Page 94 of Where Do We Go From Here?
A buzzard swoops past, and as she follows it with her gaze she finds herself looking out to sea. She’s so distracted today that she hasn’t noticed it until now.
It’s lighter than usual today – pale turquoise almost white. The colour makes her want to be on a boat, trailing her fingers through the waves. She’d always wanted to live by the sea. They should have made that happen.
Anyway, if she isn’t dealing with trauma, then what’s her excuse for drinking so much? she wonders. Could it really be as simple as boredom? And if that were the case, then surely it wouldn’t be that hard to wrestle under control something that is little more than a bad habit?
She takes another bite of her sandwich even though she isn’t really enjoying it. The bread is stale and so chewy that it’s making her jaw ache. She picks the cheese from inside and nibbles that instead.
It was the pandemic, really, she decides. And yes, her home life had been a bit boring around that time. After all, they’d stopped going out to restaurants or even visiting other people’s houses. They’d stopped hosting dinner parties and going to the cinema, too. But when she thinks back really hard, she can’t remember feeling bored. What she remembers is feelingstressed– so stressed that she could barely breathe.
The buzzard flies past again in the other direction and so she chucks the bread from her sandwich into the air hoping it will swoop and grab it like prey, but the bird isn’t interested and flies on unperturbed. ‘Can’t say I blame you,’ she mutters.
So no, not bored, but stressed. And unable to find another way to wind down atthe end of the day.
The horror of those two years washes over her. The patients dying in corridors, the piled-up bodies in the morgue… No wonder she’d been stressed!
Nearly everyone at work had found some kind of chemical crutch to get through it all. Gina got hooked on stolen Valium, and Melody started smoking weed during coffee breaks, something that was known about by everyone, and tolerated. Wendy had merely drunk a little more than usual of an evening and convinced herself that she was doing fine.So yeah, the pandemic as a nurse, she thinks.That’ll do it.
Before that, pre-2020, everything had been fine, hadn’t it? She takes a swig from her water bottle and tries again to remember.
In truth, she hadn’t been in the best place when the whole thing had started, either – after all, she’d already fallen out with Sue and Neil by then. And she’d needed them during the pandemic. If she’d had her best friend and her brother to lean on, then maybe things wouldn’t have been so bad for her. She’d needed them and they hadn’t been there, and that had been yet another reason to resent them.
Sitting here isn’t working, she decides. Her anger is starting to feel overwhelming, and the stream of fresh reasons to feel angry seems limitless. She needs to move. Action feels better than thought.
She munches on a few squares of chocolate washed down with a swig from her water bottle and stands. She’ll walk farther today. She’ll explore what’s higher up the ridge. And she’ll not think of Sue and Neil again.
But it’s been interesting, thinking about it, she decides as she starts to walk. Because she’s never thought about that aspect of the pandemic before: how even during the pandemic, and even knowing she was a nurse and on the front line, Sue and Neil still hadn’t been in touch – well, other than the occasional text message to check they were all still alive, they hadn’t.
She supposes that they must have felt submerged by their own worries. That every single person felt that their own experience was the most unbearable was almost a defining aspect of the pandemic, even when, for people like Sue and Neil, the only thing that really happened was that they ran out of things to watch on Netflix.
Still, it was silly of her to expect more of them. Because if they hadn’t stepped up when her mother was dying, they were hardly likely to become brilliant people for anything else.
But, God, the pandemic had made her angry.
Actually, anger is probably an even better word to describe how she was feeling than ‘stressed’. She can remember being so angry when she got home of an evening – angry at the government, at her bosses, at the lack of funds and material; angry at bloody Brexit for sending her gorgeous EU colleagues away right when they were most needed; angry at her family, too, for not trying harder to understand what she was going through at work, and yes, angry at Sue and Neil for seemingly not giving a shit. She’d felt angry at the news every evening, angry at the clapping – bloody hell, the clapping! The clapping had made her absolutely furious, and the sight of Boris Johnson clapping the NHS staff on the doorstep of 10 Downing Street had made her feel nauseous. She could have strangled him with her bare hands for that.
It’s not like they’d got any help, either. There had been no counselling, no discussion groups, no vouchers for sessions with a shrink… So, yeah. She’d started coming home and getting tipsy. Because being tipsy made her feel less angry or at least, it made her anger seem manageable.
It’s so obvious, now she thinks about it, that she wonders if she doesn’t have alcohol to thank for the fact she got through the whole thing intact. Well, perhaps not intact, but semi-intact, at least. She didn’t throw herself off a bridge, after all.
She pauses and looks around. She hasscrambled so far up the ridge that the globe of the radar is now the size of a ten-pence piece silhouetted against the sky. It’s wild and craggy and dramatic up here. It’s beautiful! She sniffs the air and then pulls her phone out to take a photo.
She’s feeling happier, suddenly – fancy that! Perhaps it’s this new narrative doing the trick – this idea that it’s the alcohol that enabled her to survive. As a theory, it certainly sounds right. It feels true. And now the pandemic is over she needs to calm down and get her drinking back under control. With the source of her anger now gone, why on earth would that be hard? It’s hardly rocket science, is it?
Somehow, she gets through the afternoon and most of the evening.
Time drags strangely, which in a way seems reasonable. After all, she’s sitting in a cabin on a mountain in France, alone. There’s quite literally nothing going on.
She reads until her eyes are tired then watches a detective series on her laptop until she gets bored with that as well. But unlike every other day when she has performed these same activities with a drink (or three) she does not fall asleep and so is surprised by how little time they take up. Has she been using drink to fast forward her life?
She phones Jill and has a long chat during which she doesn’t say a word about what’s been going on, a conversation during which the word ‘alcohol’ is not mentioned once. But even after that it’s still only 6.30 p.m.
She cooks dinner (tomato sauce with pasta and cheese) and eats it in front of Sky News. Mittens appears, and she feeds him not once, not twice, but three times, and though the cat can’t believe his luck, it’s still only 8 p.m.
After another hour of staring at the fire, she retires upstairs to readbut finds she can neither concentrate on the story nor fall asleep. She’s feeling nervous and irritable and other than this round robin of trying to sleep, trying to read and doom-scrolling on her phone, she can’t think what else she can possibly do to pass the time.
And then, suddenly, it’s morning and she realises that at some point she must have dozed off, straight into a world of nightmares.
She lies in the pale morning light and tries to remember the nature of her dreams, but other than a few images that are so vague they’re more like sensations than stories, she’s unable to grab hold of any specifics. But her mother had been in the mix somewhere, she’s sure of that. Her mother, and the hospital, and Harry.
