be the last person I would go to. And then it occurs to me again that there seems to be an issue, when there really never has been an issue, and it startles me. I realise I’m standing out in the cold, glaring down the street at where the car has long since disappeared. I quickly look across the street to your house and I think I’ve seen a slight movement in an upstairs curtain, but I’ve probably imagined it.
Later, in bed, I’m unable to sleep. I feel as though my head is overheating from thinking too much, like my laptop when it’s been used for too many hours. I am angry. I am having half-finished conversations with my dad, with my job, with the man who stole my space in the car park that morning, with the watermelon that I dropped carrying from the car to the house which burst all over the ground and stained my suede boots. I am ranting to them all, I am setting everything right, I am cursing at them, I am informing them all of their shortfalls. Only it doesn’t help, it is just making me feel worse.
I sit up, frustrated and dehydrated.
Rita the Reiki woman I’d seen earlier that day told me this would happen. She’d told me to drink lots of water after our unusual session that I feel didn’t alter me at all, and instead I had a bottle of wine before bed. I’d never been to Reiki before and I probably won’t go again but my aunt had given me a voucher for Christmas. My aunt is into all kinds of alternative therapy; she and my mum used to do that kind of thing when Mum was sick. Maybe that’s why I don’t believe in it now, because it didn’t work, Mum died. But then the medicine didn’t work for her either, and I still take that. Maybe I will go back. I made the appointment when everybody went back to work, something to do, something to keep myself busy, something to put in my new yellow Smythson diary with my initials in gold on the bottom right corner which would usually be filled already with appointments and meetings and now is a sad depiction of my current life: christening times, coffee meetings and birthday celebrations. At the Reiki session I’d sat in a small white room that was filled with incense and made me feel so sleepy I wondered if I was being drugged. Rita was a tiny woman, bird-like, in her sixties, but she twisted her legs into a position on the armchair that showed her agility. She was soft-faced, almost out of focus, and I’m not sure if it was the incense smoke that blurred her, but I couldn’t quite see her edges. Her eyes were sharp though, the way they took me in and held on to every word that I said so that it made me take note of my own voice and I could hear how clipped and contained I sounded. Anyway, apart from a nice chat with a supportive woman, and a relaxing twenty-minute lie-down in a nicely scented womb-like room, I didn’t feel in any way altered.
She’d given me one piece of advice though for my busy head. I’d immediately disregarded it as soon as I’d left, but now I am barely able to formulate a single thought for long enough to be able to see it through, to process it, to get rid of it, so I take her advice. I remove my socks and pad around the carpet for a while, hoping I’ll feel ‘rooted’ to stop my head from drifting again into ranty angry territory. I step on something sharp – the end of a clothes hanger – and curse as I inspect my foot. I cradle my foot in my hands. I’m not sure how rooted is supposed to feel, but this can’t be it.
She’d suggested walking barefoot, preferably on grass, but if not, generally barefoot as much as possible as soon as I returned to the house, The scientific theory behind the health benefits to walking barefoot, is that the Earth is negatively charged, so when you ground, you’re connecting your body to a negatively charged supply of energy. And since the Earth has a greater negative charge than your body, you end up absorbing electrons from it. The grounding effect has an anti-inflammatory effect on your body. I don’t know about all that but I need to clear my head and as I’m trying to cut down on the headache tablets, I may as well try barefoot.
I look outside. There is no grass in my garden. That was the terrible, unspeakable thing I did when I moved in four years ago. I wasn’t a fan of gardens, I was twenty-nine years old, I was busy, I was barely at home, I was never home long enough to notice my garden. To avoid the effort involved in its upkeep, I had the relatively nice garden that was there when I bought the place dug up and replaced it with maintainable cobble-locking. It looked impressive, it cost a fortune, it horrified the neighbours. I put some nice black pots outside my front door with plants that stayed green all year round, pruned into clever modern twisted shapes. I cared a little bit about how it affected my new neighbours, but I was never home to discuss it with them at length, and I reasoned with myself that it would save me paying a gardener – because I wasn’t about to do it myself; I wouldn’t know where to start. There is still grass on the pathway outside of my house, which is maintained by my neighbour, Mr Malone, who did this without asking me. I think he sees it as his because he was here first, and anyway, what do I know about grass? I am a grass-defector.
I’d thought that buying my own house at the age of twenty-nine – a semi-detached, four-bedroom family home – was quite a mature and grounding thing to do. Who knew that when I dug up the garden I was losing the very thing that could have kept me grounded.
I check your house and your jeep isn’t there and all the lights are out. I never need to worry about anybody else’s house. I never seem to care. I put on a tracksuit and go downstairs barefoot. Feeling like a sleuth, I run on tiptoe across the cold paving down my driveway and straight to the grass that lines the path. I check the grass for dog poo. I check for slugs and snails. Then I pull up the ends of my tracksuit bottoms and I allow my feet to squelch into the wet grass. It is cold but it’s soft. I chuckle to myself as I walk up and down, surveying the street at midnight.
For the first time since I’ve moved in, I feel guilty for what I’ve done to my garden. I look at the houses and see how mine is dark and grey amidst the colour. Not that there is much colour in the gardens in January, but at least the bushes, the trees, the grass, break the grey concrete of the paths, the brown and grey of my paving.
I’m not sure if going barefoot in the grass is helping anything other than the onslaught of pneumonia, but at least the cool air has soothed my hot, over-wired head and freed up some space. This is unusual behaviour for me. Not the walking on grass at midnight, but the lack of control. Sure, I’ve had stressful days at the office where I’ve needed to regroup, but this is different. I feel different. I’m thinking too much, focusing on areas that didn’t require thinking about before.
Often, when I’m searching for something, the only way I can find anything is to acknowledge out loud what it is, because I can’t see it unless I fully register and envision in my mind what it is I’m looking for. For example, rooting around in my oversized handbags for my keys, I say either in my head or aloud, ‘Keys, keys, keys.’ I do the same in my house: I wander from room to room, saying or muttering, ‘Red lipstick, pen, phone bill …’ or whatever it is I’m looking for. As soon as I do that, I find the thing quicker. I don’t know the reason for this, but I know that it makes sense, that it’s true, that Deepak Chopra would be able to explain in a more sophisticated, informed, philosophical manner, but I feel that when I tell myself what it is I’m looking for, then I fully know what it is that I must find. Order given: dutiful body and mind respond.
Sometimes the very thing I am looking for is staring me straight in the face, but I can’t see it. This happens to me a lot. It happened this morning when I was looking for my coat in my wardrobe. It was right in front of me, but because I didn’t say, ‘Black coat with the leather sleeves,’ it didn’t appear to me. I was just idly searching, eyes running over clothes and not finding anything.
I think – in fact, I have come to know – that I have applied this thinking on a larger scale, I’ve applied it to my life. I tell myself what I want, what I am looking for, I envision it so that it’s easier to find, and then I find it. It has worked for me all my life.
So now I find myself in a place where all that I’ve envisioned and worked hard for has been taken away, it is not mine any more. First thing I do is try to get it all back again, make it mine again, straight away, immediately; and if that’s not possible – which it usually isn’t,
