"What I saw today"
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Buttermilk Pancakes

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The world’s news sounded so sad to me that after listening to it on my radio I stood up under the cherry tree and walked barefoot towards the chrome yellow house. As I looked to the heavens it was as if the clouds had flattened in the sky and dropped like giant buttermilk pancakes on the ground all around me.

It was the same day that Aunt Josie sat by the pool in Trapani, Italy where we were staying and just cried; I distinctly heard her say “Something is really wrong with Katey” I wondered what on earth she could be talking about. That woman just kept getting things wrong lately.

I didn’t think that there was anything very much wrong with me, certainly not anything that should concern her. Josie was one of the most individual and clever people I knew and so I thought that she should understand. She usually saw the ironic, happy, bizarre and funny side of things. I didn’t know what all the crying was about and I didn’t like it at all; it made me feel very uneasy. It wasn’t good to see Aunt Josie cry – it reminded me of that time ten years ago, a time which I could barely remember usually. The tears made a pain stir within me; I couldn’t remember her ever being like this. Take your tears somewhere else Josie. You could electrocute yourself around here – water and electricity just don’t mix. You used to be a scientist so you should know that.
“I was a chocolatier Anna.”
“Please don’t say that, you were a molecular biologist I read your notebooks. You were studying yellow rust fungi on infected plants.”
“No Anna that is not true, it’s time to start listening, and then maybe you will start getting better”. All I could see was the grey wheat blowing gently in the distance as the wind stirred its stems, the sky above was only a slight watery blue, it made me think of all eternity.

Ever since Josie had retired from her job as a research scientist she seemed to speak a lot of old nonsense, I had thought that for some time. The last few days of that holiday was memorable by their quietness, like when the snow falls for days and all sounds are deadened you just feel anaesthetised.

Back in England one fresh Sunday afternoon my mother asked me to go out for a walk in Hyde Park with her and my brother Mathew, who was home from University. I don’t talk once I enter any park, the memories in parks talk to me instead. But Mathew did, he told me all about different people on his course particularly the characters he knew from the campus. They appeared like life sized cardboard figures in front of my eyes. Mathew didn’t expect me to answer, he kind of understand …and loved me anyway. Just about everyone else had lost patience. The breeze was so sharp in the park my cheeks turned grapefruit pink. Mathew had so many friends I just couldn’t imagine what a life with friends in was like any more, not for one minute.

Later on they took me to a restaurant with bright yellow and lilac silk curtains and chandeliers all around. I loved visiting hotels and restaurants it reminded me of the happy days I spent at my junior school The Holy Family. The magical atmosphere in these places made me remember entering what seemed like a full size house - the Wendy house in the reception class when I was just  five years old  - the magical new world you go into when you leave the old world behind, even for an hour – that is what hotels and restaurants represented to me.

Their voices changed in tone after the meal.  Mother wanted me to speak to someone, infact a Dr Isherwood about my life and how and why I did the things that I did, they said that I would never have done any of those things before and they were worried that I had now got rid of all of my friends. It was true; but I did have the weight of metal pressing on my heart.

Mathew touched my arm; he wasn’t usually a very tactile person. When we were young I often hugged him and he just about put up with it. I felt very cold inside as if someone was slowly filling my veins with ice water, although I thought that it was best not to mention that. Then she went on to list some examples of my odd behaviour: the coloured Christmas lights I bought in Mr Dees’ shop, I then showered them like raindrops over the trees in our garden and the neighbour’s trees too, and then going in search of the midnight sun – with no real plan. In the end I had to ring for someone to collect me from the airport, luckily before I had bought a ticket. When I won some lottery money it was all that came into my mind, at home they all restricted me so much. James and I had wanted to go there one day. Crying in the car, taxis, the bus, the shops anywhere I felt like it. Lying on top of his grave on so many occasions that I used to get chest infections. I couldn’t just stop doing it because of the severe weather, the cold didn’t matter to me but it obviously did to them. Then there was the fact that I wouldn’t talk to my old friends any more or make new ones; what was the point now that he had gone from me? Sneaking out of the house at 2am or 3am to stand alone by the bus stop that James and I used to travel from, I could remember James so much better when no one else was around. That was one reason I got rid of friends I think they along with life in general were distracting me from thinking of him, I don’t know.

On our journeys to summer picnics we had such happy times, how could they disappear entirely. We used to load the wheelchair up with boxes of food, sandwiches, maple chicken, homemade fudge and cold drinks. We put on our sun hats and hooked the radio with music playing out onto the wheelchair handle and headed over to Small Heath Park. There we would sit on a blanket and be together in our world under my favourite black walnut tree. We could see the tennis courts and smell the summer flowers – we were truly happy on those days. I thought that they were being very selfish as all of the things they listed helped me live through each day, how would I manage if they were gone?

 For Aunt Josie’s sake I agreed, she had been my favourite relative for as long as I could remember. I knew that she cared for me and my mother did too, they told me that their greatest wish was for me to agree to see a doctor, a psychiatrist. I didn’t want to say no to them anymore; I was just too tired for that. The psychiatrist was a woman called Dr Isherwood.

Dean Martin was singing down below in Josie’s’ kitchen when I woke up; I sat at the table in my pink cotton nightdress while Josie cooked the buttermilk pancakes and I could feel some happiness inside as I looked at the cracks in the corner of the oak table and thought of the all the other people who had sat here and eaten or drank tea, coffee, malt whiskey, hot milk and nutmeg, wine or just sat and talked. I knew there had been plenty because so far it had been owned by five different generations. As she cooked and made coffee she danced around the kitchen to the music, we opened the French windows and I danced too, right out into the garden… When I came back in I sat on the chair and watched the shadow of a bumble bee on the tiles as she flew outside the window pane. That was such a good day.

The first time I went to see Dr Isherwood, I fell asleep right there on the chair She woke me up gently when it was nearly time to go, she looked so pure and clear like the water in lake Thun in Switzerland on a bright Spring day….The suit she wore was a sort of lilac blue, like cornflowers. The colour reminded me of James’s eyes, the next time I looked at Isherwood the suit she wore had turned to an earth brown,. She told me that falling asleep hadn’t mattered at all,  and anyway I did talk to her for a while before I slept so that was enough talking for her to start figuring out how she was going to help me. Matthew drove me home that day and I slept again until we reached home.  After six weeks with Isherwood, the sky no longer looked as zinc white as it did before. I knew straight away that Alison Isherwood would be the one to help me. With each session colour literally started to come back into my life, I had thought that my mother’s hair was a soft grey but it wasn’t it was a beautiful chesnut colour, the pavement outside my house was not lamp black but neutral grey. Alison explained over the weeks how your own mind plays tricks on you but usually you have created them yourself, it is just that some people are so clever at tricking themselves that they forget ultimately that it is a trick and believe in it themselves.

My last session with Alison Isherwood was on a razor cold night in February, by then I had noticed that the stars were no longer like blurred plates of light at night but sharp and clear as stars are meant to be. She said that treatment was not always about being cured but learning to cope and live with things – and in my case accepting the truth that he is dead, I even had to work at saying his name – James. Think of ordinary days with him she said, small moment’s, times of laughter – we had so many, yet in my sadness I had forgotten them all. I didn’t know that grief could prevent you from remembering all the happiness you had with someone.

For some reason I found it harder to accept a child’s death than most people, she wasn’t entirely clear why in my case. I could have given her the answer – but choose not to,  I kept it safely hidden in my heart until one day Alison said that some patients never got better because they held things back or didn’t tell her the truth. Maybe that day she knew I was holding back; I so wanted to get better, I couldn’t bear the heaviness in mind and body, so I told the truth - did the hardest thing I had ever had to do since he died. It was to describe him and how we loved each other, how lovely he looked, how he talked and walked in the park with me before he was ill, and the summer and spring days we spent together when he was in his wheelchair, we would listen to music as we went along in the sunshine. His light brown hair, blue eyes and his little freckles, how he missed so much school when he was ill that to fill the time he used to read my old GCSE French and Biology books to occupy his clever little mind, he was so bright at ten that he used to love working at the questions for fun.

Telling Alison this wasn’t without consequence; I felt like the Little Mermaid in the Hans Christian Anderson’s tale ‘The Mermaid’   she made a terrible bargain with the witch so that her tail could be turned to legs in order that she could travel ashore to be with the prince that she had saved from the sea and fallen so in love with. But every time she stepped on her new feet it was as if she standing on knives. So I too paid a price, every description and happy memory I told to Alison cut glass scraped my heart. But I did want to feel the sun again, not just burn in it. I wasn’t allowed to sit out in the sun – not since James died, because whenever I did I would just burn ……but I felt no pain – until long afterwards. They couldn’t understand it at the hospital but I could, it was a consequence of the pain of missing James that was so much worse, It always got in the way of other feelings. They said that they would teach me how to control this so that I was more aware, they would teach me how to be safe. I felt happy inside that someone was really helping me now.

Two years have passed by now, I studied travel and tourism followed by stints of work in hotels one on the Isle of Wight, Bristol then London and, because I speak Italian and some German I am now in a hotel in Sicily Italy. I don’t hide James away so much anymore and I work hard at not acting strange; at least I know now that I was behaving oddly but hiding within the oddness helped me so much at the time that it has been hard to let it go, I liked my unusualness; I had to show my grief to the world in some way, it was too big for just one day at a funeral followed by on with the show. Alison said I shouldn’t get rid of it all because it is a real part of me, but that I have to learn how to let it not control my life, which makes sense. I write to Alison about my life now, she has done so much for me I was afraid that she would take James away from me completely so that I could live a ‘normal’ life but she didn’t do that. I wear a locket with his little picture in and it doesn’t burn my skin, it helps me a little. I can’t wear it every day though. I will still go and see the midnight sun in Norway where James and I once said that we would travel to together but I will take his photographs and read some words to him and think about me and him there ………one day. Then Paris he so wanted to see that place. I can’t even write of those plans yet.

Another turning point for me was the visit to a psychiatric unit in Putney with one of Alison’s assistants; there were patients there who had spent five, eight and even ten years in hospital on and off. After that I knew that I had to work harder at getting myself out of this depression and it really does require masses of effort, faith, work and so much help but I knew that none of it would work without my input.  At the time I said how would meeting others with heartbreaks help me? It would just reinforce how I felt worse than anyone, but it wasn’t like that at all. I did see so many broken people, it made me want to recover. I think Alison thought that it would frighten me into getting better so that I wouldn’t end up in there. The psychiatric unit looked to the entire world like a white merchant’s mansion on the outskirts of Putney. One of the patients I saw, a woman called Annie only felt comfortable when she was sitting in front of a wall the plainer the better – it was just how she dealt with things since her baby died, they had told her that her smoking was a contributing factor to her child’s death and this was how she dealt with the emptiness and the guilt. Alison felt that I had forgotten how to be happy, got right out of step with it; I think that she had a point.

After twelve months of treatment I was ready to try the world again, infact looking forward to it. My degree was in modern languages but as I hadn’t worked for nearly two years my brother suggested that I take a short course in travel and tourism he knew that I had always loved geography and travelling maybe it could help me to get a new start. So I did it and well here I am in Sicily working in a hotel giving information to tourists about interesting things to do and see both near the hotel and many miles away. I myself don’t do too many of the tourism spots but I like picnicking near the hundred year old palm trees near the hotel, they remind me of different trees long ago. Just walking past the almond trees in blossom makes me feel good. I really love being happy now, people are meant to enjoy life whatever has happened in their past.

I think nothing of recommending that people visit the town of Taormina, sending them off to places where they can view the Aeolian Islands, the fish markets in Catania or the blazing volcano Etna. Sometimes people want to set off to see  Corleone to look around a place of normal ordinary things, houses with balconies full of plant pots,  and old window shutters or washing blowing in the lemon scented Sicilian sunshine. A place with a dark history- the mafia, violence, betrayal, love and energy. Yes many people wanted to see the place where parts of The Godfather were filmed. Who would have thought I could do this a while ago - back then I couldn’t even relax enough to share a coffee with friends I had grown up with. The strange thing is that I would never have asked to see a therapist; I didn’t feel I deserved help when James didn’t even have his life but I am so glad that someone else made the decision for me....there are times when it has to be this way.

No one can really make you happy, but you can get out of synchronisation with how to be happy and it is not a good place to be. True happiness comes with your own journey towards fulfilment, which you can then share with those you love and like. However it is true in my case that Dr Isherwood taught me how to find a pathway to my own happiness again, for without her help I was truly lost.

Short stories include: The Webmasters Wife, The Christmas Message, The Partner, The Old Girls Trip To The House of Lords, What Was Left - these are just five of the titles you will receive out of your twelve. Click here to read extracts of the stories.

Would you like to go to bed every Thursday night, knowing as you fall asleep that for the next twelve weeks you will wake up on Friday morning to an original, unique short story created by me in your e-mail box ,followed by one every Friday morning for the next twelve weeks. Pay one pound in total and receive all twelve – Lucinda.

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The Webmaster’s Wife

"Anna sat opposite to her husband Mark in the bookshop’s cafe. It felt to her that he was slipping away like a golden magical ball with a momentum all of its own slowly disappearing over green rolling hills silently without drama but definitely, as if by magic vanishing."

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The Christmas Message

"The lift door opened, a woman was already in there, she smiled a little but Sarah couldn’t help noticing how sad and tired she looked. Her hair was pale blond her eyes barely blue – and she was dressed almost in summer clothes, a white embroidered gypsy top and turquoise long skirt with pink sandals; there was a guitar by her feet."

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The Partner

"Mark turned the wheel of the car and drove onto the broad drive of a gothic style house that had been converted into a restaurant and hotel. 'This is one of my favourite eating-places”; He said without looking at her - yet during the four months that she had known him he had never mentioned the place before."

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Art For Sale

Sophie J Rush

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