‘Hang on, that’s not what I meant!’ he called after me. ‘I’m sorry, that was a completely stupid thing to say. I didn’t mean you. I’m an idiot… ah, crap.’
I slowed down enough to turn around and shout back, with a pleasing amount of breath, ‘I’m a lot stronger than I look.’
Strong enough to not allow the brainless words of this self-proclaimed idiot to slow me down.
I decided to drag myself round for forty minutes, ignoring my anxiety’s insistence on repeating the warning on a loop:See, not safe! Alone in the woods! Not safe for a normal person, let alone a freak! What if you panic, fall and break your ankle, smash your head on a rock? What if a crazed rapist ambushes you from behind a tree – that big one up ahead? Murders you, leaving Joey motherless? What if that guy finds you curled up in a ball by the side of the path again, because a squirrel ran past or you heard a tiny rustle, because that’s all it takes to turn you into a snivelling wreck? Get back home, where you’re in control. You can’t handle outside, remember? Remember what happens when you go out?
I ran until I reached home, my miserable, bitter, whining anxiety snapping at my heels the whole way.
I rewarded myself with bacon and maple syrup on my pancakes that day. Men who couldn’t keep their opinions to themselves could go and run right off the top of a cliff, for all I cared. They didn’t know anything about me, or how I’d got there.
* * *
The day my home became my prison would be forever scarred onto my soul. Things had been getting progressively worse for the previous few years. Some ups, like getting my job as a bid writer through an old friend of Cee-Cee’s, eventually saving enough money to move Joey and me out of her house and into a place of our own. Lots of downs: continuing to be estranged from my parents, growing increasingly isolated as anxiety dominated my decisions, struggling to make ends meet while juggling a job and a small child, continuing to depend on Cee-Cee as my self-esteem rotted.
It was all too easy to accept Cee-Cee’s offers to organise things, or take Joey to school. She’d never settled back properly into coaching once I’d left the squad, grumbling about ‘all talk and not enough talent’, but I suspected the truth was that my career ending had hit her hard, seriously damaging her reputation and rattling her confidence. And so when she slipped into early retirement, we ended up propping each other up with our mutual guilt – while I had ruined her only chance at training an Olympic champion, along with her future career, I knew she blamed herself for pushing me too hard, and losing sight of the girl behind the ultimate goal, resulting in my current anxiety issues.
So, her way of making it up to me was by accompanying me out and about more and more. Most people assumed she was my mum, and Cee-Cee didn’t bother to correct them. She had no family of her own to speak of, and so in a weird way that was sort of what she’d become. Every eighteen months or so, I’d have a go at clawing back some independence, knowing that most adult daughters don’t need their mothers to come along to a routine dental appointment. Unnerved at how difficult I was starting to find it to do things alone, I would tell Cee-Cee we’d get the bus instead of accepting a lift. I’d have a feeble attempt at making my own decisions. Wonder if I could actually go about making a new friend or two somehow.
Then dawned the fateful Day of Doom.
I’d managed our current Cee-Cee holiday for five days. A record. It’d been tough, I’d nearly cracked more than once, but, like any addiction, I was praying things would get easier the longer we held out. Until something as simple as running out of tampons – an easy-breezy hop and a skip to the shops for most people (especially the women on those old tampon adverts; they’d whizz there on a skateboard, or hang glide to the square or something). To me, it felt, mentally, like a trek up Mount Everest. For a moment, I considered asking my ten-year-old son to go to the supermarket and buy feminine hygiene products. And then I had a brief flash, like a light bulb switching on, of just how low I’d sunk to even have that thought.
I threw on an old jumper and hurried to the shops. Joey was at football club, but the shop was packed with mums and children, teenagers in hoodies swarming around the snacks, pushchairs blocking half the aisles. My panic levels began to rise, adrenaline pulsing through my bloodstream in time with my pounding heart. I started to shake, felt the nausea slosh around in my stomach. Head down, I pushed past a cluster of kids, my aim to grab what I needed and get out of there.
It was as I reached for the blue packet that I heard it.
‘It is. It’s her.’
‘Nah, can’t be. What’d she be doing here?’
‘She’s buying incontinence pads! That’s so hilarious.’
‘Shhhh! It’s not her.’
‘It is! She just looks different cos she’s got so fat.’
‘Man. That’s so tragic. And those clothes. What happened to all her money?’
‘Well, it obviously didn’t go on a hairdresser.’
‘Just goes to show. What goes around comes around. She flaked out, and now she’s an ugly cow who pees her pants.’
‘Hey, take a photo. We could sell it!’
The floor of the shop bucked beneath me like an agitated bull as I turned and frantically headed for the exit. Lurching towards the door, I bumped against more people, all of whom had become a blur. My head clanged, drowning out any other sounds.
Including the sound of the two women who’d been slagging me off reporting me to the manager. And the sound of him ordering me to stop, not to exit the shop.
Even if I had heard, I don’t think I could have turned around.
Until a grip on my shoulder forced me to a halt, dragged me back into the supermarket as onlookers gaped and gawped and gossiped and giggled.
Cee-Cee fetched me from the manager’s office an hour later. She knew his sister, had been a loyal customer for years. Her concise explanation about my previous mental breakdown was enough for them to let the matter drop.
And while I may have suffered no formal punishment for my crime of stealing a box of sanitary products, the actual punishment had been two years, three months’ imprisonment. My jailer, agoraphobia. Her deputy, panic attacks.
But not any more. I was currently rocking my parole.
