Astonished at this notion of simply leaving, Lou scanned her mental list: her mother, Ned, her work. They had all let her down horribly.
‘You’re right,’ she said, holding her head up to face the wind. Her new life would start now: nobody would take advantage of her again, she decided with unaccustomed ferocity.
She thought of what Mim used to say:If you can’t have a good day, just have a day. Get by.
Today, Lou could get by. Today, she would be as strong as Mim had been.
She smiled tentatively at her sister and nodded.
‘Let’s go.’
Chapter One
Three days earlier
Today was not a good day for the Barking Dog, Lou decided as she walked up Academy Street in the morning sunshine. She had an interview with Oszkar, her boss, for the newly created company strategy manager job, and it should be nothing at all – she’d worked for Blossom Flowers for twelve years and Oszkar and Bettina called her ‘the backbone’ of the company – but anxiety ran to the beat of its own drum.
Breathe, you nincompoop.
But as she turned in the direction of the flower shop, she heard the noise of a morning delivery truck rumbling on an adjacent street, and without waiting for her conscious mind to figure it out, the Barking Dog had flicked the danger switch inside Lou’s head. It was the heavy, menacing thrum that did it: hurricane? Plane crashing into Cork? Lou’s dog didn’t differentiate between the grumbling of a heavy truck and a plummeting flight. It went for the worst possible case in all instances.
Lou gave herself a mental shake and started her thoughtful breathing. Today was not a day for catastrophic thinking.Breathe in for six, hold for three, out for nine. She had to stop walking to do it because the ‘out for nine’ bit was hard unless you were very fit.Breathe in for six, hold for three, out for nine. It was working, slowly. It seemed to be the only thing that did.
Toni had once suggested that Lou give her anxiety a name: ‘so you can shout at it. Tell it to leave you alone ... no?’ Toni simply didn’t get it. Toni thought anxiety hit like menstruation pains – once a month possibly, and then it was gone – mostly because she’d never had a moment’s anxiety in her life, a fact which astonished Lou. How could two sisters be so different? Same parents, seven years between them and nobody would have even guessed they were sisters. Toni was utterly self-contained and confident, while Lou could fit her self-confidence in one of the tiny, enamelled pill boxes their aunt Gloria collected.
Toni never said sorry.Women live in a world of muttering ‘sorry’, Toni had said so often that it was one of her most quoted statements; that andWhat I look like is the least interesting thing about me. Which might be easy to say when you were forty-three with dewy skin, perfect bone structure, and a body that seemed to burn calories effortlessly – but it also happened to be true, since Toni not only had a wildly popular TV show, she also mentored as part of the Women in Business charity. She had everything – of course she couldn’t understand Lou’s anxiety!
It was Mim who had taught Lou her breathing exercises. Mim explained that you had to inhale deeply, fill your belly and exhale slowly, all of which put the frighteners on the amygdala, AKA the Barking Dog, which was the bit of the brain that entirely hijacked a person’s sense of peace.
‘How are you so good at this,’ Lou had said to Mim, who never suffered from anxiety, who was always so serene, calm, strong.
Lou desperately wanted to be all these things and had fooled most people in her life that shewasall these things. Except for Mim. While most members of Lou’s family appeared to think that Lou was a rock of sense with an occasional foray into nervousness, Mim – who she’d only met for the first time when their daughters were five – had instantly intuited that Lou was a walking timebomb of fear and anxiety.
‘Talk radio,’ Mim had explained lightly. ‘I listen a lot and you hear lots of useful things. That’s why I know about the amygdala and all that stuff.’
It was a little longer into their friendship before Mim explained that her father had suffered from anxiety and depression.
‘Thank you for telling me,’ Lou had said gratefully. ‘It’s really helpful to hear about other people who feel the same. I don’t talk about it much because ...’
‘Because people don’t understand or they ask you how you can be depressed when you have so much, like a husband and daughter and are clearly only experiencing first world problems.’
Lou nodded fervently. ‘Exactly.’
She’d wondered at the time why she could say all of this to Mim and not to her husband, mother or sister, but then she reasoned that Mim understood because of family experience and nobody in Lou’s family had ever apparently felt the way she did. Plus, Lou didn’t like worrying the people she loved – she was a problem-solver, she liked to think and that meant not bothering other people with her worries.
Now, Lou raced past the Pandora store, which had pretty troll beads in a grape hyacinth colour that might be a nice present. Ned was bad with birthday gifts and she knew he hadn’t got her one yet and he’d be embarrassed at the party when he realised. She should have reminded him and—
Damn. She’d stopped the breathing.
By half eleven, when she was due to meet Oszkar for her interview, Lou had put out several metaphorical fires, had gulped half a cup of cappuccino and had managed five minutes to talk to Sarah, the company’s accountant, who was dealing with a wildly out-of-control situation involving her extended family and a great-uncle’s will.
Money, reflected Lou sadly, was more easily weaponised than uranium.
‘Thank you,’ sobbed Sarah at the end of the call, after Lou had advised stepping back from the situation entirely.
‘You’re not a lawyer and everyone will just get mad at you,’ she’d said. ‘Your poor uncle! He must have been sad at the end to have made such a muddle.’
Lou liked to give people the benefit of the doubt – he can’t have meant to cause such trauma.
