Chapter 12
Alice rushed onto the high street, head down against the wind. The streetlamps and strings of lights garlanded between them glowed overhead. There was a queue of cars trying to pull in at the chippy. The shops were closing. The bank was still resolutely shut.
All she had to do was get indoors, take her bath, chop some carrots and crack open the red pepper and chilli hummus she’d had delivered from Laura’s deli.
A few stars peeped out between dark cloud up above, the first glimpse she’d had of unobscured sky since she got here.
Maybe the clouds were lifting? Something, she felt, was changing.
And now she had fourteen hours all to herself.
She pondered watching a K-Drama on her laptop while she ate.
That’s the kind of thing restful people did.
She’d completed her first day at work and it hadn’t been all bad.
She’d held it together. Sure, she was in a whole new place with new systems and new people, some more alarming than others, but the stakes were lower.
There was no one screaming on trolleys out in the corridor.
No nightshifts where she’d be left in charge of three hundred patients with half the agency staff busy elsewhere, and…
No! She wasn’t going to get drawn in to remembering, not now she was turning over a new leaf.
She slowed her pace, noticing for the first time the red ‘SALE’ signs in the kilt shop window and all those gorgeous tartans. She stopped to look at them.
She’d made it through her first day unscathed, even if the image of Mhairi Sears, compliant but on the verge of tears, haunted her now.
There had to be more she could do for her and her little boy.
She’d have to do some more research on local services.
She wondered if Mhairi would enjoy getting involved at the social prescribing garden.
She’d ask the surgery to send an invitation first thing, letting the mum decide for herself whether or not she accepted.
‘There’ll always be outliers,’ she heard Bastian’s voice saying.
‘The ones that the systems can’t really help.
’ That was how he’d comfort her when she got home after a hard day, feeling inadequate and overwhelmed, worried she’d not done enough to help a patient with a complex presentation, someone requiring multi-agency collaborative support, and knowing that, for all kinds of reasons, they were unlikely to receive it, at least not right away and in a joined-up, streamlined manner.
She herself knew nobody should be considered beyond support.
Jolyon and Mhairi aren’t outliers; he’s a sweet little boy and she’s an under-supported mother, she answered back in her head, surprising the spectral Bastian who was tut-tutting in her imagination.
This too made her feel lighter. The feeling of being able to separate herself from the way he was so confident in his opinions.
The longer she spent away from him, the more sympathetically she seemed to see the world.
She turned once more for home, having not really taken in much of the shop window display.
There were crowds around the bus stop ahead of her, shop workers leaving town for the night.
She could see the minibus was on its way down the high street towards them and people were hauling huge hiking packs onto their backs in readiness.
It was a squeeze, getting past them on the narrow pavement, and there was a big red phone box in the way, and, as she pressed against a stone window frame to allow other pedestrians to pass, her eyes flew to the sight of a head bobbing, only partially glimpsed through the milling people.
It was a person in side profile, their shoulders working, kneeling over someone in the street, a serious set to their face.
They were doing chest compressions! One, two, three, four, one, two, three, four…
and in an instant she was spirited into an instinctive battle between fight, flight or freeze.
She’d be the only medic on the street, surely, the only person trained to help.
‘I’m a doctor!’ she called over the throng, trying to get through the bus stop crowd and bulky luggage. All eyes turned on her, questioning.
The person hunching over the prone figure on the ground looked up too.
How long had the patient been without oxygen? What were the chances of bringing them round? She knew from experience the chances were slim. Cold sweat ran down her spine.
‘Don’t stop with the compressions!’ she yelled. ‘Can you let me through, please!’
Why were these stupid locals gawping at her? Why were the tourists not shifting?
‘Excuse me!’ she shouted, pushing someone’s snowboard out of the way and revealing… oh, shit! Not a member of the public performing lifesaving CPR and in desperate need of help, but a hiker trying to force a puffy winter jacket into an overstuffed backpack.
‘Oh!’
Over her own panting breaths she heard a mocking laugh behind her, and there was a child asking, ‘What’s wrong with that lady, Mummy?’ followed by a sharp, ‘Shoosh, she’ll hear.’
‘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 – and she’d had 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, the Toughen up, Buttercup look, the School of Hard Knocks look.
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.
In the morning she would jolt awake before her alarm and find herself still gripping the browning core of the fruit she didn’t remember eating, black pips spilled on her white sheets, and she’d promise herself, again, that today would be different.
Today she’d be well, because this was supposed to be her re-set Highland hideaway.