Where the West Wind Blows Read Free Page A

not belong.
    My accent and life experience sets me apart and, because I am educated the shrink, therapist , seems to think it’s different for me; as if the division of a piece of paper and letters after my name makes me somehow different. But I am bloody well hurting.
    I comply with the therapist and do just as he says, answer with the words he wants to hear or I shall never get out. Escaping from here becomes my only aim although I have no idea where I will go next. I don’t want to go home.
    I shy away from telling my analyst the reasons I can’t return or he would know I am not as recovered as I pretend. I am running from the past into a future I cannot bear. My life with James is back there and I know I need to look forward, even though the future rears before me like a black impenetrable wall, I have to climb it. I just need to learn how to do that.
    Learn how to walk again.
    I don’t expect I will ever run.
     
    A few weeks before I am allowed to leave, the therapist, not ‘shrink’ you notice , gives me a pencil and some blank sheets of paper and I rediscover my art. There is a sort of healing in the act of reproducing the misery around me. For a few short hours every day I blank James’ face from my mind and make sketches of my fellow inmates – prisoners of misery. It stops me from thinking, numbs my sorrow and for a little while, I am almost me again – a sad, chastened, grown up version of me.
    Soon portraits adorn the walls around my cubicle. The old woman with her owl-like eyes stares wistfully at the floor, her arms crossed upon her breast; the light from the window shadows the scars of the sad girl’s unreadable features and my unlooked for ‘friend’ with her straggly hair and down-turned mouth, clutches her tea-stained dressing gown, her grubby bandages showing at the cuff.
    And, beside them, hang the faces of three of the nursing staff; worn out, upbeat and novice in turn. And I’ve drawn my therapist as I see him so often, his fingers probing his beard, watchful eyes, a slight frown on his brow as he struggles to understand.  He will never understand.
    The sitters, those that can acknowledge me, ask to keep their portraits and, as I sign my name in the bottom right hand corner in dark, black strokes, I wonder if I am not committing some sort of perjury for I am not sure I am the person that used to bear that name.
     
     
     
     
     
Four
     
    When they open the door to let me leave the sunlight blinds me, the traffic deafens me and the petrol fumes taint my tongue. I cannot stay here in London. I have to escape. I cannot go home, even though I promise my analyst that I am ready to return, ready for anything. Instead of taking a taxi to the house I shared with James I trudge along to the letting agent on the high street.
    I want somewhere far away, I tell him, somewhere peaceful, somewhere scenic where I can think, somewhere I can work.
     
    ***
     
    From the outside, the cottage is pretty with whitewashed walls, glossy red window frames and a solid wooden door, the paint peeling in the salt laden wind. We are two of a kind, the cottage and I, lonely and a little unkempt. Damaged.
    A path curls through a garden that sprawls with of the sort of things that grow well on a windswept shore; valerian, daisies and dog roses, the blossoms fading now, going to seed …like me. 
    Inside it is dark and cool.
    The small rooms, ill served by tiny windows, smell of damp and the fireplaces are the sort that belch more smoke back into the room than can escape up the chimney. The beams on the ceiling are blackened with a hundred or more years of soot and the corners are dark, the furniture sagging, the carpets threadbare.
    But it suits me.
    To me, it is perfect.
    It is remote, small and the hamlet sparsely populated and best of all, I have never been here before and, as far as I know, neither has James.
    I am here alone. He hasn’t followed me. There are no memories to trip me up at every corner, none of