Daffodils
Stupid, stupid, stupid to care, stupid to hope, stupid to change the way things are.
The Friday-night train from Northallerton was packed before she even stepped on board, hen parties, stag parties, football fans and tourists, raucous and boozy, the seats overflowing into the aisles and between the carriages. She found a spot on the floor, rucksack on, her view the knees of passengers as they opened the toilet door and recoiled.
She would need a distraction but Wuthering Heights was no use to her here. Impossible to work and impossible not to worry about work. If she’d kept walking, she might have begged an extension but there was no excuse now: the edit was due on Monday. Perhaps if she worked all weekend – what else was there to do? – but all this could have been avoided if she’d simply gone home last Tuesday as planned. She’d have been reacclimatised, back in her rhythm, deadline met, serene – well, not serene but at least not furious, raging at her own foolishness. Stupid, stupid, stupid to have been suckered by hope, scammed by human interaction. At York, Michael’s station, she stood to stop herself tumbling backwards out of the automatic door then slid back to the floor, and returned to her phone, scrolling through the emails she’d ignored, new phone bills available to view, an update to our privacy policy. The Ullswater hotel wanted her to rate her stay, but where was the tick-box for ‘misleading’ or ‘delusional’? She was hungry again and ate a sticky, wadded energy bar that she’d found in a side pocket, a pellet so sweet and dense that she immediately got the shakes. Jaw clenched, jittery and nauseous, she wondered, Is this what a speedball feels like? How can it possibly be legal? They were speeding through the East Midlands at 120 miles per hour and she was coming up on fifty grams of pure glucose and still it wasn’t fast enough, with the karaoke party in Carriage H reaching its wild height, the train manager joining in on the speakers, congratulating Pete and Claire in carriage E on their marriage this weekend. Cheers, applause, Marnie off her face with exhaustion and energy. Should she track down Claire and tell her, ‘Don’t do it, get out, you’re making a terrible mistake’?
The last week had changed her and now she must change back. For the most part she’d been offline, so she set about restoring her own default settings, scrolling through her old websites and social media. Deep-sea divers returning to the surface have to acclimatise to their old environment, and this is how the internet felt, absorbing the fights and feuds she’d missed, the rage and the predictions of the world’s end until she got the old feeling back, tension tightening her shoulders, all sense of pastoral well-being gone. Once she’d imagined that she might post a photograph or two online, a view or a selfie with a self-deprecating comment. If she’d made it to the North Sea, she might have posted a wholesome snap of her boots in the surf, went for a walk, got carried away. Just this morning, she’d been learning bird songs! Well, screw you, yellowhammer and your bread-and-no-cheese. At Finsbury Park she scrambled upright, rolling past the spaceship lights of the football stadium and on into King’s Cross.
The crowd pressed against the doors then tumbled out, tourists and lovers rushing to restaurants and hotel rooms in Shoreditch and Soho. Hoisting her rucksack, she felt as if she was arriving in some foreign city, dazed and disoriented but with none of the tourist’s anticipation. Sky like a blackout blind, the smell of diesel and fried food, she crossed the forecourt and descended, standing with the partygoers to the end of the Victoria Line, absurd now in her boots and waterproofs. Outside Brixton station they were still preaching the good news about Jesus but she’d no time for good news, running for the number 3, a Londoner again. In the late-night supermarket, she bought bread and cheese, milk, eggs, juice, a banana as hard as a cosh, green leaves in a chlorinated balloon, enough food to allow her to remain indoors, as well as wine and chocolate and gin in a can, the return of the treats. Cheap daffodils were in season and recklessly she bought some to cheer the place up. And then my heart with pleasure fills/And dances with the supermarket daffodils.
Her keys were buried at the bottom of her rucksack and on the steps of her flat she was obliged to unzip the pack, searching through the tangle of old underwear and charging cables. On the shelf in the communal hall, bills and flyers from takeaways and estate agents, nothing friendly or hand-written. Legs aching, knees complaining, she climbed six flights, past the sound of the TV in 2B, an argument in 3A, someone gaming in 4B, and opened the door to 5A.
It felt like opening a sealed tomb, the air frigid and stale. She shrugged off her rucksack – deal with that tomorrow – and unlaced her boots so as not to provoke the downstairs neighbours. The soles of her feet felt flayed as she padded through the flat, turning on lights until it was too bright, reacquainting herself with the sounds of her world, the click of the thermostat, the whoosh of the boiler igniting, the tick of the radiators, the lip-smack of the fridge door. She put away the groceries and placed the daffodils in a small jug, but the buds were not yet open, and it looked like a display of five spring onions. And thenmy heart with pleasure fills …
In the bedroom, the smell of her sheets, the laundry basket, the dust warming on the radiators. Grimy and sticky, bruised and exhausted, she longed to be warm and clean in fresh linen, the weighted blanket a hand pressing gently down.
But it would take an hour for the water to be hot enough to bath, and changing the sheets seemed far beyond her. Instead she lay back on the bed with her feet on the floor and looked up at the ceiling, its familiar topography of stains and bubbles and cracks. She felt suddenly overwhelmingly alone, and this was absolutely fine and might only be a problem if you’d been anticipating something else.