‘Oh,’ said Alice again, the burn of shame lighting up her cheeks. ‘Sorry, I thought…’ She didn’t want to say out loud what she’d thought she’d seen. Everyone was already staring at her like she was raving mad. The man with the backpack was now getting to his feet and looking at her.
‘You all right?’ he asked, and not without judgement.
Head down, clutching her coat lapels, she picked her way as quickly and lightly as she could through the crowd, before breaking into a run for home.
* * *
Oh no, oh no, oh no, Alice’s brain looped as she climbed the stairs to her flat, feeling as though she were trying to clamber up a downward escalator.
She fumbled for the apartment key in the deep pockets of her big woollen coat, perfect for winter in Manchester, nowhere near warm enough up here.
Running away to the Highlands had been futile. She was still getting carried away here just the same, still seeing and imagining the worst. ‘Catastrophising,’ the psychiatrist had told her. ‘A common after-effect of complex or cumulative trauma.’
She was still trapped in that state of always being on high alert, waiting for her bleeper to go off on the wards and having to run this way and that, pulled by priority patients in every direction and being the only doctor on staff for all those overnight patients, everyone wanting her at the same time, not understanding she was spread too thin, and just wanting to run away from it all, screaming in surrender.
The ordeal of being thrown in at the doctoral deep end had seeped into her neural tissue forever, it seemed; her amygdala now misjudging everyday situations and sending out panicked messages to her body, turning her guts inside out, making her sweat and see things all wrong, and her hippocampus had lost its way too and couldn’t help her regulate. Once again, she’d ended up drowned in adrenaline and stress cortisol when there was no need for it.
Back in Manchester the comedown after a shift was always so sharp, it felt like being lifted off her feet, losing the thing that tethered her to the ground, and she’d float home from hospital in a daze, seeing nothing, processing nothing from her day, leaving everything that had happened queued up like a traffic jam, unresolved at the back of her brain: all the patients she hadn’t been able to help, all the ones she had, and yet they’d still have such tough recoveries ahead of them, all the mistakes she’d made, the patients who’d cried, the ones who’d shouted, all the times she’d been slapped or body-slammed by people too ill to know better, or the furious ones who knew full well what they were doing but did it anyway and the police had to be called. These were stored up alongside the difficult conversations in the hospital’s family room, or next to the vending machines when the family room was in use. She could still hear the scream of that one bereft mother when she let herself think about it, all these years later. Her head was abuzz with it all, but there seemed never to be any time to explore it properly, to come to understand any of it, or to let some of it go.
She slammed her door shut. The flat was dark and overheated. She poured a glass of water from the tap, downed the whole thing.
It seemed that even after her GP surgery shifts she was fated to feel the same way; trapped in the awful unreality of exhaustion.
All she’d needed was a change of pace, she’d told herself when applying for this job. A change of scenery. Cairn Dhu surgery had offered both. Or she’d hoped it would.
Maybe she needed to run her bloods again? No, she’d done that just before Christmas and all her levels were good, though her cortisol was high and according to the charts her BMI had fallen again, not that she set much store in those, but the numbers could tell her one thing; she certainly wasn’t getting better.
A holiday might sort her out? Two weeks, or a month, on a lounger on a beach, eating barbeque and tropical fruits, not talking to anyone, drinking coconut water and sleeping whenever she wanted to, washing in warm saltwater, soaking up vitamin D and slowly reading a long novel that had nothing to do with real life or her textbooks.
She pulled her shoes off, shucked off her coat, shuffled her feet across the floor to the bathroom remembering as she did so the patients endlessly dragging portable IV stands along hospital corridors.
A holiday wasn’t going to happen, of course. Her bank account knew that. Student debt meant a good ten or even twenty years ahead of solid work before she shifted what she owed.
But this work was the thing she’d trained for. The thing she should be happy to have. She’d just about made it out of the trainee trenches. Things were supposed to be getting easier now.
When she’d asked her mother how she coped with it all – andshe’dhad an actual baby by her age – she’d shrugged and said, ‘Well, you just get on with things, don’t you?’
She hadn’t dared ask her father the same thing. He’d only have given her that look, theToughen up, Buttercuplook, theSchool of Hard Knockslook. His father had been a consultant too. Resilience and hard work ran through this family. Alice’s brothers didn’t seem to share her problems, and they’d far outshone her in their clinical practice. She was the only one like this.
The bathroom light hurt her tired eyes.
She ran the toothbrush over her teeth without paste then made her way straight to bed and climbed in. The dizziness was back.
She wondered vaguely if she’d remembered to bolt the door to her flat and tried to remember where she’d even thrown her keys. The light switch by her bed, only just distinct in the green glow from the fire escape sign, seemed to be stretching and melting down the wall.
She felt nothing.
Bastian would tell her she should eat something. She knew she should shower, ring her mother, see if she could work out how to tune in the telly, try to self-regulate. But the shock of seeing someone prone on the street, needing CPR, or so she’d imagined, had been enough to immobilise her again and all she could do was keep her head on her pillow.
Something hard in her palm drew her attention even though she was tied up in the black knot of the familiar panic and exhaustion cycle.
It was an apple. Given to her by that man. Cary. The one with the quiet voice, the clothes from another time, the kind eyes.
The fruit wasn’t glossy and waxed like the supermarket Pink Ladies she lived off back home. Its skin was rougher and it released a mellow orchard scent that put her in mind of a misty autumn ramble in the Bridgewater garden that day after med school registration with her new flatmates, before they’d really understood what they’d signed up for. That September day there’d been dragonflies over the river and a young orchard laden with fruit.
Still lying on her side, she brought the apple to her mouth, sinking her teeth into the subtle flesh, perfume meeting her senses.
It was a small thing, but it was a good thing. She bit again and again until it was gone before curling up like balled laundry, her body softening as the sweetness and acidity raced through her system. Sleep was coming for her and she offered no resistance to the great wave of nothing.
