by Tom Marcus
‘Tom, I specialize in helping people with traumatic events. Before this I was a police officer; I’ve helped people deal with seeing murders, rape, abuse, right the way through to a car crash. So there isn’t much I haven’t heard or helped people cope with.’
‘OK, great, I take it my employer has paid you already and it’s all sorted?’
‘Yes, all sorted out, paid very quickly. Just a question about your employer. The woman I spoke to on the phone about you, Sue, was reluctant to give me any information about the treatment you need, the trauma you have experienced or in fact your full name.’
Waiting for a response from me, David already suspected who I was. He was an ex-copper so being cagey about simple things like my name and what I do obviously piqued his interest.
‘Did she tell you who my employer was?’
‘Only that you work for the government.’
Sensing I was retreating even further into myself, he offered some reassurances.
‘Tom, I don’t care about what you did, who you worked for. But I do need to know your trauma, I want to treat you properly. I can’t do that unless you tell me exactly what’s happening. The more honest you are, the better results we will get and the faster you recover.’
Taking a glance around the room, I notice his phone next to him, and a computer that was switched off. Crucially I was looking for anything that could be recording this conversation.
‘Are you recording this session?’
‘No, Tom, sometimes I send people back into a meditative state to their trauma and I record what they say to play it back to the patient, but I would always ask permission first and it doesn’t go outside this room.’
‘David, what I’m about to say can NOT be repeated and I’m only telling you so I can get better, I NEED to get better.’
‘Of course, Tom. All I want is for you to get back to who you are.’
‘OK, I, er … This is difficult for me to say because I’ve never had to tell anyone before.’
Patiently waiting for me to untangle my tongue and say who I was and what I did, David looked on as I saw one of his many mental health professional certificates behind him among all the books on complicated subjects I’d never even heard of. I made the decision there and then that if I was ever going to move on with my life and find out who I really was I would have to shed this cloak of secrecy. I had to tell him.
‘I’m MI5, Security Service.’
David may have been a leading expert in treating mental trauma but he wasn’t that good at hiding his thoughts; his eyes widened. He was clearly shocked.
‘Surveillance officer, to be exact. I’ve been having nightmares, I’ve been seen by two people already and they have mentioned PTSD and hyper-vigilance or something.’
‘Thank you for being honest with me. I’ve never met someone in MI5 before, not that I know of anyway!’
Trying to lighten the mood and make me laugh, he continued with his initial assessment of me before deciding what the best course of treatment would be.
‘Hyper-vigilance is somewhat at the core of PTSD, but there are varying degrees of the disorder, depending on whether you are suffering with one single event or a culmination of a lot of events.’
I twitched in reaction to the suggestion of a series of traumatic events, and David picked up on it straight away.
‘I’m guessing by your reaction then it’s a series of events. If you wouldn’t mind I’d like to get a handle on your hyper-vigilance and what exactly you’re looking for. Would that be OK?’
I reluctantly agreed. I had to go with whatever he suggested now.
‘All I want to do is walk around the block here, it takes about fifteen minutes and it’s a lovely day. While we walk around I want you to describe to me what you can see. That’s it. No tricks, just be honest.’
Fifteen minutes of walking, I could do that. Piece of piss, this therapy, I just hoped he gave me the all-clear quickly so I could tell Thames House I wasn’t mental any more and stayed in with a chance of keeping my job.
We walked back outside; this area was very affluent. I’d love to be able to afford to live here one day.
‘Right, Tom, let’s walk and just talk to me as if I was a close friend of yours. I won’t interrupt. What can you see?’
‘OK, I know from the map study before I arrived that we are walking north-east on May Lane. Visibility is good. Street is clear, no pedestrians on foot, no one in the vehicles ahead. Bus stop twenty metres away, which is five metres prior to the next junction. House to our right, number 54, has window open on the top floor, no lights on.’
This was incredibly easy. David continued to listen and we walked round and we probably had another five minutes before we were back at the starting point of this big loop.
‘One unidentified male standing at the bus stop on the west side, forty-five to fifty years old, chubby build, blue suit jacket, blue jeans, five foot eight to five foot ten white male, no threat. We have a black Mercedes, VRN YANKEE FOUR THREE ONE MIKE OSCAR TANGO, tinted windows, parked up on the east side facing north, engine running, driver’s window slightly open, possible threat.’
I didn’t like this car being here, it stood out. Quiet posh neighbourhood like this, it looked like a drug dealer’s car to me. David wasn’t in the best of shape given his age so I positioned myself between him and the car and took half a pace in front to deal with anything that might come from the car.
‘Five metres from the vehicle now, smoke coming from the driver’s window.’
As we walked past I could see through the dark tint of the window just enough to see the driver was a woman smoking and looking at Facebook on her iPhone. We continued to our starting point and finished our walk.
As we sat back down in David’s office he was slightly out of breath. Composing himself, he went on to give me his thoughts on our walk. ‘Tom, great day, isn’t it ? About time we had some sunshine!’
Smiling, I couldn’t agree more; the British weather had really been on form lately so it was nice to be outside without getting piss wet through for once.
‘What’s obvious to me is that you see everything as if you’re working. The detail you see and how quickly you absorb your surroundings is incredible. You were pointing out things I didn’t even notice, even in the police I couldn’t give that much information out. But, and this is an important point, your perception of what’s happening is on a whole other level.’
Pulling a pen out of his drawer, he started to draw on a paper flip chart behind him.
‘OK, simple graph: number one at the bottom is someone just waking up, nice and relaxed and still a bit dopey. In the middle at number five is someone walking into a surprise birthday party and the lights flicking on everyone shouting “Happy Birthday!” Adrenaline rushing and shock, but a happy shock.’
I knew where he was going with this but I certainly didn’t like what I thought was coming.
‘And at the top is number ten, the seconds prior to and immediately after someone having a near-miss crash, the wheels lock up and they narrowly avoid having an accident. Adrenaline focusing the mind and making them extremely aware of their surroundings as the body enters fight or flight mode. This can only be sustained for a few seconds. The impact on the body is too high to sustain.’
Pausing to look at me briefly, he takes his pen back to the paper and makes his point.
‘Tom, you’re up here at eleven, but ALL the time.’
David sat down and changed the tone of his voice. He wanted to reassure me I was in the right place to get proper treatment.
‘When I take people who’ve experienced incredibly traumatic events around here doing exactly the same thing, they all give similar descriptions. It’s a sunny day, it’s warm, the pavements are clean, it’s very quiet, the flowers are in full bloom.’
David was trying to make me smile but I couldn’t help feeling worse, like I was some sort of freak.
‘You didn’t mention any of that. You gave
me a full breakdown as if you were working. Is that how you talk in MI5?’
‘When I’m with my team we let each other know everything we need to, constantly. You see something and question it; what’s missing that should be here, what’s here that shouldn’t be. Everything we need to know to do our job.’
‘What concerns me is you’re like this all the time? Tell me about the security of your family, how do you protect them while you’re away, alarms, stuff like that?’
‘Yeah, obviously doing the job I do I need to make sure they are safe while I’m away so: alarms, son goes to nursery with a GPS tracker sewn into his pocket, cameras at home and another tracker in his sleeping bag at night. My wife and I have a sentence we use if something is wrong and she will meet me at a prearranged location. Standard stuff.’
David was lost for words. He didn’t know how to respond to what I’d just described.
‘If your family is in real danger when you’re away or because of what you do then surely you need to find a different profession?’
‘It’s not that they are in danger, but prevention is better than cure, isn’t it? I’d rather if something did happen we had things in place to stop it happening or react to it quickly.’
As the session ended, David left me with a metaphor to think about until next week’s session.
‘You won’t find a zebra with PTSD. Think about how a zebra goes about its business having to think about lions hunting it. It’ll still go to that watering hole, and carry on its normal zebra stuff. Some will have escaped incredibly violent attacks from predators, and some if not all zebras will have seen family members eaten by packs of lions. But, they will still go about their business, always aware of the threat, but they won’t see it everywhere they trot. Human beings have something called imagination, not shared by other animals. It allows us to create machines, to dream about building spaceships landing on the moon, but it also imagines threats based on our past experiences, raising someone’s threat perception far too high.’
My emotionless face probably said it all. I didn’t want to be told I was imagining things, because being the way I am kept people like David alive.
‘Your work probably needs you to be like this, but when you’re walking around in the sun in a nice neighbourhood you don’t need to be remembering vehicles or people at the bus stop and definitely don’t need to be protecting me from a parked-up car. See what I’m saying?’
Walking out the door with my appointment slip for next week, I gave him a quick one-liner and left.
‘Let me think about it.’
As well as seeing David once a week, I had to see two doctors within the NHS too. I was under heavy medication to allow my brain to switch off and to let me sleep a bit better, but as the weeks went on and my sessions with David unlocked more memories my PTSD got worse. Walking into town to see the NHS consultant who was in charge of my medication, I was starting to withdraw drastically from the outside world. The audio and visual intrusions were, as the professor predicted, getting worse by the day.
‘STAND BY, STAND BY!’
The noise from my radio was deafening as I desperately tried to turn it off before I got another transmission. People walking beside me must have thought I’d been stung by a wasp or something, because my body folded under the pain. Except there was no radio, no transmission. I was hearing things again. A flashback, but just audio this time.
I was having visual flashbacks a lot. My wife knew when I was having one because I would start to dissociate from my surroundings and not look at what everyone else was focusing on. It happened for the third time that day in front of the consultant who was trialling my medication, trying to get the best results for me, after I had told him that taking diazepam in such high dosages was shutting my body down but not my mind.
‘Tom, what’s wrong? Tom can you hear me OK?’
Apparently he’d been trying to gently rouse me for a few minutes before I responded sharply, ‘What, what do you want?’
‘Tom, what did you just see?’
‘Briefing officer sat in the chair, couldn’t work out what she was saying.’
‘How many visions or sounds are you getting a day now?’
‘Had one on the way in, thought I had my radio on, this one just then and one this morning. Feel like it’s getting worse.’
I was exhausted, my eyes were tired and my brain felt like it was running on empty. I couldn’t see an end to this and needed it all to stop. I felt like I was starting to become reliant on medication, addicted. The consultant wrote another prescription slip out for me, increasing the dosage again.
‘Tom, the dosage I’m giving you now will mean your body will become dependent on them. But we’ll reduce the dosage gradually over the next six months once we start getting results and your flashbacks and nightmares ease off.’
As the months rolled by I was sleeping less and less and wouldn’t leave the house. I couldn’t drive through having too many flashbacks. I had lost any will or motivation to believe in myself.
Standing in the clinic waiting for the latest bag of tablets, I was surrounded by sick people, coughing and sniffing. I’d had enough, no more. I wasn’t going to use chemicals to force my brain to get better. I was the key to recovery not those tiny fucking tablets. I walked out of the clinic, leaving my prescription of strong sedatives behind.
I’d been having treatment for over a year, and now I’d finally decided if I was going to beat this I would do it the way I always did things. My way. I felt aggressive, angry at the world, at myself for letting PTSD take over my life. I was putting my trainers on, and my wife saw how quickly I was moving as I was about to head out the door.
‘This will be good for you, run as hard as you fucking can.’
Putting my headphones on, I was determined to reset my brain and body on this run. I was always a fairly quick runner even with weight on my back, despite my small frame. I was an endurance runner in the military and although I was only going to run three miles now, I was determined to run at such a pace that I would be sick, if not pass out.
Pressing ‘Play’, the music pounding through the headphones, I set off running, no warm-up. I wanted my body to hurt, to push myself to such a level that I physically couldn’t take another step. If I had to hospitalize myself I would. Fitness was the key to beating PTSD, I knew it; just like joining the army at sixteen years old, I had a point to prove.
Reaching the top of the first hill, I could feel the lactic acid building in my legs already because of the pace I’d set off at, then the audio flashbacks started creeping in under the music. I could hear Stu making jokes but couldn’t quite make out what he was saying. I didn’t want to know. Turning the music even louder, I found another gear and quickened my pace, up the next hill, my heart now thumping and lungs stinging as they struggled to feed my muscles with enough oxygen to keep this speed up. I stared at my path in front of me. Straight across every road junction, not looking for cars. I didn’t care, nothing was going to slow me down on this run, my body and brain were going to pay for this. No more medication, no more therapy. I would beat my body into submission.
Getting to the halfway point of my run, I stopped and turned around without taking even a second’s rest. Powering back on my route back home, I looked at my watch. I’d done my first 1.5 miles in seven minutes thirty-two seconds, which was a similar sort of standard to when I went on Special Operations selection. This was fast – not fast enough, though. I hadn’t been sick or passed out yet. Finding another gear from somewhere, I turned my music up full blast. It now wouldn’t go any higher and was distorting slightly.
No more audio flashbacks. Staring ahead, I felt like my lungs were on fire, I couldn’t breathe quick enough. No excuse, the oxygen was there, don’t slow down, you fucker. Run faster, you prick, find another gear in your legs, punish yourself and realize you are strong. Increasing the pace again, I didn’t stop until I got home and that’s when it hit me. Steadying myself on the door o
f the house, my vision started to blur as I went light-headed. Feeling the water from earlier surge up through my throat, I was violently sick as I stumbled to keep my footing. Job done.
Talking to my wife after the run, we both agreed physical activity was going to help me recover from PTSD faster than any drugs or therapy would. Over the next few months I trained every day, the nightmares eased off first, then the flashbacks. Ultimately my symptoms subsided but Thames House still had the final word.
My team leader and Sue arranged to come and see me. I already knew at this point that I was getting the sack. I’d become content with the fact I was no longer in MI5. Sitting around the kitchen table in my half-decorated house, I was asked to sign several bits of paperwork, Section One of the Official Secrets Act being the main one. My team leader asked for my radio kit and Security Service ID badge and the pass that used to get me into Thames House, as Sue went on to explain the final piece of paper I had to sign.
‘In recognition of your service and the sacrifice you’ve made, the office have decided to award you a pension because you are unable to operate effectively. It’s not much but you’ll get it every month.’
I wasn’t expecting this at all, and Sue was right, it wasn’t a lot, but if I managed to secure another job it would go towards paying the mortgage at least. As they both left out the door, Sue remembered she had to give me another piece of paper.
‘Oh, Director B says he needs you to read this: it’s a list of countries you’re not allowed to visit. Ever.’
Closing the door, I looked at the list of locations. They were hardly the normal holiday destinations at the top of our family list. Countries like Russia, North Korea, Syria, Iraq, Egypt, among nearly thirty others. I’ll always be under the threat of foreign intelligence agencies for the rest of my life.
I was officially unemployed, having been medically retired from the Security Service. Over a ten-year period I’d protected this country in covert counter-terrorism. All of it in a Top Secret role. What the fuck did I do now? How did someone like me fit into mainstream society?
