Closure (3 page)

Cheryl has never thanked me for anything. She takes all that I have to offer and I leave her and never fail to feel like I could have done more for her, listened better, coined a more inviting observation to engender further disclosure from her. But she thanks me. That can't be right.

I drop the tray off at the counter section for dirty utensils, recycle my apple-juice plastic bottle, and toss my napkin, free-throw-style, into the wide dustbin beside the exit. I make a quick pit stop at the gents. Wash my hands and rejoin the corridor. It's about a dozen sets of overhead lights from the canteen to Ward Three. I make two steps to cover each set of pairs and another two steps to close the gap between lights. I know this because Cheryl told me a while back that that was how she made it from the ward to occupational therapy. If she did not count her way along she would feel too much panic to make the short trip. The same mathematical logic powered her life around the ward. At the collapse of that system she took to her bed and her bones locked in foetal pose. She moved so well with her counting system, as I walked with her and talked, that I forgot that she could hold a conversation and still count her way along. I had been so keen to make up for not seeing her all day that I forgot to think about the fact that where we went to sit and talk must have been measured by her, and that as we talked she must have counted out those steps without variation. To break up her code we sometimes practised walking up and down and deliberately taking an extra step after she arrived, and rather than having to start the whole thing all over again I'd get her to talk to me about something – anything long enough for the anxiety to quell, hence our detailed and repetitive discussions about contact lenses.

I take a right into the ward and Katie tells me she looked for but could not find Cheryl and she wonders if Cheryl might have gone to art, psychotherapy, or some other appointment. She is still saying something to me but I turn and run to the front desk at the hospital entrance. I jump to the front of the queue of three people, announce that it is an emergency and ask the porter if a patient fitting Cheryl's 5' 5'', shoulder-length frizzy brown hair, thin with a prominent nose and slightly red blue eyes left here in the last quarter-hour or so. The porter scratches his head.

“Was she wearing a red cardigan?” I ask.

He nods.

“Are you sure?”

“Of course I'm sure.”

I run to the station for the second time that day, but this time I hear sirens. I turn into the park. Pigeons flare up around my feet. I bolt for the north exit and meet people coming from the station. I listen for the sound of a train, thinking I might hear the wheels on the track as it pulls away, but the traffic from the nearby road drowns everything but the sirens. Passers-by talk excitedly; some cover their mouths or wipe their eyes. I stop an old man in a hat and long raincoat. I ask him what's wrong. He pulls his arm away from my grip, lifts his hat and runs his hand through a mop of silver. He gestures with his hat at the station.

“A young lady…” But he doesn't say anymore. He tugs his hat forward on his head and leaves me on the spot.

KAREN ONOJAIFE
HERE BE MONSTERS

Arike's Daily Plan of Action:

1. Drink herbal tea
   
2. Ten minutes of each of the following,
   every
   morning:
   a) meditation
   b) yoga
   c) writing positive thoughts in journal
   d) looking in mirror while repeating positive affirmations
   e) listening to life-affirming songs
   
3. Treat others as you would like to be treated
   
4. Surround yourself with positive things and people
   
5. Engage in a spiritual practice
   
6. Exercise!
   

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*

It's the summer. You start to think about your chakras.

You are committed to becoming your best self. You are not going to care that everyone else is getting married or getting promoted, or having babies or buying houses. When friends tell you their good news, you will simply smile and then send them gift baskets of baked goods because your heart is a lighthouse, as opposed to say, a black dwarf star, colder than Alaska.

You make an action plan and you post it on this blog, for the sake of accountability. You have precisely ten followers, so if you mess it all up, hardly anyone will know.

You pick a Monday morning to start. By the time you've had your tea, meditated, yoga'd, journaled, affirmed yourself and listened to upbeat songs, you're late for work. You dash into the office, stressed as fuck and you imagine your chakras curling like week-old lettuce.

“What would Oprah do?” you ask Tieu Ly when you call her later that day.

“She would write a cheque to her hurt feelings, dreams and aspirations,” Tieu Ly says.

This is an example of why you don't tell Tieu Ly everything and why you most certainly will not be sharing the details of your action plan. Your best friend can be an emotional terrorist.

*

Things Arike is scared of:

1. Dying
   
2. Dying alone
   
3. Dying before having the chance to clear browser history
   

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*

It's still summer. One of your teeth just crumbles in your mouth while you are eating a Toblerone. You are forced to go to the dentist for the first time in years and he tells you that the tooth has to be extracted. You are consternated because:

a) who wants to hear that kind of thing and

b) your dentist is very good looking.

It seems cruel that the one time that you have a legitimate reason to be close to someone like this, he is charged with the task of looking into your decaying mouth.

“Let's talk about your diet,” he says.

You don't feel like talking about the cakes, sweets and chocolate that you eat and eat every day, but only when you are by yourself. That you eat until your stomach is a tight, anxious drum and your mind is a flat, sleepy haze. Besides, you never throw up. That would mean you have a problem.

“I like the odd sweet every now and then,” you say.

He swivels away in his chair, in an attempt to disguise his eye roll, while you wonder when you developed a taste for wildly pointless lies.

He listens to Shostakovich while he works. As he creates a temporary filling, you are already thinking what to tell your friends. You know you will make something up, because to explain that your teeth are rotting out of your head because of something that you did is too forthright and truthful.

*

Arike's online dictionary

“Leap and the net will appear” – an utterly meaningless phrase. Speakers of sentences such as this should be bestowed a swift chop to the throat.

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*

Your chakras will not realign themselves and so you turn to self-help books, but these tend to make your chest grow tight with rage. The books all seem to have been written by and for those with no concept of real life. It's easy to have an epiphany concerning one's spiritual purpose while residing at an ashram, herding goats on an Italian hillside or building wells in a West African village. You are yet to ascertain how any of the “lessons” these authors impart can be applied to your existence in a poky flat in Haringey that you can barely afford.

It seems to involve a lot of magical thinking and the last time that worked for you was when you were six years old. You happened to say out loud that you were hungry and your father, who was passing by, agreed to make you a cheese sandwich.

“It's not you,” Tieu Ly says later that evening, when she calls you from LA. “The people who write these books don't come from immigrant families.”

You think of your own parents, whose thirst for risk was exhausted five decades ago when they crossed an ocean to come to live in this cold place. The stuff they went through they barely ever talk about. But if you were to tell them now that you wanted to resign from work so that you could write? Fiction, of all things? All your aunts and uncles in Nigeria would agree that you had murdered your parents.

Like you, Tieu Ly did what she was told (in her case be a doctor, in your case, an accountant), as opposed to what she wanted. Still, she consoled herself by moving overseas to practice medicine. That way, she can tell herself that their victory (and by implication, her defeat) was only partial.

As old as you are, you still don't like to disappoint your parents and they are happy not to be disappointed. See? It all works like it's supposed to.

*

Arike is: not in love with the modern world

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*

There are so many things that you love about having a job, save for the actual job itself. The office is That Place and your life outside it is Everything Else. You spend between 8 to 11 hours a day at That Place and a lot of the time you think you manage it pretty well. By manage you mean that you are able to maintain a reasonable façade despite the fact that you feel you are on the verge of fucking up on an epic scale at any given moment.

This is what you are thinking about as you make your way to work this morning, and so you almost walk past the two kids squalling on the pavement, a worried woman standing next to them. They are two little black kids and the woman, white, is in her early twenties. She asks them questions in a soft voice but this just makes them cry even louder. You're tempted to keep walking because you're already late, but you imagine your nephew and niece standing there and you come to a halt.

They are brother and sister, both under ten. You work out that they got off at the wrong bus stop and so have no idea how to get to school. They don't know their address, they don't know anyone's phone number; all they have in their satchels are sandwiches and colouring books. They are holding hands like something out of a fairytale, except there are no breadcrumbs in a forest, just dog shit on asphalt and the relentless scream of traffic along the main road.

Eventually, you and the woman decide to call the police. The kids have stopped crying now, but the older one, the boy, has a look on his face that says he knows he's going to catch a world of trouble for getting lost. You want to fold him into you until he stops worrying, but are aware this would be alarming. So, instead, you tell him about the time you got lost when you were a kid and how you thought you'd get in trouble too, but that your mum was so happy to see you, it's like she forgot to be angry.

He doesn't look reassured, so you tell him not to worry, but then you don't know his life. You reflect that it's adults coming on like they know everything that leaves kids fucked up. The amount of lies kids must hear before they're ten years old, just so an adult can have the satisfaction of making them feel better! Or for the adult to make themselves feel better. Because, maybe, that's what you wanted more than anything else. Not to have to think about what might happen to that kid when he got home.

The police finally arrive – two white men, one old and one young, in a squad car with tinted windows. They are nice enough but it makes you wince when they make jokes about putting the kids in the back of the car. The little girl smiles the way kids smile when adults say funny stuff that they don't understand, and the boy just looks up at the clouds out of the corner of his eye.

The officers make more jokes about the kids being excited to go for a ride, and perhaps they are, though maybe these kids have heard bad things about the police and maybe ten years from now the boy will be stopped and searched every other time he steps out of the house. You think that maybe you're the crazy one for thinking these things, seeing that the three other adults in this situation are just standing around and laughing because problem solved, job done.

Back at your desk you get a client call. You give out your e-mail address, which includes your first name. You spell it out for what must be the thousandth time this year.

“Oh, that's a nice name!” the client says. He asks you where it's from and you tell him. When he asks you how long you've been here, you're confused.

“At this firm?” you ask.

“No, no, in the country?'

You laugh as you tell him “all your life” because he's just an old man being curious, a man who is always sweet to you on the phone but there's something about the exchange that leaves you sour.

You end up snapping at Seth, the new guy, because he takes far too long at the colour photocopier. You bore eyes into the back of his head as he hums and jingles change in his pockets and you know he is trying to piss you off now because he just started work today and so there is no way he can legitimately require a run of 100 copies of anything, let alone double sided paginated prints in laminate.

Prick.

*

Arike's daily plan of action (autumn edition)

1. Get out of bed

2. Anything thereafter is a bonus

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*

Seth is OK, you guess. By that you mean he is ridiculously attractive. You don't know why you didn't see it before. The worst thing? You are not sure if he actually is that good looking, or if it is the fact that Seth is the only man in an office full of women. After a while, you don't care either way.

When Seth talks, everyone draws near him like flowers turning their heads to the sun. He has the sense to be embarrassed about it so you don't hold it against him too much. Besides, he was the only one to laugh when you made that joke about ThunderCats in the team meeting, plus he smells really nice and yes, sometimes your bar really is set that low.

*

Arike is: too lazy to hate herself but is well versed in malign neglect.

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*

You go to a presentation on domestic violence after work which, okay, you knew was not going to be any kind of stand-up comedy show, but still. It takes about ten minutes before you want to start crying, but you have a rule about not doing that in front of strangers unless you are on public transport.

It makes you think of stuff you hadn't thought about in years. The things that made you want to live small and quietly, so that you could pass unnoticed. The times you heard the thumps through the wall or the sound of her screaming. The way you got that pounding in your chest before you walked into the front room, trying to conjure the right words to make him stop.

He could walk into a room and the air would be sucked out for several seconds – the time it took to gauge his mood. You loved him then and you love him now, but it's easier these days – old age has softened him. He talks about his childhood and you think of that stupid phrase “hurt people hurt people” but back then, you didn't see the hurting, he was just a hurricane.

You remember the afternoon you went to her in tears and asked her to stop fighting with him – as if she had chosen their worst moments. She said yes, anyway, and it wasn't until years later that you realised what you had asked. For her to bite her tongue and step on her heart. She did it, for you, despite the hurt.

Now you're older, you want to take it back. You want to tell her to save herself because you would love her through anything, but you don't have the words. Instead, you try extra hard to make her happy. So you really mean it when you say you'll lose weight.

*

“How I learned to stop worrying and to love the complete waste of time that is the annual performance review” – a memoir by Arike A. Douglas.

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*

You and Seth have been hanging out. He's funnier and kinder than you expect. He catches you near hyperventilating in the stairwell as you try to prepare for your work appraisal, but he doesn't say anything stupid, just sits down next to you.

“Tell me something,” he says, knocking his knees gently against yours.

“Years ago, I read about a woman who smelled oranges every time she was about to have a
grand mal
seizure. Now, although I don't have a history of seizures, I can get very stressed if I smell citrus fruits without any easily identifiable source for the aroma.”

Seth looks askance at you, before moving the conversation onto the appraisals.

“You nervous?” he asks.

“Nope.”

“So you're ready?”

“Well, hold on.”

“Maybe this'll help,” he says, bringing out his MP3 player. You watch him as he slips a pair of headphones over your ears and the world is muffled for a few moments while he cues the song.

Part of you is worried he might start playing gospel music as a prelude to asking if you've accepted Jesus as your personal saviour, so you're pleased when you hear M.O.P's ‘Ante Up'.

He grabs your hands and pulls you up with him so you're both standing. He takes a step back, rocks his head from side to side and bobs his shoulders up and down. You shake your head when he beckons for you to do the same.

“Sorry… this is what, exactly?”

“This is you, getting ready to kill it when you walk into that room. I'm serious; it's an all-rounder. Need to prep for a difficult meeting at work? Ante Up. Need to tell your boy that his girlfriend's been stepping out on him? Ante Up. You're in Sainsbury's near closing time, there's one last lamb rogan josh on the shelf and the only other person with their eye on it is the guy with a crap trolley. You going to let him steal from you?”