Into the Trees

by Robert Williams

  ‘You say you’ve been drinking more?’ Dr Barbour asked.

  ‘It’s crept up,’ said Thomas. ‘It takes the edge off things.’

  ‘Well that’s a form of self-medication, and neither the safest or the healthiest. If we do think medication would be beneficial we can monitor any side effects, tweak the dose, try a different course of pills. Alcohol isn’t a good idea. In the short term you might think it’s helping but over time it only makes anxiety and depression worse. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. For now tell me how you’ve been feeling. Describe how you feel from morning to night on an average day.’

  Depression. She’d used that word again. Pushing his resentment aside Thomas took a deep breath and began. He explained how he woke tired from lack of sleep because he couldn’t sleep with the thought of the men in the trees, waiting to strike again. And because he was tired, and probably hungover, he was short with Ann and the kids in the morning. But that was once he got himself out of bed. Sometimes, just to achieve that simple feat, it felt like he had to build himself, brick by brick from the bottom to the top and then lift his body, like a crane lifting a boulder, from the bed. Work was something to be got through. He phoned home several times a day to check that Ann was alright, but he wasn’t nice to her, he didn’t want to chat. He just wanted to know the men hadn’t returned and then he would hang up. When Ann rang him he always presumed the worst, his heart would pound, his hands shake, and he would react badly if she wanted him to pick up bread or milk. You rang me for that . . . The drive home, the drive he used to love, out of town and up on to the wide hills, the journey he used to find so thrilling was now excruciating, every second shot through with worry. He was certain he was returning home to a family held at gunpoint. And then, when that hadn’t materialised for another day, he would sit and brood and fret in his office, insisting on silence, wondering when the men would strike again. The children he loved, he was desperate to protect them, but he found them a nuisance now. He didn’t want to be playing a silly game with them when he should be on guard. He didn’t like their noise and the chaos they brought to the house. It was harder to hear anyone approach when they were playing games, shouting up and down the stairs, chasing around. Every day had become about survival. He didn’t look forward to, or enjoy, anything about his life any more. Everything good had been replaced by fear. Thomas finished talking and looked at Dr Barbour with an expression of embarrassment and hopelessness.

  She smiled kindly at him, scribbled a note, and it was all Thomas could do not to burst into tears.

  ‘We will talk about your reaction to what happened and how you can manage it in the coming weeks, but initially I want to set you a small exercise. What I’m going to suggest might sound silly; it might seem like I’m giving you a canoe to cross an ocean, but I want you to go with it. Each day I want you to record a few things. When you wake up I want you to write down a number from one to ten, reflecting how you are feeling about the day ahead. Ten is raring to go, happy with the world and your place in it, can’t wait to get out and get on with your day. One is anxious, full of dread, can’t get out of bed, a feeling of total hopelessness. And before you go to bed in the evening I want you to score how the day actually was. When you’ve got through the day, score it again out of ten, a number representing how the day was in reality. And finally, but importantly, I want you to write down three positive things that happen every day. Three good things that happened to you.’

  Thomas looked at Dr Barbour. ‘Three good things that happen every day?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes. They don’t have to be huge things – my daughter smiled at me, the sun shone, I had my favourite sandwich for lunch, whatever you can find, anything you can find. But three of them, and every day. Write them down and bring your notes to the next session.’

  With his homework set a sceptical Thomas drove home. The fear inside him hadn’t lessened a dot, the blackness he saw everywhere was still as complete. As the car entered the forest Thomas thought that maybe Dr Barbour was right, maybe this was depression.

  Eleven

  They were sad days on the farm for Raymond, but the work had a way of getting in the way of the sadness and sometimes Raymond was able to forget he was on his final stretch in Abbeystead. The middle Whitwell brother came over one sunny Tuesday morning, but he didn’t seem to expect anything from Raymond and he didn’t have any work he wanted doing before his family took over the running of the farm. Raymond wasn’t sure why he was there, didn’t know what to do with him, so he walked him around the farm and showed him where everything was, explained what jobs he did when, but Whitwell didn’t seem interested; didn’t say much and only looked to be half listening. His one concern appeared to be the date Raymond would be finishing.

  ‘So you finish on the fourth, we come in on the fifth,’ he said, more than once, and Raymond nodded that he understood that to be the case. Just before he left Whitwell turned to Raymond and said, ‘The caravan, Raymond, Frank’s asked if we’ll get rid of it when we start. He wants it gone.’ Raymond felt a surge of anger. Didn’t they understand he realised he was finished at the farm? ‘I finish on the fourth, you start on the fifth. Do what you like with the caravan,’ he said, and stalked off, leaving Whitwell standing in the middle of the yard. It was the only time in his life Raymond had been intentionally rude to anyone.

  On the nights Raymond wasn’t at the Nortons’ he spent his evenings walking. It was June and the sun was in the sky until after nine and Raymond took advantage. He crossed the valley after tea, walking through every field he could find, exploring every copse, crossing every stream. He didn’t care whose fields he was walking through or who saw him. Let them see him, let them talk. He was going to get as much of Abbeystead for himself before it was too late. These walks were different from his night walks; they weren’t to exhaust him, to convince his body to allow him to sleep. He was hungry for Abbeystead, for every inch of it, and he kept his eyes wide open, taking it in, every tree, every hillock, every stone wall. He wanted to see it, to record it, so he could remember at will when he was back in the house in Etherton and it seemed impossible that such a place as this existed.

  ‘Have you thought about getting out there? Asking around? Seeing if anybody else in the valley needs help?’ Thomas had asked him. But Raymond knew that was hopeless. Every farmer in Abbeystead would know about the Whitwell deal, they probably knew about it before he did. He was cheap and good, the work would have been offered if it was there. And anyway, what was the likelihood he would find a farmer who was happy to have him living in all the time? Maybe he could pick up a few days’ work, but not enough to save him from Etherton. There was nothing for him other than to move back to his house. What would come after that, he didn’t know. Standing at the bottom of Wennington waterfall, underneath the trees on the bank, with the cold water flooding down the drop, crashing into the pool in an angry mess, Raymond looked up to the lip of the waterfall. It was a drop, but maybe not far enough. And who was to say he wouldn’t miss the brutal rocks, land in the deep water and be carried safely to the shore anyway. That would be just his clumsy luck.

  Twelve

  On the first morning of emotion scoring Thomas sat on the edge of the bed and considered what number most closely reflected his feelings about the day ahead of him. He felt horrible, was the truth. A bad back, a stiff neck and the usual dose of anxiety. What he wanted most was to be able to crawl back into bed and sleep for another five hours. But, on the other hand, he wasn’t dying, he wasn’t in extreme pain, the children and Ann were safe in the kitchen. Thomas opened his notebook and wrote down a four in the first column. The moment he lifted the pen from the paper a scream rang out from downstairs. Thomas shot to his feet, but then he could hear Ann telling Harriet not to be so silly, a spider was nothing to be scared of. Thomas sat back down, crossed out the four and replaced it with a two. Each morning was awarded a two after that.

  Thomas normally enjoyed filling columns with figures, bu
t he was used to dealing with numbers which had been checked and double-checked, figures which couldn’t be questioned. Here he was entering made-up numbers about his own shifting feelings. And who was he to say if his misery was currently at one or three? Maybe he thought he was at one but there were further depths to fall which he hadn’t experienced yet. This guesswork reminded him of A level English literature. In physics and maths he learnt the formulas and rules, applied them to the questions and sailed through the classes and exams. If he got an answer wrong it was explained to him where he went wrong and he rarely made the same mistake again. English lit wasn’t as straightforward. He wasn’t as confident as some students who would swoop on a black door in a poem and award it layers of symbolism and meaning, seemingly at will from their own imaginations. Thomas wasn’t happy guessing what the poet might have been saying with the choice of a black door. And as he heard his classmates suggest the door symbolised death, depression, darkness, fear, Thomas wanted to say that perhaps the black door didn’t symbolise anything gloomy or threatening for the poet at all. Maybe the poet had good memories of a black door from his childhood; maybe the black door was the front door of his loving grandparents’ house. But he didn’t have the confidence to say anything at all. It was the uncertainty that unsettled Thomas. He preferred to answer a question with an answer he knew to be correct, his working on the paper evidence that he understood.

  By the end of the fourth day Thomas thought he was beginning to understand the point of the exercise. In the morning, with the threat of another day in front of him, his score would invariably be a point or two below his score in the evening, when the day had been survived without anything diabolical happening. He still didn’t score any day higher than a five, although in truth a couple of days should have been sixes and one night, when Thomas and Ann had made love for the first time in a long time, he could have even gone as high as a seven, but he kept his scores at steady fives, to make sure Dr Barbour’s point wasn’t made too easily.

  Initially he found the ‘three positives’ task tricky. He scrabbled for anything on the first few days and was forced to steal a couple of Dr Barbour’s suggestions – Harriet smiled at me, Lovely evening meal – even when those things hadn’t happened. But as the days wore on he found it easier to come up with positives and some days he ended up having to choose which ones to use and he even held some over in reserve for a bad day. It became easier, Thomas believed, because he was on the lookout for positives. So when he met his colleagues in the morning he would notice if anyone greeted him warmly; he was watching as he walked through Maltham to see if there was an acquaintance offering him a wave from the other side of the street. The weather and Abbeystead made frequent appearances in his three positives. With it being June there was so much light, so much beauty every day on his drives to and from work. Again, Thomas understood the point of the exercise – to encourage the mind to look for the positives every day, and whilst he was sure that such simple tricks could not affect the darkness of the moods he’d been carrying he recorded his numbers, and searched for, and wrote down, his three positives every day.

  Thirteen

  Keith had given up not drinking. He’d given up fruit. He’d given up on Rose. For the first time in his life he’d abandoned his appearance. His remaining hair was greasy and long, trailing damply from his scalp over his collar. His clothes weren’t washed or ironed and they hung from him in musty clumps. Rose had rarely spoken about Keith to her friends, but she would tell them, ‘He knows his way around a washing machine. He can iron a shirt so it will cut you.’ The truth was Keith never washed Rose’s clothes or the girls’, just his own, and he only learnt to wash and iron because he was unhappy with Rose shrinking his trousers, running the colours, not bothering to iron the collars and cuffs of his shirts, like his mum had. Keith, despite everything else, had always looked smart. But now, most days, he didn’t clean his teeth.

  Keith had been a positive man. He’d always imagined that one day he would get to where he deserved to be. Even when he was in prison his optimism hadn’t abandoned him. For a man like him, a man who was going to tread his own path, prison was a risk. But no matter how bad it had been in the past it seemed evident to Keith that as a king wears a crown, so he would, one day, be wealthy and free. He’d always seen himself, in the future (it was never the distant future, at most two or three years ahead), striding through streets in expensive clothes with a beautiful woman on his arm and money in his pocket. And for a few months, his wallet stuffed heavy with cash, it felt like he’d finally been on his way. And then, how quickly he’d become a man in dirty clothes, in a filthy house, fatness weighing him down.

  Keith blamed women.

  He blamed his mother for being so short, for not finding a taller husband, for loving him so much he didn’t realise there was anything different about him until he heard a teacher at school describe him as ‘the short one, the little lad’. He blamed Rose for being as poor as him, for not having money for both of them, for not wanting the life he wanted and for expecting him to be a dull, average, everyday working man. He blamed the young woman at EveryFrame who taunted him with an interview. A beautiful woman with the looks of a film star, almost a foot taller than him, everything in the world could be hers and he had nothing and all he needed from her was a ‘yes’ but she’d shaken her head. He blamed tall women who never even registered his presence. Stalking around on long legs, marrying tall men, giving birth to even taller children – the tall women of the world gradually shrinking Keith away to nothing. But his anger often returned to one woman. A rich woman in a beautiful house, a woman he’d held hostage for twelve hours and who’d barely flinched. He’d touched her little girl on the head and spoken some kind words. ‘Don’t you fucking touch her,’ he’d been told.

  When Keith’s anger threatened to overwhelm him, he allowed himself to remember his plan. It helped calm him. And whilst Keith didn’t see himself waltzing along with beautiful women any more, he certainly didn’t intend to live in his own dirt in Etherton for the rest of his life. He was going to allow himself a few more days in this state, then he would see.

  Fourteen

  ‘Thomas, every time we’ve met you’ve appeared tense, agitated at times. You sit in the chair with your shoulders hunched and you lean forward as if anticipating an attack.’

  Thomas sat up in his chair, pushed his shoulders back and Dr Barbour laughed.

  ‘It’s something we should look at, particularly if you are intent on avoiding medication. I want you to learn to relax. If the body is tense the mind is tense too, wondering what has alarmed the body, wondering why the body is on guard. The mind begins to anticipate threat, which means the body tenses even more, and the mind becomes more distraught.’

  Thomas shifted in his seat and instructed his body to relax but his tendons were metal brackets drilled into the concrete slabs of his muscles.

  ‘Stress is a powerful thing,’ Dr Barbour continued. ‘It works into our bodies and is difficult to get rid of once it’s there. It means we are constantly in a fight-or-flight state, always ready to do battle or run, and that is bad for health, physical and mental.’

  Thomas knew that to be the case. It was exhausting to be on edge all the time, jumping every time one of the children dropped something to the floor, feeling the kick of fear when the phone rang or a door slammed.

  ‘What I’m going to suggest might seem unusual, some people don’t expect to hear this type of advice in a clinical setting, but there is evidence to show that there are benefits and with some clients it has worked very well, so I want you to at least consider it.’

  ‘Consider what?’ Thomas asked.

  ‘Meditation, Thomas.’

  Thomas shook his head.

  ‘You don’t think it could help you?’ Dr Barbour asked.

  ‘I’m sure it works for some people, but I doubt it’s for me. It’s doing nothing essentially, isn’t it? Zoning out? I like to be doing something; I find it hard t
o do nothing. That’s why I used to walk, that was how I relaxed, by being active.’

  ‘But you don’t walk now, do you? Because you don’t like to leave the house when the family are at home, so we need to find you something that will help with your anxiety and stress, something you can do at home. And you are quite wrong in your understanding of meditation – it is the opposite of zoning out. Meditation is about focus, it isn’t about being distant and unaware; it’s about being completely aware. To meditate successfully you have to be present in the activity, present in the world.’

  Dr Barbour shifted in her chair. ‘Are you ever involved in a task so completely that you are lost in it, Thomas? Your body and mind are working together, you aren’t thinking about what to eat that night, you aren’t worried if you are saving enough for your pension, you aren’t worried about how the children are doing at school or thinking about a row you had with Ann. You are involved and absorbed by the task in hand. You feel calm, engaged and in control?’

  Thomas thought he understood. He nodded.

  ‘Well that is what meditation is, in a way. It’s about that kind of focus, that absorption. But rather than getting that satisfaction through work we get to it by meditation. Our body learns to relax, our mind learns to focus; we become aware of living in the moment, being present in the moment. The exercise I asked you to do, finding three positives every day – has that helped at all?’