When I was twenty-one I was scared of trains. I didn’t trust myself. I had the thought, I could jump, and although I didn’t want to, or really, because I didn’t want to, it terrified me. The possibility was there. It seemed so possible, so overwhelming, that when a girl in my tutor group said she was taking a train to London for a weekend, like it was nothing, like she just could, I looked at her in awe. When she came to the following weeks tutorial I was even more overawed. She had taken a train, to London from Scotland, she had ridden the tube, and here she was, still in tact, with her shoulder length hair and her neat tweed coat. It seemed like a miracle.
Impossible for me, then.
During a later period of trauma, when coping with a bullying landlord, and unable to stand up for myself despite the illegality of their actions, I became terrified of the flight of stairs outside the flat. I was on the top floor, and the stairwell spiralled, if you can call a square a spiral, below for many floors. At the bottom were cold grey flagstones. I thought, I could jump, and it became real.
I became terrified of the stairwell, compelled to look over the smooth iron bannister, feeling the rods of it in my hand, and at once repulsed, horrified by the picture of jumping- of being broken on the flags below. The hopelessness of climbing over the bannister, feeling the rods in the back of my palms, leaning forwards and letting go. The terror of that moment, which never came, but played in my head again and again.
I got over my fear of stairs, my fear of jumping, the terrible moment of letting go. After a while I was able to climb spiralling stairwells without hugging the far side away from the bannister, without cowering and almost crying.
I got over my fear of trains too, although during the spells I worked in London I found I preferred to walk, knowing the city overground, the trees and streets and faces which filled it. Even when I was exhausted, I walked everywhere. At first because I was broke and later, because I could, because that way it felt that this city came to belong to me. I loved how the famous sites took you by surprise, by being sudden and being there, before you as you turned a corner. A miracle. I walked through Piccadilly and Trafalgar Square, a girl surrounded by the noise and billboards and magic of a city.
Living in Edinburgh I walked everywhere too. I never thought I would come to fear walking. Until I did.
Suddenly, it seemed, this year, I became frozen, scared to cross a road, or even a pavement that might have a bike whizzing along it. I would appraise the situation and see nothing was coming, then I’d think I could hear something, see something, the rustle of leaves blowing behind me was a bike about to hit me, a motorbike with a roaring engine was definitely not going to stop at the pedestrian lights to let me cross, it would hit me. The road outside my house became too big to cross, growing in my mind to the size of a motorway. When I crossed streets I did so with other people, either surreptitiously running alongside someone, or occasionally asking, ‘hey, can I cross with you, sorry, I know it’s crazy.’
Other areas of my life froze too, although maybe they had been frozen before, a slow malicious freezing. We hear about the boiling frog all the time, and I hate that bloody cliched frog, hate how it’s wheeled out all the time, poor thing.
But what if it was the opposite, I sometimes wonder, what if, instead of boiling the frog slowly, insidiously, it was instead frozen, one degree at a time. When would it try to move one of it’s froggy legs only to find in horror, that it couldn’t? And what would it do next?
For the past two years, my partner and I have struggled with infertility. Apart from an early miscarriage, we had no luck, and with lockdown, investigations, like everything else, stopped. It wasn’t important, wasn’t crucial.
I went for acupuncture, paying a kind woman called Jian to talk to me about Chinese Medicine, and put needles in part of my body. I felt calm in her room, with the pine green walls and the smell of eucalyptus and the evening outside the window, a shade darker on each fortnightly visit. I liked the calmness of her voice, and how she warned me before she placed a needle, sensing my need to know. I liked hearing about her life, too.
Still, part of me felt ridiculous. ‘Aren’t you relaxed,’ she asked, once, when all the needles were in and the lights were dimmed, and I was I guess, except on the way in to the building I’d seen the fire alarm, and a thought occurred to me. A comedy moment from an otherwise sad film. A fire alarm goes off and silly girl runs out, studded in needles. In this shot I was the butt of a joke, a girl throwing money at something to solve a problem, that many had never had, could never understand.
At the same time, an agent dropped me. I sent off my work, everywhere and got nothing, or got rejections, until recently when I got one full request, and realised I was too petrified to make the changes to make my book strong enough, too scared to send it again to another person who said they loved it, but might change their mind when they get to know it a bit more.
I confided about infertility and writing and everything to a friend . We walked round a large grave yard together, early in lockdown, two metres apart but still an illegal meeting, and chose names from the stones for our future children. She was the one person I met in lockdown and we walked everywhere. In June, as things began to lift, and the days reached their longest, she died. It made no sense.
Years earlier I lost a friend, the daughter of my parents’ neighbours in France, in a car accident. She was in another country and the driver may have been drunk but no one bothered to check. After this, I was more cautious, but I still ran freely round the city, until this year, the long lockdown summer bleeding into autumn, when I suddenly tried to move, and found myself frozen.
If a cyclist or skateboarder comes towards me, I throw my arms up and duck behind them. If I have to cross a road, I can’t, or if it’s a zebra crossing I sort of edge across. My favourite roads have become those with an island in the middle, a little waiting place, where the traffic can rush about you, and you can be safe- not having to trust two lanes of cars not to hit you, even if those two lanes don’t have any cars on at all.
Even when I was at my craziest, when I was weeping all night, terrified of the images my brain generated, I could move, run, walk, climb, freely through the world. I had the freedom of the city, and I loved it, and it will come back.
But for now, I’m frozen, and learning how to thaw. When did I freeze? How did it happen? I don’t know, sometime over summer, but I will once again have the freedom of the capital, the ability not to freeze when crossing a road.
