Was that Anna exiting the Winston Churchill Wing of St Mary’s Hospital, where I was about to get my vagina poked, peered at, pinched and scraped. (Get those smears in and vaccinate against HPV. It’s never too late, until it is.) Funny how you can recognise an old friend from behind even at 9am before you’ve had coffee.
It was her. Anna, my friend had suffered the disquieting yuck of ten minutes with your feet in the stirrups with a camera up your fanny and all that medical fiddling. We both shuddered.
We walked to Paddington Basin and ordered coffee at one of those canal boat cafes. Our catch-up was intense. I had not seen her since I moved to Bruton. In that time, I’ve pulled myself back from a psychological edge, that in hindsight she could see coming. “You were never happy for quite a long time.”
She could tell I was in the clichéd ‘much better place’. “There’s something you need to know,” she said. “It’s not something I could have told you over the phone.”
Anna worked as my cleaner for many years, but like a lot of Polish people was massively overqualified. I think she has an economics degree. In a canal boat moored outside a tube station, we sat opposite each other on our sore vaginas and discussed things only she, really, could have known about.
*
A few weeks ago, on a Monday, I woke up after a night of bare and anxious sleep to the doom of an empty pot of ADHD medication. I lay in bed, my heart and gut so heavy I could not for some time peel myself off the mattress. I was already tired, bad enough, but without lisdexamfetamine I knew I’d be useless: wrenched and yanked by thoughts, troubled by gut feelings, overrun with ideas, none would especially serve me.
I woke with the same dread I used to feel after a big night out, except I’d drunk nothing, been nowhere. I rolled over and spooned the reassuring concrete bollard curled up beside me, asleep with her nose tucked towards her own bottom, which floated just beneath my nose. Not even the solid presence of the big podenco could help rouse me, not even a tiny bit. If she’d done one of her silent noxious farts, which she does sometimes in this most favourite of her positions, I doubt I’d have recoiled.
I felt completely useless.
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