In Denial: A Relapse Story

Chapter 5
Chapter Five - A Walk In The Park

Chapter Description: Rachel sees relapsing from another point of view. Maybe, just maybe, it’s not so bad.

Adam spent that evening sweetly and gently caring for Rachel, who sobbed intermittently for the rest of the night. This was what she wanted. All the distress she faced lately, all the relapsed people she came so close to every day, had overwhelmed her so much. What she needed more than ever was some patience and some affection, which Adam gave in spades that Monday evening.

Tuesday morning was a rather different matter.

Rachel’s eyes opened to the sight of Adam sitting at the end of the bed, a tray of buttered and toasted bagels and a cup of coffee propped over. Breakfast in bed after a hard few days? It was well-deserved, yet served a purpose unrelated to Rachel’s comfort. Adam at least had the wherewithal to wait for Rachel to scoff - and scoff she did - down the bagels and drink her coffee before breaking the news.

“Glasgow?! For a week?! Wait, what? Hold on. You said you’d be in Manchester again. You’d be gone Friday and back Sunday. You didn’t mention GLASGOW?!” Rachel had been only half-conscious until she comprehended what Adam was telling her. Then, she was as sharp as a dagger. 

“I know and I’m sorry, baby. I really am, it’s just-…”

“Don’t. Baby. Me. You said you’d be here! You said! You promised!” Adam sensed a petulance in her voice, but he refrained from voicing his opinion there. He could just as easily say it with his eyes, with a raising of his eyebrows, and with a slight smirk. “I’m being serious, Adam.”

She straightened herself up in the bed and brushed away the crumbs she had made on the duvet. To seem more respectable and adult was the aim but Adam continued to smirk.

“I’m being serious. What’s so important up there? It’s so far away!”

“It’s not that much further than Manchester and it’s only for a few days more than I’d usually go away. Look: I got a call this morning from a lead in Manchester who had some post-relapsed victims come forward, but they had been in a centre… run by the Haven Group.” She visibly backed down at that, couching herself more comfortably into the pillows behind. “This is big, maybe even the biggest scandal yet.”

The Haven Group had the monopoly on relapse care north of the border. Their CEO advised the government, their board was made up of famous Scottish parliamentarians and businessmen, and their business provided tens of thousands of jobs: the Haven Group was, to put it bluntly, a big fucking deal. 

Rachel responded that the bigger scandal was him abandoning his wife when she needed him most. Adam was visibly shook up at that comment and sat, speechless, at the end of the bed. 

“I’m going out!” Rachel declared, picking up the tray and placing down on the floor. “And I don’t need you chasing after me!” 

She got ready in a hurry, threw her hair into a messy ponytail, and chucked on a simple ensemble of jeans, heavy black boots, and a mustard yellow fleece. Once downstairs, she had her coat halfway on when she spied Adam just sitting on the sofa with his laptop propped up on the armrest. He seemed fully engrossed in whatever it was and so Rachel let him be. Stepping outside, she breathed heartily and let out a sigh. Her breath was visible in the chilly air, which charmed her momentarily. 

She didn’t care exactly where she would go, nor how cold it was outside, but she knew she needed to get out of the house. If there were relapsers out there, so be it. She wasn’t sure what she’d do if she were sick out there in the world, but she wasn’t quite in control of herself either. Something - instinct or impulse or whatever you wanted to call it - compelled her to get a move on and… head to the park.

On the way, she had to cross the street twice to avoid coming into contact with some buggy-bound relapsers and even ducked into an alley to let a middle-aged man through with a double-wide pushchair containing two young women squirming and babbling. Once she was at the park, she thought herself free of any interaction with the relapsed and found a park bench that suited her well. From her vantage point, she was well enough away from the playground where a few adult-sized figures were crawling around in the distance and close to the north gate if she ever wanted to leave. It was a sensible move.

At least, it was a sensible move until along came a young man with a young woman in tow. His shadow blocked her view first, then came the sound of plastic wheels upon the uneven stone path. The woman was unconscious, not stirring at all, and simply sat there peacefully in her pushchair while the man spoke. 

“Do you mind if we sit here?” he asked, pointing to the empty space next to her. For once, her heart didn’t feel like it was pounding out of her chest. Her head ached slightly and her stomach rumbled, but the overwhelming urge to throw up wasn’t coming. 

Silently, she nodded, and paid no mind to the young man and his regressed charge. Rachel kept her eyes forward and her thoughts on her… husband, her husband Adam. She thought of him, how he smiled when he greeted her at the door and how his big brown eyes comforted her when he looked down at her. She felt so comfortable and natural when they embraced, so it made perfect sense why she would be so upset that he was leaving her for a week. She’d been so visibly distressed, so nervous, that she was clearly in need of some support. Adam, the man who was “different” and wanted to maintain her independence, probably just couldn’t wait to get away from her the moment she needed him. Her mother’s words bounced around in her head. Maybe up in Glasgow he would go full caveman and start ogling some pretty little baby-brained bimbos, maybe he’d undo their nappies, maybe he’d feel their warmth and lick and… 

Rachel started crying. Soft sobs turned to whimpers in seconds. The fact she was doing in this in front of some man, some strange man with his little fetish doll fast asleep next to him, would have made her mother howl. 

Then, a hand reached out bearing a tissue.

“Sorry, I couldn’t help but notice you were, erm…” he said with an awkward intonation, as if he wasn’t quite sure what to do. He was right to offer the tissue, though, as Rachel snatched it out of his hand and pressed it to her cheeks. They were sodden with tears

He offered another. This time, Rachel studied it a moment before thanking him. The tissue was some baby brand, as there were little pink images of rattles and teddy bears imprinted on the outside. Rachel liked them anyway.

“I’m really sorry about… all of this.” She dramatically pointed at her glassy, tearful eyes and flushed cheeks. “It’s just… I’ve had a really weird time lately. I don’t know, you don’t need to hear about this. I’m sorry.”

The young man told her it was no bother at all and reassured her he could talk to her, so long as the “little one” didn’t wake up. 

“I’m George, by the way. This little sleeping beauty is Zoe.” Rachel gave a weak smile to him, ignoring the relapsed girl altogether. She then replied with her name in kind.

The “sleeping beauty” in question was about George’s age and dressed in a full adult baby outfit. Two strands of red hair poked out from beneath the hood of her puffy jacket, which was coloured green and had two froggy eyes poking out the top. Beneath that was a purple fleece-lined onesie that stretched down to the feet and had a cartoon frog stitched in the middle of the chest. Her shoes were quilted boots in a bright green that matched her jacket. Between her lips gently rocked a dummy, green on the mouth guard and white on the handle, and down her chin was a light sheen of spittle. 

Rachel tried not to stare too long, not least because it made her stomach turn to see a young woman in such a state.

“Well, George,” she said in a hushed voice. “I’m, I’m scared.”

“Scared?” He matched his volume to hers and leaned in to hear her better. “What’s so scary?”

Rachel’s hand stretched out and her index finger pointed sheepishly at the pushchair. George looked at his adult baby and then back at Rachel, stifled a laugh, and looked back and forth one more time.

“You’re scared of… her?”

“Them,” Rachel insisted. 

George placed his hand on Zoe’s knee and rubbed it softly. He looked at her for a few seconds longer and exerted a knowing sigh. 

“I… look, I know where you’re coming from-…”

“You know? You? You’re a man, you don’t know the first thing about the relapse. This is just bloody-…”

“Hey!” He raised his voice a touch and then shushed himself. “Sorry, I’m sorry. Okay? But, listen: I only get it because of Zoe. Before all this, before we even got married, we had this conversation a thousand times.”

“Wait. Married? How long have you two been married? You’re too young, you’re just babies.” Rachel caught herself before she said something insensitive. George, however, looked more amused than shocked. 

“Well, erm, we’re both 25 and we’ve been married for three years - three and a half years now - so I totally see what you mean. We get that a lot, actually. But, yeah, part of why we even got married was because Zoe was scared of what might happen,” George said with an ease that suggested he had said this spiel many times before. “I don’t mean to bore on but can I tell you a story?”

Rachel nodded wordlessly and gestured for him to continue. 

“Okay, so, Zoe and I met at uni. We were in the same year at Durham. I did engineering; Zoe did politics. Not exactly a lot of crossover but we just kept running into each other all over the place. You know how it goes. Anyway, we started dating and I spent a lot of time at her flat, met some of her mates. One night, we thought we were alone in the flat and we were having fun on the sofa when, to our surprise, one of her flatmates came toddling into the room. She’d relapsed during the day, had a nap, and then heard us. Zoe was a fearless sort of person, but I saw in her eyes something I thought I’d never see. She was petrified. She started screaming and bawling her eyes out. Her flatmate started doing the same. And there I was, stunned at what was going on. After that, her flatmate got whisked off by her parents back to whatever country manor they lived in, and Zoe and I had a talk. She said if it ever happened to her, she wouldn’t want her parents to take her away. She… she didn’t like them. Come to think of it, they weren’t fond of me and I wasn’t too fond of them.”

“What was wrong with them?” Rachel interjected. 

“They were very religious, I suppose. Relapsing was a kind of punishment from God for women’s sinfulness. They were that type: they didn’t even want Zoe to go to university. When we’d finished up our studies, we moved in together down here to get as far from them as possible. About a year after that, we got married. Guardianship and custody and all that is easier when you’re married.” Rachel knew all about that. Part of why she married Adam was to avoid spending an indefinite period infantilised and at the mercy of her mother; part of why her mother resented Adam as much as she did was because Rachel had “abandoned” herself to the whims of a man. 

“How long has she been… you know?”

“Relapsed? It’s coming up to nine months now.” George fetched his phone out of his coat pocket and swiped it open to reveal an app: it was called ‘Relapse Assist’ and had the logo of the Progressive Mind Institute tucked into the corner of the screen. “Yeah, says here it’s been 8 months and 27 days. I was hoping she’d wake up before the 9-month mark - maybe we’d get into the record books.”

The current record for shortest recorded relapse had been held by a housewife from Toyama, Japan called Miyuki Naito since November 2000. It was all over the news when she recovered after just 9 months and 3 days of relapsing. Some suggested that she held the next step towards a cure for relapsing, some sort of genetic remedy for the condition, yet Dr Henry Gale and his team never managed to find one. Her brief relapse was merely an anomaly that nobody had yet surpassed.

Rachel’s anxiety had dissipated. It shocked her how comfortable she was while she sat so close to a relapsed woman and discussed her condition. Usually, even overhearing such a conversation would have thrown her into a blind panic. She even wanted to know more.

“What was it like? For her, I mean. How did it happen?” 

“Oh, you know, it’s different for everyone. But Zoe here was all over the place in the days before: mood swings, making erratic decisions, forgetting simple things…” George trailed off as his facial expression grew more serious. “It wasn’t easy to watch but it must have been so confusing for her. God, that was tough…”

Rachel blinked. She had no idea what to say to him but her heart hurt for him. If her mother could see her, she would have been in for one hell of a scolding. Part of her wanted to shut it down, to cut out the empathy she felt for this… this man. Yet, here was a good example of a man who loved his relapsed wife and cared for her happily. If he could do it, could not daddy?

Adam, she reminded herself.

Adam.