CHAPTER 8
“Yeah, I know, but I don’t know about the rest. We’re going to finish up here, and after the wine is done we shall have some frozen yoghurt, to which my lover here is very partial.
Then I shall stretch my legs for a while, if you want, with Ginny”
Straight into things, then, and I wondered exactly how close the friendship was between Kate and Sally. Just a few phone calls, and husband and wife were already knocking at my door. There was something else there, something that pushed them, and I almost smiled at myself as I realised we were both in a dance. She knew I was hiding something, and I knew that she was too.
The door shut behind Stewie and Virginia as he said something about the Red Lion, and Sally turned to me, face carefully neutral.
“Nightmares, Adam. Talk to me”
“Nothing much to say, Sal. It sort of goes with the job. Had a few incidents, a few fatals, and I decided to sort of drop off the front line for a while”
“Bollocks. You don’t sell your house and change jobs just because you fancy a bit of a change.”
Did she just say ‘bollocks’? Was she channelling Ginny? She was still talking.
“You have almost doubled your weight and stopped seeing any of your friends. You don’t go out apart from when absolutely necessary, except when your arm is twisted, and when you do you sit by yourself. You talk to a rag doll. So it’s bollocks.”
Her tone softened. ”I have had my own share of shit, Adam, so please do your best not to mess me about. Come on, bring your glass”
She led me to the sofa, and settled down into it with her wine and me.
“What are the nightmares, Adam?”
I waited for a while, as images flickered over my eyes, and then started in, trying to put order into them.
“I was rammed by some thieves when I was on the bike. I got away with the impact, but they lost it and hit some street furniture and a wall”
Breathe, sip….
“There was a fire…..”
Breathe. Breathe again. As long as you are breathing….
“I stay away from roasts now. It’s the smell. Ginny is educating my tastebuds, now, and I can’t complain about what she does. Some meat in it might be good, though”
“Stay on plot, Adam. You are doing well.”
“There are---were---three of them, and the oldest was only sixteen. I couldn’t get them out, then the car blew up”
Blew me half way across the road, my jacket on fire, visor part-melted.
“Ah. Were you injured?”
“I fractured my arm when I landed after the crash, and got a couple of burns”
“But you blame yourself for not getting them out before the explosion”
I couldn’t help it then, I was crying. “One of them was only twelve, Sally!”
She waited for a little while, and then started to talk through some of the others, and I told her about the baby, still in its seat, the car seat that Mummy hadn’t bothered to secure to the car itself, that had come past her when she drove into the back of the van. The child still sitting upright in its little seat, on the road, on the dirty tarmac, eyes open but absolutely lifeless while the mother sat by the ambulance screaming as I laid a blanket over the tiny corpse..
The Rover, the old Rover 3.5, on the mountain road. Not children, this time. I had to pause a lot in that one. The details….the details never got any less sharp, the smell, coppery, rich, of so much blood, as the rock outcrop had sheared the bonnet’s front-set hinges and driven it back through the windscreen, and as the engine met their legs, so the edge of the bonnet met the necks of the old couple, and the sound that lives in my mind is a steady slow drip of their life draining out of a partly open door.
Sally handed me a tissue. “There are more, aren’t there?”
“Yes. That’s enough for now, please.”
“So you looked for a new start, a new place?”
“Yes. I got my sergeant’s, and decided to try another force”
“Did you go indoors straight away?”
“No. They put me on a foot patrol for a while, get to know the place sort of thing”
“Did you enjoy that?”
“I did, proper policing”
“Did you not miss the bike?”
Yes. No. “Sort of, but one too many incidents, you know”
“Were you having visions, flashbacks, when you rode?”
Fuck aye. “Yes….”
“Why did you move off foot patrol, Adam?”
Dark. Trying to get the lane markers out as the traffic wouldn’t fucking slow down, apart from the two cars that had pulled up as their drivers were trying not to be sick, or cry, and failing on both counts. Sarge, you’ve done traffic, you can mark where the body parts have gone. Sarge? Sarge?
“It was that jumper, a couple of years ago, Sal, by Worth. I had to help clear it up and I sort of broke down”
I looked round from my nightmare to see a complex of expressions hit her face and then Sally was crying. She held a hand up as I moved towards her.
“It’s OK, just a memory of my own. Melanie Stevens”
“You knew her?”
“She was a patient, and a friend. She was Stewie’s best mate.”
Sally got her own look on, just then, her own sight of things past, just as Ginny had. She took a couple of very deep, measured breaths, and then continued.
“Who is treating whom, here? We were at her funeral, and at the trial. It’s where we met. How bad was your own breakdown?”
That was either a slip, or a deliberate hint. Was she talking about herself, or Stewie, or the dead woman?
“I was sent home on gardening leave for a week, then the boss asked if I wanted to take a slot in Custody.”
“And you started drinking”
I continued the process, Sal, just in a higher gear. “Yes, I started drinking”
“Adam, can you do me a favour?”
“What?”
“Can you just answer the questions without having a discussion with yourself first?”
“You are a bit good, Sal. Thought of trying my job?”
“I don’t distract easily, Price, so don’t try it on. Now, you mentioned something else to Ginny. What is it, Adam?”
“Just that I was feeling a bit lacking in confidence now, being so fat”
“Bollocks again, Adam, obesity isn’t congenital unless you are a walrus. Who s Tabitha, Adam?”
“A friend. I talk to her, like I would a pet. I can’t keep a dog or cat on my shifts.”
“Or you think you might injure one if you were pissed?”
No, it would need rehoming when…when I am no longer around.
The door rattled at that point, and the two strays were back, letting me off the hook on that one. The smell hit me as the living room door opened.
“You bastard, Ginny, you got chips! That is not fair!”
“I’m not the fat fucker, am I? How you doing, Sal?”
“Patient-doctor confidentiality, Ginny”
I caught Stewie looking at me, and I suddenly realised that there was indeed someone here who understood my problems, at least one of them, as the others couldn’t.
“I was right, wasn’t I? How do you do it?”
He gave me a wry grin. “You’ve met the wife properly now, so you know the answer to that one. Ginny, stop teasing and give him a chip”
I thought it through for a second, then–
“Stewie, can I have a word please, in the kitchen?”
Sally gave me another of those quick appraisals, then nodded to him as we stood together and went out.
“What do you want to ask, Adam?”
“Melanie Stevens. I helped pick her up...afterwards”
I was trembling as I spoke, but he went absolutely rigid.
“What do you know about Melanie?”
“Only what came out at work, and what Sally said, that she was close to you. I was a bit self-absorbed back then. Sal said she was your best mate”
“Oh yes, she was. She told me she loved me once….”
That look, just like Ginny, just like his wife, as the past played across his inner eye. If Sally was doing anything for me, anything at all, she was letting me see that the nightmares weren’t mine alone.
“Did you…you know?”
“Oh, fuck no, Adam. Mel wasn’t into men in any way at all, she’d have given Ginny some competition on that front. Anyway…she was called Mike at the time. People would have stared.”
Comments
I feel like I'm hanging off the back of the bike
...it keeps going around all these turns; the curves have me going one way while the bike is going the other way. But I'm hanging on, since this is such a great story. Flashbacks suck big time...just reading about Adam makes it too painful to continue, but it would be even more painful to abandon this! Thanks once again.
Dio vi benedica tutti
Con grande amore e di affetto
Andrea Lena
Love, Andrea Lena
Ahhhhhhhhh - !!!
Pennies dropping loudly.
Thank you for your usual stunningly high-level writing.
"The Cost of Living Does Not Appear To Have Affected Its Popularity"
in most, but not all, instances
Ride On 8
Talk about a doozy of a chapter!
May Your Light Forever Shine
May Your Light Forever Shine
questions
I wonder now and then at stuff like ptsd. Never having been in a battle situation or a job that puts you in recurring nastiness I lack perspective maybe. There's a few un-pretty images I see now and then but only a few. Is it erosion as I think your 'drip' analogy alluded to? Yes I can empathise, but I aint been there exactly.
Sometimes wonder about the wisdom of tie ins too, but I can the whys of it here. Sometimes it assumes a bit I think or maybe asks a lot, but... I think I get it. Curiously that dream an ep or two back made me think of this stoopid Nicholas Cage movie I saw late one night, Ghost Rider I think, brings up one of my own un-pretties. (too many thinks? in this par? grammar police please)
As somebody else said above pennies dropping loudly. You do this stuff so well.
Kristina
You don't need combat to
You don't need combat to have PTSD. I wasn't in real face to face combat in Vietnam, I just cleaned up and picked up cadavers from both sides, smelling the stence of death, blood, and burned human flesh, after the battle -- and then only once. I came closer to being killed in the U.S. by a drunken driver. It took me over 20 years to let myself smell food or anything else after that.
There are a lot of things that can generate PTSD that have absolutely nothing to do with war. A bad childhood with rape or physical abuse; caring for a loved one in their final days instead of letting hospice do the job; parents who argue constantly and fight keeping the kids(s) in a state of uncertainty, while staying together "for the kids" but really creating a large degree of trauma, and probably future unhappiness, since the kids are learning about how husbands and wives interact from the poor example of their own parents; or even a long, drawn out internal conflict like gender dysphoria, where you create a facade to hide behind and then experience the constant worry of exposure and fight daily against depression, until you "hit the wall" and are diagnosed with GID.
It really doesn't take the horrors of war for PTSD, honest. All it takes are negative experiences that wreck you emotionally.
CaroL
CaroL
Well put Carol
You've said it all as far as I'm concerned though Steph still says it better. At least I think so.
Bev.
Growing old disgracefully.
Tie in
Just a way of telegraphing a few things. I don't want to get into a cosy little 'universe', just let a couple of existing characters breathe a bit. One of the challenges in covering the same ground is in finding people drift to a generic cardboard cut out. Call it laziness, call in unoriginality, call it thrift!
Wheels spinning within wheels.
And the the turning screws out the truth..
Somebody had to 'pick Mike up' and it would have had to hurt.
After so many hurts it's inevitable and the biker is often first on the scene. First to face the obscenities of sudden, unexpected, premature death.
You put it together well Steph.
Fortunately I've never had to attend or get involved in an immediate fatality. Seen a couple of corpses in the aftermath but nothing brutal or immediate.
Good story Steph.
Beverly.
Growing old disgracefully.
PTSD,
ALISON
'is an insidious thing that eats away at you then finally engulfs you.From a paramedics point of view
it is not just the carnage that you witness but your inability to be able to do something about a situation.
When you have worked your butt off to save someone knowing full well that your efforts are in vain, but you
have to try only to have them drop off on you,there is a feeling of failure.Not justified,but that is how you feel.
The piece about the baby in its' seat had me weeping as I once saw a baby that had been thrown through the window
of its' parents car and then through the windscreen of the car that they collided with,landing in the other drivers
lap.The driver ended up in psychiatric care for months but amazingly,the baby survived.
This story is so real that I have to read it in portions or I get too upset,but I can tell you this,after 21 years
of dreams and flashbacks which would wake me with a pulse of 180/190,shortness of breath,sweating profusely and
feeling like you had been run over by a Mack truck,my introduction to HRT now means that I can sleep 8 to 10 hours
a night without interruption.Unfortunately,a lot of men who are not TG will not have the treatment because of the
feminization that occurs,but they do not know what they are missing out on.Even though I have had a strong femme
side to hide all my life,at 77 years of age it was still a difficult decision to make,but I am so glad that I did
make it as life is so much better now and the girls in the support group have been wonderful for me.But please
if you comment,don't attempt to trivialize PTSD----it is very real.
ALISON
Reward
This is where an author finds a reward: that what they say has not only been understood, but 'speaks' to others. I celebrated my 20th rebirthday some years ago, as I have previously remarked here, but that was only one among several incidents, and as with others here I will not go into detail that is unnecessary. As Alison says, frustration can be a big thing here, that sense of being in the play of forces that you can do nothing about, whether it is death's arrival or violent abuse as a child, or many other very personal evils. It is indeed personal.
One of the most frustrating things my therapist told me...
....don't try to remember and don't try not to remember because neither are in your control As I said in my message, take away the dreams/nightmares...okay. Still left with night sweats, hypervigilance, flashbacks while awake; both in memory and physical sensation. My present therapist told me that writing about our experiences actually helps the hypoccampus amd the amygdala reintegrate memories to make them manageable. The PTSD symptoms are the body processing for the amydala what the hypocampus was unable to do at the time of trauma. She likens the reintegration of memory to a parent reassuring a child that everything will be alright. Simply fascinating. But as you and Alison have mentioned, and many of us here know from first hand experience, it is very personal. Thanks again for writing.
Dio vi benedica tutti
Con grande amore e di affetto
Andrea Lena
Love, Andrea Lena
trivialise?
Sounds as though the erosion imagery is accurate enough. I have my demons and depressions, but no I do not have PTSD nor do I wish to. As stated in the story, I haven't been there so I can never quite get it, maybe. Extrapolate out to some sense of approximation maybe but no, not quite. So my comment was in no way meant as a dismissal or trivialisation, just an acknowledgement that I can't quite understand it. A good story such as this makes you look at it and think about it some, which it does and I do.
Kristina
getting closer to coming out
apparently, he isnt the first with his issues that his friends knew. that story sounds like it had an unhappy ending. I hope Adam can make a better one for himself.
"Treat everyone you meet as though they had a sign on them that said "Fragile, under construction"
dorothycolleen
Uniforms
I didn't make the connection between Stewie and Melanie until one of those cartoon light bulbs went off in my head.
Great, the way you run the separate stories with a little connection through the characters.
I don't know if it qualifies as PTSD, but yes, I have been run over by a Mack truck and I can still see those wheels going over me as if it was happening now. It just doesn't give me nightmares. Different things get people different ways.
On a construction job many years ago we had an accident where the driver of a front-end loader was killed and I went to the accident site and stood spewing my guts out because the driver's head was crushed and his brains were all over the ground. While I stood there and shook one of the foremen, a big tough Austrian, who had fought in the war (on the other side, naturally) calmly scooped them up into a plastic bag.
The same man, some months later rang me up one day and asked me to go round to his house to help with something. The problem? They had caught a mouse in a standard mousetrap and neither he nor his wife could go near it. Honestly, I kid you not. So I disposed of it for them and that worried me not at all.
Ain't life funny?
Joanne
How
is my vote not on this chapter, did it delete or something?
May the rest of us never have to face the horrors and carry them on our backs.
"Reach for the sun."