Chapter 14
It was a dream day for a Fixer. While Donovan had opted not to risk a fractured hip, Merry and Joel were already waiting when I arrived at Tucker’s. Samira had refused to come if the ‘TikTok woman’ was there, but Darya joined us once she’d completed her shift cleaning Bigley library.
She took one look at us trying to rip up half of the lino, all the tables piled up on the other side, and decided the word for today was ‘CHALLENGING’.
It was worth it when, after lots of manoeuvring, we found the floorboards underneath were in a salvageable state. Merry had borrowed a steamer, and as dusk fell, we scraped off the last layer of wallpaper and finally reached magnolia-painted plaster.
Joel had pried off a row of pine tongue and groove panelling, and along with that we’d cleared the grimy lampshades, cheap plastic chairs and a whole load of other décor into a giant pile in the small yard behind the café.
By the time Joel insisted he was perilously close to malnutrition, Merry was trying her best not to panic at their café being reduced to bare bones.
It was incredible how quickly things got done when we didn’t have to keep redoing takes, film everything from three different angles or keep going over the same unscripted ‘chat’ until Carly was happy we’d got enough for the edit.
‘What’s the plan now then?’ Merry asked, repeatedly yanking the zip up and down on her fake-fur gilet.
‘Now, we go home and rest. If you need to do something, you and Joel can start looking up other cafés online. Check out their menus, the branding, photos of their interior. Send me over anything you like the look of. Meanwhile, I’m going to put some designs together.’
I pointed out where walls had to be sanded down, showed her the nooks and crannies needing a scrub and other bits and bobs that required sorting before we could start creating the new Tucker’s.
Truthfully, I was blagging it. Borrowing expertise and all the lingo from Harry, the obnoxious Winning at Life interior designer.
I’d paid someone else to decorate my own house.
They’d spent hours ‘understanding the Alex Nixon essentiality’, which probably explained why it was so bland and lifeless.
We agreed that Merry, Darya and Joel would have the place spick and span by Monday morning, by which point I’d hopefully have everything we needed to start bringing Tucker’s back to life.
I let Will know we were finished, but he was in the middle of cooking dinner, so we hauled our aching muscles up to Darya’s cosy living area for tea and made omelettes using ingredients that would otherwise be wasted thanks to the unexpected café closure.
While we were eating, Lola messaged the group to ask if we could have a video call to plan the December social.
‘Cheers, everyone,’ she said, once we were all online. ‘I’m already booked up with a couple of things and Fletcher wants to know when I can help him sort presents for his mum and sister. Are we sticking to the third Thursday and having a Christmas dinner or going out somewhere or what?’
‘It’s Bonnie’s Christmas play in the afternoon. I could do the evening if Jordan is free to babysit,’ Will replied, while stirring a pot of something on the stove.
‘Jordan’s performing at my Christmas recital on the Thursday evening,’ Donovan said. ‘I hope you’ll be there to support him, Will. But what about the Friday?’
Merry shook her head. The four of us in Darya’s apartment were squeezed onto one screen. ‘Ray comes back on the Friday, and, no offence, but he’s going to want to unwrap me all by himself.’
‘Ugh, Mum. Gross.’ Joel lurched away, pretending to vomit.
There was more back and forth, but I couldn’t help noticing that Darya, squashed beside me on her little sofa, hadn’t joined in. Instead, her face had gone pale and she was furiously wringing her hands.
‘Darya, are you okay?’ I asked, gently.
‘No. Yes. Not really.’ Her breathing started to hitch, and she clutched the top of her head. A sheen of sweat glistened on her face as her whole body rocked back and forwards. ‘Okay, hold on everybody, Mr G is waking up.’
Merry had noticed now, but as Darya scrambled to her feet the only response to her extreme distress was, ‘Aw, bless you, Dar,’ from Lola and Merry offering a glass of water.
‘Do you need some help?’ I asked, confused at the general lack of concern or action. Who was Mr G?
‘It’s the grinch inside my head,’ Darya gasped, now pacing across the other side of the room, in the kitchen area.
‘He wakes up sometimes and makes a nuisance of himself. On a bad day, his wife, Lady G, who lives in my chest, joins in.’ She leant against the fridge, pressing a hand against her rapidly heaving ribs.
‘Yes, she’s feeling quite grumpy today.’
‘It’s a panic attack,’ Merry said as I stood up. ‘Naming the symptoms helps her deal with them.’
‘What do we do?’ I asked, panicking slightly myself.
‘Darya’s a doctor.’ Merry shrugged. ‘She can handle it.’
‘Okay, so I’m a life coach, but I still made a monumental mess of my own life,’ I snapped, too distraught to process that nugget of information as Darya now bent double.
‘Would you be better sitting down?’ I asked, moving close enough to place a hand on her shoulder.
‘Outside,’ she wheezed, so I took her elbow, nodded to Joel, and we helped her stumble into the freezing-cold darkness of the tiny balcony that overlooked the back of the café building.
After Joel had hastily disappeared back inside, I tried rubbing Darya’s back, murmuring the kind of random nothings I used when babysitting a fractious Bronte.
I slowed down my own breathing as she leant on my shoulder, focusing on the twinkling Christmas lights draped across the trees surrounding the village square another street away.
For a long time, she gripped my hand as tightly as a woman in childbirth, until mumbling, ‘Counting helps,’ into my neck.
‘Okay. Let’s count. One… two…’
‘No.’ Darya shook her head, forcefully, still gasping. She then started softly counting in a language I’d never heard before. When she reached what must have been about fifty, she stopped, slowly straightened up and brushed back her hair.
‘Okay,’ she whispered. ‘The grinches are sleeping again. I’m ready to sit down. Somewhere not so deathly cold, please.’
We returned inside to find the apartment empty. As I was boiling the kettle, Merry messaged to say they’d left as Joel was getting tired, and the December social was going to be Wednesday the sixteenth, instead of the Thursday. Lola would be organising it, so she’d let us know the details.
Once I’d rooted through the cupboards and brewed us both some herbal tea, we collapsed onto the sofa.
‘Do you often have panic attacks?’ I asked, tentatively.
Darya shrugged. ‘Enough that I cannot even think about getting my licence to practise as a doctor here.’
‘What type of doctor are you?’
Darya gave a twisted smile. ‘A psychiatrist, would you believe? This is one reason I left my country. There are not so many women practising medicine there, so over the years I became popular with the wives of some prominent people. Politicians, wealthy businessmen. Criminals. They are afraid that I know things. Which I will neither confirm nor deny to a woman I have only met three times, no offence, Alex. So, when a perfectly pleasant British man came along, I ran off with him. Now I am safe, living in the middle of this Bigley Bottom. But sometimes it catches up with me. The anxiety. The loneliness. That I do not know a single other person who speaks my language, or celebrates my customs and culture. That has any idea of what it is like to have lived in a nation ruled by repression. That I will never know whether my parents’ car crash was an accident or a warning.
’ She sighed. ‘When you all talk about Christmas festivities, all this loveliness and good cheer, and my calendar is empty, because I have no one apart from this group, I am reminded I am an ignorant stranger here.’
‘That must be so hard.’ Understatement of the century. I thought growing up with a rubbish mum and dad was rough. ‘Did you celebrate Christmas in your country?’
She shook her head. ‘We would give gifts and gather for food for New Year, there was a winter festival in my village, but that is all.’
‘I hope in time you can create a home here and feel as if you belong. Where you’re known and loved and can enjoy new traditions and make more memories.
I mean, the advent word challenge is a start.
’ I took a shaky breath. ‘Maybe, one day, practise psychiatry again, or not. Become a zookeeper or a helicopter pilot. Keep cleaning, if that’s what you want. ’
‘I believe this will happen. I see the tiny green shoots, I do. I am so grateful for my flat, for Merry and Joel and the other people I work for. But the journey of grief is not a straight line. Sometimes we bump into our pain again along the way. And this wakes Mr G up.’
‘Have you always had the attacks?’
She shook her head. ‘I tolerated my husband’s affair for far too long because the alternative felt impossible.
Even after everything, the day he asked me to leave was one of the worst moments of my life.
He offered me his idea of a fair divorce settlement and said I had a week to find a new home.
My first night in a one-room apartment, huddled on a blow-up mattress, staring at the damp patch on the wall while a fight broke out on the street below, wearing three layers of clothing because the heating was broken and I had not even a kettle for a warm drink, I remembered the day I graduated from medical school.
The pride on my parents’ faces. My hopes and dreams for the future. That was the day Mr G woke up.’
We drank our tea in silence for a minute.
‘You’ve come a long way since that night,’ was about the best this life-coach could come up with.
‘What about you, then, Alex Nixon? What was the worst day of your life? Standing on that stage announcing to the world you are a loser?’
‘Not by a long shot.’ I sat back, reluctant to be the one answering questions.
‘Come on. You are not here to fix me, as if you are my psychiatrist. This is how friendship works. I share, you share.’
‘Promise you won’t start analysing me?’
Darya laughed. ‘Too late. But I will keep my conclusions to myself.’
I had never told anyone about what was, without a doubt, my worst day.
I’d never spoken to Gemma or even Lacey about it.
But so much of the essence behind what Darya had shared – the sense of loneliness, the fear and unanswered questions – resonated deeply.
So, I decided to continue this new, open, authentic, trusting journey I’d begun, and I told her.