Please, Nuala protests.
When Tanya’s father had that fall and she had to go up to Scotland to sort him out, it was you who took her kids in for a fortnight while she was away.
Look...
No, hear me out. When Cassie had the gall bladder op, it was you who visited every day, looked after her dogs. Mary’s building up a head of steam now. Who makes the soup for the school winter fair every year? Who does the cash and carry runs for its summer fete? Nuala shrugs. Whenever there’s a birthday party for a child, it’s always you who offers to help with the food, the ferrying. And you’re always the last one to leave, mucking in with the cleaning up afterwards.
Everyone helps out.
Tell me, Nuala, how many kids are you godmother to?
Oh, come on...
No, it’s true. And that’s not all. You’re damn good fun, too. Remember all those girlie weekends we used to go on. Whenever we were planning them, the question we’d all be asking each other was always, ‘Will Nuala be coming?’. Why? Because your presence was a guarantee of a bloody good laugh.
You’re embarrassing me now, says Nuala.
It’s true. Remember Ingrid’s hen party? The boozy ferry crossing to Calais, the gourmet restaurant booked? An evening of fun with a dawn return crossing to recover? Remember what happened?
Nuala smiles ruefully.
Yeah, I screwed up, forgot my passport. They wouldn’t let me off the boat at Calais. And what did we do? Bugger off to the posh nosh, the clubbing? No, we stayed on the boat with you, all sixteen of us, lost our deposits on the restaurant meal, spent the evening drinking in the ferry bar, lasagne and salad for all in the canteen, made our own bloody entertainment. Bloody fantastic, it was, too. Remember the dancing on that silly cabaret stage, the girl band routine we did with Carrie and Linda and Martina? And you know what? We didn’t stay out of pity for you, there wasn’t an ounce of resentment amongst the lot of us. We stayed because we knew damn well that you’d be the life and soul, the one to make the party as memorable as it was. We stayed because we loved you. And you were embarrassed out of your skin, kept saying Ingrid would never forgive you. Well, you know what? When you owned up about the passport, she was the first to suggest we bin the restaurant and stay on the boat.
Everyone else wanted to, but felt too awkward to propose it, not without Ingrid’s say-so. When she made the suggestion, we all felt such relief.
Nuala listens, starts to say something, but she’s welling up and her face crumples. Now there are tears for her loss, not only of Greg but of herself, of who she once was. And of who she will never again be. As she heaves great sobs, Mary shifts up to her, puts an arm round her shoulders.
There you go, says Mary. You have a bloody good cry. You do whatever you want. Remember, you make up the rules.
***
A further milestone. Nuala starts seeing a counsellor, a referral by her GP. She has her first experience of the professionalisation of death and bereavement. Dr Ahmad talks about the grief cycle, the mental and physical effects of bereavement.
It’s from him that she learns about ‘complicated’ or prolonged grief. A reaction to the loss of someone on whom the bereaved is particularly dependent for happiness or wellbeing such as a partner or, for a parent, one’s child. He explains that this more complex version of grief can also stem from a situation where there are other circumstantial factors (like no body to grieve for, no definite confirmation? Nuala wonders). In this version, according to Dr Ahmad, the bereaved becomes locked into the ordeal and cannot move through the cycle. The transient trauma becomes permanent.
From Dr Ahmad, too, she learns the formal names for the ‘symptoms’ she has been experiencing, the tell-tale signs of grief which, with his help, she can now skim through, apply to herself and wryly tick off. A sense of unreality? Check. Emotional anaesthesia? Check. Depersonalisation and withdrawal? Check. Feelings of anger, terror, resentment, jealousy and depression? Check, check, check, check, and fucking hellish check.
And then there are the physical symptoms that, once formalised by him, she can now identify. Since the initial shock of the crash, the first days of adrenalin overload, she has found herself overcome by periods of lassitude. Her nights are frozen in timeless insomnia. She develops palpitations, breathlessness, a chest so tight she would be at the doctor’s in a flash if she didn’t recognise in the back of her mind that what she was suffering from was mindfuck not body sickness. As Dr
Ahmad reassures her that these indicators are entirely normal, she feels a sweeping sense of relief. In one session, Dr Ahmad gives Nuala a writing task, to produce three texts about herself. The first one must describe a past pre-Greg event where Nuala felt strong and happy and powerful. The second is to describe a significant episode in Nuala’s life that occurred sometime around the beginning of her relationship with Greg. The final text has to describe a more recent episode involving Greg and herself, a time of intimacy.
For the first episode she writes about the second of her parachute jumps and fills two sides of A4. She tells the counsellor about her jump dream, finds herself describing the pleasure she now finds in her martial arts class as if the two activities are somehow connected.
For the second text she writes about the holiday she took to Tunisia some twelve years before, and in so doing notices that she’s attempting to re-discover her old self. The process sets off a stream of memories of those early days. She begins:
I’d planned the trip with a college friend, Liz, a chance to enjoy my independence, discover a new culture, kick back from the stresses of teaching and London. I’d met Greg three years before at an NGO conference in Nairobi, me an English language teacher in Eritrea, he an art teacher in Zimbabwe. At first I’d viewed Greg as a bit lightweight, an enjoyable holiday romance, but probably no more. But he’d been persistent in his attentions, producing a regular stream of letters from Zimbabwe, sent first to my Asmara home and then, when I left Africa a year after our Nairobi encounter, to the flat in London I’d shared with three other girls. That was my first job on the mainland, teaching English to French au pairs, Japanese teenagers and young Spanish business graduates at a north London college of further education.
Despite his apparent interest, I hadn’t expected our relationship to develop. Not that anyone else had taken his place. Between graduating in French from Trinity College Dublin and my overseas volunteering, I’d spent three years teaching English to foreign students in a private language school in Cork. Arriving in London after Cork and Asmara felt like being thrown from a paddling pool into an ocean. There was so much to discover and the girls I was living with were more interested in partying than romantic relationships. Clubs, concerts, museums, pubs, badminton and tennis, but always as a female gang. True, I’d got drunk at a party in Camden Town and enjoyed a one-night stand with an American who did something in insurance. I can scarcely remember anything about him apart from his magnificent mane of hair. And I’d been on a couple of dates with a colleague from work, a rather uptight Mancunian with a barking laugh and receding hairline. But that was all, and for the time being, this single status suited me.
Why should I have thought that my fling with Greg had meant anything significant? After all we’d only been together a week in Nairobi before heading back to our respective postings. When my contract had come to an end, he’d already extended his. He made it clear he was enjoying a footloose life in Harare and was in no hurry to return to the gloom of insipid Britain. But the letters had continued, and when he’d finally headed home a year after my departure, he’d made straight for London. He’d called me up a few days later, we’d met up in a pub on the Archway Road and I’d surprised myself when, catching sight of him standing at the bar as I’d walked in, I’d felt a kick of pleasure, of tenderness, as if he already belonged to me.
He was looking for a teaching job and I’d kept an eye on vacancies at my college. I found
a post for him covering someone’s maternity leave that was soon upgraded to permanent. So without quite knowing how, I discovered that my temporary overseas fling had become a more serious domestic relationship. Three months later, when my tenancy came to an end, I found myself setting up home with Greg in a studio flat in Willesden.
And just before my departure for Tunisia, he threw a bombshell, an out-of-the-blue marriage proposal. When he put the question to me, I experienced a curious sensation, something between nausea and a spasm in my gut, like the first sign of dysentery. It was an awkward moment to propose, just as I was about to take pleasure in a period of independence. So the exhilaration I felt I ought to be enjoying seemed soured by traces of resentment. It was supposed to be three weeks of personal time, an opportunity to show the world, and myself, that I was still a cool, reflective, adventurous individual: back-packing, sightseeing, a blend of culture-vulture and beach bum, but what I hadn’t planned for was to have Greg’s proposal hanging over me. If truth be told, though a little inopportune, the proposal was exciting, and I felt genuinely stirred. It was just bad timing, I felt.
At the time I wondered why he couldn’t have waited until my return. Now, in hindsight, I suspect that perhaps Greg’s action was deliberate. His choice of timing was probably a reaction to his own insecurities, an attempt to tie me down before I headed for the liberating and, in his mind, inhibition-loosening sunshine.
Not that I was looking at the holiday as a means of escape. Even before my departure, I knew in my heart of hearts that I would say yes to Greg. Still, in the meantime, there was an adventure to be had, and it’s this that I want to write about.
She describes the disastrous beginning to the holiday – her bout of diarrhoea and vomiting a day after arriving in Tunis, the falling-out with Liz, their decision to go their separate ways, meet up again only on the eve of their return to Britain. Then she writes about her tourist experiences, the sweeping circle she’d made through the country, her growing confidence travelling alone, using the local minibuses and coaches, staying in cheap hotels, haggling for food in the markets, coping with the daily irritations she’d been subjected to as a lone foreign female.
And she describes her life-changing experience towards the end of the three weeks, an episode she’s never shared with anyone, not even Greg to whom she told everything. She describes her meeting with a young Algerian, hardly more than a boy, broken in spirit by the civil war in Algeria, by the damage it had done to him. She describes their fleeting friendship, a night of comfort shared in her bed. When she returns to Britain, she has changed. She writes about the after-effects of that encounter, her self politicisation. It’s a process over the following months in which she educates herself on development issues, commits herself to various left-wing causes, shifts her job from teaching affluent Europeans and Japanese to more vulnerable asylum seekers and refugees.
And when she returns home, another development: she says yes to Greg. Within six months they are married. Less than a year later, Beth is born.
She tells the counsellor about the postcard she’d sent Greg from Tunisia, the one of the Grand Erg Oriental. She tells him of its effect on Greg, the inspiration for his first exhibition.
And then she’s talking about Greg, his character, his habits, an odd assortment of details that pop into her head, that she shares without editing: his special names for the kids, Bethanina and Sammalamadingdong; the emails he’d send to her at her work, sometimes silly, sometimes rude; his habit of breaking into song at the drop of a hat, Dirty Old Town as he washed the car, The Bare Necessities on country walks, Food Glorious Food as he made bread; the way fluff would always gather in his tummy button, the times she’d scoop it out, hold it up like a magician, and he’d laugh and kiss her on the mouth. And soon there are tears and more tears, and she can no longer speak, the session is over.
For the third text she tries to write about a week’s trip they’d made to San Francisco, the longest time away from the kids. But as soon as she gets to their departure, the flight from Heathrow, she finds it too painful. She remembers how Greg always used to say how he hated flying with her and the kids, the fear that something would happen to them, but that when he flew alone he loved it, the terror giving way to exhilaration, a momentary liberating celebration of his own mortality. She wonders whether this was a premonition. A thought process germinates, a question in her mind about how Greg must have felt in those seconds between bomb blast and crash landing, but she cuts it off before it’s fully-formed.
And then she’s telling the doctor about the thousand daily traps she has to avoid – his favourite radio station, the programme he always watched on TV, the music he loved, the recipe he used to cook, the shop they always went to together, the restaurant and pub. All designed to ambush her, to ensnare her when she least expects it
This referral to Greg plagues her life. How many times a day does she get the urge to share a piece of news with him, to ask his advice? Imaginary conversations are a bitter-sweet habit she fails to kick, exercises in exquisite masochism.
***
One day she arrives at Dr Ahmad’s house in a particularly awful mood. She’d been ill-prepared for a lesson at college and had been short with her colleagues in a meeting. At home Beth had asked her if she could go shopping in town with a couple of friends, her first independent excursion into the city centre.
She’d got it all planned, had been saving her money, researched the bus number to catch, the stops to board at and descend. Her friends often travelled in groups to town and were careful to stay together at all times, and besides, they all had mobile phones.
But Nuala dismisses the idea out of hand, and instead offers to accompany the girls, promising to allow them a long rein. Beth says nothing, but the look of loathing on her face is a shock to Nuala, a look that seems to scream, You’re a crazy suffocating bitch and I hate you! Nuala carries the image with her into Dr Ahmad’s room. She describes her day, ending with her daughter’s furious contempt.
I’m going to damage something permanently in our relationship if I don’t snap out of it soon. I’m going to lose her, she says. Jesus, since Greg went, things have never been worse for me.
Dr Ahmad gives her a long look and smiles.
I don’t agree, he says. If you ask me, things have never been better.
You must be joking!
No, I’m not. Think about it. For the first time since you’ve been coming to me, you’re talking about how other people feel. Up to now, you’ve been living in a bubble, oblivious to your impact on their lives. That’s only natural, of course, part of the process. It may not feel like it, but I think this is real progress.
Nuala considers his words in silence. She recognises the accuracy of his revelation, the madness she’s been living with these past months. She nods and talks to him for the first time about what she has named her Doomsday Theory, that compulsive over protectiveness towards her children that has been growing since she first heard the news of the crash.
At the time, befuddled by the rawness of her emotions, she had understood little of what she felt, but over the months that followed, as she has begun to make sense of her calamity, she has started to formulate an explanation for her obsession. Today, at the end of her session with the counsellor, he asks her to go home and draft a summary of her side of the conversation. She writes:
What happened to Greg was one of those One in a Billion events. For most of us, for most of our lives, One in a Billion events actually mean Never events – they may happen, but not to us. If we do worry about them, the anxiety is buried deep in our subconscious. When the One in a Billion event does indeed happen to me, those odds change radically. Henceforth, in my mind, One in a Billion is transformed from Never to Quite Likely. So if the odds of Greg plunging out of the sky become Quite Likely, then so too does the odds of my daughter drowning at the swimming pool, my son falling out of a tree in the par
k and snapping his neck, one of them being abducted by a psychopathic child killer somewhere between the house and the shop at the end of the street. Faulty plugs, dodgy toasters, lightning storms and rabid dogs. The dangers are everywhere.
Like the crash that robbed me of Greg, there’s only a One in a Billion chance of something happening to the children when I’m not around to protect them. But those odds are no longer worth taking.
Even as she scribbles these words she realises that in identifying and analysing her Doomsday Theory, she has begun to move beyond it.
***
There are days when she makes a conscious effort to ‘progress’.
Sometimes it’s a step forward, sometimes a step back. A day off, the children at school. Nuala wanders around the house aimlessly, eventually finds herself in the utility room off the kitchen. She opens the cupboard above the washing machine. The breadmaker sits on the top shelf, its cable coiled around its body like the tail of a contented tomcat. She reaches up, brings it down and carries it into the kitchen. She puts it on the table and surveys the appliance with a mixture of pain and nostalgia. The machine hasn’t been used since Before. It’d always been Greg’s thing, the breadmaking, a mid-morning ritual, a break from his painting, the mixing and measuring carried out while the kettle boiled for coffee.
She roots around again in the cupboard, finds some powdered yeast, two half packets of flour. The weighing scales are on the shelf next to the CD player. Amongst the recipe books she finds the breadmaking guide and flicks through until she finds a basic recipe. Flour, yeast, sugar, salt, olive oil, water. She props the guide up on the table and begins to weigh out the ingredients. There’s something comforting in resurrecting one of Greg’s old practices.
The phone rings. It’s Mary checking that it’s her turn to do the school pick-up. On the way back to her baking, Nuala stops at the radio, flicks it on and surfs the stations looking for something of interest. There’s an extended news broadcast on one of the national stations, and she listens to the stories with growing gloom: a tanker spillage off the coast of Alaska; hundreds killed by a series of car bomb attacks in the Middle East; ethnic clashes on the Indian subcontinent; new figures showing an increase in malaria deaths, a rise in HIV infections.
Divinity Road Page 20
