Anxiety for two to take away

While my daughter was sitting the first exam of her life, I didn’t know what to do with myself. I hovered outside the building in the same way I have done when loved ones are undergoing surgery, transferring my weight from one foot to another – cursing that I have only two – nursing the strange delusion that feeling extreme discomfort myself might just be comforting to another, through the ether. All that kept coming into my mind were her parting words to me: “‘All at once’ is a good alternative to ‘suddenly’. And also ‘without warning.’” It cannot be denied.

My anxiety was really surpassing itself. It was citrus-hued and neon-bright. All at once my ring of worries had little multi-faceted briolettes of worries suspended from them and these, in turn, had matching ear and toe rings, necklaces and bracelets. I could almost hear my nerves jangling and looked about myself anxiously as though I were an unwelcome morris dancer about to be shooed from a sophisticated urban setting. I have dispatched such rustic groovers myself with cutting remarks in my time. I regret it now, obviously.

I embarked on some old-school anxiety relief techniques. I visualised a warm sun-drenched beach and calming turquoise waters, but Jaws 4 was in my brain from Christmas and I saw some of its leading fibreglass villains bobbing about on the horizon, all the better to eat me. I took four drops of Rescue Remedy, forgetting that Rescue Remedy and I have too much history. The taste of it now transports me back to earlier traumas, such as the time it was administered with an exasperated look and a brisk tut-tut after I requested an epidural during childbirth.

With an empty stomach and the distinct recall of physical pain, I encouraged myself to find a café to seek calm. A comedian on a mountain-trekking exercise recently stated that she felt a bit nervous whenever she was too far away from a café, and I agree with her. I spied a coffee shop with a striped and scalloped awning in the distance and raced there. A waiter handed me a menu that said “Breakfast Cocktails”. Evidently I was in a refined north London suburb that fancied it was the louche bit of Miami. I scanned the menu for something that would soothe me. It was obvious, really.

What is anxiety’s favourite beverage? Coffee. Two is too many and three is never enough ... Drinking my second coffee, I rooted for my daughter strenuously. I was a one-woman cheer-leading team on the quiet. A whispered school sports song I recently heard was soon echoing round the Italian-tiled floors: “We’re gonna B-E-A-T, beat ’em. We’re gonna B-U-S-T, bust ’em. We’re gonna beat ’em, bust ’em, that’s our custom, come on team let’s readjust ’em.”

Two other mothers entered the café and started discussing at what age you had to talk to your little sons about the perils of porn. I hung my head in my hands.

. . .

Love and work is the cure for everything, I remembered, and in the absence of the former I tried to think of a neat ending for a story I am writing set in a retirement home for actors. I would love to finish my days in such a place but you need evidence of a past life on the stage before they’ll even look at your application. I used to know a professional forger and wondered if I could commission him to start putting together a set of documents for me, detailing a distinguished theatrical career, or whether he’d be wildly insulted because it’s Old Masters and watermarked passport paper that, I suspect, are his specialities. Or perhaps I could save up and buy a tiny theatre and put myself on the bill intermittently over the next few years. Rumour has it Henry Irving once paid for the titular role in Hamlet, so spending your way on to the stage is not an unprecedented entrée into showbiz ...

Without warning, the story I was writing fell apart in my hands, the characters even commenting to each other, mid-conversation, that these tired old clichés they kept uttering simply wouldn’t do any more. (Which is never a good sign.) A novelist friend of mine feels her anxiety makes an artist of her but mine has no such redeeming features.

Two hours later I hovered outside the exam room again, pale as flour as I watched my daughter emerge. Then, checking carefully that none of her friends was watching – for there are rules about such things – I flew into her arms.

susie.boyt@ft.com

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