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Chapter Five – Takotsubo Cardiomyopathy

(Or, in human speak – ‘To die of a broken heart’)

Dave the plumber was lying down on our kitchen floor as I hovered over him clutching his spanner. The tenants in the flat below had heard a loud dripping and after a rather tense phone call with our landlord we had agreed to get things checked out. To be honest, I knew that something was wrong when the water didn’t drain in the sink, but like everything I’d ignored it and pretended things were fine. Things were not fine. As I leaned against the open fridge, tapping my flip flop against the floor, Dave looked at me.

‘It’s a hot one,’ he said, wiping his brow with his work cloth. ‘Apparently it’s going to be the hottest summer on record – hasn’t felt this hot in years.’

Dave was right. It was an uncomfortable, muggy heat that left you feeling drowsy and inexplicably tired. Despite my promises, I still hadn’t phoned Harry. And to my shame I’d ignored two voicemails and several text messages from him.

‘All done here,’ Dave said, making an involuntary noise as he got to his feet. ‘All fixed.’

If only everything were so simple, I thought, as I reached for the cash in my purse. As I watched Dave pack away his tools I reached for my phone and unlocked the screen. To be honest, the stumbling block wasn’t the memory of Charlie, let alone Harry. It was a feeling. I craved the euphoria of the past nine months: a strange addiction I’d garnered to feeling helpless. At the time my pain was special and now I was left in the numb void of normality. Takotsubo cardiomyopathy: the emotional equivalent of being smacked to the floor. And I am not talking about actual death, either; more of the kind of situation where you have loved somebody so deeply, in a world that is so perfect and happy, but then somehow, somewhere along the way things just, unravelled. For the lucky ones, this separation is mutual: you have both decided that things would be for the better if you went your separate ways. For the not-so-lucky ones the decision could have been made by only one of you. While one person is confidently beginning a life without you, the other is left in emotional limbo. But the real mystery lies within feelings: where do they all go once the battlefield has emptied? Just imagine sitting, on a Saturday night, across a table from someone you may find attractive but don’t fancy, who is generally amusing but can’t make you laugh out loud, someone who is not in any way a bad idea but in short, isn’t them? Nature tells us that we have to keep evolving, keep edging forward and this act of survival is something we must repeatedly force ourselves to do.

Takotsubo cardiomyopathy, in medical terms, means to die of a broken heart. After heartache, you are free to remain in the empty space, reflecting on what went wrong or trying to pinpoint when the disintegration started and, most importantly, if there was anything you could’ve done differently to alter the outcome.

The truth is, there probably wasn’t. If he wants to leave, he will leave. If she wants to leave, she will leave. And although you could wait for them to have a change of heart, the collateral damage you do to yourself in the meantime can prove instantly catastrophic. So instead of turning the magnifying glass on yourself, picking apart the very essence of your own being, try turning the focus to science and the biological reasoning behind the pain.

At such times it can feel as if the head and the heart are operating on different playing fields. Emotionally, we are swinging between moments of clarity and optimism. You even manage to convince yourself, even for a second, that this could actually be for the best.

The brain works on a much more pragmatic level. There are actual scientific names for the areas of your brain that are responsible for what you are feeling, be it memory, anger, arousal or unhappiness. The brain invests in feelings at a certain level both chemically and intellectually and it is this investment, a chemical reaction that attaches you to a person and their smell, their pheromones, their person. It is this attachment that makes detaching so very, very hard. Your brain has become chemically acclimatized to the other person being there, which is why we sometimes feel the pendulum effect swinging between one emotion and another. Your body is literally counter-balancing the way you are feeling in the hope that it can shift your levels back to normality. In human speak: trust your body and trust your instincts. It is only trying to heal.

When you first break up it usually precedes weeks if not months of arguments, snapping at one another, picking faults that aren’t always there and generally creating space between you both. And out of nowhere there will come a day when the arguments cease, when the quiet creeps in and you have no plausible reason to contact each other: no messages, no texts, no phone calls. Whether you talk the ear off a friend or sit together in silence, sometimes we cannot take the burden alone. I talked about it to death, to the absolute maximum that my friends could handle. They were my touchstone, my rock in the waves. They were my only sunrise.

As I stood at the kitchen sink pretending to inspect Dave’s repair job while not really knowing what I was checking, a small, lime green parakeet flew in and rested on the windowsill. ‘Little bugger!’ Dave muttered as he made his way out of the flat. I had never seen a bird that colour in this part of London before. They usually stick to the leafy suburbs of Richmond or Kew Gardens, places where people pay large sums of rent to see birds like that: a half mix between watery green and yellow. As I stared at the red tip of his dark green beak he looked right back at me. Almost through me.

Growing up I was in the top grade, highest in the class and proud recipient of the ‘most likely to achieve great things’ award. A tongue-in-cheek certificate was given to me on my last day of school that was now moist with damp at the bottom of my keepsake box. Looking around at the eggshell paint crumbling from the plastered walls of our kitchen, I couldn’t help but smile at the irony.

The truth was I failed my second year of law school. A fact I had been unable to tell my classmates, let alone my parents. The bright, ambitious star pupil had failed at her first attempt to truly succeed. In fact the only person I had ever told was Charlie. It was a moment of honesty in one of those late-night conversations, caught between the sheets, somewhere between night-time and morning. He turned to me, in that nonchalant way he saved to placate serious moments, and explained that perhaps it was just a case of the wrong dream. After two years of feeling like an underachiever, lying to everybody in my life, he had pushed me forward and funnily enough, almost back into the person I thought I could be.

With him, days turned into weeks, weeks to months and that was that. Before we even knew ourselves, we became an ‘us’. He owned a tall, glass-fronted apartment overlooking the Thames, a bachelor pad complete with hi-tech gadgets that I didn’t dare touch. Men in finance tend to be bad for reputation but fantastic for consumerism. In those days the fancy life had swallowed me up and I was foolish enough to think that I deserved it all.

‘Look,’ he said, turning to me one night over dinner. ‘You’re here near enough all week anyway – why not just move in and then you never have to leave?’

I looked at him as I ate my jacket potato, slightly dubious about his proposal.

‘I don’t know,’ I said, putting down my fork. ‘What will Amber say? We just renewed the contract on our flat.’

‘I’ll pay it,’ he said without flinching. ‘Just be here for me.’

And in a move that would make Emily Pankhurst turn in her grave, amongst the grated cheddar cheese and baked beans, I agreed.

It’s embarrassing to admit that you’ve been hurt. It’s not a shame as such, like bankruptcy or the time Amber accidently sent me a naked selfie, but more of a signal to others that you’re not that capable after all. That some things, when left in your hands, do fail.

I sat down at the kitchen table and closed my eyes, my pupils making spectacular light shows in the dark. I pictured that night, a few weeks ago, when everything had gotten too much. Charlie had been up all night at the office closing a deal that had netted the company a fair amount of money and had decided to celebrate by staying behind for a drink. But with Charlie this was only ever where it started. Months of jovial rumours about strippers, cocaine and office lock-ins combined with promises that, of course, none of it involved him, had built up to me standing alone in his kitchen with no clue as to where he was – the harsh sound of the buzzer stabbed me awake, I walked to open the front door and there he stood at the door swaying, for the third time that week.

‘Where have you been?’ I asked, noticing he was dripping wet. His shirt was unbuttoned and I could see the water shine off his stomach.

‘I’ve just been out with the guys from work. Don’t start,’ he snapped defensively. From experience I knew that an argument in these conditions was pointless. I turned off the light and made my way back to bed, my sleep disturbed by the sounds of dry heaving coming from the bathroom.

The next morning I continued my day as usual. I began making myself some breakfast in the kitchen – some fruit, yoghurt and a very large cup of coffee – when I heard a bang coming from the bedroom. I had expected him to crawl in, unkempt, dry-mouthed but instead he was dressed for work, freshly showered and smelling of aftershave. A sight that was surprisingly more worrying than the night before.

‘Just so you know,’ I said as he sat down at the breakfast bar, ‘I’m not one of those girls that will fill your role of nagging wife.’

‘What do you mean?’ he said, without looking at me.

‘You clearly want someone to be at home waiting for you while you go out and do god knows what with god knows who. But that’s not me…’

‘Give it a rest, Jess,’ he said, opening his newspaper.

I slammed my favourite coffee cup into the sink, making us both jump as the handle snapped off, shooting a shard of cream pottery into the air. I looked over at him as he stood up and left, the door slamming behind him. And knew that would be it until the early hours of the next morning. A repetitive dance we both did, until one of us grew brave enough to stop it. I started to pick up the broken ceramic from the sink, trying not to cut my fingers through the murky water.

I suppose the worse part was that I never knew for sure. I couldn’t prove my instincts. Instead, I carried my fears like heavy weights. A weight that became unbearable in the end.

The parakeet was still sitting on the window frame. I slowly and carefully reached for my camera that was nestled beside the microwave. In two clicks I had managed to capture him: alone, far from his familiar surroundings and desperate to spread his wings and fly away.

I know how you feel, little one, I said out loud. I know exactly how you feel.