‘Are you mad? Of course you need to go to the day assessment unit.’
There was a small audience gathered round at this point and the fruit-stall owner, who was wearing a Moroccan hat, was saying something about his mate who had a cab firm. ‘My friend, he take her to the hospital, I call him …’
Joe was all set to go, until I finally managed to spit it out: ‘No, Joe, we don’t need an ambulance. I’m having a panic attack.’
Joe stopped then.
‘A panic attack?’ he said, breathless. ‘How do you know?’
‘Because I get them all the time,’ I said. ‘Every day.’
The journey on the way home was in silence. Panic attacks always exhausted me, and I slept most of the last half of the journey on the bus. When we got home, the first thing I noticed when I opened the door was the smell of turps and then that voice, Butler’s voice:
Sorry about the smell, I’ve been doing up some house on that executive estate.
‘Jesus, Joe. Will you tidy your decorating shit up after yourself?’ I said.
I heard him take a breath. ‘Robyn, please will you just talk to me?’
I wandered into the cool of the lounge and sat down on the sofa. I heard Joe drop keys on the kitchen table, pause; the flat was so quiet I heard his hand brush across the stubble on his face, then footsteps as he walked across the hard tiles of the kitchen floor.
He stood in the doorframe of the lounge. ‘What’s going on?’ he asked. I looked up. He looked strange, unfamiliar. ‘Because this isn’t you.’
‘I know.’
I felt this awful sense of this being the end of everything. All my prophecies coming true. I couldn’t do this; I never could have done this. I’m not designed for love like this: real love, where you have to let go. But then this calm descended, this feeling of detachment. Joe was talking to me but his words were hollow wisps flying over my head. I could understand them, but they didn’t make me feel anything.
‘Why didn’t you tell me about the panic attacks?’ he said. ‘I feel like there’re things you’re hiding from me … that you
have
hidden from me. Don’t you feel you can talk to me?’
I was looking at his shoulders; he had such broad shoulders for his build. How come I’d never noticed how broad his shoulders were before? It felt like I was looking at a stranger.
‘If I’d known, I could have done something, we could have talked, I could have helped.’
‘I didn’t want to worry you.’ My voice sounded odd to me, unfamiliar.
‘Worry me?’ Joe looked genuinely bewildered. ‘Robyn, I love you.’
I understood, too, the gravitas of these words, but they bounced off me like rain on a pavement.
‘I want to know if something’s bothering you. I want to know if you’re so fucking scared, you’re having panic attacks – course I do. Also, it’s my baby in there, too.’
He gestured towards my bump, which had developed now, at twenty-four weeks, into a proper beach-ball bump – everyone said I looked like I was having a boy, even though I knew I wasn’t – but it felt like an appendage rather than a part of me. Inside, I felt her move, oblivious to the seismic shifts she’d caused.
‘How often have you been having them?’ he asked.
‘Every day. Several times a day – but not as bad as that one in the market. I know what they are now. I can usually control them more.’
‘Is that why you won’t take the Tube any more?’
‘Yes, partly.’
‘Have they got something to do with the intimacy thing – with what happens when we try to have sex?’
‘Yes.’
His whole body kind of slumped against the door.
‘But, darling, why didn’t you tell me?’
‘I thought they’d go away on their own.’
Joe was really frowning at me, like he didn’t recognize me; like he didn’t really know who I was any more. I didn’t know who I was anymore.
‘But what about the anxiety … the hyperventilating thing you were doing then in the market? I don’t know, lack of oxygen.’ It was the same lack of medical terminology he’d had in Dr Love’s office, but this time I wasn’t finding it endearing, I wasn’t feeling anything. ‘Couldn’t it affect the baby? You have to look after yourself.’
‘It doesn’t always get to that point. Like I say, I can control them now.’
Control them? Who was I kidding? Nobody had to see I was having one, but that didn’t mean I didn’t regularly feel terrified.
I put my hands over my ears. I suddenly couldn’t bear this any more. All this talking. ‘Dr Love said stress had nothing to do with it happening again!’ I shouted.
‘No,’ said Joe, he sounded angry now. ‘He said it wouldn’t cause it, but that it could contribute to it. He said that adrenaline could affect the labour, make the birth more difficult …’
I just wanted Joe to go. I wanted him to leave me alone.
‘Oh, and that helps, does it?’ I said. ‘That makes me feel relaxed, Joe? I am worried all the time that it’s going to happen again. That this baby is going to die too. And I know she was your baby too …’
‘But I can handle it, though, Robyn,’ he said. ‘I’m hopeful. I’m all right. But why the hell are you running around, trying to help the unhelpable, trying to “save” Grace, doing extra work, when you really should be looking after yourself? Grace is making you worse, if you ask me, and what happened to the list? That promise we made that you’d stop thinking you could save everyone …?’
‘Well, you should have made a promise not to go on at me all the time! I need space, Joe, you’re suffocating me. Don’t you see, you’re making the panic attacks worse?’
He started back.
‘Oh, God,’ he said, this awful realization crossing his face. ‘I’m sorry. I just care, I love you.’
‘You won’t …’
‘What?’
‘Look, Joe.’ I suddenly felt so tired, so tired with all this trying. ‘I love you, too – so much – but I can’t do this, I’m so sorry.’
He looked at the ceiling and sort of laughed. ‘Oh, God, not this again.’
‘
Yes
, this again,’ I said. ‘I can’t. I knew I couldn’t. I should have listened to my instincts. I don’t want you to have to deal with me, Joe. I don’t want to be this basket case you have to look after – I spend enough time with mad people to know how draining they can be.’
‘But what about me?’ he said. His lip was quivering; he had to take a sharp breath to gather himself, to stop himself from crying. Joe, with his soul on his sleeve, his heart on his sleeve. ‘What about what I want? What if I don’t give a shit if you’re a basket case? I still love you.’
You won’t.
I sat up straight then; I was absolutely clear in my head on what needed to happen.
‘I just think it’s best if you just go,’ I said. He was crying and yet I felt numb, I felt nothing. ‘I think right now, I just need …’
‘No,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘You’re not doing this again. You’re not pushing me away again, walking away when the going gets tough, or when there’s commitment up for offer, because that’s what I am willing to do, Robyn, to commit to you. I mean, seriously, what do I have to do to make you …? It’s not fair, it’s like I’m doing all the trusting, the hoping, and you’re not meeting me halfway. Robyn, all this happened to me, too, you know, it didn’t just happen to …’
‘I was sixteen when you asked me to marry you!’ I said, although of course I knew the age was not the problem. ‘
AND YOU’RE MAKING ME WORSE!
’ I shouted. ‘YOU’RE MAKING THE PANIC ATTACKS WORSE!’ I was sobbing now. I knew that Joe was, had always been, the one person in my life who could save me, who could make me so happy – if I could let him. The one and only person I had ever loved and who I’d let love me. And yet I couldn’t do it. I’d tried, and I’d failed.
He stared at me for a few moments, shocked, pale as bone. I stood up. He leaned against the door then, to let me pass.
‘I have to go back to work,’ I said, laying my cheek on his by means of an apology, even though I knew no words –
no words
– I could say anyway would ever be enough.
‘Please, Robyn, please, don’t, I’m worried about you …’
I walked right past him, then, and towards the front door.
‘And I think you should go back to Manchester.’
And then it was like the globe stopped shaking, slowed to a stop like a train coming into a platform. The world took on an entirely new colour: a kind of cool, greeny-blue; none of this blood-red. Calm.
I went swimming every morning before work, like we’d stipulated on the AA list. I ate well. I went to bed early, the sheets barely ruffled by the time I woke up.
The panic attacks as good as vanished.
And God, I missed Joe. I missed the physicality of him, his solidness, his gaze on me: that dark, deep gaze that you could see right inside of, right to the bottom of. But there was this blue calmness. It felt like I’d been emptied, cleaned out. Perhaps this was how depressives felt when the antidepressants kicked in – they described it like that to me sometimes: this sense of calm, but a numb calm. A welcome blankness.
Whatever, I knew I’d made the right decision. I only had to listen to my heart and my breathing – slow and even – to know that. Maybe soon, I’d be able to take the Tube. It wasn’t even a ‘decision’ really, anyway, because it was the only thing I
could
do, I realized that now. I was never going to have been able to be with Joe. He was always out of bounds for me. I’d tried to go against my instincts, my capabilities. I’d tried to swim against the current. That must never happen again.
Joe was so angry and I didn’t blame him. He sent me emails, the first at 2 a.m. after he’d got back to Manchester that day when I’d told him to go, when I’d watched him pick up his keys and his bag and walk out of my flat, thinking my heart would break. ‘I just don’t understand why you’re doing this again – pushing me away,’ he wrote. ‘If that’s what you want, then fine, but it’s not fine with me – don’t ever think this is what
I
wanted. We could have been happy …’
Then one the next day: ‘Sorry, I was horribly drunk. I’m just upset. I just wish you’d told me earlier how you were feeling. Maybe I could have helped.’
I wanted to email back and tell him everything – about what happened with Saul Butler down Friars Lanes, how it had ruined me, how when we tried to make love, all I saw was his face, how it was like the past was repeating itself. Most of all, I was desperate to tell him my secret. My dark, awful secret. But how could I ever, ever tell him that and what good would that do? It’d only hurt him more and I still wouldn’t be able to be with him. No, I decided, he would thank me in the end.
Instead, I wrote a one-liner back, saying that I loved him and I was so sorry and that we would talk because he was still this baby’s father, but that I needed time.
Today it is Wednesday and I go to the swimming pool before work as usual. I love it at this time. Sometimes I am the only person in here and, during those sessions, I feel like I am a girl again, in an early-morning training session at Kilterdale pool, the milky sun streaming through the windows and onto the turquoise water.
And I am weightless; thinking of nothing but my stroke, my breathing; ploughing through the cool water, rhythmically, letting it carry me: stroke, stroke, breathe, stroke, stroke, breathe. Just water and breath. No blood in my ears, no thumping heart.
I do thirty lengths as usual and then I get out. My bump is big enough now to draw admiring looks from women in the changing room: ‘Oooh, you’re a lovely neat shape. How many weeks?’
‘Twenty-five.’
‘When’s it due?’
‘Early January.’
‘Oh, gosh. I hope it holds off over Christmas!’
‘Yes, me, too, otherwise it’ll have to have two birthdays, like the Queen.’
There is girlish laughter. I still, astonishingly, seem to have retained my sense of humour in all of this mess – or maybe I’m just good at pretending.
‘Well, you look fab,’ says one of the women: short, dark, Jewish looks. ‘I’ve got three boys and my husband says he fancies me most when I’m pregnant.’
‘Yes, mine, too, actually,’ I say. It just slides right out, so natural. ‘Mine, too.’
I get to work. Jeremy is already in, gargling with the TCP, with his door wide open.
‘Morning, Kingy,’ he says. ‘You’re in bright and early.’
I’ve got several assessments to fill in, calls to make, paperwork to catch up on, and I am eager to do it, and to be seen by Jeremy doing it. I want him to know I am coping, I am doing the stuff I know to be important to him: the form-filling and other bureaucracy. I want him to know that I am dealing with clients other than Grace, that I am on top of my workload.
He walks past my desk, whistling, and puts a hand on my shoulder. ‘Good to see you bright and early this morning,’ he says. ‘Good to have our Kingy back.’
Maybe Jeremy was right, I think. My concentration has been awry these last few weeks, I have been distracted; but this week, I feel as clear as the water in the swimming pool and Jezza is in an extra-good mood today, because he’s got a meeting with the medical director about budgets and there’s nothing Jezza likes more than a meeting about budgets.
The day rumbles along at an even pace. I do my paperwork, I do two visits – one to John Urwin, who’s home now from his recent admission and still wearing his Dennis the Menace wig, and one to Levi. Levi seems to have found a new level recently. He’s still working at Dulwich Sainsbury’s, with all the ‘mo-fo dull witches’, but he is, he tells me, well on his way to raising enough money to go back to Nigeria to see his niece, who is five months now and sitting up. He shows me a picture: she is beautiful, like him. He is making plans for the future, which is a good sign.
Finally, in the afternoon, I speak to Grace. After the incident at the market, I had to come clean at clinical, that the photography day hadn’t exactly gone to plan. When I’d caught up with Grace the next day, after Joe had gone (I found her smoking dope outside her block of flats and she had calmed down), she’d promised me she did not want to be ‘sent to the funny farm’ and therefore from now on would be ‘swallowing her pills like a good little mental patient’. She also said she was sorry, and she thanked me for being her friend.