avalanche. She couldn’t really take him seriously when he called himself that but when she thought about it now she wondered if that had been his point. He had gotten her to talk.

What else makes you happy? That was one of his sessions. It was shortly after she’d told him about the Sisters, with probably a more detailed account of Wayne Hussey’s exit than he’d necessarily wanted for clinical purposes, and this was his follow up. Even then she was savvy enough, guarded enough, to recognise what this was. He’d patiently taken notes as she’d enthused about the early singles, listened intently to her make the case for them as punk band, really, not a goth one. It was all in the spirit of the thing, that was her point. She could feel herself speaking, in the moment, and there was nothing self-conscious about it, no division between thought and word, no accompanying bone dry commentary from internal April. And she knew that was what he wanted because she knew he thought that would be the source of her truth. That would be the route to all the insecurities and anxieties and issues that they all thought must be there from the six months locked up on her own. For a moment she had felt out of control but only for a moment. She composed herself and reeled off a pre-prepared list of things that she always said made her happy: her parents, her friends, school, shopping. Avalanche just nodded and made some more notes.

It hadn’t all been a lie. Not in retrospect at least. If she was speaking to him now and if she was honest with him now then she would still say ‘friends’. She hadn’t expected to enjoy sharing a house as much as she had and she couldn’t imagine not seeing Cora, Aps, and Leah every day now. What else would she tell him? Holding a sip of purple-black Shiraz in the roof of your mouth, letting the cherry and tobacco flavours seep into your tongue and down your throat. Reading the description of blank, silent snow drifting into the warm office of William Stoner in John William’s novel. She knew all her therapists would have a field day with that one. So you enjoy the metaphorical encroachment of winter into a place of comfort and security? The ridiculously grandiose choral introduction to This Corrosion; so huge and confident. Wagner and Jim Steinman’s beautiful bastard offspring. Dancing. That made her happy. Particularly on her own. Imagining she could see herself suspended as a sequence of snapshots, frozen through a fog of dry ice by the pulses of a strobe. Listening to the others talk, sitting just on the periphery and observing their lightness, their ease, their grace. She was sure that’s not how they saw themselves necessarily but that was what she saw. Their joy. That made her happy.

All of that stuff’s external, isn’t it? Things you observe or consume or experience. Avalanche would have said something like that. What about you? Inside you. What makes you happy from in there? That was where he’d been going with that line of questioning, that line of attack as she would have seen it then, and that was why she’d put the shutters up again.

She wasn’t sure she knew the answer, even now. She wasn’t entirely sure there was one.

Fragments

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I remember the bridge and the accident. Or, at least, I remember that I wrote that there was a bridge and that there was an accident. Something bad happened. We can agree on that. I’ve been coming here for weeks now, perhaps months, and trying to talk about it but the words just won’t come. The summer house at the end of a garden, slatted windows open in the late summer to let in the air, shuttered tight in the winter to protect the heat rising at our feet from the electric radiator. There’s a box of tissues that I’ve never reached for although there’s some part of me that thinks that I should: the absence of tears no doubt noted dutifully in the book of notes I never get to read. Am I a secret to myself ? A wasp drones angrily at the glass in the summer house door.

“Perhaps we should let it out ?” he asks.

I look up at him, at his eyes, at his eyebrows raised expectantly, at his kindness.

“Letting things out isn’t my forte,” I reply ruefully. He lets me lapse back into silence and watch the wasp, a study in impotent rage, continue to fail to break through the glass, fail to fly to the garden it can see but not reach.

I remembered the shattered shards of glass on the bridge after the accident. The lights from the ambulance refracting through the splinters, red and blue light dancing across the wet tarmac as I waited for them to tell me what had happened. Does it matter if there was really an accident or if I just wrote it ? Something bad happened. It seems easier somehow to dramatise it rather than  just lay out the bare facts because the reality was so banal, so mundane, or at least it was when I said it out loud; inside it felt like an accident. It’s not as if I don’t have the words. I am not short of the words, whether recounting the miserable, ordinary slide into depression, or describing it second hand via a series of thinly disguised metaphors. All of those stories came from the same source, the same white light scattered through the mosaic of broken glass strewn across the bridge, a myriad of separations, a spiders web of my shattered self reflected back in shattered glass. Does it matter if the bridge was real ?

“So what did you want to talk about ?” he asks, more questions.

“I’m not sure that I want to talk about any of it to be honest,” I reply. “You know I prefer to write it all down.”

“The stories ? The music essays ?”

“I’m better written down,” I persist.

“But it’s another front, isn’t it ? Another way of packaging yourself up to present to the world ? The pieces of yourself you’ll allow people to see. Carefully considered and thought through. Nothing in the moment or out of control or truly vulnerable or exposed.”

“Pieces of splintered glass,” I murmur. “I don’t know. Is it just a front ? I’m not saying those stories amount to ‘Blood On The Tracks’ but there’s all of me in there if you search. They seem as real to me as a hand shake or a late night conversation with a friend or, or I don’t know, an imagined road accident on a bridge and its post traumatic fall out.”

“So why don’t you cry ? Or get angry ? Through all that pain, through that trauma. Where does it all go ?”

“It goes on the page. Or it pulls me down, eats me up. It’s better on the page. I’m better on the page.”

“And do you think you could put yourself back together on the page ? Tell enough stories, find enough of the fragmented strands of yourself that you can stitch them back, weave a tapestry out of the threads. Work it all out on your own. Is that the point ?”

“That’s not the analogy I use. In the story – you know, the first one – it’s glass. All of those stories are just the little pieces of glass sprinkled across the scene of the crash, little reflections of a part of my whole.”

“So change the analogy. Glass doesn’t really yield. It shatters or breaks and even if you could glue it all back together you’d always see the joins, you’d never see through it as clearly again. Sure, we unravel sometimes but when you knit the frayed threads back together you can make something new; just as strong as it was before, maybe stronger if you can see where the stitches failed last time. Don’t write stories to describe the fractured pieces of glass. Weave.”

“How would I start ?”

“I don’t know. You’re the story-teller. How do stories usually start ?”

 

……

This is story 41 in a series of 42 to raise money and awareness for the mental health charity Mind. My fundraising page is here and all donations, however small, are really welcome: http://www.justgiving.com/42shorts

This is intended as a wrap back to the very first story: Beginnings. It either all gets a bit meta or it disappears up its own arse. It’s a fine line… but it’s well intentioned. One to go.

The cowgirl and the counsellor

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I was late for the appointment. It had helped to talk about him at first but not anymore. I felt like lately Claire didn’t want to talk about him; she wanted to talk about me and I wasn’t interested in that. Or didn’t want her interested in that at least. I was my own puzzle to solve.

Her room was bright, pastel painted walls, a large print of Van Gogh’s “Sunflowers” hung above a walnut coffee table atop which sat a box of tissues, a sketching book and a selection of pencils in a jam jar. Claire was sitting forwards in her chair, smiling, and beckoning me into the room. It always struck me as odd. This incongruous, boxed off oasis of peace in an otherwise sterile set of shared, serviced offices. Grief counselling and therapy alongside A-Z MiniCabs, LB Accounting, and Mitchell & Hobbs Solicitors: wills and inheritance a speciality. That always struck me as particularly unfortunate and Claire hadn’t found it funny in one of our early sessions when I’d asked if she picked up many referrals. I always felt like she was testing me and I was failing. Maybe I’d just wanted to test her for a change.

“Sorry I’m late” I offered. She just broadened her smile and shook her head, gesturing at me to sit down. I perched on the edge of the armchair that was reserved for the unwell, the soft chair to sink into and surrender. I could smell her herbal tea. The more the room screamed calm at me the more I felt on edge.

“How are you ?” asked Claire. “It’s been some time…”

“I’m fine,” I replied, too quickly. She pursed her lips and inclined her head, expecting more. “Really. I’m sorry I’ve missed a couple of sessions but I think that just shows that I’m doing well. I haven’t needed to talk to anyone. No offence.”

“None taken. I’m glad to hear that you feel you’re doing well.” She fell silent. I knew how this worked by now; early on I used to hate the silence and would desperately fill it. Stories of growing up, memories of Dad. I would tell her I felt sad if I thought that was what she wanted to hear and other days I’d tell her it was getting easier, that I thought I was getting better. I did feel sad. But not in the way that I could tell Claire even if I’d wanted to. I don’t really have words for how empty everything had felt after he died, how numb. When I was little I broke my arm, fell off a swing in the park, and the pain was so intense at first that I blacked out. When I woke up in the ambulance they must have given me something because everything was duller, I could still feel the sensation in my arm but it was like I’d been separated from it. They stopped me feeling it because I couldn’t cope with it. That’s what the sadness felt like now: if I try to really feel it then I can’t deal with it. There’s just too much of it and so I try to stay separate from it. Claire cracked first. “I’ve been reading back through my notes and it struck me that we never really talk about the reason you’re here.”

“I don’t understand what you mean ?” I replied. I started to fold my arms but forced myself to leave them open, any change in posture usually provoked a flurry of note taking from Claire as if my innermost thoughts were laid bare by the position of body parts. We had spent twenty minutes in a previous session debating my fingernails, bitten to the quick. She saw some conspiracy of anxiety whereas I was pretty sure it was just because I couldn’t play the guitar with nails. Eventually I’d confessed to a concocted feeling of restlessness as she’d become increasingly interested in how I felt when I played music. I think I’d made the mistake of saying that I needed my fingertips exposed to connect to the strings, that in a funny way I felt connected to myself when I played. It was too close to the truth and so I’d deflected her with a lie. The pain isn’t separate when I play.

“We never talk about how you feel about your dad’s death,” said Claire. I held her gaze, fighting the urge to look away, to twist and hide in my seat. This was unusually direct for her. Perhaps she was as tired as I was of dancing around each other. Perhaps she’d given up trying to coax me out and had settled on a full on assault. She broke eye contact. “I’m just trying to help you Emily. Grief is a complex thing, it can eat you up without you even realising. I’m worried that you’re not…”

“Not grieving ?” I interrupted.

“No,” she said. “I can see that you’re grieving. You’re hurting so much that I think you’ve shut yourself off from feeling anything much at all and that’s a part of grieving. But it’s not a part you can stay in forever if you want it to get better.” She was looking straight at me again now and this time I did look away. I knew she was right. Maybe that was why I kept coming back, despite my deflections and defensiveness she kept on trying and, at times, she seemed to find me even as I tried to keep myself hidden.

“I… I don’t know how to do it,” I whispered into my shoulder.

“There’s no right and wrong way. You don’t get an instruction book. They don’t even give me one and I’m supposed to be helping.” I looked back at her. She was leaning forwards in her chair looking intently at me with a worried, weary smile. I smiled back at her.

“So what do we do now ?”

“I think now we try and do this a different way. Write me a song. Forget about today, we can just have a cup of tea and chat about the weather.” She must have caught the look on my face. “Don’t worry, you don’t have to have the herbal stuff. Come back next week, bring your guitar, and write me a song. I’d love to hear you sing. Deal ?” I was scared but curious. I thought I knew what she was trying to do but the quickening in my pulse when she’d asked me to write a song was the most alive I’d felt in weeks. Perhaps it was time to stop hiding.

“Deal.”

 

……

This is story 31 in a series of 42 to raise money and awareness for the mental health charity Mind. My fundraising page is here and all donations, however small, are really welcome: http://www.justgiving.com/42shorts

This is probably the last we’ll hear from Emily’s story (as spread across the previous three posts, Concrete Cowgirl, Broken, and Heartbreaker) for a while. Largely because I haven’t written anymore of it… However, I think she’s okay in Claire’s capable hands for a while. This one’s for anyone that’s ever sat in a therapist or counseller’s room and wondered how the hell they try and explain how they feel. I was spectacularly bad at it !