Cold Feet

I get cold feet a lot. The literal kind, the ones that make you wince when they brush your leg in the night, stop you slipping off to sleep, distract when you wear thin socks. That kind. I've had them for a while, I'm almost used to them. Thing is, I never used to, not before January.

I've written this before. I laid it all out over two pages, all mysterious and slow and perfect. I wrote something that followed perfectly the thoughts behind me doing something that made no sense, something stupid I've regretted on and off since. I had it all written out, but I never typed it up. I filed it at the back of my folder, behind all my Physics notes and pretended it wasn't there. I felt bad every time I saw it then, one day, I finally sorted my folder. I took it out, read one paragraph and folded it in half then tore it up. My Mum works for the Civil Service, she has this way of tearing paper that she learned there, ripping it into smaller and smaller pieces so nobody could find the pieces and read them easily. She does it every time she throws out a bill or anything confidential. I did it to that page, walked to the recycling bin, dropped it in there. I forgot about it until five o'clock this morning when cold feet kept me awake; and I remembered a poem from GCSE English.

It's by Simon Armitage, him or Carol Ann Duffy. Can't remember which. Probably Armitage. There's a snowman, and the character in the poem kicks it apart just to destroy something the children worked on.

That's what I did. It was January, and the snow had covered my garden. It was our first winter in the new house and the novelty of a lawn covered in snow wasn't lost on my brother. He'd gone up and down, trying to make a snowman. 14 years old and it was his first one. At the time the revision I wasn't doing kept me inside but I watched until, like Calvin's dad in one of the strips in my Calvin and Hobbes anthology, I left my work and went outside to play in the snow. I helped him pack the snow better, did the heavy lifting to stack the sections on top of each other. I told him he wasn't weak for not being able to do it himself, I'm not even strong, he just needed to wait for his shoulders to fill out. Story of his life, not being able to do things his older brother can.

Later that day, he roundhouse kicked the thing back into two pieces. I didn't say anything, didn't even think anything about it, just watched him from the kitchen.

The next night the work got too much again. I headed out in coat and gloves and rolled all the remaining snow into a new ball, bigger than any of the others out there. I wasn't trying to prove anything, I just threw myself into the task. I got carried away with just getting things done a change, it was great. I was out of breath for the first time in weeks. I finally came back into the kitchen smiling again and loving it. That went as soon as revision got mentioned.

An hour or two passed. I was standing in the kitchen in a tshirt, barefoot. I looked through my reflection to the snow outside and I got angry at myself. I got upset, I panicked again, my head started to hurt. After a while I felt that change that comes when I don't cry, scream or laugh. When I cock my head to the side, crack a smile a foot wide that doesn't reach my eyes and stop thinking in straight lines.

I wanted to kick the snow, just kick it, destroy it, hit it a lot, 'take my frustrations out' on it like people in movies and on TV do when they're angry. I never do that, I never just smash something, maybe I hould, maybe it's actually good. Yeah, I need my shoes, shoes, trainers, the hallway. I've got them but there's no socks. I can't wear trainers without socks, I don't want athlete's foot again, that sucked I don't have socks theyre upstairs but im down here and i dont have socks but the flip flops the sandals the ones from newquay they cost me six pounds and they gave me pain so bad i had to keep popping paracetamol every morning just to be able to walk but it was ok i could wear the flipflops i cant go out in the snow in flipflops oh who am i kidding i dont even have a jumoer fuck the jumper just go just go

I pointed myself at the door and drifted through it. I stood on the edge of the patio with my massive snowball in front of me and I swayed slightly on the spot. I exhaled, catching a swearword between gritted teeth and smashed my foot into the side of it. It didn't give much, I'd put a lot of effort into packing it tightly after all. I kicked it again and again, kept going, I got angrier, I got angry at everything, everyone, me, myself, my father, my school, the whole damn exam system. After a while the sandals started to fall off. They wouldn't stay on and after a while I just left them where they flicked off to.

The stupidity of the whole thing hit me but I felt myself drifting, separating. There was this disconnect between me and what my body did. I just stood there watching it go, watching me attacking this thing, every now and then I made a suggestion or two, pointed out a weak spot, but generally just watched. I guessed this was what they mean by 'automatic pilot', I just watched. I could feel the cold starting to seep into my shoulders through the tshirt. It was a wickable one I'd bought for DofE, the wind ran straight through it and chilled me. I suggested speeding up to generated more heat, fight the chill and smiled slightly as I felt my head flick to the other side as I sped up.

My feet hurt, then they didn't. I finished the snowball and aimed myself at the next one. I'd like to say it felt like it took forever to reach it, I'd like to say it felt like I was there instantly, but it didn't. It took as long to walk there as it ought to, no more no less. I thought about that as my feet started crashing into the second snowball, thought about how normal this all seemed. I knew I'd snapped, gone too far, I knew this was stupid. I was a fool, a spastic - no. That's his word, I won't call myself that. No, this was different, I... I tried to switch off. I concentrated on the task at hand, or rather at foot. I thought about that 'joke', I thought about how my feet had turned into tools. They weren't responding now, the only evidence I had for them hitting the snowball was my eyes. I thought about how bad the grammar in that sentence was but didn't bother to correct myself. I realised my feet were long gone, that in fact my knees were the lowest things I could actually feel. If I closed my eyes my feet wouldn't even be there, that sense of knowing where my body was had gone, I was just guessing based on where my legs were. The snowball was gone, and I stomped it into the grass then rounded on the final snowball. I didn't give myself time to think.

The third was the worst of them. It was shoddy, poor workmanship. It was far, far too soft. It hadn't been packed down properly. It wasn't his fault though, he'd never played in the snow like that before, like I had that magical day when the headteacher came into our classroom and said that afternoon lessons were cancelled. After lunch loads of us had gone out to the green down the road from the school and built walls nearly as tall as we were then had massive snowball fights behind them. We set up something approaching a paintball 'map' and played capture the flag with a scarf on a stick in the middle of the fortified lines. It was such a good day, such a wonderful time. I didn't know if it brought a tear to my eye, my eyes were watering so much I couldn't tell.

I came back to myself a bit and saw that I'd kicked most of the way through to the other side. I suggested that I might like to move to the other side and break through from there and let myself drift round and take my own advice. The snowball split in two neat halves and I raised my club and smashed it down onto them again and again. I nearly lost my balance, so I switched to the other one and brought that down on the snow instead. Soon there was nothing left except a kind of packed ice and the grass I should have been able to feel between my toes. There was no more, it was done. I stood still again and I hung my head. I took breaths, I swayed, I gave up and went inside.

The walk back seemed to take ages, but only because it did. I couldn't trust my legs, I could barely feel my knees. Without any kind of feedback I had to watch my legs and my footing. Back inside the house I went down the hallway to the lounge door which was mercifully ajar. In a quiet voice I asked my mother for help then went into the dining room and collapsed into the swivel chair.

I'd like to say I don't remember what happened next, but I do. She came through and I said my feet hurt. They didn't really, but it was a small lie, one that let me hide the truth for one last moment. She asked why, she noticed they were wet. She touched one of them, they were freezing. Why had I been putting my feet in cold water. I started to speak in a low voice, a defeated monotone. I didn't look at her, didn't need to to know that surprise, anger and concern would be chasing each other across her face. She went to get a towel. She came back and at next to me, made me put my feet on her lap. I used my hands to do that, lifting my legs and swinging them round. I didn't tell her they hadn't moved when I told them to. I closed my eyes and answered her questions in the same voice. I waited for the question she obviously wanted to ask, and then told her I didn't know why. The sad thing was, I wasn't even lying.

Time passed, I took my feet back and rubbed them myself for a change. She said the same things about being concerned for me, asked me if  wanted to just quit, leave school. I laughed a horrible short chuckle and said, for the thousandth time, no. Eventually she left me alone with my books. I sat and didn't cry, or laugh, or so anything really. Later, I don't know how much later, I started to move my arms and shift papers around the table. I started to work. There was no time left for anything else. Later again, my mother came back through and told me I should go to bed. It was one, or twelve, or eleven. She said revising now wouldn't do anything, I told her she was wrong as nicely as I could.

My feet started to hurt an hour or so later. The pain was good. It focused me. Like Judge Dredd wearing tight boots I was too focussed on the pain in my feet to worry about anything else. I gritted my teeth and worked through the pain. The night passed in a panic, questions and answers everywhere, a whole table covered in paper. I read things I'd never seen before in my text book, then answered past paper questions about them. I checked off topics on a list I constantly revised. Eventually I went and put a suit on. By this point I was in agony, shooting pains up my shins stopping, mercifully, just short of my knees. I couldn't stop moving though, couldn't stop. I kept moving until I had to leave for school.

I waited outside the Great Hall alone. There were Lower Sixth taking these exams for the first time. I didn't even bother looking at them most of the time. I looked out over the field, transfixed by an expanse of snow that made my garden seem irrelevant. If my friends were still here, still in Woodford, if I could make some calls, if I could get everyone here, make some plans before we started, we could have a wall seven feet high running for twenty feet in front of the rugby posts. We could set up a mirror image down the other end, walls and barriers dotted across the middle, surrounding a fort in the middle, the flag in the centre. Same rules as last time, one hit and you drop the flag, go back to your own lines. It would be magical. It wouldn't happen though. They were gone. They were all gone, scattered across the country at various universities or at home taking gap years by choice or otherwise. The lucky ones wouldn't even be awake yet.

I snapped out of it and started to recite formulae in my head, run over methods I hoped I wouldn't need, making sure of everything I could remember. After a time two people in my new year showed up, they were resitting too. I didn't know their names. I really couldn't think of a time when I'd spoken to them really. The guy noticed the equations I'd drawn in the snow on the low wall in front of me, I smiled slightly. I drank my Lucozade and watched them talk, running through everything I knew about them, remembering where I'd seen them, who they talked to, putting my memory to use pulling up the mundane details, the little observations that I don't even notice I'm making, the little things I never even realise I know until times like this when I lose focus and start drifting away from what I should be concentrating on. I stopped listening to them and ran over the formulae again.

The hall was cold and the paper wasn't easy. Most of it was okay, there was just enough stuff I couldn't do to keep me on edge though. Every now and then, as little as I dared, I rubbed my legs again. I had to be careful - rubbing the life back into your legs isn't exactly something you're supposed to do under exam conditions.

It ended. I'd lost five minutes on a mistake with a decimal point and I'd forgotten to add a '+ c' onto the end of my integration. Both cost me marks. I tried to work out how many, I found my maximum mark was 86.666% if every question I'd answered was right. I knew they weren't. I was too tired to worry. I had to focus on the next paper. I had one hour to prepare. I had to focus, had to go over the topics again, tighten them up. I was halfway through writing that on the page when my head dipped forward and the clock slipped round most of a turn.

I kept quiet over lunch, glad eam nerves could hide my exhaustion. I was back in the hall faster than I wanted to be, even though I'd turned down another twenty minutes' break. Filling out my candidate number and signing the front of the booklet, I realised I'd been awake for over twenty-four hours. I just wanted it over, wanted to get home and sleep. I did the maths, I left, I got the bus, I went home. I told my mother how well it had gone. Even with everything else, the all-nighter had given me enough knowledge to scrape through. I was looking at a passing grade, maybe even a B, not the terrible, all-encompassing failure I'd envisaged. She was happy for me, she asked about my feet. I was too tired to lie, so I just went to get some thick socks instead. After I took off the suit I curled up in my bed. Below me, my mother was still expecting me to be coming straight back down. I was sound asleep before she reached my room two minutes later.

The next day, term started. I was back in school, getting sympathy for having had to come in on Monday for exams and, as usual, not quite telling the whole truth about what happened. My feet would hurt constantly for another few days, but I welcomed the pain - it was a sign that the nerves I'd wrecked were repairing themselves.

After my next exam was done, I gave out. The exams, the weeks of pressure before, the stress and physical pain during, combined to put me out of action for a good few weeks. I barely attended school, not that that was a change. After a while though, I forgot. Like with any bad memory, I let it slide from my mind. I wrote it down, then filed it away and forgot. Later I even tore that up, a nice gesture for moving on. Except, this time it didn't really go. Not completely. Every now and then I get cold feet. Normally, I warm them up, I forget again. Not this time though. With Spring in the air and the heating off, I didn't have a nice source of heat at the foot of my bed. My feet stayed cold and that cold started to run up my shins and I couldn't lie down any more, so I came and wrote instead.