ONE YEAR, 162 DAYS
It was the sea that saved me.
I took to swimming — up and down the beach at Cromer, the same place I’d tried to drown. It was an act of defiance. Death, you won’t have me. Not while there’s a chance, not while there’s hope. My body had grown weak and elastic from grief, from too many cigarettes and not eating or sleeping, or when I did in snatches. I needed to get strong again.
I ploughed up and down under the huge skies — moving, constantly changing, with big white clouds flying across them, or pinky-grey ones that burst into rain showers on my head while I was in the water.
Sometimes pure blue.
Pure blue, like the sky was on the morning I knew I had to change things; that I’d been steadily retreating into a world that I didn’t recognise, and where I couldn’t be reached.
My first day — the induction day for nurses’ training. Too soon, everyone said. I responded by saying I was afraid I might already be too late. That maybe I’d fallen through some cellar door and I was trapped there and the only way I could think of getting out was by doing this. Actions: for other people.
All the same I nearly turned back that first day. I’d parked my car and I was walking towards the building — a one-storey sixties block. It’d been raining and the water shone on the tarmac, making doubles of the others turning up for their first day. They looked so — how can I say? Ordinary. Good ordinary. In the way I felt I’d never be again. They swung their bags, weighted with books, onto their shoulders and splashed across the wet ground and up the three steps to the entrance. I hung back. How could I possibly join them in all their glorious ordinariness? Suddenly this seemed a crazy enterprise.
I turned to go.
Then, as my vision was swinging away from the three steps, the people and back towards the car park, I changed my mind again. Courage, I told myself, courage. Courage, I made one foot go in front of the other. Courage, up the steps. I found the room number, courage, I opened the door.
Some people looked up and smiled and I smiled back.
I settled into a chair at the back and got out my notepad and pen and lined them up on the desk. This is the only way, I told myself. I have to do something. It’s the only way to survive. If I can do something good then maybe it will go a tiny way to right the balance of what’s happened. It was magical thinking, but it’s what I figured — if I put some good into the world then that’s what might bring her back, not incessant looking. It might tip some scales that exist in the natural order; it might tip them in our favour. I couldn’t sit — day after day — in that big lonely house, with the floorboards sighing and asking where she was, the beech tree knocking at the wall to enquire if she was back yet. And someone like Graham, who I liked so much, being kept at arm’s length.
Besides, there was something I hadn’t told anyone about. The real reason I was sitting there. The reason I couldn’t go back.
One day I woke up on the sofa. It was afternoon already and I was muzzy from whisky the night before. I flicked on the TV without getting up and I saw planes flying into towers. I saw it and sat up with a gasp and my only thought had been ‘Thank God’. I think I even shouted it out loud, ‘Thank God.’ Because it seemed to me that for the first time something was happening that was equal to the rending of the universe that had happened to me.
Later, I went for a walk. I saw all that and I was pleased, I told myself. What kind of person would Carmel find if she returned now? Whisky-smelling, baying at tragedy like a half-starved dog. When I got back to the house, sloshing up the path in my muddy wellingtons, I realised something else too.
It had been the first time I’d been out of the house and not looking.