Christmas stocking

Hi Blog followers, I wrote this in July, I think.  I didn't ever post it because, well,  we all know why.  I am posting it now because there is a postscript to it.  Something that has happened subsequent to it, which I am going to post but if I don't put this on, then the context will be lost!

Christmas stockings

‘I come with baggage’, she laughed, deprecatingly.  ‘So do I’, I admitted, but for the first time in my adult life, I didn’t feel the need to laugh in that way.  I did let rip with a belly laugh that travelled all the way up and exploded in the small space.  One man, idly picking up bits and pieces of chinaware, turned round.  My laugh echoed.

‘I have a sack bigger than Father Christmas’ that I drag around with me,’ I said, continuing to laugh at the absurdity of the need to admit that I hadn’t got to forty something, with some serious life experience under my belt.  I imagined myself hauling my load across continents, which I had done, dragging the contents behind me as a necessary burden to bear. 

But in that small space, in a charity shop in Blandford Forum, Dorset, chatting to a fellow South African, it occurred to me that what I pulled along was not something to be ashamed of.  Was it really necessary to feel the need to admit to dragging, or pulling life experience?  Were the memories, carefully wrapped and sometimes hastily thrown into what made me, me, necessary to be perceived as burdensome?  Perhaps it was the result of the manic side of my bipolar condition, rearing its ugly head, in the face of some unseasonably sunny weather that was altering my perception.  But for the first time, I felt pride in my baggage, rather than embarrassment.

I had met Mandy the week before, when browsing the charity shops.  That activity is my preferred means of escape from the tyranny of being tethered to a computer, trying to earn a living, typing up indistinct, regional accented Market Research interviews.  When I get to the point of fighting a very real desire to tip my laptop out of the window onto the high street below, I push away from my desk and go walkabout.

In my view, charity shops are my God’s answer to: being an economic migrant; satisfying the Magpie urge in me to acquire pretty sparkly things that can just about be justified as ‘Only costing £1.00’; providing me with conversation and human company.  Charity shop workers, be they volunteers or paid,  seem happy to while away a minute or two chatting to a complete stranger, rather than pretending to be helluva busy stacking a supermarket shelf.  Are they a magnet for the disaffected?  I am not sure; suffice to say that surfing them gives me real pleasure and a sense of adventure.  I have got ‘Lucky at the tip’ on occasion, as my aunt refers to finding a little gem for next to nothing.  My best find to date, which really had everything to do with its colour and shape, is an LSA International – it still had the label on – vase, for £1.25.  A lusty, red, pear shaped vase which I love!  They retail, or so I discovered, anywhere between £35.00 and lots of pounds.  ‘Get in there’.

So there was Mandy, serving a woman, negotiating putting something on the side, till pay day, being assured, ‘I get paid weekly on Fridays, so I’ll definitely be here on Saturday’.  And both of them were speaking in South African accents.  ‘This shop’s like South Africans Are Us,’ I said, when she had completed the transaction.  ‘Tell me about it,’ said Mandy, in a very, distinctive, Capetonian accent.  ‘We’re all over the place.  My neighbours both sides, are South African, okay, well, one’s from Zimbabwe, but still’. 

‘How long have you been here?’ I asked.  ‘Oh, nearly two years now!’  Such a long, long, time, she seemed proud.  ‘And you?’ she asked me.  I did a quick mental calculation, ‘Ten, almost eleven years’.  ‘Wow’, she said in something close to awe, her eyes, widening.  ‘But I’m home sick, like crazy,’ she said, taking money from a customer and ringing it up on the till.

‘Oh, yes, I know what you mean’, I said, thinking that I am no longer homesick for that place.  I am just homesick.  ‘I hate going back’, I admitted.  ‘I go to pieces, I can’t cope.  I should really love it, but I don’t.  I was hijacked twice and something inside me is broken, I just suffer from anxiety and I should love it, because that’s where my sons are, but I just can’t enjoy it.  I can’t relax.’

‘Oh, me too; they actually got in the car, with my kids!  But, I had a dicky immobiliser so they couldn’t drive away that time.  They also broke into the house, this was in Joburg, because I’d moved there with my now ex partner, and I can still remember swallowing the key.’ 

‘Swallowing the key?’ 

‘Yes, I locked my kids in the bedroom and swallowed the key and I told them to, ‘Just shut up, just shut up’’.

Do other shoppers stop to listen, I am not sure?  We are speaking a language that is familiar to us but must seem fanciful to others.  Surely she must be exaggerating?  Surely I was never hijacked twice, in Howick, a retirement village just outside of Pietermaritzburg, in Natal?  A place that few have even heard of.

 ‘Well,’ I whisper, ‘I manage on pills, they do help’.

 ‘Oh God,’ she says, ‘I’ve been on them since the beginning; I could never, ever cope without them.’ 

Her attitude seems ever so slightly cavalier, since I fought the obvious for five, long, tortuous years, of terrifying depression and humiliating mania. 

‘Good for you,’ I say.  ‘I wish I’d gone on them sooner.’

She says, as I leave to return to the ball and chain of mumbling Market Research respondents, ‘Come by any time for a chat and a coffee’.

So I do.  Today, she admits her eyes are red because she’s been crying. 

‘What happened?’ my concern is genuine. 

‘Oh, I heard today that my mum had a stroke yesterday.  But she’s fine, she’s in hospital and my sister says she’s okay for now’. 

Her mum is still resident in South Africa and Mandy’s son lives with her. 

‘I’m facing such a dilemma.  Do I spend what I have and go there now?  But that money is what I am putting on side for my son’s passport and paperwork.  Or do I wait and regret it, if my mum dies?’

‘What does your partner say?’ I ask, hopeful that she has a partner who is sympathetic to the dilemmas, both financial and moral, she faces.

‘Oh, he’s very supportive.  But he worries that I’m going to dump him and go back.  So, it’s a bit difficult.’

‘I think you should wait till things have died down a little bit.  Trust your instinct, trust your gut.  You will know if you need to go now, or later.’ 

I am not really in a position to give this advice, at all.  Where was our instinct when my husband’s father passed away in his sleep, two days after I had received an email expressing concern for my three week stay in hospital for a complication following pneumonia?  But I don’t tell Mandy this, because it will only frighten her, I feel.

‘Yes, all I can do is pray,’ she says, and I do hope that her God answers her prayers in a way that she finds comforting. 

No, I don’t have baggage.  I am, as Johnny Clegg so aptly put it, a ‘Scatterling of Africa’.  And what I bring with me is a wealth of experience, fear, hope, pain, anger, joy and faith; a regular Christmas sack of goodies!   Let the unwrapping begin.