A Drop in the Ocean

The tight walled labyrinth of brick terraces had loosened to stretches of bay windowed semis in magnolia, beige and cream, flashes of green glimpsed down side alleys, creeping into front gardens, and eventually garnishing horseshoe drives before taking over entirely, fading from the vivid hues of tended lawn to the dryly yellowing pallor of ripening wheat as the flat fields opened out on either side of the road. Lydia knew she was late without needing to glance at the clock on the car’s dashboard, but she did, as if casting time a stern look might stem its advance, allow her to catch up, feel less at its mercy. It was the same look she used when the children threatened to unravel her, and it didn’t work then, either. The morning had been a difficult one, and on her knotted shoulder, the blue cotton of her dress was still dark with Jack’s tears. Maybe his snot too. “It is what it is, I’m doing the best that I can”, she thought, and tuned the radio in search of some music she could sing too, re-set her mind.

“You’re late” said Mr Fenton, coming down the path to meet her at the kerb. He must have been waiting by the door, she thought. “Traffic, was it?” he offered, but they both knew that there was no traffic, out here.

“It was bad getting out of town” Lydia answered. “My son told me he would rather be dead than go to school but I physically carried him to the car and took him anyway, and I feel like I am failing him utterly” didn’t seem the right fit for the moment.

Inside, Mrs Fenton sat, miniscule amidst the chaos of a home stuck in every decade since 1940. Floral antimacassars sat on floral chair arms like hydrangeas amidst the gladioli, while porcelain spaniels watched over the tangled cables of a games console, stretched across a rug in swirls of browns and oranges which lay rucked at one end where a hi-fi tower stood atop a child’s pink plastic table. “Can I get you a cup of tea?” asked Mr Fenton.

“Thank you, but I’ve not long had one” said Lydia, and they both felt satisfied despite the lie. She turned to the woman sat wringing her hands with evident strength despite her frailty in the chair furthest from the window. “Gracie, how are you today?”

The Fentons had raised two children in the house now crumbling around them, the middle of a terrace of five, each of which had remained empty when their last tenant had moved away until the Fentons were alone, their neat front lawn bordered by tall grass, their car the only one still parked beside the cracked pavement. The Ministry of Defence was keen to buy the land and expand the firing range which backed onto Mr Fenton’s lovingly nurtured dahlia border, and the council had offered a flat in a block near the centre of town, but they had said no. This was their home, and besides, those blocks were full of drugs. “If we had the money for a bungalow, with a little garden….” they said. But they didn’t. Now they were trapped here by more than money, Mrs Fenton having not left the front door since before the pandemic, when she had been told to shield at home.

Lydia took her a seat as Mr Fenton headed out into the garden to give them some privacy and Gracie Fenton, in her thin, wavering voice, told Lydia about the ghosts of her past that haunted her day and night, leaving her ever ready to run and hide. The panic was understandable, it always was, but living with it had confined her to these four walls. We all need a reason to live with our pasts, and Gracie’s lay out of her reach. She had waited nearly two years for help, and the big bad wolf lurking outside had grown fatter and fiercer while she waited.

“So what can help?” Lydia asked.

“Red Bull.”

“Red Bull?”

“Yes, Red Bull.”

“Okay, so when you notice it starting up, you have a sip of your Red Bull?”

“No, I have a can of Red Bull. To calm me down.”

The woman couldn’t weigh much more than a child, thought Lydia, imagining, with horror, her own child after four Red Bulls. Had it really been just an hour since she had left him, red eyed and subdued amongst the clamour of children and bells and brisk adults, calling for an order their small charges could never achieve? Back in the car, she had both the urge to run back through the gates to retrieve him, and also to drive away, and keep driving. After four Red Bulls there would be no contest. Still, perhaps this one might be an easy win, she thought, as she slipped into a well-worn script about panic.

The first explosion went off just as she placed her hand against her chest and uttered the words “your heart rate goes up”. Which she would have been able to tell you was true, if she had stopped to analyse it, even without her hand over her heart. Lydia, startled, found herself on her feet before she’d had time to recognise any of that however. The air around her, cracked open just a moment ago, seemed to knit itself back together as Gracie remained serene in her chair. Mr Fenton popped his head through the back door just as Lydia sat back down, mildly embarrassed. “Firing the big ones today!” he said merrily, amused by Lydia’s obvious discomfort even as he tried to reassure her that all was normal.

“Sorry,” said Lydia, “I suppose you must be quite used to that?” Gracie nodded and smiled her encouragement for Lydia to resume. “Where was I? Okay, yes, so as soon as your brain perceives a danger, it sends out a signal to get your body ready to run, or fight, so the first thing that happens is your heart rate goes up, and along with that your breathing….” The second explosion and the third and fourth came close together. Lydia felt the room shudder, then shudder again, the sonic impact seeming to steal a breath from inside her lungs. When she started again, her breathing was faster, shallower, and her heart was keeping pace. Still, Gracie sat unruffled in a haven of floral padding.

“Your breathing” she went on, determined to retain a professional composure, “gets faster. You might notice yourself shaking, or the sensation of jelly legs, as all that energy floods out to your big muscles in your arms and legs, and you might sweat more” - she shouted over the fifth explosion – “as your body tries to keep the muscles cool!”

“Are you alright Lydia?” Gracie had been playing close attention to the live demonstration of panic Lydia had unwillingly embarked on. “Are you sure I can’t get Tom to bring you a cup of tea? I’ve got Red Bull if you’d prefer?”

“Breathing! Gracie, I am going to show you how to breathe!” Lydia’s voice was still a little louder than was necessary in the gaps between gun fire. But it helped, the breathing, and her client watched with forbearance as Lydia calmed herself.

“Okay, so what do you know about the effects of caffeine?” she asked. Gracie didn’t, and Lydia left with the satisfaction that she might have made a difference. It didn’t last long. In the car back to the office, she thought about the ghosts of the men Gracie’s mum had brought back to their house – boyfriends, she said, not customers. But they paid for something, those men, and Gracie was still paying now. Still, she thought, less caffeine will help. And in the sixteen sessions she could offer her, that was a start, right? Small gains. Keep looking for the small gains. Lydia had learnt that lesson early in her training when any hero fantasies she might have harboured had flown straight into a wall of suffering twenty bricks deep and building.

The pale lino and light blue walls of the clinic felt constrictive after the sun-washed fields and open skies of her drive out to the Fenton’s, and the background smell of disinfectant and fear accompanied her down the long corridor, the sound of her shoes, unnoticeable almost anywhere else, bouncing back at her from the hard surfaces on every side. She felt a sinking nausea as she entered her stuffy clinic room. The room had no windows, and the air conditioning unit had not worked in the two years she had been there. In the latest battle of an ongoing war between herself and an unknown colleague, Lydia rearranged the three bucket chairs and little orange coffee table how she preferred them, and opened her lap top. Three clients, a meeting, then time to pick the kids up from school. Fourteen emails. Two minutes to eleven, time to focus. Lydia picked up her phone.

Three Facebook notifications, twenty six WhatsApp messages on the school parent group, and emails, largely junk, but one about an alumni reunion dinner dance at her own old school. She wondered whether to go. Most of the boys from her class had gone off to work in the city after university. Facebook suggested they were all still in touch, too, twenty five years on, those beautiful boys now middle aged men staring red faced and sweaty into cameras, shoulder to shoulder with one another just as they had been back at school. The girls had followed more varied paths, finance, medicine, fundraising, law, but all led back to pictures of gap toothed children smiling as they pressed their rosy cheeks to their smooth skinned, sleek haired mothers. Lydia felt something of a let down in comparison. All that privilege, the expensive education, the horse riding lessons and piano lessons, and here she was with her doctorate and her studiously blithely named children, earning less than her mortgage payments and building a narrative around the joy of family camping holidays. She imagined standing in some dimly lit hall with 90s music playing at a volume she had enjoyed in the 90s, trying to find something to talk about with people who hadn’t much wanted to talk to her in the 90s, and having to get far too close just to hear anyway. Perhaps not. She sent a text message to Layla, the only person she still had any real contact with from school.

How are you lovely? Are you going to the reunion?

Cant, patriots march in Kent that weekend. Fancy meeting up soon?

Lydia sighed inwardly at the prospect of trying to steer the conversation repeatedly away from the dangers of immigration. She tried to remind herself that Layla, she hoped, was still motivated by wanting things to be better, but wondered when she had fallen so deep into an echo chamber that it was hard to resist shouting back at her.

Like Gracie, Lydia’s 11am had waited two years to start therapy. Unlike Gracie, he wasn’t so forgiving. “As I see it, you’ve let me down. I wanted to kill myself, and then you made me wait two years, with nothing. I could be dead! I could easily be dead, and you don’t give a shit about it. Well fuck you, I’m sorry, but fuck you, that’s how I feel.” Lydia was towing the party line now. Very sorry. Pressures on the service. Welcome to make a complaint. Not forgotten about. Make this useful. But he was right, and she hated it. Three more attempts while he’d waited in line, and what did she have to offer him that could justify the wait? What could she offer that would counter a childhood of beatings and neglect, of poverty and fear? An adulthood of knockbacks and flashbacks and vulnerability raging beneath aggression and violence? “I understand”, she said, “I know.” He thanked her, though, as the session ended, agreed a time for the following week, said he felt lighter, for being heard. Lydia pictured him arriving home, and wondered how quickly he would grow heavy again in the solitude of his bedsit, watching YouTube videos and eating from the microwave to save on turning the oven on.

Just past midday, Lydia followed him out the door. She walked past her 12 o clock client, sitting on a plastic chair screwed to the waiting room floor. She walked past the receptionist, behind her protective plastic panel. She walked past the security guard, still scrolling on his phone despite last week’s hostage situation. She walked out, into the sunlight, back to her car, drove home and got into bed.