‘I’m just saying,’ said Nadia, ‘that you seem a bit distant, is all. Like, whatever it is, you can tell me.’
They were sat at breakfast in the courtyard of the club, handsome waiters buzzing around them and the promise of poached eggs with hollandaise sauce on the way.
‘I. Am. Not. Hiding. Anything,’ she said, enunciating every syllable. ‘Don’t crowd me, okay? If I want to talk, I’ll talk!’
She said it shiftily – not mad, or angry – she was like a teenager who didn’t have the words for her feelings yet. But the feelings were most definitely there.
Nadia couldn’t figure it out. She’d waited all weekend to say something, thinking every time she caught Emma’s mind wandering off halfway through the conversation, or noting how she obsessively checked her phone, that surely it would be the last time. Nadia gave Emma imaginary chance after imaginary chance, but she kept using them up. Nadia had gone from being slightly irked to totally outraged to now genuinely concerned about Emma’s behaviour. It was like she’d had bad news she didn’t want to share, or was waiting for bad news to come. Nadia’s own funk had lifted enough to be aware of the company she was in, and the company she was in was undoubtedly in pain.
‘It’s only because I’m worried,’ Nadia said. ‘I thought I was the broken one this weekend. But I feel like you need some TLC too.’
Emma softened.
‘Oh, I’m sorry,’ she said, acknowledging the waiter with a smile and muttering thank you as her orange juice was delivered. ‘I don’t mean to snap. I’m obsessed with my phone because of work and I promise I’m not doing anything other than listening to you 100 per cent. I’m enjoying myself! I am!’
Nadia reached out to touch her friend’s hand.
‘Me too,’ she said, not buying what Emma was saying at all. ‘But also I’m here, okay?’
‘Okay,’ Emma nodded, smiling.
Their eggs came, and they ate, observing with a nudge when an Australian pop star from the noughties walked past their table, and smiling broadly when Brooklyn Beckham walked past with Madonna’s son. It was a clear and bright morning, and the place bustled with Sunday morning energy: lots of cashmere sweatpants and Sunday supplements and cappuccinos. Camera phones were against the rules, but Emma still took a photograph of their food.
‘What time is the class?’ said Nadia, eventually.
‘Oh, bugger, yes: we should think about going down there actually. We’ve got about twenty minutes.’
‘Awesome.’
They’d both laughed in serendipitous glee as the Sunday’s social schedule had been slipped under their cabin door the night before while they’d been eating ribs and sweet potato skins. In amongst an organic skincare workshop and a core workout class, there’d been the details for a fascial release session with a world-renowned expert.
‘I can’t believe it!’ said Emma. ‘This is what I was telling you about – the thing Denise at work did! After her divorce!’
Nadia peered over at where she was pointing. The leaflet said,
Myofascial Release is a safe and effective hands-on technique that involves applying gentle sustained pressure into the Myofascial connective tissue restrictions to eliminate both physical and emotional pain and restore motion. Taught by Ivanka Nilsson.
‘I’m still not sure about this …’ Nadia said. ‘But. Okay. Fine. Let’s do it.’
The pair signalled for Emma’s membership card back and she signed for the food, allowing it to be charged to their room, and in their Lycra leggings and Nike trainers – the uniform of any exercise class – headed to the gym.
For the first twenty-five minutes of the hour-long class, Nadia was almost hysterical in her laughter. What they were doing was ridiculous to her. Ivanka Nilsson turned out to be a six-foot-something blonde Swede who had the air of a shot-putter about her, and there were only five people in the class. Her English was flawless, but retained an authoritarian air to it – Nadia often found that about native Nordic speakers: their directness came across in the way they intoned their English. She was slightly afraid to be caught laughing, like she’d be told off. It was made worse by the fact that Emma was totally into it and was mostly listening to the instructions with her eyes closed (‘Intuitive release,’ Ivanka called it), so Nadia felt even more adrift and silly. Basically, the whole point was to find where it hurt to roll your body on a tennis ball, and then gently move back and forth so that whilst yes, it was painful, ultimately (or so said Ivanka), it would eventually cease to hurt.
Well yes, thought Nadia, because I’ve gone bloody numb.
‘There are two ways to treat malaise,’ Ivanka said, walking between the five mats in bare feet, heel-toe, heel-toe, heel-toe. ‘Our emotional trauma is stored in the fibres of our body, in between our muscles. Our bodies hold on to sadness, and grief, and it causes physical pain. Sometimes, we bury these emotions so deeply that symptoms do not demonstrate themselves for many, many years. But they are there. And so, by rubbing deeply into this fascia using a simple tennis ball, we access these hidden emotions, and we release them.’
Nadia looked over at Emma again, hoping to roll her eyes in united sympathy. Emma was lying on her back with the tennis ball just above her right bum cheek, making small circular movements so that her body rotated over the ball. Her eyes were closed, and to Nadia, at this angle, it looked like … she was crying?
‘I repeat,’ Ivanka said, most likely in response to Nadia’s insistence at peeking at everyone else. ‘This is more beneficial to you with your eyes closed, so that you may enter communion with your body. Listen to what it is telling you. Listen to the stories it has buried. It wants you to know them. To find them. Seeking out the dark parts of your story allows you to shed light on them, and in shedding light you will cease to be afraid.’ Heel-toe, heel-toe, heel-toe.
Nadia tried the tennis ball under her bum like Emma had it. Nothing. She moved it to the left and tried it there. Nothing there, really, either. A sort of weird digging sensation, maybe, where the surface of the ball dug into her skin, but it didn’t feel like a release.
She moved the ball up a bit so it was in the middle of her back. Nadia moved her feet up so her soles were flat on the floor, knees bent, and used the leverage to move her body up and down on the yoga mat. The ball slipped further up, to near her shoulder blade and behind her heart. There. There Nadia felt a hot, pulsating sort of pain, that if she had to identify out loud she’d only be able to locate as right in the middle of her body. She kept her eyes clamped tightly shut as the ball moved back and forth, back and forth, digging deeper and deeper and deeper. She altered the motion so that instead of up and down she went around and around, the heat rising and rising, and Nadia saw in her mind an amalgamation of every time a man had dented her heart.
She thought about Awful Ben, and her school sweetheart, and the guy in her uni halls who had slept with her and then ignored her. She thought of all the nights – endless nights, it seemed – that she had stayed home alone, her phone by her side, waiting for a text message from a member of the opposite sex to validate her, to validate her existence. She thought about her grandfather’s affair and how he’d left her grandmother for their neighbour, and she thought about how much she wanted to love and be loved in return. That her appetite for it might consume her whole, because for all the pep talks she gave herself there was something, buried very, very deep, that told her that maybe she wasn’t worthy of it.
‘Good,’ said Ivanka now, kneeling down beside Nadia. She felt the woman’s hand on her shoulder. Nadia’s face was wet through with tears. ‘This is fascial release.’
Winding through the tight back lanes that would eventually give out to an A road and then the motorway, the women drove home in companionable silence. Nadia reflected on the lightness she felt after the fascia class – like her shoulders were no longer bunched up in stress around her ears and her breath shallow, like she couldn’t quite steady herself. Her whole body had been tense since Thursday night – maybe longer. Nadia hadn’t realized how she’d carried anxiety in her jaw, tension in her arms. How had a tennis ball relieved her of all that? It was a miracle. She came out knowing that she had to take her life in her own hands, that she had to take charge of her own romantic destiny. Emma absentmindedly sang along to a Spotify playlist she’d made of all her favourite love songs, and Nadia noted that she seemed happier now too.
Nadia typed in the URL for Missed Connections on her phone and stared at the submissions box. She took a breath. Take charge of yourself, she repeated in her mind. She typed:
Train Guy: You, me, coffee on the platform at 7.30 a.m., Thursday? Love, Coffee Spill Girl (though I promise not to spill any on you)
She read it, and reread it, wondering if it was too to-the-point, and if they were supposed to write back to each other a little bit more first. But, surely not. Surely the whole point of Missed Connections was to get a date in the diary and not miss what otherwise wouldn’t have happened. They’d established a rapport and she’d enjoyed that, and maybe before this morning she would have gone back-and-forth a little more. But now she’d decided: she desperately wanted to meet him, because she understood how she was a woman worth meeting.
Yes, Nadia decided. I am going to be a modern, go-getting woman and get this off the page and into real life. I am ready for my future.
And with that, she hit ‘send’.
‘Did you get that feeling too?’ Emma asked her, a little time later. ‘That you were having some big amazing release?’
‘Yeah, it was so strange. Like, she was right! There was something hidden in there, and I got it!’
‘Me too,’ said Emma.
‘Mine was in my heart, if you can believe that,’ said Nadia.
Emma smiled. ‘I can.’
Nadia smiled too. She could as well. ‘Where was yours?’
‘A bit all over, actually,’ said Emma. ‘Mostly around my pelvis though.’
‘Ooooh, how telling!’ said Nadia, about to make a joke about her sex life that was rudely interrupted by the ringing of a phone. It wasn’t Nadia’s ringtone. It was Emma’s. Emma’s hand jutted out, off the wheel to where it sat below the radio, just as Nadia’s did.
‘I’ll get it!’ Nadia trilled, since Emma was driving, and she went to pick it up just as Emma said, ‘No!’
Emma clawed at Nadia’s hand so that Nadia ended up holding one end of the phone and Emma the other. Startled, Nadia looked at her friend, and Emma turned her head away from the road and looked at Nadia, and Nadia didn’t understand. In shock, she dropped the phone, registering the panic on Emma’s face, who suddenly let go too, just as something happened outside of the car, beyond the windscreen.
Nadia followed Emma’s gaze, and it all happened so fast, so quickly, but so slowly at the same time. No reactions were fast enough. There were people in the road – men. A group of men in the road. The car brakes screeched and the car jerkily slowed down.
No, no, no, no, no, no, no, Nadia silently prayed. Or did she say it out loud?
Both women screamed as the group in the road turned their heads and registered the car, dividing themselves by either propelling forward or pulling back. The car came in at a halt, stopping inches from where the crowd had just been. There was silence. Shock. Nadia turned to Emma, who still had both hands on the steering wheel, her arms fixed straight in front of her, panting.
‘Ohmygod,’ she said.
‘You’re okay,’ Nadia said, unclipping her seatbelt. ‘Emma – you’re okay! Fuck.’ She went into organization mode. Rolling down the window, she said to the group to her left, ‘Are you okay? We’re so sorry!’
‘Fucking sorry?’ said one, in a Barbour jacket and wellies. ‘You almost bloody killed us! Jesus.’
Nadia turned to Emma. Her face was deathly white. ‘They’re okay, babe. Can you hear me? They’re okay.’ She lifted the handbrake and put on the emergency hazards. ‘Emma?’
Emma turned to her. ‘That was … horrible!’ she said, promptly bursting into tears.
‘Oh babe, get out. Come on. Let me drive. We need to get out of the road. Go on.’
The women clambered out of the car, where thankfully the group they’d nearly hit had already headed off into a nearby field. They were mad. Really, really mad – but at least that was better than being hurt. One of them turned around and shook his head, but Nadia was relieved that they all kept walking. She climbed into the driver’s seat and drove them to a nearby pub car park.
‘Bugger me, that was close,’ she said, closing her eyes to finally catch a breath.
‘Yeah,’ said Emma. ‘That was … yeah.’
Nadia switched off the engine and pressed her forehead to the wheel. It was no good thinking about what could have happened, but it was hard not to.
‘What happened?’ Nadia said, eventually.
‘I just took my eyes off the road for like, a second,’ said Emma. ‘That’s it. I just panicked.’
Nadia shook her head and then turned so she could see her friend. ‘But why? I went to answer your phone and you freaked out. Why would that freak you out?’
‘I didn’t know who it was,’ said Emma, as if that explained it.
‘I really need you to talk to me,’ Nadia implored. ‘I need you to tell me what’s going on. Emma!’
Emma stared blankly ahead and shook her head. ‘No,’ she said. ‘Just drive.’
They didn’t speak another word until they’d got back to London.
‘I’ll text you later this week,’ Emma said, as a goodbye.
‘Okay,’ Nadia nodded, sadly. ‘I’m here, you know. When you’re ready.’ She didn’t know what else to say. She’d never seen her like this before.