June

“What I’ve been left with is a slight but noticeable limp and a vivid memory of Gemma in a floral dress on her last birthday party on the 8th of June.”

It was June 2008 when I decided to change my name by deed poll. I’d never spent too much time on creative thinking so I picked June without excessive dwelling. At least my initials would stay the same. I hated the weird spelling of my given name. Fair enough, the easiest way was to change it to Justine but to me it sounded like someone’s grandma or a drag queen. So I got rid of the “sti” in the middle.

My dad chose my name. Once he was gone, I didn’t have to worry about hurting his feelings and my mum didn’t seem to care. That was a small sign of rebellion but it didn’t mean I stopped doing what was expected of me. I duly went to uni and five years later emerged from Queen Mary with a degree in medicine. Literally emerged. I’d had no life outside of my course for five years. Thinking about it, I didn’t even get to know Mile End. At least not until I met Mickey and his dog. Being me, I fell in love with him almost straight away. In a hindsight I think it was because of the dog or else my gaydar was temporarily out of order.

Mickey made me feel safe again in my own skin. He had a confidence in my ability to be a wholesome and meaningful human being. He made me tea with honey and I made him his favourite vegan dishes. We ate and drank sitting in front of my defunct fireplace filled with stones picked on beaches instead of fire. That’s what friendships are for, I realized. It hit me that I hadn’t had a true friend for a very long time. Not since Gemma died and I was left with a not-so-fully functional leg. Gemma’s mum never spoke to me again. Now I think it was because she couldn’t forgive me that I survived — more than she couldn’t forgive the man who ran us over.

People thought that I would be drawn to orthopaedics — what with the leg and all, I presume. I wasn’t because I didn’t choose medicine to find answers to my own questions. That was my official explanation. I kept using it also after I pursued psychiatry as my post-grad. Mickey just smirked and shrugged. He knew better — but then I’d told him about my dad.

That would have been a complete disaster if not for Dr Olafunke. She had this weird ability to see right through me and she praised or prodded me when the situation called for it. She knew instinctively when I was losing patience, when I couldn’t connect and when I was freaking out. She believed in me way more than I believed in myself. She knew that I cared and that my heart was in the right place but she wasn’t aware of my absolute inability to inhabit my patients’ worlds. I knew when they would benefit from Olanzapine and when Xanax or Diazepam were in order but I could never grasp why they said what they said and what made them react in a certain way in a particular moment. I knew the science behind it but I didn’t really understand. Even in my bleakest times in life, I didn’t touch the edges of depression, nor have I been endowed with any hereditary illness. I’ve always been a get-up-and-go kind of person and seeing people who hadn’t left their homes for months and spent their days sleeping or staring at the wall made me want to scream. I knew they needed meds and talking therapies but what I really wanted to do was to put them in a rickshaw so they could experience sun, rain and wind in their hair and in no time they would be cycling themselves, climbing mountains and swimming in lakes and their wounds would be healed. Which obviously is not the case in most circumstances.

But it was for me — as far as my leg was concerned. At the time, doctors thought I wouldn’t be able to use it again. At first, they were opting for amputation, then they proclaimed it would remain stiff and unable to support my weight. But I wasn’t going to settle for that. I needed to run free for both of us. The doctors called me their feisty eight-year-old. In the end, what I’ve been left with is a slight but noticeable limp and a vivid memory of Gemma in a floral dress on her last birthday party on the 8th of June.

My mum didn’t question my name choice. For years she’d been getting used to my disassociation from my home country. She had no right to complain. She uprooted me and took me to England before I even had any notion of my homeland or nationality. She said she needed to rescue our family after my dad’s spectacular financial flop. The business boom of early 1990s turned out brilliantly for many budding entrepreneurs but my dad was not one of them.

So she became a cleaner in London, while my dad’s soul started sinking. During one of his hospital appointments he met Christina. The vast lawns of hospital grounds became an unlikely meeting point. Every Wednesday morning my dad would arrive for this psychotherapy session and when he finished an hour later, Christina would wait for him on a bench, smoking a cigarette. She was erratic, impulsive and colourful and she was slowly getting better until one day her health was deemed restored and she wasn’t there anymore.

In the era pre-dating social media and mobile phones, it took my dad almost a year to reconnect with her. But obviously at that time I didn’t know any of that.

It’s my mum who bestowed on me her solution-oriented behaviours and can-do attitude. Her cleaning gig morphed into a full-fledged business employing fifteen Eastern European cleaners and my dad finally got a job in a warehouse, subsequently becoming a supervisor. Financially they were doing alright and they never spoke again about the times when my mum was a maths teacher and my dad a journalist with his head full of business ideas. They just subtly made me feel as if I needed to do better.

I decided on medicine even before I did my GCSEs. I wanted to be a vet but my mum — in her signature, almost imperceptible way — let me know that wouldn’t be prestigious enough. So I ended up at Queen Mary University of London, conveniently located next to Mile End Hospital — and Tower Hamlets Archives where I learned to spend my free time, reading up about people whose ancestors were real East Enders — unlike my family.

But that was later — after my A-Levels and university admission, after my dad’s funeral, after my mum’s unexpected decision to sell her business and the flat we lived in Stratford, pay the rest of the mortgage off, put a deposit on a flat in Stepney Green for me and buy herself a campervan. She didn’t consult me on any of it. One day I came back from holidays in Cornwall and found a “sold” sign in our front garden. I thought our first floor neighbours were moving but then I saw my mother packing the kitchen. “Your things are in storage in Hackney Wick”, she said matter-of-factly. “And here is the key to your new flat.”

I haven’t been to Cornwall since. I feel that if I go, the world as I know it may disappear again.

I wish my dad was buried on the Tower Hamlets Cemetery — I would have visited him every week. But his grave is on a massive necropolis where dogs are not allowed and I go to cemeteries only with Mickey who rarely parts with Fyodor. So I almost never visit my dad’s grave. I don’t know if my mum does, I often have no knowledge of her whereabouts, now when she went mobile. She may be somewhere far away or on a campsite in Lea Valley, who knows.

Dr Olafunke stopped asking me about my family when I made it clear I had nothing interesting to say on this subject. Mickey has never asked, he’s been waiting until I choose to say something myself. But I know what they both think — that I haven’t come to terms with my bereavement, that I’m longing for a shelter, that I need to find my own truth. In some respects they are right — I’ve never found an answer to my question why I was spared while Gemma perished (and I did look for it — in churches, meditation centres, Tarot decks and Ouija boards).

I was also never able to forgive Christina. I managed to extend my compassion to my lost, broken father and to my overburdened, coldly practical mother but couldn’t find it in my heart to reconcile with a woman who I believed to be a source of a schism in my small, tight-knit immigrant family.

That’s why when I saw her in the waiting room of a mental health clinic where I was completing a three-month placement I knew I wouldn’t let the opportunity pass. She was begging the receptionist to let her see a doctor after hours and she glanced at me with her hazy, rabbit-like eyes. She was still erratic but not colourful anymore. I quickly stepped into a bathroom door, although there was no chance she would have recognized a feisty eight-year-old with a leg in braces in the present me.

There and then I decided I was willing to forgo my professional ethics and my private values if necessary. I simply had to finally get to know Christina.

This is the backstory of the protagonist (MC) of the novel I’m writing. Choosing an archetype and writing a backstory is a powerful exercise — your character will tell you things you’ve never expected her/him to say or do! I’ve done it as a part of the first class in the year-long Heroine’s Journey Storycraft Workshop taught by Heather Jo Flores.

Keep reading…

https://medium.com/lit-up/egoists-fb786f48f5a6

https://medium.com/lit-up/fear-of-losing-e03f56d5e2b6