Too Close

by Natalie Daniels

  Sometimes I’d like us to walk out of here, share Lorazepam stories, go and have cake and tea somewhere; to play different roles than the ones we have been allotted in this room.

  ‘And how was the anxiety?’ she asks.

  ‘Well, very quickly I needed more than 1 mg to have an effect and then I’d rebound to worse anxiety than before, so I had to take more pills just to feel normal. They are completely addictive, which star-fucker doctor failed to mention, and not just psychologically but physically. My body lost its own ability to calm down. Presumably you know the legal guidelines in Safety of Medicines say that no one should take benzodiazepines for more than one month. And they should only be taken for acute anxiety. Tell me, how do you define acute?’

  ‘Tell me about the day of the Harvest Festival, Connie.’ She’s like a dog with a bone. I bet she drives Si Hubby bloody mad. Have you taken the rubbish out? – In a minute. – Have you taken the rubbish out?! – In a minute!

  ‘You tell me about you. You know what it’s like to be on your knees, Dr R,’ I say. I’m taunting her. I can be so mean, but I don’t like her like this, the snooty superiority.

  ‘We’re not here to talk about me. Come on, help me out here.’

  ‘No. You help me out. Ask Karl to bring Josh and Annie to see me.’

  She cocks her head, arms folded, furrow-browed. She looks like she’s about to say something. But she’s tired; she might just get up and go. I don’t want that. I look out of the window. The sky seems to be up to something, a smothering white dankness infusing everything, a pillow pressing down on London. I can feel it permeating through the panes of glass, a wall of suffocating chill right next to us.

  ‘Oh, look!’ I say, getting up. ‘I think it’s starting to snow!’ She turns suddenly and we both stare. It is snowing. She joins me by the window. It’s beautiful! Big fat flakes start swirling silently past our noses; we’re like children, our eyes wide with wonder. We are no longer psychiatrist and patient – we are just two people watching the snow falling.

  When we sit back down, the atmosphere feels different. It’s as if the snow has softened me; I stop being so combative. I don’t know why I’m so angry. I feel rootless and scared sometimes in here. ‘It’s the context of the day you have to understand,’ I say.

  ‘OK,’ she says. She can be so gentle sometimes, so motherly. What I really want to do is lie down with my head in her lap and go to sleep. ‘Give me the context.’

  I pause a moment and think back. ‘I now need these pills just to feel normal, Dr R. On Wikipedia I find out that 1 mg of Lorazepam is the equivalent of 10 mg of Valium and some days I’m taking three or four. By this point, I’m a bona fide junkie and it’s all pretty much legit.’

  ‘Did your doctor know the quantities you were consuming?’

  ‘My doctor snorts lines of cocaine in the children’s toilet at the Christmas Fair, Dr R.’

  ‘Did you confide in anyone?’

  ‘I could hardly tell my parents. They’re paid up members of the Bach Remedy Squad. I once snapped my shin as a child and my mother put me to bed and rubbed arnica on it.’

  ‘And Karl? Did he know?’

  ‘Yes, to a degree. But Karl was a great advocate of substance abuse; he was all for it. Besides, I think he preferred me dulled, less waspish, less alert. You see, my bone china edges had now become fuzzy and soft like cotton wool, cushioning life’s little blows.’

  ‘And how were those little blows? How were things between you and him?’

  I sigh; I stretch out my stick-thin legs. I’ve got white leggings and white socks on and they look like two cotton buds. I have become something absurd.

  ‘I’d forgiven him and Ness. Not for altruistic reasons, just because it was the only way in the end for everybody. This way, life could just carry on as normal. I wanted the kids to feel safe and I needed to reassure Josh that Karl and I were OK. I stopped giving Ness a hard time – she’d screwed up, she knew it, but it was over. Things were back to normal; if anything there was a deeper connection that forgiveness brings. She and the girls were at ours all the time as usual. Although …’

  Talking about it now, something strikes me. ‘Between you and me, it might have been nice to have seen a little more remorse from them. Some prolonged contrition wouldn’t have gone amiss, or at least some hearty acknowledgement of my magnificent benevolence …’

  She smiles and nods. I love it when I make her smile. ‘But no, now they were absolved of their sins, they laughed and capered, seemingly impervious to any pain inflicted. So I licked my wounds in private with my sugary Lorazepamed tongue …’

  ‘Admirable, Connie. Well done you.’

  I flounder. Her empathy feels like small hands squeezing my throat, making my eyes water. I don’t want to cry. Sometimes I worry that if I start to cry I’ll never stop. ‘The truth is I loved them, Dr R. And this way, I still had them in my life. I hadn’t lost them.’

  ‘I understand,’ she says. She is smiling; she looks tired. I want to please her.

  ‘Sorry, yes. That day. I woke up with these terrible period pains. You know the kind, that every-other-month ovary that’s a killer. I was feeling really groggy and bleeding copiously. It had gone on the sheets, down my legs, on the carpet. Even after thirty-five years of menstruating, it still takes me by surprise every month. You have to understand, maybe you do, that even something as normal as a period demanded difficult decisions to be made – what order things should be done in – and my medication made me feel pretty numbed much of the time. I felt quite pleased with myself dealing with it all: sanitary wear, washing machine, carpet cleaner, ibuprofens, hot-water bottle down my granny pants.

  ‘I could hear Annie downstairs practising her song. She’d been given a solo for the festival despite showing no musical ability whatsoever – presumably it was school policy that every loser was a winner. I listened to her downstairs singing lustily without hitting a note, a song about starving children and fruit salads, as far as I could make out. She was also to be dressed as a banana and hang out in a bunch with some boys behind the grapes. Polly was a dragon fruit, which Annie was a little jealous of – more tropical, more glamorous, I guess. Ness had been roped in to play the piano because the music teacher was ill, so she had been round practising with the girls on our piano. It was a big day in the Mortensen household. And I was going to rise to the challenge. I would go to great efforts to make my family happy. My parenting had been somewhat erratic recently but today I was going to make amends. Mum and Dad were coming to the service. Josh had training after school so would meet us there. Then everyone was going to come round to ours for supper, even Leah, and Poll was going to stay over. We would be one big happy family. All I had to do was make a lasagne.

  ‘I took a Mother’s Little Helper just to keep on top of things. I carried them around with me in my pockets these days: dressing gown, cardigan, coat, bag – I never knew when I might need one. Before Karl left the house, he made some dig about the state it was in and how long was I going to go on playing the victim? How he would cook and clean when he got back from a marathon day of meetings if I wasn’t up to it. I saw the way he looked at me with a kind of general disappointment but I let it all bounce off my cotton-wool edges. “Great, I’ll leave it for you,” I said. Notice that I still had a little of the old spunk left, Dr R, a dirty residue of anger nestled deep in my colon to be gobbed out at Karl every now and then.

  ‘The house was quiet. They’d all gone. I sat there on the bottom step, bemused by the chaos left in the wake of kid-departure, an ominous feeling that unutterable misery was lurking nearby. I stared at the mess unable to do anything about it. My phone rang. It was my mother in a panic because she couldn’t find her handbag. She said, “Are you all right, darling, you sound a bit slurry?” It was unusual these days for her to notice me in that way. I was touched and told her I was fine and that she should keep looking for her handbag – I was going to clean the house and go shopping and I would see her late
r in the church. She asked if she could bring anything for supper but I knew she wasn’t going to remember it so I said not to bother.

  ‘But somehow I didn’t get off that step for quite a few hours because I couldn’t decide what order to do things in. I rang Ness for support but she must have been busy at the gallery. She rang me back a little while later – I was still on the step – and she suggested I didn’t bother with cooking, to cheat and get a frozen one. She offered to pick something up after school. But no, I wanted to do this for my family. So, in an incredible display of togetherness, I ignored the filth, found the cookbook, made a list of ingredients and made my way up to Sainsbury’s. Then on the way back I popped into the hardware shop, determined to give the house a proper clean, and bought all sorts of things, my coat pockets bulging as I made my way home: metal scourers and limescale remover for the showerhead, drain unblocker for that dodgy bathroom sink, Spirit of Salts for that yellow piss build-up in the toilet – I would not be outdone by my own house.

  ‘In actual fact I didn’t do any cleaning but I picked up things from the floor and ran the vacuum cleaner about the place. I concentrated my efforts on the lasagne and tried to consciously make it with love, but I found it almost impossible and couldn’t keep count of the quantity of ingredients … it was going to be a disaster. Soon I was crying tears into the béchamel sauce – I don’t know why I was so weepy: period? Pills? Deep sense of failure? – which I found strangely fascinating. I stirred them into the mix, popped another pill and told myself how stupid I was, how lucky I was to have what I had in my life: my beautiful children, my wonderful parents, a good husband despite everything.

  ‘I covered the lasagne in tinfoil and left it on the side ready for the oven. I laid the table, which was not as easy as it sounds: I kept losing count of how many people would be there. I placed candles in the middle, waiting to be lit on our return. Then I had a bath, changed my clothes and made up my face for the concert. The prospect of actually leaving the house made me slightly anxious. I’d avoided social events, especially school occasions. So I crushed up a little diazepam to ease things along and grabbed my coat.

  ‘I felt OK. It was raining and getting dark; I wanted to be late, I didn’t want to have to chat to anyone, but I promised Josh I’d be there to meet him. Halfway there I realized I’d left my phone charging in the kitchen but I’d gone too far to turn back. The church looked beautiful, full of candles and flowers. It was warm and dry, filled to the brim, the chatter of a hundred voices, the buzz of excitement, keen parents who’d been there for hours to nab the best places at the front clutching cameras and phones ready to record their little fruity darlings. I said hi to various people, nodded at the grinning GP and the other drug-dealing mum. You know what? It was actually really great to be there, to be out in the world. And everyone was kind and funny and I felt part of it all again. I had a feeling that everything was going to be all right.

  ‘I looked around for Karl and spotted my dad in a pew near the back reading a book. I made my way through the throng towards him. “Hi, Dad,” I said, sitting down next to him beside Karl’s folded leather jacket. My father looked up, momentarily surprised to see me, and seemingly surprised to find himself in a church at all. “Hello, darling,” he said, and nodded towards Karl and my mother, who were both engaged in separate conversations by the pillar. Karl was talking to the vicar. “No Josh?” I asked, looking about the place. I could see the headmaster down at the front talking with Ness by the piano. She was laughing. I tried to catch her eye and wave. She was looking incredibly dashing, Dr R, I remember that. She was wearing a flowery dress, quite low cut, hair down. She looked fantastic. I wasn’t the only one to notice her; a few fathers were hovering around the piano. I recognized that flirty air that I now knew she liked to create.

  ‘Karl’s jacket started buzzing next to me. I hoped it might be Josh trying to get through and I rummaged in the pocket and found the phone. It was Josh. He’d left a text. I tried Karl’s usual code but it didn’t work. I looked up; he was still over by the pillar charming the cassock off the vicar, his voice just that bit too loud, his laugh slightly over exuberant, being demonstrably entertaining company. I paused for a moment and tried the Sky code. Bullseye. I went to his texts: Running late just missed bus. J. I was about to put the phone straight back into Karl’s pocket when I noticed that the previous text hadn’t been read either. It was from X. I don’t know why I looked. But I did. You make me SOOO wet when you say things like that XX. Delete!!

  ‘I read it several times. I checked the number.

  ‘Yes. It was her. It was Ness.

  ‘It was as if my spirit rose out of my body. Up I went above the pews. I could see myself sitting there with Karl’s phone in my hand, stock still, paused in a moment of time. I looked over at her at the piano by the pulpit, flicking her frizzy fucking hair, laughing a new silvery laugh, eyes flashing, in her element, surrounded by adoration, throwing a glance towards the pillar where Karl stood. They were parallel to each other, separate but connected, like they were dancing with each other, like they existed only for each other. I saw it all quite clearly.

  ‘I stood up, back in my body with a thud, my blood rampaging through my veins. I had to get out of there as quickly as possible. I shuffled past my father, not even taking my bag, past the people along the pew to the comparative safety of the aisle, heading for the exit. I felt sick. I heard someone call my name but didn’t turn. I had one thought: I needed a Lorazepam now. I put my hand in my deep coat pocket but instead of the Lorazepams, my fingers found something else, something that might offer me far greater results. I stopped in my tracks. I turned around. I could see her. There she was, leaning against the piano, looking up, laughing, tossing her hair about, leaning forward, showing her cleavage.

  ‘I hated her.

  ‘Slowly I made my way towards her, like a steady but lethal missile. “Excuse me, excuse me,” I said calmly, eyes focused on my target. I knew what I had to do. I stopped. I was no more than four feet from her. She was seated at the piano now, with her back to me, talking to someone – I have no idea who – I saw no one but her, the flowers on her dress, the moles on her neck, the necklace I had once given her. I fancied I could smell her, my Jo Malone perfume.

  ‘I brought out the thick plastic bottle from my pocket and looked at it: Spirit of Salts. Hydrochloric Acid. Hazardous. I started to unscrew the lid. It had a child lock on it so I had to apply pressure with a twist.’ I watched, quite mesmerized, as the acrid vapour swirled out of the bottle like a sick and dangerous genie.

  ‘“Ness?” I said, my voice sounding faraway, even to me. She was smiling, beautiful. She turned round, her face dropping as she saw me. She knew I knew. And as I chucked the contents of that bottle straight at her, I felt this wonderful, almost perfect feeling of justice being done.’

  Dr R has covered her mouth with her hand. And I realize she doesn’t see it in quite the same way that I do.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ I say to her. ‘Some have-a-go hero leapt to the aid of the damsel in distress and I felt myself being jumped on, flung to the ground.’

  I remember the fizz as the caustic liquid genie spilt himself upon me, on to my neck, down my own arm, on to my legs, denying me my wishes. I lay there on the floor with a stranger on top of me, acrid steam rising up from the tiles, getting up my nose, into my mouth, making me choke. And there she was: still beautiful, still treacherous, but acid-free, looking down at me while my skin sizzled and burnt itself raw.

  Dr R listens carefully. Then she slowly takes her gaze out of the window and frowns. ‘It wasn’t premeditated then?’ she asks.

  ‘Not at all. It was divine opportunity.’

  ‘Then what happened?’

  I think back. I remember the searing pain on my leg, on my tummy, my arm. I remember people looking down at me on the tiles, their faces twisted with disbelief and confusion. Fear, actually. I saw fear. I was a monster. I was still holding the bottle and someone wrenched i
t from my grip as if I might be some sort of Spirit of Salts terrorist and liable to go rampaging around the church splashing all and sundry.

  ‘I scrabbled to my feet. I had to get out of there. I ran out of the church by the little door on the side. It was dark outside. I kept on running, down the hill, across the road, over the railway until I got to the river. It was pitch black, raining and cold on the towpath but I was on fire, my skin was burning up, burning off my hands, my torso, my right thigh. I was crying out with the pain of it when in the darkness I saw this little flashing white light approaching. I thought it was a fairy, a spirit. But it was a woman on a bike. She screamed when she saw me. I remember thinking why is everyone so scared of me? Then I looked down at my body lit up by her flickering bicycle light. You couldn’t see the burns but you could see the blood. I was covered from the waist down. Had someone stabbed me? Then it dawned on me that what with one thing and another, I’d forgotten to change my Tampax.’

  But the blood was nothing compared to the pain. Holding my hand out in that winking white light I could see that the skin had burnt right off, as if the flesh itself was trying to breathe the air.

  ‘I had to get into the water. I started ripping off my clothes. I slid down the bank as fast as I could, slipping in the mud, the woman still shouting at me …’

  I remember the coldness of the river, squatting in the shallows, the filthy water soothing my fiery flesh. I remember wondering if I’d make it back in time for Annie’s banana song. And what time I should try and get the lasagne in the oven. I needed to light the candles, put napkins on the table, decant the wine. But the next thing I knew, a policeman was dragging me out of the water along the shingle, scraping the skin off me. I felt like raw meat being scored. I was screaming, trying to stop him, fighting him off, but then more police came down to the water and there were more flashing lights. God, I needed some drugs.