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, because I’m a realist, not a voodoo practitioner – then I must find something else to look for, something else to achieve. I’m obviously talking about my job here. I know I will get back to work eventually, but I have been put on hold. I have been stalled, and there is nothing I can do about it.
I’m on what is called ‘gardening leave’. It has nothing to do with gardening, thankfully, or I’d have a very long year power-hosing and weeding between the cracks of my cobble-locked garden. Gardening leave is the practice whereby an employee who has left their job or who has been terminated is instructed to stay away from work during the notice period, while still remaining on the payroll. It’s often used to prevent employees from taking with them up-to-date and perhaps sensitive information when they leave their current employer, especially when they are leaving to join a competitor. I wasn’t leaving to join a competitor, as I’ve already explained, however Larry felt certain that I would work with a company we were in relative competition with, a company I had tried to schmooze to buy ours. He was right. I would have worked with them. They called me the day after I was fired to offer me a job. When I told them about the gardening leave they said they couldn’t possibly wait that long – twelve months gardening leave!! – and so they went off to find somebody else. Not only has the length of my gardening leave chased away other employers, I have absolutely nothing to do while I wait. It feels like a prison sentence. Twelve months gardening leave. It is a sentence. I feel as if I’m gathering dust on some shelf while the world is moving on around me and I can’t do anything to stop it or join in. I don’t want my mind to start growing moss; I’ll need to continuously power-hose it, to keep it fresh.
Blades of wet grass stick to my feet, working their way up my ankles as I walk back and forth on the patch of grass. So what happens when I’m put on hold for an entire year and there’s nothing I can do about it? What do I do?
I pad up and down on the wet grass, my feet starting to feel cold but my mind buzzing with a new idea. A new project. A goal. An objective. Something to do. I must right a wrong. I will uproot the very ground I walk on, which will be easy because I feel as if I have been uprooted already.
I will give the neighbourhood a gift. I will bring back the garden.
‘He’s beautiful,’ I whisper, looking at the tiny baby in my friend Bianca’s arms.
‘I know,’ she smiles, gazing at him adoringly.
‘Is it amazing?’ I ask.
‘Yeah, it’s … amazing.’ She looks away, her smile a bit wobbly, her eyes sunken into the back of her head from two nights’ lack of sleep. ‘Hey, have you started a new job yet?’
‘No, I can’t – you know, the gardening leave thing.’
‘Oh yeah,’ she says, then winces and goes quiet for a moment. I don’t dare interrupt her thoughts. ‘You’ll find something,’ she says, giving me a sympathetic smile.
I have grown to hate that smile on people. I am in the Rotunda Hospital, once again finding myself visiting somebody as they do something else. It has occurred to me lately that most of my visits have been this way. Calling into a friend at work, dropping by one of my sister’s classes to watch, seeing my dad while he is busy with Zara, chatting to friends while they are watching their children swimming or dancing, or at a playground. Every time I see people lately it is me interrupting their life, them busy with something – distracted heads that have one eye on me and another on their job – while beside them or across from them I am still, patiently waiting for them to finish what they’re doing to answer me. I am the still person in every scene of my life and I have started to see myself from afar each time it happens, like I’m outside of myself, watching myself be still and silent while the others move around, tend to their work, their children. Since realising this, I have tried not to meet anyone during the day when they are in the middle of something and I am not. I have tried to make appointments for nights out, dinners, drinks – times when I know we can be on even ground, face to face, one on one. But it is difficult, everybody is so busy, some can’t get a babysitter, we can’t seem to synchronise a night out that suits everybody, and so we struggle to arrange anything. It took me weeks to organise a dinner party in my house this weekend. Then I will be busy, and they can be still. In the meantime, here I am in the hospital, sitting at the bedside of one of my dearest friends who has just had her first baby, and while I am happy for her, of course I am, and was secretly delighted about