Sleepwalking Into Catastrophe
Olivia wrote this short fictional piece in response to my request for articles on Brexit. She's not alone.
- T
If she hadn’t been sitting in the car park with the passenger door open, she would never have noticed it. A tremor, as though a heavy lorry had just driven past. She looked up from the forms she was filling in, but it had already stopped. She took a gulp of water and reminded herself to buy multivitamins next time she was in the supermarket. It was probably nothing.
The next time it happened she was in the car again, waiting for her housemate. Laura always seemed to have a million and one things to do in the mornings and it became easier to wait for her in the car. The heat was already shimmering above the tarmac. The driver’s door window kept falling out of the frame when she tried to roll it down so she had the door open to let a breeze in and avoid faffing around with the window when she got to work. If the door hadn’t been open, she wouldn’t have felt the tremor. It was faint. Faint enough to be a lorry, but it lasted almost a full minute before settling down.
There was nothing on the radio about it that night, but she started leaving the door open whenever the car was parked. The ground shook. Nobody seemed to notice.
The curtains swung in a non-existent breeze. Thunder rolled through a cloudless sky. Her head pounded and she existed outside of herself. Above herself. An onlooker in her own life as sirens wailed and nobody else heard.
An earthquake will die away. A storm will blow itself out. Flood waters will drain. But some things have no end. If you hunker down and wait for it to pass, you will be waiting a lifetime. And if, one day, you open the door and step outside, you will find the world so changed as to be unrecognisable.
She wrote letters and nobody replied.
She phoned government numbers and nobody answered.
She marched with face paint and a pithy sign and nobody looked, nobody listened, nobody heard.
Sleepwalking into catastrophe is scariest for the one who is awake. The one who felt the early tremors, who heard the crash of waves on the shore, who smelt sulphur in the air.
They prescribed her pills which made her throw up, and more pills which made her hair fall out, and more pills that made her eat every bar of chocolate on the supermarket shelves. They suggested counselling, which had a waiting list of eighteen months, and yoga, which did wonders for her tight hamstrings and very little for the way the windows rattled.
She was sitting at work with her head in her hands when someone touched her shoulder.
“You feel it.”
“Yes.” She looked up. “I thought I was the only one.”
The stranger shook her head and held out her hand.
“There are more of us. Come with me.”
- Olivia Ballantine-Smith
