They Do Not Know (pt 2 grief)

In complete juxtaposition to how things are now, the year I left my family home was turbulent to say the least. I remember Mother yelling, Father never there, my older Sister an exotic creature I did not understand and my Brother meeting the love of his life and our relationship began to change. Cherry was a baby, a sweet child that everyone loved. I remember that Cherry had been to EuroDisney and brought me back a small Minnie Mouse notebook which I tried desperately to fill with my aspirations and dreams, but I had none; life was bleak and confusing. I had suffered three major traumas to my young life already and although the sun continued to rise my future plans darkened as it all fell to a desolate wayside and I retreated to my bedroom.

It is remarked that these things happen in a cycle of three but I doubt it really does, you simply remember three things as being significantly worse than any of the other things and there were several contributing factors as to why I packed my bags at midnight and left my family home at four am one morning, but three are harder to accept than the others. Most people do not know why, they just do not know.

The act of black balling is to reject someone by secret ballot and this happened to me. It were secretly agreed that the group would eject me to hide what Mia and Huddy had done. It was decided that none were to acknowledge me and I would lose all my school friends because my footballing boyfriend had sex with my best friend. I left sixth form without completing the year and knowing I was throwing away my chance to go to university however, I knew I did not need a formal education to be successful and managed to score a casting to work on channel 4’s The Big Breakfast as a runner/researcher. I pretty much had the job having been green lighted by one the Execs’ a week previous, but, on the way there, I was stopped by about six young men who tried to drag me to the ground at the train station and rape me. I somehow got away from them, I fled onto a train, two of them caught up with me and smashed my head repeatedly against the plexiglass and spat in my face.

Kelly Brook got the job at Channel 4, I got a job in a Magistrate Court and a part time job in a pub where through both jobs I discovered that the area I lived in was full of crime and grime. I began to slowly detest where I lived. By day I would feel the fear each time I boarded a train or any man walked behind me and at night I learnt that the underworld had been right beneath my nose as I served drug barons and complex business deals took place over pints and brandy shorts. I wondered what had happened to me. I desperately tried to move forward from fickle friends and an attempted assault but could not. As I look back now I make these events seem irrelevant but to my young eighteen year old self they were the absolute, most horrendous happenings I could imagine. I doubt many people knew, they just did not know.

I decided to leave against the will of my family, my new friends and my new boyfriend. I would wake up to see him staring down at me. ‘Lets have a baby’ he would whisper into the morning. It filled me with sadness and foreboding. That would be the end of my life, being Ryan’s wife, stuck in this dreadful place forever, doing the same banal things that everyone did everyday. I did not want to be like everyone else so I ran, I ran away. Six months after leaving my periods stopped and never returned. Had I been punished for rejecting Ryan’s love and crushing his future dreams? Punished for turning my nose up at normalcy? Did I cause my footballing boyfriend to have sex with my best friend, did I annoy the boys on the platform with my casting confidence so that they would strangle me, rip my clothes off and make my forehead gush blood? Did I cause Ryan’s heartache, ruin my chance of matrimony and motherhood, was it all simply my fault? I did not know, I just did not know. So I spent a decade thinking about it.

It was the intravenous cannula that signified the beginning of the end. I walked around fraud-like , a failure, a fake. I was winging my way, terrified that I might be outed as ‘miserable’ in my newly constructed ‘happy’ life.  Few people knew that something medically was wrong with me and it was not until I was forced to have surgery did the traumas come to light. It was the intravenous cannula, I refused to have it placed in the back of my hand. I freaked. I screamed, the banshee within finally freed. Somehow the nurse found out that I did not sleep, that I survived on snatches of something that amounted to less than two or three hours each day. The noise in my head was growing, was more audible, had been threatening me.

I was introduced to Lyn Bear-hugs by Ann Rogan. Bear-hugs specialised in infertile couple counselling and adoption preparation. We never once spoke about my infertility. We spoke about loneliness, a lack of cyclical routine to my life, and I wondered aloud if anyone could ever love such an unfortunate creature. I would watch the fish swim around in the bubbled tank, count the slats in her roof as silent tears fell. This was not depression this was grief.