Page 77 of To Hell With It
We both stared at each other for a moment and then I carried on, because it suddenly felt quite freeing to just say it as it was to Eve. ‘Then there’s the woodlice – I have to count them every night and make sure there are twelve. They live on my gate. If I don’t do it the guilt eats me up and I imagine them screaming, all squashed and dying.’
‘Do woodlice scream?’ Eve asked.
‘I’ve no idea, but they do feel pain. I have to brush them all off onto the ground before I shut the gate and then they come back again to the exact same spot the next night.’
‘How do you know it’s the same twelve woodlice?’ Eve asked.
‘It is.’
‘But how do you know?’
‘It just is,’ I said, irritated.
‘What else do you do?’ she asked, intrigued.
‘If I see a red car on my way to my best friend’s salon, I have to start all over again, otherwise she’ll die.’
‘That’s superstition.’
‘It’s OCD.’
‘It’s anxiety.’
‘Yes, but it’s also OCD,’ I snapped. ‘If I walk out of a room, sometimes I have to walk back into it again because I’ve seen something and have to go back to look at it.’
‘What do you see?’
‘I don’t even know. It might be a crease in the duvet or some fluff on the floor, but then the intrusive thoughts come and I’ll be there for ages. Sometimes it’s not a penis, sometimes it’s an incest thought.’
‘That’s wild! Like what?’
‘I’m not going to say what.’
‘Go on.’
‘No.’
‘Do you do anything else?’
‘Plenty,’ I said. ‘When my grandmother was alive, I used to watch her sleeping to make sure she was still breathing. I’d stare at the duvet for ages to check it was moving, whisper I love you three times and blow her three kisses. They had to land on her head, so I’d blow them to make sure they travelled in a straight line.’
‘That’s fucking nuts,’ Eve chuckled.
‘When I’d eventually crawl back into bed, I’d have to get up and do it all again because I’d convince myself she’d died on my way back to the spare room.’
‘Jesus. You must be knackered.’
‘I don’t even know anymore.’ I shrugged. ‘Then there’s the whole germ side and it’s not even about getting ill or the actual germs that bother me. I’m fine with horseshit or cow poo. I could stand in it with bare feet or have mud all over my face and it wouldn’t bother me one bit. But if someone sneezes near me or spits on the ground or I see some phlegm or have to touch money or pin machines or door handles – I can’t cope with it. I have to sanitiseeverything.’ I emphasised the everything.
When I finally finished, Eve looked at me with a frown and then said, ‘You need a sound bath.’
* * *
I had no idea what a sound bath was. Eve explained that it didn’t mean actually lying in a bath but involved being bathed by different sounds to relieve worries and anxieties. When I agreed to do it because Eve explained I wouldn’t have to touch anything, she went on to tell me that she knew someone on the way to Te Puke who could do it and I figured it wouldn’t do any harm before I saw Jack if it relaxed me as much as Eve promised it would.
We drove for another forty-five minutes and I spent the whole time looking out of the window. The roads wound around valleys so green and vibrant it looked like a fantasy world (just like the shire inThe Lord of The Rings,actually). There were mountains at every turn, much bigger than Slievenamon, and giant ferns everywhere – and I mean giant, as in bigger than me. The rivers were lagoon-blue and as wide as Auckland’s roads (and if I’d seen them first, I would have described Auckland’s roads like the rivers). The whole way, I imagined a raft of my worries drifting along beside me.
When we finally reached Waihi (that’s where we were headed for the sound bath), I had fallen in love with New Zealand more than the reason I was there. It captivated me in a way I didn’t know existed. And it only dawned on me when Eve pulled up outside a house that resembled more of a shack that I hadn’t done one OCD ritual the entire journey there (if you didn’t count sanitising the dead cat).
