In Denial: A Relapse Story

Chapter 4
Chapter Four - An Atypical Monday

Chapter Description: Rachel is back at work… but not for long.

Sunday went by like a blur. 

After a few more trips to the toilet, she popped a few ibuprofen and sunk a pint of orange juice. Determined to seize the day, she had a shower and started getting changed in the bedroom. On the unmade sheets, she made the timeless mistake of lying down for a touch too long. She awoke to the sound of Adam’s key in the door, turned to her phone on the nightstand and saw the time was now 3pm. She rushed downstairs to greet him, her sodden towel wrapped tightly around the curves of her body. He lit up when he saw her, throwing down his suitcase and embracing her for a warm hug. 

“Miss me?” they said in unison. In a fit of giggles, they leaned in for a kiss. Firmly, their lips pressed together and then parted. She felt  his hands brush back her wet brown hair behind her ears as Adam pressed himself forward into her. He kissed her neck and she giggled more, yet softer this time. 

“I think you missed me more, my lovely,” he said with a wry smile and a suggestive wink. 

Rachel rolled her eyes and sighed, placing her lips on his one last time. She went back upstairs to dress in something more comfortable. When she returned, they spent the remainder of the afternoon talking about Adam’s trip up north. His journalism contrasted starkly with Rachel’s mother’s in every conceivable way. Where Sheila Buckland cast doubt on every mainstream sensibility and shared her opinion on every public matter, Adam was rather narrower with his focus. For the past seven years, he had been working as an investigative journalist. His investigations took him all over the country in search of the truth about abuse and corruption in the relapse care system. Rachel thought him incredibly noble for the work he did and admired (if not envied) him for his ability to stomach the awful things he saw. 

Ever since the system had been privatised in the early 1990s, regulation had been light-touch at best and the horror stories of relapsed women being beaten, sexually abused, and treated as cash cows by the management of the care facilities grew more widespread every year. Those women whose families could not afford to take care of them on their own were subjected to terrible treatment and it was Adam’s greatest pride that he could bring their stories to the fore. Not everyone appreciated it, of course. The industry was worth billions and there had been the odd anonymous threat sent to Adam’s email. Still, he persisted. 

Rachel, meanwhile, had to herd teenagers towards a decent understanding of classic literature. Herding cats might have been easier. 

Monday morning had started off with a less than stellar Year 7 class who saw little fun in identifying embedded clauses and compound sentences. In fact, they saw more fun in playing on their phones and talking behind Rachel’s back whenever it was turned to them. The new generation coming up from the primary schools were certainly of a different… calibre. A female teacher at her age was a rare sight in many schools, as it was with women her age in any profession or workplace. Without being certified as post-relapse or getting past a certain age, a woman had to live by the kindness of her employer. All of this had compounded, over time, to solidify the idea of all teachers being men by default and all women being liabilities at work. 

Children’s attitudes to her reflected the new social norms. Male students barely out of primary school sometimes refused to be taught by a “baby-brained woman” and had to be relocated to another class. Others openly demeaned her, especially when she tripped over her words or made a small mistake: with forensic scrutiny, they latched onto the most minor of errors as signs of her imminent relapse. One particularly rabid little misogynist - Ryan Dunn - even placed an adult dummy in her desk drawer for her to find once. Attached was a post-it note that read “mute button”. All she wanted to do in that moment was put the grotty 14 year old through a window, but she composed herself and passed the evidence on to the headmaster, Mr Harrison. He had been a real guardian angel to Rachel for many years and he managed to get the boy expelled for the disrespect. Parents complained, even Ryan’s own mother, that it was merely a silly prank that Ms Buckland had taken too seriously. Still, Mr Harrison stood firm. 

The new breed were not quite as pointed in their disrespect. These 11 and 12 year olds, the boys and the girls, simply ignored their female teachers. If it wasn’t immediately exciting for them, then there was no chance they were going to let a woman make it so for them. She was treated as an irrelevance and it hurt her, but Rachel still had to go through the motions of setting them homework in the hopes they would do it and telling them off though they would never deign to listen. She felt relieved when that bell rang and the class was dismissed. 

Her second period lesson was her small group of Year 13s, all of whom had a lot more respect for her. After all, they needed to if they were going to pass their final exams and go on to university. The nine students before her got out their laptops and carried on with their coursework, quietly tapping away while Rachel got on with a bit of admin. She spent twenty minutes of collecting up various pieces of marked homework in folders and planning out her next lesson - her Year 11 class, which included poor Clara - before there was a sudden noise above the tapping. 

Snoring. 

Someone was snoring. 

The whole class stopped typing away and pulled their laptop screens down to get a better look at the classroom. The only that hadn’t gone down belonged to one Miss Maisie Greening. She was seated on her own nearest the windows, her head resting on her laptop keyboard so that none could see what was going on. They could hear it, however. A light chuckle went around the room, which Rachel quickly silenced with a finger placed on her lips and an intense stare. She crept slowly over to Maisie’s desk, cautious so as not to make a sound but slightly excited to catch her out. It would make for a funny story later on in the staff room, if nothing else. So, when Rachel pulled the lid of the laptop back to reveal Maisie’s face, she was stunned by what she saw. 

“Miss Greening, are you still with us?” Those were the last words that Maisie Greening would hear pre-relapse.

What greeted Ms Buckland was her 18 year old student sound asleep at her desk with her thumb planted firmly in the corner of her mouth and a thick line of spittle running down her knuckles. Rachel’s heart started to pound. She clutched her chest and stumbled back. 

“Oh god oh god oh god,” Rachel repeated breathlessly. Her students were frozen in their chairs, unable to comprehend what they were seeing. It was not every day that a student relapsed. In the school’s history, only two students had ever relapsed and both were before Rachel’s time as a teacher. 

Nauseous, panicking, and feeling like her chest was about to explode, Rachel had no idea what to do. Her eyes darted around at her students in hope of one of them running out to grab another teacher. She was supposed to do that… wasn’t she? Why did she look to them to do it? She was the grown-up… erm… the adult in the room, wasn’t she? She repeated “oh god” and “oh no” a few times more before the wetting started. It started as a trickle, then became a rush of urine racing down Maisie’s skirt and pooling on her chair. All the overgrown tot did in response was place her thumb further into her mouth and make a little squeaking noise. 

Rachel could not cope. She bolted out of the classroom, tears streaming down her cheeks, and rushed towards Mr Harrison’s office. It was a short walk down the hallway made even shorter by Rachel’s sprinting. His assistant, Miss Reid, sat at her desk with her earphones in and was too late in stopping Rachel from forcing her way into the office. Mr Harrison was idling at his desk when Rachel stormed in, barely able to breathe and clearly in a state of shock. He jumped up to grab her a chair to sit in, offered her his glass of water, and placed a reassuring hand on her shoulder. She didn’t mind that. She needed it. Rachel stopped panting just long enough to take a gulp of water and get her words out. Miss Reid stood with her head peaking out past the doorframe and tried to listen in, though Rachel’s speech was so fast that she likely heard little of it.

“Maisie. She’s relapsed. She’s in the room. She’s relapsed and she’s there and she’s pissed everywhere.” Mr Harrison nodded along, holding Rachel’s gaze as best he could and responding with soft affirmations of what she was telling him. In studying his face, she felt his reassurance all the more acutely. His mossy green eyes contrasted sharply with the greying mass of hair on his head, through which some residual pockets of brown still showed. His beard sat tidily on his face, neither too short nor too long, and made him appear avuncular. He was handsome for a man just past sixty years old. 

She felt warm all of a sudden. The nausea soon subsided. Mr Harrison smiled and beckoned his assistant into the room, explaining what had happened and sending for the cleaners to attend to Ms Buckland’s classroom. Miss Reid took down her notes and left them in peace after that, closing the door behind her with Mr Harrison’s wordless blessing.

“Don’t you worry, Rachel. It’s all going to be taken care of now.” In her head, Rachel heard it as “you are going to be taken care of now”. Her toes wriggled about in her shoes for a split second, barely registering their movement amidst all the other physical sensations that had overtaken her so suddenly. 

Straightening herself up in the chair and placing the glass down on his desk, Rachel looked at Mr Harrison with a grimace. He told her she could be off the rest of the week, full pay, and that she needed rest. Nodding along, she felt better already knowing that she had Mr Harrison looking out for her. Not every teacher - and certainly not every female teacher - had the privilege of a headmaster as gracious and understanding as Mr Harrison. 

When she left his office fifteen minutes later, she peered down the hallway to see the school’s support staff leading an ambling Maisie Greening out of her classroom. The 18 year old girl had the gait of a newborn foal and her lips were smacking aimlessly at the air, no doubt in search of something on which to suckle. Her eyes were glassy and vacant. Rachel felt ill once more, though this time her eyes were the vessel of her emotions. Tearing up, she strode back into her classroom without a care for the eyes peering at the back of her head. She dodged the stream of urine that had originated on Maisie’s chair and aimed straight at her desk. She collected her things and left the building forthwith. 

When she got home, she fell like a ton of bricks onto the sofa and planted her face deep into the cushions while she sobbed. Moments passed before she felt a hand on her shoulder and imagined Mr Harrison standing over her. She turned around, the taste of salty tears now upon her lips, and smiled up at Adam. 

“Hey, are you okay?” he whispered gently. Inside, she wished he could understand her without having to say a single word.