THE WAY THINGS ARE
By Colette NiReamonn Ioannidou
This concerns two women I know: one was at extinction level, almost, and the other was avoiding fossilising a face. Susie who has been keeping to her home a lot recently and not answering her phone except to say, ‘I need some rest.’ tried to end her life. Mental health problems in Cyprus, experts tell us, don’t lead to suicide as much as they do elsewhere. Really? those of us who have gone through that dark passage and came out the other side or had people we love try to charge down it, might say.
We are all mostly wrapped up in our own minds so that, at times, it doesn’t sink in that a friend may be showing warning signs of inner trauma. We should have sensed it with Susie who got on a bus, travelled up the mountains, got off, walked into the trees, found a quiet place and sat down with a bottle of whiskey and a pile of sleeping pills. She was already under when a man from a village out walking his dog found her and called for help. She survived and is now in hospital. It will be a long, slow haul back to interest in life.
Susie managed, resiliently, to survive a bad marriage and a worse husband. Then he died and she was free and had a bank account for the first time in her life. The relief of being free and being able to spend freely took over from oppression and his control of her life where money was concerned. We began to notice that she was finding Antonis, a wrong choice for her, attractive, although he never even looked twice at her except to criticise. The last time we had met as a coffee group he had insulted her and she had closed the door on going out and we hadn’t tried hard enough to get in, thinking she’d ‘come around’ eventually.
‘The psychiatrist said it was a trigger, what you said about that man… Antonis,’ her son who had flown in from the UK told me. We had had a long chat on Skype before he arrived in Cyprus.
‘All the things she had been suffering and sustaining and pushing away, came back at her like a wrecking ball. Her sense of self-worth, which was on the rise, was knocked back down to floor level and she suddenly found herself too tired to want to fight anything anymore.’
He would have to return to his work and his family; so we assured him we would be there for her day and night now that the alarm had been raised. He would return when the hospital was ready to release her into our care under his proxy. Cassandra, Stavroulla and I visited. She was heavily sedated and limp on the bed, her eyes sad and empty. Saying a lot of blah, would not have been of much use. We just sat with her, held her hands and promised we’d take turns to come back and keep her company until she was well again.
‘We should have promised that sooner,’ Cassandra said as we left the hospital. I could not argue with that.
Then there was Helen, arriving out of the blue when we discovered each other on Facebook after years of lost contact. My childhood pal had gone to live in New York, married it and had a good life. On a whim, she decided she was going to ‘come see Cyprus’ on her way to London to meet hubby who was at some conference or other. She booked a long weekend at the Hilton.
‘Kids grown up now, travel’s the thing.’ All Irish intonation had evacuated her vocal range and she was pure Nuu Yoirk as we spoke on the phone.
We met in the foyer of the Hilton; she had invited me to lunch. She is my (advanced) age, but the face had stopped growing old. In fact it had stopped doing most things she was so stretched or Botoxed or mummified, not sure which. She was giving me the once over from the depths of her reigned in eyelids. I knew she was taking stock of my wrinkles and I could hear that ‘Oh Gawd, you look ancient!’ dying to get out from behind those puffed up glossy lips and unnaturally white teeth.
Expensive jewels, clustered around her face, neck, wrists and hands, loudly sang ‘Money, Money, Money’ louder than an ABBA chorus. We chatted vacuously about her for most of an hour and then she arranged the lips into a smile of sorts saying, ‘We’ll go Dutch on this right? You know how thrifty my mom was, got that from her, riiight?’
‘Riiight,’ Says I, thinking that if she had mentioned it was ‘Dutch’, I would have taken her to McDonalds. I ate my lovely lunch and told her I needed the ‘rest room’. I exited the building faster than Frasier might and from a taxi I called to tell her – not quite lying, ‘Sorry, I have urgently to go see a friend who is ill and needs me. We’ll be in touch, have a great trip.’
I took the taxi on to the hospital where Susie was sitting up sipping tea. Give me that tired face and decent heart any day. The extinction level event is passing and the preserved fossil is somewhere in the air or on some foreign ground being as tight with all her bloody money as her plastic surgeon was with her skin.
