Lessons in Heartbreak

‘Tish, tish,’ said Corinne, unconcerned. ‘We’re all women here and we’re proud of our bodies. It’s the cycle of life, Yvonne. The great life force that moves inside us because Mother Nature put it there.’

Normally, Anneliese would have been grinning by now. Nobody could deny that Corinne was marvellously entertaining when she went into her whole Mother Nature routine. Mother Nature was responsible for all manner of things, including Corinne’s addiction to milk chocolate and Dr Burke from Grey’s Anatomy. Mother Nature would, undoubtedly, be responsible for Edward running off with Nell, if Corinne had a chance to think about it. The great life force would be in flux or something. Anneliese shuddered at the thought of having this raw pain slapped up on Corinne’s mental chopping board for examination. She wondered if she could leave without being seen. Too late –

‘Hello, Anneliese…ohmydear, you look soo tired. Poor you. I have just the thing in my bag –’ began Corinne, reaching into the enormous patchwork leather handbag she hauled around with her. The bag smelled plain bad after too many little bottles of oil and potions had spilled in it. ‘It might look a little odd, dear, but it’s a fungus and you keep adding water to it and drink the juice and –’

‘Corinne, thank you,’ said Anneliese quickly, thinking she might have to throw up again at even the thought of drinking fungus juice. ‘I’m afraid I can’t stop, not now. Bye.’

She almost ran out of the shop, holding her jacket and bag in her hand. She couldn’t deal with Corinne. Not now.

For all Corinne’s bulk, she was very fast and fear of Corinne running after her made Anneliese rush down Fillibert Street looking blindly for somewhere to escape. The bookshop. The Fly Leaf was a small, quirky establishment with a big crime section and darkish windows so it was hard for anybody from outside to see in. Perfect. Nobody would talk to her there.

It was a Bookshop Rule: smile and nod only.

She rushed into the silence of The Fly Leaf, and made blindly for the shelves at the back. The classics section. She fingered the spines of the books, asking herself how long was it since she’d read Jane Austen?

Eventually, she felt calmer. Corinne hadn’t followed her. Now that she was out of the Lifeboat Shop, she could stop pretending and be herself again. Except she wasn’t sure who herself was. It was a strange, disconcerting feeling. Anneliese felt fogged up, not real somehow. Like she’d been teleported into this body and this life and none of it was even vaguely familiar.

Oh no, please, no.

She moved on from the classics and found herself in Self-Help. Her breathing was getting faster again. No. Breathe deeply. In, count to four, and out. After a while, she refocused on the shelves. Self-help. She’d looked in this department many times before and knew that there were no Meditations for People Who Were Pissed Off with the Whole Planet.

A definite gap in the market, she thought grimly. And no 100 Ways To Kill Your Husband and Former Best Friend, either.

But there were plenty of books on depression, which could either be cured by therapy, positive visualisations or eating exactly the right combination of supplements, depending on which book you read.

Anneliese had read lots of them, wanting to be fixed. She scanned the shelves, thinking that she probably had all of these volumes at home, apart from the newer ones. None of them had worked. Depression wasn’t something you could sever from yourself merely by reading a book.

It was so much darker and deeper. She stared angrily at the books, furious with their authors for daring to pretend that they knew what it was like.

Bloody psychiatrists and mental health gurus wrote books on depression, not real people who’d actually been in that cavern underground: a place where you couldn’t imagine ordinary, happy life; a place where functioning was almost out of the question.

Anneliese, come on out of your room and talk to me, please. Her mother’s voice in her memory again. Dear Mother. She’d tried so hard, Anneliese knew, but she’d been stuck with a daughter with a cloud of darkness inside her and their family – ordinary, kind, simple really – hadn’t known what to do with someone like her.

‘If only you’d tell me what’s wrong,’ Mother would beg.

‘I don’t know what’s wrong,’ Anneliese would reply. Because she didn’t. Nobody had hit her or hurt her. But she felt everything so deeply, more deeply than Astrid, her older sister, who was nearest in age to her. There were days when there was simply a cloud in her head, a cloud of fear and anxiety and darkness. She didn’t know why – it was just there.

It was over forty years since she’d had that realisation. She’d been fifteen when she discovered that everyone else didn’t feel the same, that she was different.

And then, in The Fly Leaf bookshop in Tamarin, Anneliese Kennedy had that familiar, jarring sensation of darkness in her head, and something else, the onset of sheer panic. Behind her eyes came a thrumming sensation, like drums beating far away. A slow, constant noise that wasn’t real – she knew that – but felt more real to her than anything else at that exact moment. She hadn’t heard it in so long, normally only heard it in nightmares now, but she knew what it was: fear and panic.

She’d once read that certain types of situation made the lizard brain dominate. The lizard brain was the core survival part of human beings, lower down the totem pole than the limbic system and the cerebral cortex.

The lizard kicked into place when people reached a deep primal fear. There had been so many other hugely long medical words in the article that Anneliese had slightly tuned out, but she’d remembered that bit: that the lizard brain was basic survival and came out when the person was mortally threatened.

Like now. When a panic attack swept over her with raging force. No sooner had she thought the words, than the breathlessness hit and she began to wheeze, feeling her chest tightening. She couldn’t breathe, her heart was racing.

Anneliese moved so quickly that she bumped into a man bending over looking at the sports books.

‘Sorry,’ she half gasped, whisking past him. She had to get out and home. She needed to be in a safe place so she could make this fear and darkness go away.

It was years since she’d had a panic attack, years. She’d forgotten how horrific they were, how she always felt as if she was going to die.

Her hands were shaking so much, it was hard to get her keys from her bag, almost impossible to keep the key for the car at the right angle to slip it into the lock. But she did. Safe, she was a bit safe.

She sat in the driver’s seat, shaking, trying to calm her breath.

Breathe in, count to four, breathe out.

When she’d felt recovered enough, she started the engine, keeping the volume turned up loud on talk radio, willing the discussion to block out her own head. She didn’t want to think.

The house was silent when she got there – not the silence of a home where another person might be back soon, but the deadening silence of a place where only one person lived. Anneliese made herself a mug of herbal tea, the Tranquility tea that Edward used to gently tease her about. About to put the pack back in the cupboard, she took another teabag and stuck that in the mug too. She needed a double dose of tranquillity.

Then, she took the mug and an old fleecy blanket outside to sit on the deck.

With her feet curled up under her, mug in her hand and the blanket wrapped around her, Anneliese stared out at the crashing waves and let herself breathe slowly.

Breathe. In and out. Slowly and deeply. Concentrate on each breath, let your lungs fill and exhale slowly through your nose. In and out. That was all you had to do every day – breathe.

Shit, shit, it wasn’t working. Despite the deep breathing, she could feel her heartbeat fluttering along at speed, and the darkness was still in the back of her head, coming closer now.

Fuck you, Edward, for doing this to me, Anneliese thought bitterly.

She huddled into the fleecy blanket for warmth.

She was not going back on the tablets, not again.

Edward had been so good and understanding about her depression, even if he’d never entirely got it.

‘I feel a bit sad too sometimes, you know,’ he’d said early on in their marriage. ‘It’s not the same as you, love, but I understand, or at least, I’m trying to.’

Anneliese, who’d chosen her words carefully when she talked about being depressed so that she didn’t scare him or make him think he was married to a complete nutcase who needed access to a straitjacket at all times, had to stop herself from laughing out loud.

He couldn’t know or understand that depression was a part of her: she could go about her daily life like anybody else but while some people had freckles or lovely olive skin as part of their genetic make-up, she had depression. A part of her: sometimes there, sometimes not. She could go months, years, without feeling that overwhelming darkness, but when she did, it was far more than feeling a bit sad. And yet she loved him, loved him for trying.

‘I love you, you darling man,’ she said to him fiercely. He’d laughed too and hugged her, and Anneliese had ended up sitting on his lap, their arms wrapped round each other, and she’d felt really loved.

This kind, complex man didn’t really understand what she went through, but he was doing his best. That was love: trying to understand your mate, even if the understanding was outside your scope.

She remembered talking to Nell about it too. That hurt: thinking of bloody Nell knowing about Anneliese’s inner pain and then still walking off with her husband. Anneliese shuddered under her fleecy blanket.

She was beginning to hate Nell.

‘How can you be feeling like that, you know, down, and still go out and be normal?’ Nell had asked once, when Beth was a little girl and Anneliese had brought her to a classmate’s birthday party and gone home to cry for two straight hours, which was where Nell had found her when she dropped round.

‘You put your game face on,’ Anneliese said simply, her face raw with tears. ‘You can’t sit in a corner and stare into nothingness when you’ve a child. You just can’t.’

Not that she hadn’t felt like it many times, but mother love was a potent force. Anneliese might have had many days where she’d have liked to stay in bed, drag the duvet around her like armour and sit out the bleakness. But she couldn’t do that to her daughter.