by A J Waines
We set about wheeling the new chair into place, guiding one arm each, but in line with my experience with most shopping trolleys, it had a mind of its own. We both giggled as it ran into the bookcase and got jammed as we tried to reverse it.
‘Oh heck, I hope it’s not going to be more trouble than it’s worth,’ she said.
My first impression of her had been of someone who was used to having to elbow her way through a crowd to get noticed. When she told me she was the only girl in a family with four brothers, all of whom were rugby players, that made sense. With the chair finally in situ, she dusted off her hands and left me to my first patient.
Ken arrived on time at nine. He’d been in a bad way when I’d stood beside him at reception a few days earlier. Poor guy, he’d had a panic attack and had thrown up all over my shoes. He didn’t look much better today and had another anxiety attack almost as soon as he sat down. Sure enough he threw up again, but on this occasion I managed to get the waste bin to him in time. I reached for the window catch, before I remembered it wouldn’t budge.
After Ken, I saw another two patients, before I had to attend a ‘short’ meeting about data protection which overran into my lunch break. As a result, I bolted down a sandwich in the canteen instead of heading out into the sun.
On the way back for my afternoon patients, I passed a stretcher trolley parked in the corridor. I stopped when I heard a muted cry from beneath the blanket. The blonde paramedic in attendance nodded as I flashed my ID.
‘We’re waiting for the go-ahead from intensive care,’ she said. ‘This is Holly – she’s eight,’ she added, as she adjusted the girl’s neck-brace with one hand and flipped a switch under a screen on wheels, with the other.
I swallowed hard, doing my utmost not to flinch. The blanket had come adrift revealing Holly’s leg, twisted the wrong way below the knee. More worrying was that a section of metal from somewhere had lodged in her side and another paramedic, with a long blunt fringe, was holding it steady. Both professionals were wearing blue surgical gloves and were too busy with IV tubes, portable monitors and bursts of radio transmission to offer the girl any TLC. I touched her little finger gently and she turned her hand to grip mine. Hers was clammy and cold.
‘Holly, you’re in very safe hands,’ I said to her. Her eyelashes were matted with dried blood, and I wasn’t sure if she was able to see me or not. ‘They’re really good, here.’
‘Mummy…’ she whimpered, tears coating her face.
‘Parents informed?’ I called out to the woman who was checking Holly’s blood pressure.
‘On their way.’
‘Mummy will be here before you know it,’ I assured the girl. ‘Can she have water?’
‘Yeah – over there.’ She pointed to a plastic bottle lying on the blanket. I tipped the water carefully to Holly’s lips and she took it down in tiny gulps.
‘It’s so hot,’ said the blonde paramedic, wiping her hairline with her forearm before leaning over to pick up a swab. She was in her early twenties, I surmised. The elastic band roughly holding back her ponytail was at odds with the fancy diamante clips above her ears. She wore heavy make-up, too, showing all the signs that she’d been snatched from her day off.
Holly stopped swallowing and starting panting and gasping. The paramedic cupped a plastic mask over her mouth.
‘Okay, sweetheart, just breathe,’ she said.
As Holly began to calm down, I started singing, softly. ‘Feed the birds, tuppence a bag, tuppence, tuppence, tuppence a bag…’
With the familiar soothing tune, Holly’s breathing started to regulate, but it was still too fast, her little chest pumping up and down.
A voice came over the radio and the blonde paramedic flicked the brake switch with her foot. ‘Okay, we’re cleared to go.’
‘I’m going to let go of your hand, now, Holly,’ I told her. ‘They’re going to move you on and make you more comfortable.’ She didn’t respond. ‘You’re being so brave. Everyone’s going to be so proud of you.’ I stood back and watched her being trundled away.
As I filled a cup at the water cooler outside my office, I noticed a young woman I didn’t recognise sitting in the bank of chairs opposite. I could tell by her behaviour that she was my first patient of the afternoon; her knee was bouncing up and down at a frantic pace and her eyes were sweeping the waiting room, on high alert. Typical symptoms of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. My referral notes said she'd been in a fire in a restaurant and I could see pink scar tissue running from her cheek and disappearing under her collar. I wondered how severe the burn was and whether the worst part was hidden from view.
I approached her. ‘Jane LaSalle?’
‘Yep.’ The woman jumped, then tried to hide her reaction.
We went inside. ‘I’m Dr Samantha Willerby, but please, call me Sam.’
Jane sat on the edge of her seat, hugging her bag. ‘We don’t have to talk about what you’ve been through at all today, if you don’t want to,’ I said. ‘There will never be any pressure to relive any memories of it. At any time. Only when and if you feel you can cope with it.’
Jane gulped. ‘That’s good. I wasn’t sure I could handle going into it all again, straight away.’
I explained what the treatment would involve and how the initial six sessions might unfold. ‘We’ll be discussing small changes in your behaviour – seeing if you can try some new ways of dealing with situations.’
Jane nodded. She must have been in her mid-twenties, but looked like a frightened child about to make a dash for the door at any second. I was sure she hadn’t blinked once since coming in.
I smiled. ‘You’re nervous about being here, aren’t you?’
She laughed. ‘Bloody terrified,’ she admitted. It helped clear the air.
‘That’s completely normal. You’ve not done this before and you don’t know what to expect. You’ve been through a terrifying experience and you’re probably not sure whether talking about it is going to help or make it worse.’
Jane visibly sank into the chair, as if the puppet strings keeping her taut had snapped. Good. We were off to a promising start.
‘Can I check first what symptoms you’ve been experiencing this week?’
I ran through a list of the common ones, asking her to rate each of them in terms of severity on a scale of one to ten. ‘So, the flashbacks and nightmares are causing the most problems for you, right now.’
‘Yeah. And I can’t go on the Underground.’
‘Okay. Would you like to be able to go on the Tube again – could that be a goal for us to aim towards?’
‘It would make things a lot easier getting to work. I have to go miles out of my way on the bus at the moment.’ She fiddled with the handle on her bag. ‘I don’t want to be afraid anymore.’
I made a note in her file.
She was talking again. ‘I remember being trapped in the smoke. All I could see were flames closing in on me.’
She was already moving on to the difficult part. ‘Just take your time,’ I said.
‘I fell when I got to the top of the escalator. I remember the floor was terribly hot. There was a smell of scorched oil. And the heat…it was like being in an oven.’
She stopped and looked at me, her mouth twisting from side to side as if suddenly aware she was talking about it, when she hadn’t meant to.
I waited.
She went on. ‘I managed to get up, but I couldn’t see a thing with the black smoke. I could feel lumps around my feet – I knew they were bodies…’
I was momentarily distracted. Her referral notes must have been wrong; this didn’t sound like a fire in a restaurant. But, it was a fault our end and I didn’t want to interrupt her. Instead, I watched as a lone tear crept down her face, part of me trying to work out which incident she’d been involved in.
She blew her nose and straightened up. ‘I was very lucky. I got out. People died. It was horrible…’
My mouth was dry. ‘You’ve done
really well to talk about it.’ Whatever the disaster was, it sounded horrendous.
‘How long have you been having flashbacks?’ I asked.
‘About ten days.’
‘And when was the actual incident?’
‘When I got the burns?’
‘Yes.’
‘About eight weeks ago.’ I felt a frown fold into my forehead.
‘So you didn’t have any distressing flashbacks during the first seven weeks at all – just recently?’
‘Oh, no.’ Jane shook her head. ‘The flashbacks I’m having are about the second one. More recent.’
I was confused. I rested the pen across the notes on my lap.
‘We’re talking about two different incidents here?’ I asked.
‘Yeah. I got the burns at work when the chip pan caught fire. There was a flash flame that caught me across my neck.’ She turned to show me the burn I’d noticed earlier, but was dismissive about it. ‘I work in Jerry’s Fish Plaice. It’s a restaurant on Tottenham Court Road. But I didn’t seem to have any bad after-effects then. I mean, I had a few nightmares and I was anxious for a while, but it faded.’
‘And the recent incident?’
‘Yeah. On the Tube.’ Jane looked confused herself, now. ‘The weird thing is I can’t remember exactly when it happened. There are loads of bits missing. But this is the one I’m so messed up about. I was okay with the restaurant fire. I went back to work there after a week or so and it was fine.’
What she said suddenly rang a bell. I’d read something about a fire at Liverpool Street Tube in the free paper about ten days ago, but it hadn’t even made the national news. I hadn’t realised there’d been fatalities. How unlucky for Jane that she’d been caught up in that so soon after the first fire. One at work and another a few weeks later on her way home. My heart went out to her.
I had three more patients after Jane and by the time my appointments had ended, it felt more like three in the morning, than 6pm. The sheer emotional exhaustion from hearing people relive horrific experiences – whether from a train crash, traffic collision or Tube fire – was an aspect of the job I was still struggling to come to terms with. The unexpected downside being that every time I heard a victim’s story, their suffering wore away a little piece of my soul.
Trauma counselling was certainly far more intense than my mainstream work as a clinical psychologist, but having done that job for several years, I was looking for a change of focus. I suppose I wanted to make more of an impact. Now, I was helping people through that terrible wasteland in the weeks following a devastating incident, when a barrage of disturbing symptoms often took hold.
I could always go back to mainstream therapy, if it turned out the job wasn’t for me. I was going to give it three more months and see.
When I got home, Miranda had left an ‘enlightening’ note on the mat, stating merely: Gone Out. I took a step into the sitting room and stopped. It looked like the aftermath of the party to end all parties. Whatever Miranda had been doing all day, it had involved scattering a wide selection of food substances everywhere. I found scrambled egg plastered to the sitting room wall, cereal crunched into the carpet, ground almonds in the bathroom plug-hole. She’d also had a go at painting, but in the absence of a canvas she’d chosen a corner of my bedroom to start a decidedly erotic mural.
I’d called the care home earlier and it turned out everything my sister had said was above board. She was out. For good. Let loose in the big wide world over a month ago.
I tried Con’s number, but his phone went to voicemail and I’d left enough messages already. I didn’t want to pester him, but we needed to talk. There was one issue between us that we needed to iron out. Unfortunately, he had a habit of disappearing when I most wanted to speak to him.
I heated up a tin of spaghetti and spent the rest of the evening vacuuming and rubbing frantically at the wallpaper, inhaling white spirit that made me dizzy.
When I finally went to bed, I had no idea whether Miranda had come back or not.
Chapter 4
Morning broke to the throbbing chorus of Knowing Me, Knowing You from the sitting room.
‘Can you turn it down?’ I groaned, dragging myself out into the light, thrashing the belt of my dressing gown around my waist. ‘You’ll disturb people.’
‘A bit of Abba never hurt anyone,’ Miranda retorted.
‘It’s early.’ A broad yawn made my point.
My sister stood by the window with her arms folded and I noticed her eyes were puffy.
‘You okay?’ I said, taking a step closer. She winced and shrank back as if I’d tried to strike her. ‘What’s going on?’ I said, as softly as I could. ‘Have you been crying?’
‘Don’t be silly.’ She sniffed and walked away.
I followed her into the kitchen. She stepped around two cardboard boxes with pan handles sticking out of the top. ‘Just moved in?’
‘No. I’ve been here over a year.’ I waved vaguely at the boxes. ‘I haven’t got around to sorting everything out yet.’
Ever since I moved here I felt the place would ‘do for now’. Situated on the first floor of a Victorian house, it was only five minutes’ walk from Clapham Junction railway station. The bumf from the letting agent said it was ‘ideally located for local shops and amenities’ and for once it was an understatement. The area had everything: wine bars and restaurants galore, delis, a fresh organic bakers, an apartment store, takeaways, a library, a gym and vast expanses of parkland.
I hadn’t done much to it, because in spite of the great location, I kept thinking I wouldn’t be here for long. The flat itself was cramped and shabby, in need of serious refurbishment. The shower leaked and the kitchen sink kept clogging up and there were patches of damp in the bedroom I’d turned a blind eye to. I saw it as a stepping stone to the next, better phase of my life when I was more established, more sorted. Whenever that might be.
Nevertheless, I liked to think I’d made the place cosy and put my stamp on it. I’d made bookshelves from old planks of wood and bricks; the coffee table was carved by my father from a storm-felled tree. The shape reminded me of a map of Cyprus and was speckled with knots, impeccably sanded down so that the surface was as smooth as glass. Sometimes I sat beside it and skimmed my fingers over the surface. It was oddly soothing.
The flat came furnished with the basics, so I’d draped throws over beaten-up old chairs and put down rugs in pastel shades over worn patches in the carpet. All in all, the place had grown on me.
‘What’s that?’ Miranda was pointing inside a cupboard I’d just opened. A green lava lamp from the sixties. I’d bought it at a car-boot sale about ten years ago. ‘I love it!’ Miranda was stroking the base. She’d never seen it.
I caught my breath as a memory shot into my mind. It was the earliest one I could recall of the two of us one summer when we were at the seaside. Mimi was seven and I was five. A man was jogging across the beach carrying a surfboard towards the water. He was in a hurry.
Mimi ran in front of him chasing a beach ball and the man turned sharply, swinging the board round straight into her. I remembered the snapping sound and the wide gash as her forehead cracked open. Copious amounts of blood rolled down Mimi’s face and her look of bewilderment before the tears came will be forever imprinted on my mind. I’d never seen so much blood. I thought the man had killed her. It sent a gooey sick taste into my mouth even now.
Miranda turned and I saw the thin scar from that day catch the light. Hard to imagine she was the same person. So much had happened to her since then.
She pointed to the old-style Trim phone. ‘Hey – we used to play with one of these when we were little! Do you remember?’ She was like a child in a sweet shop.
I nodded with a transient smile. I had done my best to forget most of our shared childhood memories.
I wanted to ask why she was here – but I couldn’t think of a way to broach the subject that didn’t sound unwelcoming. I knew if I bided my time, sh
e’d tell me eventually.
‘Is this your boyfriend?’ she said, stroking a photograph on the fridge of Con and his son, Justin. We’d been on Hampstead Heath. The picture was slightly blurred; a gust of wind had yanked a clump of Con’s curly hair across his eyes just as I’d taken it.
‘Kind of,’ I said. Miranda had caused havoc with my boyfriends in the past. I didn’t want her getting her sticky fingers into this relationship. Con was too special.
‘Married?’ she asked, pointing to Justin.
‘Not now,’ I replied. ‘His ex-wife has custody of his son. Con’s away a lot.’
‘Wedding bells?’
‘Hell, no – it’s only been about three months,’ I said. Three divine and delicious months.
‘Good-looking,’ she said wistfully. ‘Why is his arm in a sling?’
‘He came off his motorbike,’ I said.
I remembered Justin’s fascination after it happened. ‘Dad’s shoulder nearly came right off,’ he’d said, with a nine-year-old’s innocent pride. ‘The doctor said they might have to pull the skin off Dad’s bottom and stick it onto his arm.’ Justin had been laughing. ‘How funny would that be?’
Miranda straightened up, clearly bored with this line of questioning.
‘Didn’t you get my letter?’ she said.
‘Letter? No. When was that?’
‘Last week.’ Miranda had stopped examining everything and stood in the centre of the space, looking terribly fragile. I noticed her mousy hair was thinning, turning grey at the temples. She seemed to have lost her train of thought.
‘Do you want cereal?’ I asked with warmth. I wanted to reach forward and stroke her arm, but my heels stayed pressed into the floor.
‘No. No cereal.’ There was a poignant silence. ‘I’ve changed,’ she said. She looked at me, her thin smile seeking acknowledgement.
‘Okay…’ It was one of those statements that could imply either a minor alteration or a turnaround of enormous proportions. I wasn’t sure how far down the road towards personal transformation Miranda was talking about – or was capable of, for that matter. ‘The letter?’ I said.
