Christie Watson - Quilt on Fire: The Messy Magic of Midlife

FICTION

Tiny Sunbirds, Far Away

Where Women Are Kings

NON-FICTION

The Language of Kindness

The Courage to Care

VINTAGE

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First published by Chatto & Windus in 2022

Copyright Christie Watson 2022

The moral right of the author has been asserted

Cover quilt Erin Wilson
Photograph of quilt Aniza_Iiguez
Design Suzanne Dean

ISBN: 978-1-473-58440-2

This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorized distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the authors and publishers rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

For my mum. And her mum. And her mum.

This book is based on real events. However, some names and details have been changed in order to protect identities. Joy, for example, is made of composite experiences. Alastair is an entirely fictionalised character.

I am invisible. I finally got what I wanted. My brother and I spent much of our childhood arguing about superpowers: would it be better to be invisible or to be able to fly? As a child I often dreamt I was flying and would claim that nothing could beat that feeling of speed and freedom, the giddy whoosh of being in the night sky. Invisibility, my brother would tell me, leaning in and whispering as if it were a secret, means you can spy on people. You can know everything. Eventually we would both agree that to see without being seen would be the greatest of all powers.

Yet here I am, invisible, and I feel totally and utterly helpless.

I am sitting in the car outside Sainsburys and people are walking past me without so much as a glance in my direction. I look straight at them with a swollen, crying face, and nobody looks back at me. Ive never really been a crier. I can watch the saddest of films without shedding a tear. My nurse heart, Ive often thought, is a bit hard and brittle around the edges. I can laugh a lot, be incredibly sarcastic, sometimes sardonic, and have developed the dark protective humour of my profession. Yet here I am, a blubbering, snot-crying wreck. I feel like running, too. Away from something I cant quite name. My leg muscles are tense, on high alert, as if they want to bolt. I remember my friend Joy, after her son was born, phoning me up in a panic. She told me shed been putting the bins out when she looked down the lane and had suddenly wanted to run. Run away and never come back. She described the longing for freedom, to be herself once more, without carrying the weight of another life. I wanted to leg it. To run fast as my legs could carry me. I looked into the distance and every single bone in my body screamed at me to run. I feel like that now: like packing it all in, running for the hills. I watch people walking past, resolutely oblivious to me, as I sit in the car staring out at them. In a full, busy car park, I feel very alone. And just wrong somehow. I feel like Im floating outside my own skin, looking down at myself, but all I can see is a faint outline, a shell, emptied of organs, vacant. I cant articulate these feelings, not even to friends and family; I cant seem to relate to anyone, except perhaps Mrs Dalloway: She had a perpetual sense, as she watched the taxi cabs, of being out, far out to the sea and alone; she always had the feeling that it was very, very dangerous to live even one day. Perhaps it is insomnia? For the first time in my life, I am not sleeping. Ive been waking, routinely, every night at 3 a.m. foam-mouthed, shaking and sweating with anxiety, like a rabid dog.

Am I a terrible mother? Is the world ending? Did I turn the oven off? Did I pay the parking fine? Is my TV licence up to date? Will I go to prison? Who will take care of the children?

I worry about everything, but mostly about my teen children. They have been watching me suspiciously, recently, as if I am possessed. They move past me cautiously staring, a little confused, and when they ask, How was your day? in bright, breezy voices, I tell them, good, great, Im fine, and ask about theirs, but instead of sounding reassuring, my voice sounds artificial, saccharine.

I spend an entire weekend staring at the television screen. The only problem is that the television is turned off.

I search every morning for my keys, which I keep in the zipped part of my bag. They are never there when I first look. I scour the house, the kids bedrooms, even the oven and fridge, where I do keep finding random things: my wallet, passport, a lipstick. Finally, when I check my bag again, they are there suggesting they were there all along. I dont believe you, I tell the keys. Even the keys look worried.

I get out of the car slowly and head into the shop. I always pick the trolley with the dodgy wheel, which is a bit of a metaphor for my love life, really. My trolley today, though, is worse than unmanageable, so I give up and grab a discarded basket. I look at the rows and rows of food and my head spins. All I need to do is buy food to fill the almost entirely empty fridge and cupboards and make sure there are dinners. The basics. And yet it feels like a mammoth task. I dont care; its as though I have no care left, its been totally rinsed out of me. Im empty of it, this womans resource that is assumed unending. I have suffered compassion fatigue in my nursing career before, but this is something entirely different. Care fatigue? A woman walks past with a shopping list, checking things off as she goes, aggressively ticking. I cant plan. I walk down the aisles quickly, and chuck random items into the basket as if Im doing Supermarket Sweep. Pasties, courgettes, Mini Cheddars, tinned sweetcorn. I am burning hot. My legs and feet stop working properly. I suddenly shuffle as if weighted down, through the aisles, and my eyes blur. I feel the cool coming out of the freezer section, and stop. People walk past, ignoring me still. I must be sick. Flashes and dots float inside my eyes. I open a glass door, the shelves behind it half empty of fish fingers, and lean in, and in, until I am able to half close the door. The air is cold on my back and I feel sweat drip down my spine, almost in relief. The icy blast on my body goosebumps me into calm, and I take a few deep breaths. My head settles and I come to a pause, half in a freezer, next to the fish fingers, frozen in all senses. I should feel humiliated. I often do. Im standing in a freezer. Surely, I should be cold-water swimming, like everyone else seems to be, all those women who are doing life better? But instead of getting out of my fish finger freezer, I watch the other shoppers walk past, dare them to say something, anything. I lean into the cold. Still nobody looks at me. They arent averting their eyes, embarrassed, or pretending to be on the phone; they simply carry on as if they cant see me. One man comes over to the freezer next to mine, opens it, takes out some breaded cod, then closes it, without a flicker of awareness that I am there.