Читать книгу M in the Middle - The Students of Limpsfield Grange School - Страница 6

Chapter 3

Joe is sitting next to me in break, telling me about the player formation in the football last night, which is very interesting. Toby had been watching it before he went to the cinema but the crowd’s relentless chanting, chanting, chanting and roars meant I had to go to my room, and the likely event of Toby shouting out unexpectedly meant I had to retreat. When he does this I feel like anxiety is booting me in the chest and I can’t breathe. So I took myself away from potential harm.

Corridors, noises and difficult instructions always cause me distress at school but I had been doing very well that day, that week. I was managing. Shaznia came up to me at form time and asked if I wanted to go to town. She had some vouchers and wanted my advice on some new trainers but I couldn’t go.

Her face dropped and she let out a sigh. Was she hurt? I didn’t mean to upset her.

“What are you doing instead?” she asked.

“I have to see my dad this weekend.”

“Cancel!” she said. A wave of nausea swept through me and I sense The Beast of Anxiety watching me from the doorway. Just skulking and waiting for an opportunity to attack me.

“Oh go on. Come with me M! Cancel. I’ve got some vouchers for Coffee Star too. We can sit by the fountain. You like the fountain, don’t you?” It’s true I quite like the fountain and the rushing water. A little bit of nature amongst all the concrete and neon lights.

My mouth goes dry and I feel a ton of pressure weigh down on me.

“Sorry, I just can’t.” Her voice got louder and my body tightened. Anxiety, snarling, edges closer to me.

“You could come over to mine after?” She pauses. “My aunt won’t be there.”

“I can’t Shaznia.” (How many times do I have to tell her?)

“Oh that’s a shame. Are you sure? Could you go to your dad’s on Sunday?” she suggested. I tapped my face.

SHAME AND LIES

SHAME AND LIES

“But she’s planned to go to her dad’s on Saturday.”

Shaznia ignores Joe and continued,

“Jake told Dawn, in Year 9, who gets the bus with me on Monday, that he was going to Sports Rite on Saturday morning, so that means Lynx and Jake will be in town, because they are always together and I can wear that pink checked skirt and we could do our nails. You could do my nails with that sunset gel varnish.”

Bus. Sports Rite. Town. LYNX. Sunset nail gel varnish. I want it all. My heart sank. Low. But it’s just not possible.

“I can’t Shaznia.”

She tuts and says,

“I’ll ask someone else then.”

And she sat on Nev’s desk and asked if she wanted to go instead.

“Oh how quick we are replaced!” says Joe.

Is she really replacing me? Will she still be my friend? I place my hands on the desk and take a deep breath because she’s just thrown town at me and all its noises and smells and lights and I’m just not prepared. I’m not.

Anxiety hangs about the class room… Its cruel, heavy eyes watching my every move. Judging. Sneering. Intimidating me.

And I’ve told a lie. A nasty lie that is sitting in my guts and eating away at me. The LIE which is sitting in my stomach like a coiled tape worm. I’ve seen pictures of them in science, all coiled up in jars, removed from Victorian women’s stomachs, who used to eat them to lose weight.

“I didn’t think you were going to visit your dad’s again,” says Joe. And he’s right, and now he knows I am a liar too.

OVAL OVAL OVAL

The Oval is a hole I’ve fallen into many, many times. It’s Nan’s home. My dad’s mum and now Dad lives there too. He grew up there but left when he met Mum. But when they separated he moved back to The Oval and took all his guitars and records with him.

Days before our twice-monthly visit I would be teetering on the edge of the Oval hole. Wobbling until finally I would be thrown into the Oval abyss and by my parents. Thrown in by the people who are meant to look after me! Protect me from danger.

Visits to The Oval were a grey overload with sharp, concrete edges with 48 cold, grey steps and at the top of the 48 grey steps is my nan’s flat. Damp and stinking of overcooked cabbage, whiskey and cigarettes and The Oval has orange slices too. Orange wallpaper and orange curtains, and two particularly harsh, lime green scratchy cushions and nicotine net curtains that hang at her super, shiny, clean windows.

My nerves ripped and I’d cry and scream and Nan wouldn’t say, “What’s wrong with her?” She’d suck on her cigarette and say,

“You’ve got problems lined up with that little one.”

One visit I was lining up the switches and knobs on her cooker and one came off in my little hand and she immediately smacked me across the back of my little chubby legs.

“You naughty, naughty little girl,” she yelled in my face, and it was an accident but I couldn’t tell her that, and then she spoke as if I wasn’t in the room.

“Amanda, you’ve got big trouble ahead with her unless you stick in a bit of good old-fashioned discipline.” Mum rushed over to me and rubbed my leg and that made it worse! Her touching and rubbing their stains into my skin. “I don’t care what anyone says, there is nothing wrong with raising your hand to a naughty child.” And I had never been smacked before, and the shock and the pain rushed into me and I shook with fear and Nan kept talking. “Some kids need a smack. Children need to know who is in charge, Amanda, who is the boss.” And Mum said,

“Don’t ever touch my daughter again.”

And Nan replied,

“Get her to behave and respect my property and I won’t have to.”

And on every visit to The Oval I would scream the whole way and struggle and contort myself to escape from my car seat. Mum and Dad would argue the whole way and Toby had his head phones on, looking out the window. Detached from all the stress and the family. My anxiety and screams would rise as we got nearer and nearer The Oval.

Dartford.

Bexley.

Isle of Dogs.

Sidcup – and at Sidcup they always started the same argument.

“It’s just twice a month,” Dad would say. “We see your bloody mother all the time.”

“M can’t cope. Look at her.” And she’d turn and rub my shaking legs and she’d say,

“It’s OK, baby, it’s OK.”

But it wasn’t OK. That was the problem. I may have only been a very little girl but I knew we were heading towards The Oval and Nan’s flat at the top of the grey stairwell.

“The problem is, you’re a snob,” he’d say to my mum.

“What’s that got to do with anything? I am not a snob.”

“You don’t like going to my mother’s because she lives in a council flat and now that’s rubbing off on our daughter and that’s why she kicks up this fuss every time.”

FUSS FUSS FUSS

Fuss is a word that gets used a lot towards me. I seem to have spent a life time causing a FUSS.

I’ve since looked fuss up in the dictionary and this is what it says:

Fuss

[noun]

1. An excessive display of anxious attention or activity; needless or useless bustle: They made a fuss over the new baby.

2. A complaint or protest, especially about something relatively unimportant.

[verb]

1. To make a fuss; make much ado about trifles.

Am I relatively unimportant?

Trifles?

“She has to learn to travel in a car and come in to London and see her family. She is just a child and we have to guide her,” my dad would state as I tried to squirm out of the seatbelt, which would be pressing into my little bones.

“Even if she doesn’t like it?” Mum would argue.

“Yes! I had to go on visits when I was a child. It’s training for life. Look at Toby. He’s not making a fuss.”

FUSS FUSS FUSS

“But Simon, she’s so distressed. Look at her!” And I’d see his eyes dart to me in his rear view mirror and I could see his eyes soften.

“I know… I know… Look, I guess it’s just a phase. Aren’t we doing the right thing taking her to see her nan? Isn’t this what normal families do on a Sunday? I’m just trying here!”

“I know… I know…” Mum would half agree, “but I’m not a snob, Simon.”

And then we’d stand at the bottom of the stairwell and I knew that terrible fate awaited me. It doesn’t get better. I never get used to things. Doing stressful things often and more doesn’t make it easier. I just know what’s going to happen, i.e. Anxiety will launch a full-blown assault on my little body. Entering the harsh world of my sharp orange nan never changed. I would envy Toby, as he stomped up the stairs with his ear phones still on and I’d stand by the first, cold, hard step listening to Mum and Dad’s usual argument.

“Maybe she had a bad experience on the stairs that we don’t know about,” my mum would say. “Maybe when your mum took her out.”

“Don’t blame my mum.”

“Maybe she met a nasty dog on the landing and it’s given her a scare and your mother never told us.” Dad would mumble at this theory and walk up the steps ahead of us.

But it wasn’t a nasty dog, it was anxiety attacking, and it was the dread and fear of being trapped in a flat with overwhelming smells and tensions. And The Beast shows no mercy to age – even as a little girl it would pull and jostle me about the stairwells and throw me, terrified, near the edge of the concrete steps, as I screamed inside, gasping for breath and for someone to understand! To believe me!

Mum would try and coax me up the stairs and sometimes she just lifted me screaming, saying,

“Sorry, sorry, sweet heart. We won’t stay long.”

But it always felt like a very, very long time when we visited The Oval, and the last three times we visited I would not get out of the car and I ate my dinner sitting in the back seat, in the car park. Mum and Nan agreed it wasn’t working and I stopped my visits.

So the truth is I wasn’t going to The Oval at the weekend. I don’t go to The Oval any more. I lied, a nasty, dirty lie eroding me.

Talking about my feelings helps me clear my head…so I can deal with a few more days…