Going back

The road running along the quayside is becoming narrower and its surface increasingly broken down. It is hard now to keep the car on a straight line.

Out of the mist over the harbour to the right looms the huge bulk of an ocean-going tanker, tied alongside. Further out in the estuary, the masts of a wooden tall ship needle into the sky. Its sails are furled.

The wind appears out of nowhere, tossing the fragile carcass of a small boat high into the air. I brake automatically and shut my eyes tight in case it hits me. I open them as it flies across my path and into the lagoon on my left.

The vehicle I'm driving seems to be made of nothing stronger than plastic and it's a struggle to keep it going straight. Nothing happens when I brake.

The roadway is now scarcely wider than the car I'm driving. It's become a pot-holed track, petering out into nothing where the land ends and the ocean begins. I have no way of stopping before it does.

+++

Abruptly the scene shifts. I am driving the same vehicle, but now on an industrial estate some miles inland from where the road ends. On one side of me, over the river, are huge and dilapidated brick-built warehouses, on the other small thrown-together shacks. The warehouses are deserted.

I am driving in reverse gear along what feels like an old airport runway. I desperately want to stop at one of the shacks so that someone can help me get the car out of reverse and fix the brakes. The harder I want to stop, the faster I go.

I can hear my tyres screeching on the tarmac and I know that the only way I am going to be able to bring myself to a standstill is to veer off the tarmac onto the gravelled roadside where the flimsy shacks are and crash into one of them.

This is what I do.

Nearby, a young man appears from one of the shacks I haven't hit. He turns out to be a motor mechanic and tells me I want to get my brakes fixed. He says I am lucky not to have hurt myself because my vehicle is so fragile and the shack I hit sturdier than it looks.

He sucks his teeth when I struggle out of my car. It will be some time before he can get the parts he needs to mend it and meanwhile I have no way of getting to where I want to be except to walk back the way I've come. Where I am is miles away from where I need to be, and there is no passing traffic. I am not sure that I will ever find my way back to him but I have no choice except to leave the car with him and turn my face towards the town.

It takes an age to retrace the journey I have just made, in reverse, in seconds. I don't see a soul on the way.

When I reach the town, it turns out to be a maze of tiny streets lined by shops and offices. The traffic is manic and the footpaths narrow. I can almost feel the cars as they pass me. I cannot find my way.

I ask a woman in a shop and she takes me to the door so she can show me. She wants me to go back the way I've come, navigate road-crossings where the traffic lights are always against me and there are no breaks in the streams of vehicles. I double back and come to the main road at another junction, but still can't find a way to cross. This is hopeless and I weep with frustration.

+++

The scene changes again. Now I am somewhere I know: I am in bed, in in my own bedroom at home. It's the middle of the night.

I hear voices outside the front door of the house and the sound of it slamming. My son and his friend are joining the crowds of people, in twos and threes, who are making their way past the house towards the centre of the small seaside town where I live. The night is obviously cold as everyone is huddled in thick coats, scarves and hats. They are either all coming back from somewhere or all going to the same place.

I get up, and dressed, and join the flow. Although some of the streets of the town are familiar, they are jumbled together with streets of houses from long-ago places and the coastline I eventually arrive at is not the one near where I live now.

The length of the pier to my right is illuminated by strings of white lights between the lamp posts all the way to the end. There are people swimming in the cold sea between the pier and a headland somewhere to my left where the waves crash. It's odd that there should be crashing waves half a mile away when the sea where the swimmers are is calm and clear.

A young man catches at the tail of a dolphin, one of a group of half a dozen teasing the nearby bathers with their sleek speed. A cheer goes up from the watching crowd as he makes contact with one hand, and a second as he secures his grip with the other. In seconds the dolphin has swished him away and out of sight.

I am walking along a broad promenade towards a place where lights shine and crowds gather but when I get there, I see no-one. I am completely alone. I pass boarded-up cafes and kiosks and the fairground, and few lights burn.

I turn for home, sad and cold and suddenly very very tired. I watch myself turn left just past the church into my road, and see the tears glistening on my face.

++++

When I wake up I feel broken. The parts of my body that should fit together are separated by tiny cracks. They have shifted so that each is no longer quite where it should be. I have dislocated.

+++

I go back to work the day after tomorrow, after four months away on sick leave. I have had periods of depression before but I have never been back to the same place afterwards. Depressions in the past have been the catalysts for major life changes, reasons to move on. This staying put is new and frightening and as if the illness has been for nothing, even if I know that the changes I need to make have simply been postponed.

I am afraid of what will happen when I go back.

I am afraid of not knowing what to do or who to be when I am back in a place that has caused me pain. Where there are people who knew me before but don't now. Where things seem superficially the same but have rearranged themselves subtly and mysteriously while I wasn't there into shapes I may recognise but that feel as different as I do.

Dis-located.