How do you cope with anxiety?
When Jed’s mum dies, his world is turned upside down and his anxiety finds a new source of unease to feed upon. After the funeral, he leaves his job in England to start work in India. His anxiety only gets worse in his new role until he finds a new friend. A friend only he can see.
Aftab has a head shaped like an egg and small, dark eyes at the side of his face rather than the front. His nose is long and slim, beneath which is a narrow mouth, slightly wider than his nose. Perfectly bald, he has no facial hair or eyebrows either. Despite his mouth never moving, he speaks in the voice of Stephen Fry.
Jed’s new friend helps him sleep by using a vacuum cleaner to stop the anaconda sliding down Jed’s throat. And he makes him smile by playing jokes on people at work. He warns Jed, too, that something is wrong in his life. Something Jed can never make right.
How do you cope with anxiety?
When Jed’s mum dies, his world is turned upside down and his anxiety finds a new source of unease to feed upon. After the funeral, he leaves his job in England to start work in India. His anxiety only gets worse in his new role until he finds a new friend. A friend only he can see.
Aftab has a head shaped like an egg and small, dark eyes at the side of his face rather than the front. His nose is long and slim, beneath which is a narrow mouth, slightly wider than his nose. Perfectly bald, he has no facial hair or eyebrows either. Despite his mouth never moving, he speaks in the voice of Stephen Fry.
Jed’s new friend helps him sleep by using a vacuum cleaner to stop the anaconda sliding down Jed’s throat. And he makes him smile by playing jokes on people at work. He warns Jed, too, that something is wrong in his life. Something Jed can never make right.
I am a man.
I am stupid.
Especially when it comes to my health.
That’s why I did nothing about the Thing. I called it the Thing because I didn’t know the cause of my health issues. If I had known, I would have been even less inclined to look for help curing it. Men don’t go to the doctor about stuff like the Thing; it’s not a manly response. The Thing didn’t care that I was a man—all it cared about was growing stronger. And as each day passed, I allowed it to mature and influence my life until it felt like I was losing my mind.
Calling my illness the Thing didn’t explain the dull ache inside my head. The quickening of my heart when the ‘what if?’ questions surfaced. Or how I lay awake in bed each night, unable to sleep with the lights off because it felt like the darkness would drag the air from my lungs if I didn’t make it disappear with the flick of a light switch.
I never used to be edgy all the time—not this acutely. So how had I become this way?
When I was a younger man, I always asked myself the ‘what if?’ questions.
What if it rained?
What if I missed the bus to work?
What if she didn’t like me?
I guess most people do the same, but most people can handle the thoughts and feelings normal day-to-day questions arouse. I easily coped with my mind noise in those days. It wasn’t until the ‘what if’ questions changed that unease reared its head.
What if more people came into this room that suddenly felt so small? What if someone locked the door and I couldn’t get out? What if the lights went out and the darkness absorbed all the oxygen?
When those kinds of questions surfaced, my nervousness morphed into darker thoughts and feelings that trapped me in a world of nonsense. A world where I could not sleep, one that fed the unease and helped it grow stronger.
I still haven’t answered the question, have I?
How did I get this way?
The question I’m avoiding.
Looking back now, I guess the Thing slowly changed when I got promoted at work. My salary increased then, and so did my workload and responsibilities. I was a quality manager at a pharmaceutical manufacturing company. Managing the day-to-day decisions was stressful, but managing people was worse. I didn’t feel suffocated, but the job affected my health. I ate too much. Drank too much. My waistline increased and I had a lot of stomach problems.
As a stupid man, I deemed it acceptable to see my doctor when my stomach ached so painfully that I had to take time off work. It was a physical problem and fine to discuss those things with a doctor, as it would not stray into conversations about feelings.
My doctor wanted me to go for a biopsy.
I think in some ways, I wanted the results to be positive. A positive result would explain so many things going wrong in my life. It could lead to an end of the Thing if it led to an end of me.
I went for the check, and everything was clear. I didn’t have cancer.
“You must have IBS,” the consultant said. He gave me a pamphlet detailing what IBS was and how to reduce the discomfort. He said it would likely never go away, and that was that.
I knew I didn’t have IBS.
Einstein once said that if you do not do things differently, nothing would ever change. Maybe he didn’t say it in those exact words, but I think that’s what he meant.
If I wanted things to change, I needed to do things differently. I started to eat better—healthily, whatever that means. For me, it meant cutting out the booze, eating fewer sweets, and including more greens and oats in my diet. I exercised, mostly walking and simple mat stretches. Sometimes I fasted one or two days a week. I gradually lost weight, and I looked better physically.
But despite my improved physique, something kept nagging away inside my mind. A voice. My voice. Who else could it be? It didn’t sound like me, though; it sounded like… someone else.
Some Thing else.
“You don’t help your mother enough,” the voice said.
“She lives on her own and needs to see more of you.”
“You are hopeless in everything you do, including how you look after your mother.”
The voice was right. Some days, I thought the voice was right.
My mother lived on her own. My father had passed away a long time ago and she missed him desperately.
I missed him desperately. I could talk to my father about things I could never discuss with anyone else.
We are all busy. We all live demanding lives. We can only give so much time to other people, even the ones we love. No one can give anyone in their lives the time they deserve.
That’s what I told myself. Or maybe it was the voice.
Mum lived in an apartment where the rent went up every year. She couldn’t afford the rent and wanted to move, but the places she could afford were dishearteningly bleak.
“Maybe we should get a mortgage on an apartment and let your mum move in,” my wife, Edie, suggested.
“That will impact our holidays. No more vacations abroad.”
“Yes, I know.”
I loved my wife.
We bought a brand-new apartment in a decent part of town and Mum moved in. She paid us a small amount of rent that did not go up every year, and we put the rent money towards paying off part of the mortgage. The rest of the mortgage we paid ourselves.
“He talks to me, your father, you know,” Mum said.
It seemed that Mum had a voice that talked to her too, only her voice was a comforting voice. Not one that filled her with unease.
I didn’t see Mum during the week. I had a job and my own children to bring up. Every Saturday morning, I took her to the town centre. We strolled the shops, checked out the books in the library, had a bacon sandwich and cup of tea in the William Stead. I did it because I loved her.
“You did it to stop yourself from feeling guilty.”
Not true. I took her out each Saturday because I loved her and I enjoyed being with her.
Mum sipped on her tea. “I see him sometimes too, your dad.”
Her voice had a face, unlike mine, which hid from me like a frightened child.
“Why are you checking your watch all the time?”
“You can’t wait to take your mother back to her apartment and leave her there, can you?”
“What a son you turned out to be.”
“Can we stop off at the fish and chip shop on the way home?” Mum asked.
“Yes.”
The voice sighed. “That will add an extra twenty minutes to your time with her.”
I wanted to tell her I saw him sometimes too. What a conversation we would have had if I had spoken. If I had been truthful.
If only I had told her.
Mum hardly ever ate her bacon sandwich. She passed it over to me when I finished eating mine and then took a sip of her tea. “I’m dying, you know.”
I didn’t look up from the paper I was reading. “You always say that.”
She had been saying it for the past ten years or so.
“I think you will outlive us all. You will reach your 100th year, no problem.”
“Fish and chips would be nice,” she said, nodding her head up and down so quickly I wondered if there was something wrong with her.
When we finished in Stead’s, I took her back to the car and drove to the fish and chip shop. Back at her apartment, Mum got out of the car. “Won’t you come in and share these chips with me?” she asked. “You can have some of the fish, too.”
“I can’t, Mum. I have a lot of things to do this afternoon. You enjoy them anyway.”
She nodded and before she closed the car door, she separated the fish and chips and gave me half. I watched as she walked to the apartment block. She looked older. What did I expect? She was… 82, or was it 83? She was doing great for her age. Still, I had this feeling.
This feeling.
I didn’t trust my instincts anymore.
My feelings.
I couldn’t make decisions.
I was always exhausted.
Always grumpy.
Why was the voice silent?
Why didn’t it tell me how selfish I had become?
Tell me to go and have some chips with her in the apartment?
I had this feeling that I would not see Mum again.
I started the engine and drove home to all those important things I needed to do that I can no longer even remember.
My instincts, those feelings, had been wrong. I did see Mum again. In the hospital, a few days later. She had phoned Edie while I was at work.
Edie then rang me. “Your mum is in hospital,” she said.
“For her check-up?”
“No. She fell over, in the apartment. I’m sorry…”
“Your mum told you she was dying.”
“What?”
“I’m so sorry. I don’t know how to say this. They said she doesn’t have long to live.”
“You said she only fell down.”
“I know, but she’d been having tests for a while. She never told anyone.”
“She told you.”
Edie sniffed. “When she went into hospital because of the fall, her test results were ready. She has cancer. She has had it for a long time.”
Why couldn’t the test just confirm she had IBS?
Edie began to weep.
How do some things happen so quickly? Too quickly to give you time to prepare.
“You had time to prepare. She told you in good time. How many times did she tell you she was dying?”
I went to the hospital. Mum looked so frail, so tiny as she lay unconscious in the bed. Her face, her expression, looked like she was concentrating on something. I wanted to know what she was thinking about. I had so many things to tell her. Things I’d put off because the timing never seemed right. I hardly ever told her I loved her. She knew, though. I’m sure she knew.
“Maybe she didn’t.”
She always wanted me to hug her.
“You hardly ever hugged your own mother.”
I hardly ever hug anyone.
Why don’t I hug people? Why does it make me feel uncomfortable?
It’s something wired in my head. A blocker. It turns me away from physical contact. The only person I can hug without feeling uncomfortable is my wife. And my kids, when they were younger. Now that they are older, it feels uncomfortable hugging them.
What is wrong with me?
I don’t remember being hugged much when I was younger by Mum. I don’t remember being hugged by Dad. Did anyone hug me when I was younger?
We had talked all the time about travelling, me and Dad. How he wanted to visit India. And China. Egypt, too. If only we could afford to travel, he would take me and Mum to the most beautiful places in the world.
“I don’t mind not having much money,” he’d said, ruffling my hair. “I have you and Mum, and that’s what really matters. Family. We are nothing without family. Travel would be pointless if I didn’t have my family with me to share the experience.”
I remember laying on the couch when I was a child. Dad used to leave his jumper on the arm of the couch and I would climb into it like it was a tent. I could smell him through the fabric as I closed my eyes and dreamed about climbing to the top of a pyramid like Dad told me we would one day. At the top, we would light a fire and Mum would cook sausages for us while we drank lemonade and waited for the stars to come out. I never felt as close to Dad as I did when I was inside his old woollen jumper.
I wanted to hug him. Now and then.
Mum didn’t awaken. I couldn’t tell her the things I should have said years ago. How she amazed me with the way she brought me up. How she amazed me the way she looked after our children, Sam and Ben, when me and Edie both worked. I couldn’t tell her how much I loved her.
She passed away two days later.
And now, because I hid from death, hid from Mum, she had no last words for me. What would she have wanted to say to me before she died? What were her actual last words? I could not remember.
I was okay with her death. It didn’t affect me like I thought it would. I had been a dutiful son. I had housed her and visited her once a week. Invited her to birthday and Christmas get-togethers and been there when she had a problem or needed something fixed.
“You weren’t there for her when she wanted a hug.”
“Or when she wanted to talk about dying.”
“Or those nights when she was in her apartment feeling lonely.”
She was so lonely. Sometimes scared, too. How many times had she told me she was lonely?
“You know how many times.”
I could not grasp what it meant or felt like to be lonely. I thought she was using loneliness as an excuse to get me to visit her more often. Only people who never saw people for weeks on end could be lonely, right? I saw Mum every week. What was she scared of, again?
“Dying alone.”
She did not die alone. We were all there at the end. Hugging and weeping. Still, she always told me she worried about dying alone. Every week she told me, and every week I ignored her.
The next few days were consumed with preparations for the funeral.
Sam took some days off work. I hardly ever saw my daughter these days. Edie visited her in Reading, where she lived, but she didn’t want me there. She looked older, hardened to the world and its manipulations. She was no longer my little girl.
“Mum,” Sam said as she hugged Edie the day she returned. “I miss her already.”
“We do too, Sam,” Edie said.
Sam stared at me over her mother’s shoulder as they hugged. Her eyes glistened with tears. “I’m sorry for your loss, Jed.”
I moved closer to them, wanting to hug them both, but Sam pulled away from Edie and turned her back to me as she picked up her case. “I’m going to unpack,” she said, heading to her room.
“How is Claire doing?” Edie asked.
“She’s doing great.”
“Why didn’t you bring her?”
Sam glared at me. “You know why.”
I wanted to tell Sam I had changed. But I hadn’t changed. I still could not understand why she was wasting her life living with another woman. She would never have children. Her own family. Perhaps she would travel around the world instead, but it would mean nothing if she could not share it with her children.
I watched Sam disappear upstairs, wishing I could follow her and light a bonfire in her bedroom. We could cook sausages and try to understand each other.
“She already understands you. She understands you are a bigoted old man who left his mother to die all alone these past few years.”
To read the synopsis of Two Lumps of Sugar for Mr Anxiety – in which author Eli Wilde describes Aftab Rickwick, the eponymous Mr Anxiety, as having a ‘perfectly bald’ egg-shaped head and states that he helps Jed, the novella’s protagonist, ‘sleep by using a vacuum cleaner to stop the anaconda sliding down [his] throat’ – you might well think you were in for a somewhat madcap tale in the magical realism mould. Indeed, the rather whimsical title alone may give rise to such an assumption. And, of course, Two Lumps of Sugar for Mr Anxiety does have strongly fantastical elements, though these are balanced out by a healthy dose of realism. It is, after all, due to an excessive literalism on Jed’s part that he conjures Aftab (his anxiety incarnate) so that he might look his anxiety in the face.
This first-person narrative centres around Jed, a deeply flawed character. With a tendency to bury his head in the sand and an apparent inability to wholeheartedly accept his daughter’s sexuality, Jed is often described – by himself and others – as something of a bigot. While he is certainly not a likable character, however, it is arguably a credit to the nuance and depth of Wilde’s characterisation skills that he is never entirely alienated from the reader’s sympathy. Perhaps some of Jed’s most maddening traits that make him seem so human. His tendency to deflect or misplace his anxieties while ignoring his mother when she tells him she’s dying and overlooking the dire state of his relationship with his daughter, for instance, maddening as it may be, also points to the simple human truth that severe anxiety such as that experienced by Jed so often is irrational.
While Wilde is to be commended for his searching exploration of anxiety and the taboo surrounding men’s mental health, I personally felt that this was somewhat let down by the novella’s apparent obsession with matters scatological. Arguably, this comes down to a matter of personal taste, and I can understand that Wilde may have intended these sections to provide some light relief to his otherwise weighty subject matter. Personally, I have no objections to writers exploring subjects that test the boundaries of “good taste” or to grossness in literature per se, but in the case of Two Lumps of Sugar for Mr Anxiety, these sections seemed compositionally incongruous and I don’t feel they added anything worthwhile to the novella. That is to say, I felt these sections had been added either for cheap laughs or with the deliberate intention to disgust, rather than to serve some wider thematic or affective purpose.