The Trawlerman, стр. 27
‘Are you scared?’
She thought about this for a while. ‘If you’d asked me a week ago I would have said I was pretty much OK, bar the odd bit of unscheduled weeping. I am coming to realise that I’m not OK.’ She looked down at the deck. ‘I’m not myself any more and I find that scary. My counsellor just told me I was hyper-vigilant.’
‘I can try to explain that in terms of fuses too, if it helps.’
‘It helps. Go on.’
‘Will you have dinner with me if I do?’
‘No,’ she said.
He barely registered the refusal. ‘Shame,’ he said. ‘Wait there. I need some props.’
A conceited man, she thought. Good-looking, but too sure of himself, like most of the men she regretted sleeping with.
He returned after a while, with a stem of broccoli, a small potato and a banana.
‘I said no to dinner,’ she said, attempting a joke.
‘Sorry. I spent a while looking for the right vegetables. I was looking for almonds which would have been more appropriate in shape and size than a potato. These,’ he said, laying them out on the glass-topped table, ‘represent various parts of your brain.’
More flippant remarks occurred to her, but she stifled them.
‘We think of the brain as a single organ, but it’s useful to think of it as many separate organs working together. This –’ he held the banana – ‘is your thalamus. Among the many things it does is act like a kind of wireless hub, taking in signals from your eyes and ears and distributing them to your frontal lobes . . . here.’ He picked up the broccoli. ‘That’s your conscious brain. So that when you see something that is particularly frightening, the thalamus routes the signal there and, ta-da!’ He waved the broccoli. ‘You can act rationally in response to the danger.’
‘Like, is this a murder weapon or just a cake knife?’
He frowned, not understanding. ‘Yes. I suppose.’
‘Sorry. Continue.’
‘However, it also sends signals here –’ he picked up the potato – ‘to the amygdala. If the thalamus is like a wireless hub, this is like a smoke alarm, activating the so-called unconscious brain. Up goes your heart rate, and it triggers the release of stress hormones like adrenaline and cortisol. Fight, freeze or flee? Those reactions are all taking place before your frontal cortex –’ he put down the potato and shook the broccoli – ‘has even had time to process what’s going on. You’ll have noticed that in an emergency you start to act before you even know what’s going on?’
She nodded.
‘Because the thalamus has spoken to the amygdala and triggered a reaction. But then your rational brain kicks in and decides whether that course of action that you’re already halfway through makes sense. That’s kind of how it’s supposed to work. But sometimes the trauma is so great that it appears to overload the—’
‘The broccoli.’
‘Yes . . . and all the usual social and rational responses to danger are overwhelmed. Now you’re in trouble. All you are left with is the alarm bell . . .’
‘The panic.’
‘Exactly. You lose it. And because the rest of the brain has been overwhelmed, the bell keeps on ringing.’ He picked up the potato this time and shook it.
‘It’s as if the brain had forgotten the code to reset the alarm?’ suggested Alex.
‘That’s perhaps one way of looking at it.’ He spoke with the caution of an academic attempting to explain something complex to a layperson. ‘Another effect is that in some situations that alarm keeps going off. Even long after the car accident or the rape, it’s as if that traumatic incident hasn’t actually ended. Those people become stuck in this kind of fight or flight response. People with PTSD carry their trauma with them, as if it’s still happening. Some people talk about having lost a sense of time. Something that should be in the past is still firmly in their present.’
Alex realised she was nodding to everything he said.
He stopped. ‘You recognise that?’
‘Exactly that. When I think of what happened it’s not a memory at all. It’s now.’
‘That’s very hard for you.’
‘Why doesn’t my counsellor tell me any of this?’
‘Because it’s of no use to them, I suppose. It doesn’t solve the problem. Is it of use to you?’
She thought about that for a while. ‘I believe it is. It helps me understand what is happening, at least.’
When she told him about what she had done two nights before in the restaurant in Rye, he laughed briefly, stifled it, then apologised. ‘I’m sure it probably wasn’t funny at the time.’
‘We hadn’t even started on our main course.’
‘How is your daughter coping? The naturalist.’
‘She’s OK,’ she answered.
‘Are you sure? It can be very tough on children. They don’t always understand why we behave the way we do.’
Alex stood, realising she was irritated by the implication that she was somehow failing her daughter. ‘We’re fine,’ she said. ‘We always have been. Look. I should go. I just came because I thought you ought to know . . .’
‘Before you go, I need to ask. Do you think someone killed Ayman because of what happened with the money?’
‘Revenge, you mean, because they lost their money because of his enthusiasm for Biosfera? It’s a possibility.’ She peered at him. ‘Are you worried you’re in some kind of danger too?’
‘Constable Ferriter asked me if I’d received any threats.’
‘And have you?’
‘No. Nothing at all.’
That prickle again, at the back of her neck.
At the front door, she said, ‘Thank you for the . . . vegetables. I mean it.’
‘Any time. Really.’
She left, glad to be away. It wasn’t that she didn’t like him; the opposite, in fact.
In the daylight, she cycled home again, via the murder house.
This time it was deserted.
In the daylight, the copse seemed much less sinister.
She found an old rake handle propped against the side of the garage to prod into the vegetation and it took her a couple of minutes to find