Thank you so much.
I am not in the habit of getting back to emails, not that I get a great many of them. I don’t really ‘do’ the internet at all. I don’t have social media. All I have is WhatsApp and I rarely even use that. But with your message I felt I must reply, and reply properly.
I am so sorry for all you have been through. I remember your mother from parents’ evenings. I liked her. I remember her as serious, but with a little smile twisting the corners of her mouth when she spoke about you. You clearly cheered her up. Just being you. And that was a real achievement, especially for a teenager.
I started writing a response to you and it just grew and grew, far beyond a little email.
I have been meaning to write this all down for quite some time now, to be honest with you, and your message was the perfect prompt.
What I am about to tell you is a story even I find hard to believe. Please don’t feel any obligation to take my word for anything. But know that nothing in this is made up. I have never believed in magic, and I still don’t. But sometimes what looks like magic is simply a part of life we don’t understand yet.
I can’t promise that my story will help you believe in the impossible. But it is a tale, as true as any, of a person who felt there was no point left in her existence, and then found the greatest purpose she had ever known, and I think I have a duty to share it. I am definitely no role model, as will probably become clear. I have felt a lot of guilt in my life. And in a way this is a story about that. I hope you find some of it valuable.
Please find it attached.
Very best wishes,
Grace Winters
Sob Story
Once upon a time there was an old woman who lived the most boring life in the universe.
That woman rarely left her bungalow, except to see the doctor, help at the charity shop, or visit the cemetery. She didn’t garden any more. The grass was overgrown, and the flowerbeds were full of weeds. She ordered her weekly shopping. She lived in the Midlands. Lincoln. Lincolnshire. The same orange-bricked market town that she had stayed in – apart from a stint at Hull University centuries ago – all her adult life.
You know the place.
And it wasn’t so bad, but its streets were less welcoming than they used to be. It was hard to see half her fond memories covered in chipboard and ripped posters.
She sat and watched daytime TV and read the occasional book and did crosswords and Wordle to keep her brain in gear. She watched the birds in the garden, or stared at the small empty greenhouse, as the clock on the mantelpiece kept ticking. She had been an avid gardener once, but not any more. She was only seventy-two, but since her husband passed away four years before, and her Pomeranian – Bernard – shortly after, she had felt completely alone. In fact, she had felt alone for more than thirty years. Ever since April 2nd 1992, to be precise. The date she lost her entire meaning and purpose and never really found it again. But the loneliness had become a deep and literal reality in the last few years, and she felt approximately one hundred and thirty-two. She hardly knew anyone. Her friends had either died, or moved away, or retreated. She only had two contacts on her WhatsApp – Angela from the British Heart Foundation and Sophie, her sister-in-law, who had moved to Perth in Australia thirty-three years ago.
But of all the sad moments of the past, it was still that April date long ago that reverberated most profoundly. The death of her son, Daniel, had been the hardest and most devastating, and when a tragedy is as large as that it leads to other sadnesses and failures, the way a trunk leads to branches. But life went on. She and her husband Karl eventually moved into a bungalow and tried to make the best of things, but that hadn’t really worked, and so they’d sat in mutual silence, watching television or listening to the radio. Her husband had always been very different to her. He had liked hard rock and real ale but had really been a fundamentally quiet soul. The trouble with tragedy is that it tars everything that comes after. On occasion they’d been comforted by the sharing of their memories, but when Karl died it became harder because the memories had nowhere to go. They just stayed, growing stale, inside her head. Which was why, whenever she saw herself in the mirror, she only saw a half-life. A slow-falling tree in an unseen forest.
She was also in a bit of a pickle with money.
Her life savings no longer existed. Ever since a scammer with a comforting Scottish accent had pretended to be a NatWest security advisor, and – with her foolish help – stole the £23,390.27 she and Karl had put away together. It was a long story, full of cunning characters and one ridiculous old fool (hello!), but much to your good luck it is not the tale being told here.
So anyway – this particular lady – she just sat there, with her aching legs, trying not to answer any emails from strangers, and letting her crumpled life drift like an empty crisp packet down the river. Her only spark of interest was the sight of a chaffinch or starling at the bird feeder in the small back garden, as she inhaled old memories and faded dreams.
Apologies
Sorry. That was a bit grand and melancholy. Talking about myself in the third person. I am just setting the scene. It’s going to be fun, despite that introduction. And, like so many of life’s fun things, it will begin with minimally invasive radiofrequency-based vein ablation surgery.
The Inability to Feel Pleasure
I was upside down when I decided to go to Ibiza.
The surgery bed I was lying on was tilted so far back I thought I was going to slip off. There was a mirror on the wall. I looked at my unkempt grey hair and tired face and hardly recognised myself. I looked like a faded person. I avoided mirrors, where possible.
They were trying to reverse the blood flow in my legs, you see. I was more covered in blue veins than a chunk of Gorgonzola and I needed to get them done. Not because of how they looked, but because they were making my calves itch and giving me sores. My aunt had died of a blood clot which broke free and achieved the lofty status of a fatal pulmonary embolism, so I wanted to get the varicose veins sorted before a clot of my own arrived with similar ambitions. I am sorry if this is too much information. I’m just determined to be as honest as possible with you, so I am starting as I mean to go on.
Truthfully.
So, as I listened to the radio, the vascular surgeon injected me multiple times with local anaesthetic along the length of my left leg – the final injection she fondly but accurately named the ‘bee sting’. Then we got to the main part where, she told me, a catheter would be inserted into my calf to blast my great saphenous vein from the inside with 120°C of ‘sauté-an-onion heat’.
‘You should be able to feel something…’
And I did feel it. It wasn’t pleasant, but it was something. The truth was that I hadn’t really felt much for years. Just a vague lingering sadness. Anhedonia. Do you know that word? The inability to feel pleasure. An unfeeling. Well, that had been me for some time. I have known depression, and it wasn’t that. It didn’t have the intensity of depression. It was just a lack. I was just existing. Food was just there to fill me up. Music had become nothing more than patterned noise. I was simply, you know, there.
You should be able to feel something.
I mean, that’s the most basic and essential form of existence, isn’t it? Feeling. And to live without feeling, then what was that? What was that? It was like just sitting there. Like a table in a closed restaurant, waiting for ever for someone to occupy the furniture.
‘Think of something nice…’
And for once, it wasn’t very hard to think of something. And the main thing I was focusing on was a letter I had received from a solicitor’s office less than two hours before.
Pineapples
The letter had been an unusual one.
It had informed me that I had been left a property in Ibiza, Spain, belonging to someone called Christina van der Berg. This Christina van der Berg had died and left me her worldly goods. Or some of them, at least. Another scam, I thought. You see, when people have stolen from you, it is hard not to see the world as a den of thieves. But even if I hadn’t been scammed, it was ridiculous to imagine that someone I had never known would bequeath me a house in the Mediterranean.
It took me a while to understand that this is not exactly what had happened. Or, to put it another way, it took me a while to realise Christina van der Berg was not a stranger. Not exactly. The trouble was that the name had rung precisely zero bells. The Dutch element – van der Berg – added a kind of grandness that seemed fictional and unfamiliar, and it had thrown me off. Luckily, though, the letter from Nelson and Kemp Solicitors gave some further information, including a fleeting mention of this Christina’s maiden name: Papadakis.
Now, that did ring a bell.
Christina Papadakis had been, for a very short while, a music teacher. We had worked at the same school together just before I got back with Karl. (We’d been together at university, but he had been in too much of a rush, so I’d called a hiatus.)
