The World at My Feet

by Catherine Isaac

  We turn left at the parsonage and approach my old primary school. It looks almost the same as it was when I was ten: boxy, beige, functional and welcoming. The only difference is a brightly coloured banner pasted on the wall next to the entrance, which reads: HOW DO YOU FEEL TODAY? It is surrounded by cartoons of small animals each offering a suggestion: Excited? Confused? Relaxed? Happy? Worried?

  We turn onto Nightingales Lane and Guy puts his foot down as we head into open countryside. I got used to being the passenger in a fast car when I was young. With Mum at the wheel even a trip to the supermarket involved going at full throttle, as if she was ready to perform a handbrake turn should the occasion require it. Perhaps I’m just unused to it these days, but the speed with which Guy drives – comfortably over the limit – only adds to my anxiety.

  I become aware that he is talking and I am responding, but the moment words are out of my mouth I have forgotten what they are. I look straight ahead, feeling my eyes blur as I press my hands into the seat, sweat leaking into the upholstery. If Guy is aware that something is wrong he does not show it. The words You Can Do This are on repeat in my brain, but like the man who says Mind the Gap on the Tube they lose all impact as soon as they’re spoken. No part of my body any longer feels within my control.

  ‘I feel sick,’ I blurt out. I don’t know how long we’ve been in the car. Two minutes. Five minutes. Whatever it is, it feels like more.

  Guy glances over. ‘What, travel sick?’

  ‘Yes.’ I nod. It’s the easiest explanation.

  ‘Okay, don’t worry – we’re nearly there.’

  My head snaps in his direction. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘The station is at the end of the road.’

  ‘But I thought we were driving?’ Even as I say it I realise I haven’t been thinking straight. He was never going to drive all the way into central London and we’re almost at Chalfont and Latimer, which is on the Metropolitan line with a direct route into the city.

  ‘Only to the station,’ he says. ‘You’ll be fine once you’re out of the car.’

  A metallic taste rises into my mouth. ‘I can’t go on a Tube.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ he asks.

  ‘I mean… could you just take me home?’

  He glances at me again. ‘You do look a bit rough, now you mention it. Do you need me to find something to be sick in? There are some bags for life back there.’

  I shake my head.

  ‘It’ll pass once you’re out of the car,’ he continues. ‘If we turn around now, you’ll have another ten minutes before you get home. You’ll be better just getting there. Look, here we are.’

  We pull into the car park, only to discover that there are no spaces. Guy performs a slow tour of the tarmac, becoming increasingly frustrated, as the heat in the vehicle makes my jaw loll. As it becomes clear that there is literally nowhere to leave the car, my hopes begin to rise that he might give up on this whole idea.

  ‘Aha!’

  A guy with a baby in a papoose approaches a minivan and clicks the lock.

  We hover next to his space as Guy’s indicator blinks insistently, while the new father wrestles the child out of its fabric binding and into its car seat. He eventually pulls out and Guy goes to turn in, when a small, dusty Citroën approaches from the other direction and slips into the space. A middle-aged woman is at the wheel, with hair that resembles an apricot shower puff. Though it’s clear that she’s made a genuine error, Guy slams his hand on the horn, forehead flushing.

  ‘Silly cow,’ he mutters, winding down the window. ‘Hey! What do you think you’re doing?’

  She slams on the brake, her eyes wide. ‘Awfully sorry! I’ll move!’

  Guy retreats as she evacuates the space, before taking her place. ‘Thank God for that, eh?’ he says, opening the door to climb out.

  But I am unable to move. My hands grip the sides of the seat, as the pulse in both palms throbs against the fabric.

  ‘Are you coming?’ he asks, leaning in. ‘There’s a train in four minutes. We’ll make it if we’re quick.’

  I glance at him, then back at the dashboard. ‘I feel terrible, Guy.’

  ‘Well, you will in there. It’s red hot. If you get out, you’ll be fine.’ I don’t move. ‘Ellie?’

  I take several deliberate breaths, before a sentence bursts out of my mouth. ‘I just want to go home, okay?’

  He jolts back, as if he’s been slapped on the cheek. ‘Are you… joking?’

  ‘No,’ I plead, shaking my head. ‘I’m really sorry.’ I’m engulfed by a wave of self-loathing.

  ‘Well, okay,’ he says gently. But I get the impression that the tone in his voice does not match what he’s really feeling. ‘Seriously, Ellie, why don’t we just get on the train?’

  ‘I… can’t.’

  He straightens up. ‘So… what am I meant to do with these tickets?’ He’s angry with me now, of that there is no question. He also has every right to be.

  ‘You can still go,’ I offer weakly.

  ‘Well, yes,’ he replies, making me wish I hadn’t said that. ‘But how are you going to get home from here?’

  ‘I… I’ll have to phone my parents.’

  He lets out a long sigh. ‘No, don’t do that.’ Then he gets back in the car. He glances at me. ‘Well, this has turned into quite the shambles, hasn’t it?’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I say.

  ‘No, don’t keep apologising. If you’re sick, you’re sick.’ He turns to look at me. ‘You are sick, aren’t you?’

  All I can do is nod.

  I try to make small talk on the way home, but the words blood and stone spring to mind. Even when I manage to think of something to say, he answers in monosyllables. He’s polite enough, just quiet, so much so that by the time we are nearly home I am awash with paranoia. He pulls on the handbrake outside Chalk View.

  ‘This probably seems a little… weird,’ I offer.

  He shrugs. ‘It does a bit.’

  ‘I should explain. Though… now really isn’t the time.’

  He turns to me and exhales. ‘Don’t worry about it,’ he says softly. The fact that he looks genuine makes no material difference to how crushed I feel.

  ‘Thanks again. And sorry,’ I add quickly, before I open the door and scramble to my annexe, feeling like a fish gasping for water.

  Chapter 24

  ‘Happy birthday to you…’

  Dad’s voice trails off as he registers my expression and he places the cake on the table. The candles continue to flicker, dripping wax on buttercream, determined that the party – if that’s what you could call the three of us – will carry on. I lean in and blow them out, as ribbons of smoke fill the pocket of air above us.

  ‘Shall I do the honours?’ Dad asks. He cuts three large slices and hands us one each on a plate.

  ‘I believe you had a rough day, Ellie?’ he asks.

  ‘Yes, you could say that.’ I pick up a crumb between my finger and thumb and place it on my tongue. There’s nothing wrong with the cake, but it feels like swallowing sand. ‘I think I might have messed things up with Guy. I think I’ve messed things up full stop really, haven’t I?’

  Mum picks up a fork and digs in. ‘You are way too harsh on yourself, Ellie,’ she sighs. ‘You always have been.’

  ‘Not really, Mum. I had every opportunity in life given to me by you two. When you think about what could have happened to me, I’ve got no right to be like this.’

  ‘Nobody else thinks that but you. Absolutely nobody,’ Dad says. ‘When any child goes through something like you did, it has lasting effects. When people say that to you they’re not just saying it to make you feel better. There have been studies on childhood development that prove it.’

  ‘Yes, I know all about those. Colette made sure I did.’

  Mum leans back in her chair. ‘Why do you think it went so wrong with her, Ellie?’

  I’ve never fully explained to my parents why I stopped seeing Colet
te so abruptly. They pressed me for an explanation, of course, but when a person who is mid-breakdown decides to dig in their heels, people tend to back off quickly, worried that they’ll do something completely unthinkable. I owe it to them to explain though, I know I do.

  ‘She wanted to try something new,’ I say.

  ‘What kind of something?’ Dad asks.

  ‘She felt that CBT for the agoraphobia could only take us so far. So she suggested something similar to the way PTSD is sometimes treated. It’s called exposure therapy.’

  Mum leans back in her chair. From her expression, she immediately understands the implication of this. ‘That presumably involves delving into your past a lot.’

  ‘Yes.’

  I couldn’t claim that Colette had sprung it on me. In fact, she’d first raised the idea at the initial session, then repeatedly dropped it into conversation subsequently, suggesting that it was something we might try at an undefined point in the future, when I felt comfortable. ‘It’s not something we’d rush into,’ she said. ‘It requires a commitment, and an understanding that it might be difficult at times. I only want you to do it when you feel you trust me.’

  ‘I do,’ I said. It was true.

  She explained that the therapy works on the basis that PTSD sufferers use avoidance or ‘safety-seeking’ techniques, in my case refusing to acknowledge or talk about the early years of my childhood. This can prolong or intensify PTSD symptoms because, when a person avoids certain situations, thoughts or emotions, they don’t have the opportunity to fully process their experiences. Exposure therapy aims to eliminate avoidance behaviour by confronting the very situations a person fears – by imagining or vividly reliving them – thereby lessening anxiety. That’s the theory anyway.

  ‘So you’d want me to talk about things that happened when I was young?’

  ‘Yes.’

  I felt the sharp half-moons of my nails digging into my palms. ‘I don’t even like to think about it, Colette, let alone talk about it.’

  ‘That’s because, at the moment, doing so involves re-experiencing the more upsetting memories. You’re avoiding the trauma reminders, even though those reminders are not inherently dangerous.’

  But that wasn’t the only reason. Not in my case.

  ‘I just want nothing to do with that place anymore,’ I explained. ‘I don’t feel part of it in any way and I refuse to let it define me. It’s not me anymore. In fact, I feel as though it never was me, that what happened didn’t even happen to me, but someone else.’

  She began to jot something down.

  ‘I like it this way,’ I continued. ‘I like being an ordinary English girl, with two nice parents, who grew up in a lovely place where nothing very exciting ever happens beyond winning best-kept village or the vicar starting to wear a toupee.’

  She looked up. ‘That’s not the whole truth though, is it, Ellie? Recognising your past doesn’t have to mean allowing it to define you. But the fact is, it did happen. It is part of you, whether you like it or not.’

  I don’t know what occurred to change my mind, beyond a sharp sense of duty to my family and an intense dislike of letting people down. I felt I had no choice but to give it a go. And the trust issue was significant. That led me to believe that perhaps this could be the key, after all. That if I just took this one painful step, I might be able to lock away all my troubles for good.

  It didn’t work out like that.

  I called time on the first session before our hour was even up and raced out of the place. It was only two years ago, but my main recollection is not what I said, or what Colette said, but how I felt, with my nerves rattling at every word, spoken and anticipated. Afterwards, the glorious realisation that I did not have to do this – not any of it – hit me like blinding sunlight.

  ‘We suspected it was something like that,’ Dad says now. ‘It was almost inevitable. You’d been the same since your early teens. You never wanted to talk about it. Mum and I would try to encourage you to open up about what happened beyond what you’d told us in the first couple of years. But there came a point when you just seemed to turn your back on it all and stubbornly refused. After then, we didn’t want to force the issue. It felt cruel.’

  I top up my wine glass and take a large mouthful.

  The heat of the alcohol slips down my throat and I look up, fortified. Perhaps it’s that I have reached such an intense state of self-loathing after what happened with Guy that I don’t feel I deserve to avoid this pain any longer. Perhaps it’s simply that hitting the age of thirty-four feels like as good a time as any to break the habit of a lifetime. Or perhaps it’s more practical, the unavoidable recognition that this is simply not going to get better by itself.

  ‘Tell me about it, will you?’ I say to them both.

  They exchange glances. ‘Where do you want us to start?’ Mum asks.

  ‘How about the day you found me.’

  Chapter 25

  Harriet, 1990

  As the humanitarian convoy approached the Romanian border, the atmosphere among the volunteers seemed to shift. The last overnight stop before they reached their final destination was at a soulless, Soviet-style hotel and it was outside that, with church bells tolling somewhere in the distance, that Harriet stood with Colin and the others. Marie, a representative from one of the two charities accompanying them, had asked the group to gather round. She had a south London accent, a light brown complexion and beautiful jet-black braids, which she tucked behind the silver hoops in her ears. Harriet had interviewed her after they’d first set off from the UK and was struck by her knowledge and passion. But as she addressed the others now, there was the faintest touch of apprehension in her voice that had been entirely absent before.

  ‘I need to mention a few practical matters before we get to the orphanage,’ she told them. ‘The first thing I ought to prepare you for is the smell. It’s pretty awful. There are no toilets so the six hundred children are using sewers directly in the floor. Also, ladies, if you’ve got something to tie your hair back with, now is the time to do it. Most of the little ones have had their heads shaved, but not all. Those with hair are crawling with lice.’

  They’d read about Romania’s orphanages in the newspapers, of course. Marie’s charity, which operated globally, had already been out here several weeks earlier. But although images of starving, naked and sick children found in overcrowded state institutions had shocked the world, what the volunteers were about to walk into took on a new immediacy. A collective paralysis had descended on them as Marie finished her speech. ‘If anyone who heard that wants to turn back now,’ she said, ‘I’m afraid it’s too late. So, come on, folks. We’re in this together.’

  In the months following President Nicolae Ceaus¸escu’s fall in a bloody uprising in December 1989, it was estimated that one hundred thousand children were in state orphanages, though that figure was still growing. The astonishing scale of it had been the result of Ceaus¸escu’s family policies during his twenty-four-year reign, during which he wanted to boost the population and create a ‘Citizen’s Army’. ‘The foetus is the property of the entire society,’ Ceaus¸escu announced. ‘Anyone who avoids having children is a deserter who abandons the laws of national continuity.’

  Motherhood was now a state duty to be rigorously enforced by the secret police. Abortion became illegal for women under forty with fewer than four offspring. Contraception was banned. The result was babies and more babies, a far greater number of unwanted children than desperately impoverished parents could afford to feed. So they were encouraged to hand over children into state care, where they ended up in one of around seven hundred institutions, the true horrors of which were only beginning to be uncovered.

  The orphanage was a colossus of a building, three storeys high and pockmarked with brittle exterior paint, its arched windows criss-crossed with bars. As Harriet clicked open the passenger door of the van, her eyes were drawn heavenward. At a window on the second floor, she saw the outlin
e of two children, one gazing silently at them, his eyes muted and dull, the other rocking back and forth.

  Marie was met at the door by the orphanage director and Harriet followed them inside. The stench of urine and faeces hit her like a blast of hot wind. Her eyes skittered around in the dim light, to the rot on the walls, the dirty, cold floors, the squalor in every corner. Before she could fully take it in, three boys appeared from nowhere, followed by a surge of other children. When they realised there were strangers in the building, they emerged from every direction, frantically pushing each other out of the way, amidst a melee of noisy squabbling and excitement. Their heads were shaved and dotted with scabs, their limbs thin and clothes imbued with dirt. Harriet couldn’t place an age on any of them, something she attributed at the time to the chaos of the moment. On later reflection, she would realise that, malnourished and underdeveloped, they simply looked younger than they were.

  ‘Hello… hello there,’ she said, through a smile, as she made her way through the crowd. Colin by now had an arm round one boy, then another. ‘Why don’t you be my helper, come and show us round?’ The others jostled for Harriet’s attention, demanding hugs, reaching for her hand. She tried to clutch them all, one after another.

  Shortly afterwards, they were given a tour of the building. A set of stone steps led to the basement, where in one room the stench was so powerful that one of the volunteers had to run for the door to be physically sick. The washing machines were all broken and soiled nappies were laundered by hand in sinks with an intermittent water supply. Across the room, stinking pieces of cloth hung from strings. These were the ‘clean’ nappies. Every corner Harriet turned brought new horrors. Rusting pipes, black mould, a repugnant residue on the floors that she couldn’t identify.

  It was when they turned into one large room that Harriet felt her knees slacken. There were sixty or so babies, lying in rusting cots, several piled into each one. Some were covered in their own excrement and urine. They were empty-eyed and malnourished. Some were naked, all were filthy.