Sunday 20th: Mathilde, Monday, School Trip

The two big cups of unaccustomedly-strong coffee are making her even more anxious and sweaty than she would usually be before a trial like today’s trip: the edge of anxiety magnifies and focuses her self-doubts; she’s convinced that she must have put on weight over the last week, because her waistband feels tighter than it should – concomitantly, her backside must be projecting, spoiling the line of her long coat and drawing attention to her weight gain; she tries to keep her chin tilted upwards so that the loose flesh she imagines flapping around her jowls like turkey wattles won’t be too obvious to the casual observer; she can feel cold droplets of sweat forming in the warm caves of her armpits, sliding down the already moistened and stuck-together curls of underarm hair, and then dropping onto the odour-sensitive material of her clothing or onto the warm, powdered swell of her fleshy rib cage.

As her awareness of her anxiety and sweating grows, so does her fixation on it, and her ability to ignore it. It sits at the front of her consciousness until she finds herself swearing at it, repeatedly telling it to ‘fuck off’. It taunts her back by sneering, and then giving another quarter turn to the sweaty anxiety trap. Mathilde, self-aware enough to know what she’s doing to herself, doesn’t find this circular self-torture amusing: rather, it’s an indictment of her weakness and uselessness, of her inability to master herself, to be the mature and responsible woman that she should be at her age. How can she expect to carry off the responsibilities of guiding/leading a school trip when she doesn’t even have enough self-control to restrain her feverish imaginings?

She can feel her breathing changing, getting faster and shallower, so she stops walking for a moment and tries to fix her attention on something that will take her outside of herself, which will separate her from the swirling mess of uncontrolled interiority. She’s at the end of one of the main bridges across the river. She leans against the waist-high stone balustrade and closes her eyes, trying to concentrate on the things that aren’t inside her head: the warmth of the risen sun on the taut curves of her cheeks; the play of the cooler breeze alternating on her skin; the rumble of traffic vibrating through the deck of the bridge and up through the pavement and her autumn boots.

Stop. Stop. Stop. Breathe slow and deep. Put your hands flat on the top of the wall. Concentrate on that cool stone and the feeling of the air coming in and out. It will soon be over, and you can relax and sleep.

These feelings of panic and inadequacy are familiar to her. All her adult life she has felt like this, on and off: that sense that she doesn’t feel how she should feel, that she’s different from other adults – weaker, more childish, less reliable, incapable of nuanced adult behaviour. It’s as if she’s got something missing from her brain, the piece that lets you enter fully into the world, unafraid, and which allows you to bridge the gap between yourself and other people; the magical element that allows you to love and makes you lovable. [To explore here – At bottom, she knows that there’s something wrong with her, something lacking, which stops her from really giving her heart away to another person, and stops her seeing the signs that indicate that someone else might want her to do so.]

So often in the past, before new experiences or frightening events – parties, social engagements, job interviews – she has found herself in a fluxy state of anxiety, sweating, and repeated visits to the lavatory, winding herself into an ever-tighter spiral of [tension]; in this state, she often spawns a little fantasy of liberation or escape, where some convenient deus ex machina frees her from her obligation/duty and leaves her [free] to do whatever she wants to do: these liberations, when they come in actuality, are usually of her own making – the feigned illness, the invented car trouble – and they usually result in a couple of hours of euphoria [eg…] followed by a residue of guilt and self-disgust that she’ll usually seek to obliterate with drink or food.

Afterwards, when the hangover is fading, or the food is sitting heavily in her digestive tract, she’ll pledge to herself that this is the last time that this is going to happen. From now on, things will be different – she’s going to get a grip on herself, and make some changes to her life that will bring her into a new era of maturity, personal security and self-regard. These plans usually revolve – distantly and vaguely – around personal grooming, nutrition, disciplined daily schedules, and commitments to daunting reading lists/exercise regimes. She’ll say “Right, that’s it! a lot.

When she’s in the midst of these resolution-making frenzies, she’ll often find herself realising that she seems to have been sleepwalking through her life for months: she’ll realise that she’s barely smelled a smell, or seen a colour properly, or noticed anything visually, or registered anything new in her world for weeks or months upon end. This will terrify her momentarily: she’ll feel as if she might as well have been dead for that period of time. These bouts of anhedonia just creep up on her, she knows, but she’s never aware of them until it’s too late: it’s only ever in retrospect that she can see how the colour, flavour, spice and energy has leeched out of her existence until it feels as if there’s nothing left that isn’t grey, irritating and inert.

[also…the things that bring her back to herself; and the sense of your life being ‘over’ in some way – when you get yourself cul-de-sac’d, and then realise that you’re going nowhere, and that what’s keeping you in that dead-end is, partly, the sense of hopelessness and inertia born of having nowhere to go, and no novelty in your world…and how playing things safe and hiding away from the things that could hurt you locks you into another iteration of that self-perpetuating cycle…]

Sometimes it will be a piece of art that jolts her out of this shadow world and back into the concrete, three-dimensional world of the senses, and into a world where her life is not over – a world where she can recapture a sense of enjoyment of the world, and realise that there are still new things she can do, new directions she can set out in. A world where she hasn’t already done all her best work, and where she can still offer things. A world where she isn’t washed out and knackered, on the back foot, and where she is awake to positive possibilities, and not just to fear, negativity, and the resignation to necessity. Where she still has the energy and courage to take risks, and the confidence in her own abilities to do the things that she’s good at, and which might – just might make her happy and fulfilled.

[Oh yes…sometimes it’s a piece of art…] There are particular books, the thought of which alone can take her to the brink of this more positive world […]; and there are particular poets whose rhythms and cadences can open up a little sunlit space in her mind, where a spark of indeterminate possibility is kindled, a space where you get an echo of that feeling you had at the start of the long school summer holiday when you were a teenager – the feeling that you had boundless energy, and that there were no constraints on you; that you could do anything you wanted to do, and that all you had to do was wait until the time was right and turn your attention to that thing; that you could live a number of different lives; that time is not short, and that the whole world is lying out there, waiting for you to discover it in your own time.

[More often, though, it’s a piece of music [or music and an image, like in The Rock and Roll Years] that will drag her involuntarily into a world of vividly-evoked memory and present emotion, making her shoulders and nape of her neck tingle with a melancholy anticipation of loss/that plangent feeling of nostalgia – that all the world of your childhood and its perfect, worry-free sunlit summers has been irretrievably lost [except, ironically, via the dream-like clarity and conviction of involuntarily memory – the kind whose vividness and immediacy can make you start with surprise, and which can make those amazed tears of recognition and loss creep into your eyes.]]

She opens her eyes, and there’s the river glittering in the multifaceted sunlight, and the glinting glass and cool shadows of the big-money corporate riverfront headquarters, and the paint and metal trim of the boats glinting in the sun, and the slosh and smell of the river scum and pollution around the bridge’s piers, and the iridescent sheen of oil on the water.

And here she is, on this anxiety-fuelled Monday, and now nothing is going to save her from the duty she has to do [leading the school trip] – she looks at her watch, and there are only another five minutes until the rendezvous with the other teachers and the kids. Choiceless, she has to resign herself to the task, and, freed from the possibility of reprieve, she does so with shocking ease: shocking to her, in the sense that she can create so much anxiety and unhappiness for herself in imagining the things that can go wrong, and generate so much self-disgust and self-loathing, that the rapidity of the transition to resignation makes her think that all of that angst and internal wrestling was a waste, waste, waste of energy, and that she can’t really have felt those anxieties in any real depth, and that she is just wallowing in the luxuries of self-indulgence, of narcissistic martyrdom, of habit-based empty solipsism. For a moment, she sickens and amazes herself…and then she flips over into finding it funny – especially how she can move so rapidly between these different mood states – that feeling of being out of control, roller-coastering on emotional waves that she can never control, but which – sometimes – she can manage to see coming, and which she can catch and surf on [until the metaphor drowns itself in a weary ocean of over inflation…].

Just. Stop. Fucking. Thinking. Just be. Just do.

So she strides off to meet the other teachers, her hand in her overcoat pocket, clamped on the fat wad of notes she’d made during and after yesterday’s reconnaissance trip with [uncle x].

There aren’t as many children as she’d envisaged in her ‘worst case’ imaginings – this is a positive start for her, as it means that she feels some of the pressure to perform (and to be perfect) diffuse. The other three teachers involved in the trip all seem genuinely glad to see her, and they all drop into a friendly, relaxed banter. It feels like it might actually be all right.

She watches the other teachers usher the kids down the river stairs, then across the slippery dark stone [jetty] and onto the slowly undulating deck of the converted barge they’ll be travelling on. The barge’s cargo hold has been converted to seating, and there’s a lightweight glass roof supported on narrow pillars; the sides of the seating area are open to the air, and there’s a little raised booth at the prow of the barge, equipped with a microphone and surrounded by plexiglass screens to keep off the spray and rain – this is where Mathilde will stand and make her commentary for the children as the barge steers its route through the city’s waterways.

The kids are chattery and hyper as the barge pulls away from the mooring, but Mathilde knows that this frothy haze of breakfast cereal and orange juice energy will soon burn off, and they’ll settle down into relatively docile and well-behaved attentiveness: there’s something innately awe-inducing about being so low down in the water, and in sensing the cold, deep water thrumming only inches below your feet, and in seeing the might and detail of the city from this low, unaccustomed angle. She feels those things herself, and she knows that each child will also bring with them a wealth of imagination, expectation and interests, and that today’s sights will impress themselves on their minds. She envies their impressionableness and openness to new things.

(c. 2090 words)