Authors: Chris Wimpress
The day after Luis stormed out of Casa Amanhã I tried to get myself and the kids out of Naviras but there weren’t any flights. All London’s airports had been closed because of the deepening power shortage. I called James to ask for help, he said things would probably improve the following day. ‘We’re making sure the important stuff is working okay first,’ he said. ‘But I don’t know why you’d want to come back so quickly, it’s a mess here. You’re better off where you are.’
‘I just want to get back to you,’ I said. He must’ve been surprised, there hadn’t been much in the way of passion between us for a long time. Just infrequent, unmemorable sex. I couldn’t quite believe my own words, either, but overnight something had switched inside my head, even though I’d not slept more than an hour. I’d decided things with Luis were shot to pieces, that I ought to focus instead on salvaging my relationship with James. Not that I wanted to, of course, but I felt desperate and didn’t want to end up with nothing.
We kept to the hotel the whole of the next day, the kids not minding particularly when I’d refused to take them to the beach, they were happy enough in the rooftop pool. I hadn’t slept much and dozed in the sunshine, trying to blot out the thoughts about Luis. Every now and again I’d stand up and survey the village, just peering over the high wall. I could see everything from the top of the hotel, the tall trees surrounding Casa Amanhã, the beach, La Roda perching over the square. Looking down I was able to trace back almost every significant event from the previous nine years. I stared at the beach bar, trying to make out Luis among the people at the tables. His truck wasn’t parked in its usual place in the square outside La Roda. Probably taken a group scuba-diving up the coast, I thought.
Late in the afternoon James rang to say limited flights into Heathrow would resume the following morning and that Rav had managed to get the three of us seats. ‘Don’t make too much noise about it,’ James said. ‘Officially everything’s full for a couple of days.’
I wanted to get out of the village that night, drive to Lisbon and stay in a hotel near the airport. James signalled agreement before hanging up. I mobilised the kids, ignoring their howls of outrage at the sudden curtailment of their holiday.
‘We’ll be back soon enough,’ I lied as we packed up in the hotel room, knowing I wouldn’t ever be coming back to Naviras; the village felt like a smashed eggshell, all the goodness drained out. I bundled everything quickly into the boiling car and started the engine, opening all the windows to cool it down. I checked out of the hotel, strapped the kids into the back seats and sped too quickly down the lane heading for the main road, slowing down as we drove through the square but accelerating again after going up the road and passing the crossroads. I didn’t check for traffic because looking to my left would’ve required seeing the wall and gates of Casa Amanhã.
I thought I’d made it out, but at the edge of the village where the cottages became grassland Luis’s truck came round the corner and braked. He looked at me for three seconds. I looked at him, then at Carolina in the passenger seat, her window wound down. She was smiling at me. There wasn’t room for our cars to cross. Luis reversed ten feet, let me pass him. I kept my eyes fixed on the road and put my foot on the gas too fast, the car kangarooed a bit as it moved forward, its engine hiccupping.
Carolina waved at Bobby and Sadie, who were both saying goodbye as we passed them. I focused on keeping the wheel steady, blinking furiously to try to shift the watery film that had formed over my eyeballs. After I’d passed Luis’s car and quickly accelerated I wiped my face with one hand. I don’t think the kids noticed my tears from the back seats, they were unusually quiet. Perhaps they sensed my unease, or maybe were feeling out of sorts at being unexpectedly displaced. They must’ve noticed how I was driving too fast around the hairpin bends of the road leading to the motorway, the brown hills and stubbly grassland fields sliding sideways in my vision.
There were very few cars on the motorway, occasionally I’d overtake a minibus or a jeep but largely the road ahead was empty. I began to ignore the dividing line between the two lanes on my side of the carriageway, allowed the car to meander. For the second time in my life I felt the sensation, the one I’d had on the plane heading down to Portugal for Lottie’s funeral. The sense that I didn’t want to carry on but couldn’t turn back either. It manifested itself physically as a knot in the very centre of my torso, like I’d swallowed a pebble which had got stuck. I released my grip on the steering wheel, my hands hovering just above it. It was edifying, rescinding control of a car travelling so fast. Soon the road will curve around and we’ll plough through the safety barrier, I thought. We’ll go into some ravine or the side of a hill, and that’ll be the end of it.
‘Mummy!’ yelled Bobby as the right wheels of the car came up against the thick rumble strip at the side of the carriageway, making a grinding sound and causing the car to shudder. Instinctively I put both hands back on the steering wheel, guided the car back into the inside lane. A few seconds later I realised what I’d done, or tried to do. It was horrifying, the idea that I could murder anyone, particularly my own children.
We had a quiet night in the hotel at Lisbon, the kids amusing themselves with videos on my phone while I watched the news. The power shortages in Britain were the top story on all channels, the disruption to travel rippling around the world and prompting questions about whether it could happen to other countries. James popped up at one point, making all the usual reassuring noises. He wasn’t just pretending to be calm, I could tell from his face he was quite enjoying the crisis, there was a levity to him.
Once again I barely slept, my thoughts trapped in some kind of feedback loop. Obviously the mess I was in was directly attributable to James, who’d destroyed the sanctity of our marriage with Rosie. But how much of the rest was my fault? It was hard to assess, but still I kept trying as I got the kids ready for the flight. As we walked through the entrance to Lisbon airport I saw the queues at the ticket sales offices of the UK airlines, people angry with the helpless staff there. No such frustration for the three of us, who went straight to the first-class
check-in, dropped our bags and picked up our boarding passes. I saw the looks of envy from those in other queues, felt like telling them they’d no idea what it was like on the inside, how it felt to be me at that moment.
How did it feel, exactly? Like I’d ceased to function as a normal person, had become a different species, one that looked like a person and acted like one but really was something else. A charlatan, perhaps, some kind of shapeshifter. Later I’d realise that I’d been caught up in it for a long time, but the night after we landed I couldn’t sleep a wink. The insomnia continued all weekend and by Monday morning I was exhausted and couldn’t face going to work. Paula took the kids to school in Eppingham because
I was lying on the floor in the bathroom. ‘Bad sardines,’ I called through the locked door. When they’d gone I called my GP surgery, asked for an emergency appointment.
When I arrived
there and went through to the consultation room the doctor immediately looked concerned. I asked for sleeping tablets and she was reluctant to prescribe them, asked me what was causing the lack of sleep. I explained how I’d been unhappy for years, how I’d wanted to crash the car on the way from Naviras to Lisbon. Then I began to cry, unable to speak for several minutes. They were tears of guilt at my own selfishness, at the thought I might’ve killed my kids. She didn’t comfort me, she just waited.
‘You’re depressed, Mrs. Weeks,’ she said, finally, when I’d
recovered some semblance of composure and explained about my Dad, the death of Lottie and the impact James’s job was having on my family. ‘You’ve been having suicidal thoughts,’ she re-affirmed, ‘I’m signing you off work for two weeks, and I want to start you on a course of antidepressants immediately.’
Of course I’d considered that course of action before many times over the years but had always resisted, had hated the idea of admitting defeat. I explained as much.
‘The brain’s just an organ, same as any other,’ said the doctor gently. ‘Your brain is unfortunately not working properly, and needs medicine. That’s how you must see it.’
I said I was worried it would leak out that I was taking anti-depressants, explained how the press would turn it into something political. She just nodded, and hand-wrote the prescription. ‘This is rather unorthodox, nowadays,’ she said as she filled it in. ‘But this way it stays off the computer. That should allay your concerns?’
I drove twenty miles out of Eppingham to a pharmacy; I didn’t want to get the antidepressants from the one I normally used. When I got home I immediately swallowed down my first pill and within half an hour was comatose on the sofa. When Paula came over that afternoon I dragged myself up to the bedroom and shut myself away, after asking her to contact James’s parents to see if they’d look after the kids. I didn’t want them to see me in such a catatonic state.
James never came home that night, he was still up to his eyes in the brownout crisis. It took a week for me to get used to the effects of the pills, but I never went back to work; I resigned. When James asked why, I said I’d been struggling to cope with my caseload, the constituency duties, the kids. ‘Lottie dying, it’s been eating me up inside,’ I said, which wasn’t in itself a lie.
‘I wish you’d told me it was all getting on top of you, L,’ he said, clearly a bit surprised that I’d taken the decision without consulting him. ‘I’ll have to advertise for someone.’
‘Maybe it’s just temporary,’ I said. ‘I might be able to go back to it in a few months.’
‘Oh I wouldn’t worry about that,’ said James. ‘I have a feeling things would’ve changed soon enough, anyway.’
After a month of taking the pills I stopped feeling utterly miserable, started to feel quite free of Naviras, of Luis and Lottie. I’d just turned 39 and had become a family manager; Bobby was at a reasonably good primary school, Sadie still too young to be at nursery but about to start at one. Women all over the world would’ve killed to be in my position, I told myself. That’s not to say I was happy; one thing people don’t tell you about antidepressants
is they’re just that. They stopped the worst thoughts but I came to realise they blocked the best ones, too. They kept me inside imaginary tramlines of emotion, good and bad.
Then things changed again, one August morning when all of us were in Eppingham. The night before I’d gone to see Dad, who’d been convinced the radio was on when it wasn’t, shushing me every time I spoke because I was apparently interrupting his programme. While hospitals and schools were exempt, places like nursing homes were subject to the usual power restrictions, enforced by a system of self-policing. Anyone catching their neighbour using power when they weren’t supposed to was urged to call a hotline, which was so popular it sometimes took ten minutes of holding before people could get through, apparently. One of Rav’s ideas.
With things so febrile a holiday was out of the question for us, which suited me fine, I certainly didn’t want to go to Naviras given the way things were with Luis, with whom I hadn’t spoken. I worried he might angrily tell my husband about our relationship, or perhaps my secret about Casa Amanhã.
‘Of course Drake’s going to have to go,’ James was on the phone to Rav, who was working at the crisis unit within the Home Office. ‘He’ll have to take the wrap for this.’
A video of the chancellor kissing his intern had surfaced, and was being replayed on a near-constant loop on the morning news as I was trying to get the kids to finish their breakfasts.
Bobby pulled a funny face. ‘Is the prime minister going to be rapping, mummy?’
James didn’t see the funny side of this and got up from the table, walking through to the living room where he could talk undisturbed.
‘Not quite, darling.’ I couldn’t quite see how the public embarrassment of the chancellor equated to the need for Drake to step down. The whole country was hot and irritable thanks to the
on-going power restrictions, which affected air conditioning and even desk fans. A lot of sensible people saw the brownouts for what they were, with Drake just being in the wrong place when the music stopped. Unfortunately not everyone was sensible, far from it, and irritation at little things mounted up. Washing machines stopping mid-cycle, printers going silent half way through a job, such things were bearable as a one-off but quickly became a daily bugbear for the sorts of people in swing seats, the kinds of voters who genuinely chose governments.
James had been broadly praised for managing to get a grip on the disorder. Labour found themselves flip-flopping over his policy of allowing the public to form neighbourhood teams to patrol the streets after dark. Crowdsourcing to the nth degree, some called it, but it had worked in part. To give him credit, James knew how to wield political power, saw it not through the narrow prism of passing laws or having meetings. He understood how behaviour – mass behaviour – could be influenced. ‘Best of all it hardly costs a bean,’ he’d say. It was becoming obvious publicly that he was withholding full support for Drake, saving up his best ideas.
James headed off to work and I took the kids to playscheme. When I got back I was bemused to find Rav and Rosie in the house, James had given them a key. They’d turned the dining room table into a little office with computers, phones and screens. Rav looked up at me. ‘Sorry for the intrusion, Ellie, but James said we could set up here.’