One pond is good, two’s even better
Chapter 8
“We need frogs” I tell Bob. “To eat or to look at, or both?”?” he enquires. “The thing is” I say, “I read somewhere that Koi carp and frogs don’t get on together, so we’ve got to have another pond. Urgently. Just a little one”.
We both like frogs. Bob also likes obliging me, almost as much as he likes digging holes. At the weekend he digs a sunken round pond about the size of a dustbin lid. It’s maybe half a metre deep. He lines it and recuts the patio flags to overlap the edges and after filling it with water we beg some frogspawn from Dan’s communal garden. It has been raining heavily and their communal frogs have gone into an enthusiastic sexual frenzy and laid spawn in all the puddles.
I particularly wanted the new pond to be near the house so that we could see any activity through the glass conservatory doors on rainy days. Within the first week of establishing it, I’d stepped out of the conservatory carrying a basket of washing in front of me and walked straight into the pond. This happened a couple more times before the frogspawn got used to it and by then I was remembering to skirt around it. Later in the summer the frog babies, no bigger than my thumbnail, began to leave the safety of their watery haven. It was a warm day and I watched anxiously as they began a mass exodus and hopped across, what must have felt to them like, acres of hot, dry patio before they disappeared into the safety of the cool grass beyond.
Months later in the autumn, Bob and I are on the sofa watching telly in the living room. “Hang on a minute”, says Bob. “What was that going past the kitchen door?” He went to investigate and found a fat frog pottering past the fridge closely studied by our two cats. They bring a number of frogs into the house after that. They never puncture the skin despite lugging the patient amphibians through the stiff cat flap. We just as carefully, return the frogs to the long grass further down the garden. To be on the safe side, I put the light on if I come into the kitchen for a cup of tea in the night.
Stan and Brenda live next door to us, both retired. He is a small wiry man with heavy framed glasses and neat thinning hair. She is also small and has a fairy-like halo of yellow fluffy perm plus gold rimmed glasses. Bob calls their back garden Shed City. Stan has several sheds and they are all immaculately treated with black stain and also padlocked. This looks quite sinister written down. The remaining garden area is tilled to a fine crumble that resembles Christmas cake. I can’t actually remember anything growing in it though there must have been, mustn’t there? Stan is a kind and gentle neighbour, he feeds our cats for us if we go away. Despite his slight build he was unexpectedly fierce when thieves broke into my pink Morris Minor in the night and started pushing it away down the road whilst Bob and I slept. Stan woke, ran out in his pajamas and pursued the thieves shouting at them and they fled leaving the car in the middle of the road.
One summer’s day, his wife Brenda squeezes through the gap between our shared hedge and the water barrel by the wall of the conservatory in our back garden. She’s brought an offering of home grown tomatoes for me. It’s quite early in the morning and I’m watering the conservatory plants, peacefully and starkly naked. She stares at me in shocked horror and I freeze too, as if that might make me less visible. Then breaking up our little tableau she squeezes back the way she came. Neither of us mention it again and I’m glad that she never tries another visit without knocking to warn me. It felt like an invasion of my privacy although I’m sure that she hadn’t meant it that way.
Coming back from a holiday I’m surprised to see that their whole front garden has been concreted over and the flower beds have gone under. It now looks like a prison exercise yard for miscreant rabbits. Brenda explains to me, “I won’t be able to cope with it when Stan’s gone”. I’ve no idea why she thinks that he will die before her. At first I wonder if he’s been diagnosed with something terminal but I don’t like to ask. Gladly, time proves me wrong.
Across the road live Jessie The Healer and her partner Malcolm. We have a very good agreement about the protocol for visiting each other as Jessie and I are both freelancers working from home. Either of us can pop over and see if the other fancies a chat and no feelings are to be hurt if the answer is “Sorry I’m busy” or, “I’ve got ten minutes and that’s it.” When you work on your own it’s usually good to have company sometimes and also have the time alone needed to get on with work. Jessie and her husband are both editors at Oxford University Press and she is training to be a healer as well. She practises on me sometimes and I always feel rested and light afterwards.
She turns up one afternoon and asks if I’d got time to give her some advice about an issue in her family that is bothering her. It’s a Friday afternoon and sunny so I decide to knock off early and I offer her a gin and tonic. We take them out to the raised pond and sit on the wall seat chatting about this and that. I refresh our drinks a couple of times and suddenly Bob appears around the corner of the house in his suit and carrying a briefcase. It’s seven o’clock in the evening!
“We never talked about your problem”, I say, “S’all right, haven’t got one now”, says Jessie as she hugs me and gently staggers off. The next day she presents me with a handmade certificate For Proficiency In Alcohol Therapy. By this time I’ve had a lot of therapy of the non-alcoholic type, and it had seemed a natural progression to train as a psychotherapist. It was a good combination of very different kinds of work, half the week was set aside for my cartooning, both for commissioned work and my own themes for books which I then found publishers for. Two full days and an evening were filled seeing individual clients and facilitating a women’s group.
“I’m always feeling tired and ill, but never ill enough to go to bed” I complain at my therapy supervision group. “How ill do you have to be to go to bed?” asks the supervisor. I have a think, “Too ill to stand up” I reply. It turns out that I have M.E. Numerous people have pointed out that Myalgic Encephalomyelitis makes the word ME. I find this embarrassing, as if I only think of myself and not of others. Although I’m fortunate that my doctor recognises the illness, it’s a disease which is still in the early days of being acknowledged. Enclosed with a get well card, my mother sends me clippings from The Daily Mail “Malingerers claim to be sick and get paid huge amounts of benefits for lazing about”.
Actually it was the perfect disease for me though I didn’t think that at the time. My body and mind seemed to be saying “O.k. Viv, it’s really time to focus on giving time and care to yourself”. I’d always done this to some extent, but to actually let down my clients, which I was forced to do through the illness, felt alien and shameful to me. But no matter how hard I tried to “Get a grip” not to mention “Pulling myself together”, it was apparent that somewhere inside, the elastic had well and truly snapped.
The gardening goes kaput. As I become more exhausted, more fuzzy brained and develop increasingly painful muscles, I give up cartooning except the monthly letter page for New Internationalist. It’s still not enough. I’m cancelling appointments with therapy clients at the last minute, the pressure of not wanting to let a client down paradoxically making me more exhausted and sick. The therapy work has to go. As I grow worse I can’t even offer a closing, goodbye session to some of my clients.
It seems that the only thing I can do is to lie around thinking of nothing. Unable to bear the stimulation of the radio or even a book. Television is far too exciting. Mostly I feel very little. A great big blanket of restful M.E. engulfs me. I lie in bed, sometimes asleep, sometimes staring at the ceiling in a sort of catatonic state.
I have to ask Bob to help me which feels humiliating. He washes me in the bath, lifts me out and dries me whilst I weep steadily. I weep partly because I’m so weak, and partly because I can’t remember anybody helping me to bath or to dry myself when I was a child.
We both love the countryside and spend more and more of our weekends driving out of Oxford to walk, slowly because of the M.E., in the surrounding open farmland. Each time it’s harder to come back into the town.
We spend a few days in a tiny 1950s caravan on the edge of a cliff in Yorkshire. The caravan belongs to a friend of a friend. It’s the shape of a cough lozenge and covered in dog hair. In the hazy morning we pull on sweaters and shorts and sitting on uncomfortable rocks, we drink tea and eat bread and butter to avoid trying out the ancient grill. Looking out over the patchwork of fields far below Bob says “We could live in the countryside if we wanted too.” “Yeah” I reply, sheep snuffle, thoughts mull.
By now, the M.E. has dragged on for nearly two years and I’ve tried so many remedies that have cured somebody that someone I know has heard of.
“I’m not hopeful about this Hypno-Healer chap” I say, trying not to be hopeful. “Me neither” says Bob. “But you never know.” He’s driving me to London to see some bloke that somebody recommended.
The healer reminds me of a dodgy salesman and introduces himself with “Yeah, I fix all the tricky ones that no one else will touch.” I think “Thanks a lot, now I feel like a social pariah”, but being me, do not say so. As soon as he starts the healing session something magical happens and I trust him completely. “I’ll be back working in my studio in six weeks time” I say whilst under hypnosis.
On the way home we are both deeply sceptical and in six weeks time I’m back at work in the studio and the garden. Apart from occasional brief relapses, I’m fine. The healer dies of a stroke in his early sixties.
The town is growing more crowded. The pale cream stone and architecture of the ancient university buildings draws increasing numbers of tourists all year round. At weekends it’s almost impossible to find seating space in a tea shop for the privilege of being served by a petulant undergraduate who gives the impression of having better things to do.
At the same time Bob is becoming increasingly fed up with commuting daily to his workplace in Birmingham. He’s been travelling there by train for several years since moving in with me. The service is infrequent and usually uncomfortably crowded. The commute also adds hours onto his already long working day.
“I’m just not sure how I would feel about actually living in the countryside”, I agonise. “I might get loads more memories back, even have a break down. But it might be really great.” After eventually realising that we cannot read the future, we make a decision to try it for a year. As Bob’s mum left him some money when she died, we can afford to get a place in the countryside and still keep the Oxford house. We begin to look at maps and draw a circle around Birmingham. It seems that we could live somewhere rural and still be within an hour’s drive of his work place. Herefordshire, Shropshire and Worcestershire are all possibilities.
We’re going to rent out our home which will help to fund the experiment and make the house useful in our absence. I walk round the Co-op looking for cushions to replace the pistachio green silk ones that I can’t bear to entrust to the tenant. “He might take them outside or spill things on them” I explain to Bob. “You’d do better to leave them” he says, “Given that the cats cover them in fur, and use them as welcome mats for muddy paws and vomit”. I leave the cushions but, despite their disgusting habits, still take our cats. Our rabbits, Ruby and Rachel, are coming too.
It’s only for a year. Somewhere in the pit of my stomach, a shark swirls.