Everyone is divided. Everyone has different people, different pieces of themselves, inside. Hal, Charlie, Felix, Mira – even Barney. If everyone is on their own roller-coaster, looking through their own personal panes of glass…then we’re all kind of in it together. And if we’re all in it together, maybe other people will understand, and I can just…be. No more worrying about whether I’m too fast or too slow, or how I explain me.
Maybe he’ll understand.
Someone says my name, just on the edge of my hearing, and I turn. It takes me a moment to see them in the press of people. Three girls about my age gathered around one of the side tables and holding glasses, two wearing dresses just like ones Mira tossed aside and one wearing a jumpsuit. They look familiar, but I can’t place them.
The girl in the jumpsuit shakes her head, smiling. “I told you – it’s definitely Flora. I can’t believe she’s actually here.”
The one on the left, in a taupe dress, frowns. “My cousin said they gave her loads of pills. Probably shock therapy. He was there when she, you know, freaked out.”
They’re talking about me like I’m some kind of exhibit. They obviously don’t know I can hear them, or how loud their voices are.
Maybe they just don’t care.
A horrible, cold sensation claws up the inside of my stomach.
This is everything I’ve been afraid of.
The one in the middle, the one wearing a long navy blue dress embroidered with little gold suns, gives her a playful push. “You don’t know what you’re talking about. Your cousin doesn’t either.” Her voice sails across the room on bladed wings. “So what do you think they actually did to her? Do you reckon they had to put her in one of those padded rooms?”
She lifts her glass to her lips, tilts her head back to drain her drink…and sees me looking straight at her. I watch her eyes widen, see her dig her elbow into Taupe Dress’s side, but it’s already too late.
The glow around the world sharpens, deepens. Panic pinpricks up and down my spine and my heart moves from a jog to a flat-out sprint.
Everything I’ve been trying to tell myself is a lie.
Faces turned to stare out of the bus window as Mr Parkins takes for ever to cross the road.
I used to go to school with them. They know.
They’re talking about the Incident.
About Crazy Flora, Freaky Flora, Mad Flora.
And standing right behind me on the stairs, Hal has heard every single word.
Barging past them, I make a break for the door. If I can get to the door, through the door, out into the big wide outside, then I can let everything in my head out. Somehow.
Hal calls my name – I hear it, but I don’t stop. Not even for him. Not now, not this time. My name follows me to the open door, but it doesn’t catch me, and outside in the blue-pink of the evening, the gold of the candle lanterns and the green of the lawns, it won’t find me. I can taste the scent of the grass as I run across it, away from the hotel, from history, from Hal…away from my name, away from me.
Ahead, the entrance to the hedge maze is flanked by tall flaming torches, the pathways glowing with yet more lanterns, but none of the party guests have ventured this far out and the maze is silent and still.
Into the labyrinth, right hand on the hedge and keep it there…turn, turn, turn…and my brain starts to settle as the quiet and the rhythm of the maze takes over. I’ve always loved this part of the gardens. When Charlie first got his job here I would try to find my way to the centre before he could – I never won. And after…after I broke, this was one of the places I found the pieces of myself, walking in the cool of the towering hedges, because a maze is just another puzzle.
“You’re okay. You’re okay. You’re okay.”
The branches bounce my voice back to me at every turn, all the way to the heart of the maze and its fairy-tale tower – built as a folly long before the house was a hotel. Following the path through the maze, sidestepping lanterns and dead ends, means following the people who lived here before me, before any of us. It brings my edges back into focus and into reach.
The tower, like the rest of the maze, has been lit with lanterns – its little stone windows glow from the inside. Just like Sanjay taught me, I count the steps up the spiral staircase. I put all of myself into the tips of my fingers on the rough stone walls, letting them ground me, draw me back to earth even as I climb. By the time I reach the top and step out onto the platform of the round roof to lean on the low wall, the hammering in my brain has fallen silent and the world is quiet.
Except for my name, which floats up from somewhere below me, drifting between yet another pair of flaming torches that loom above my head, and lands at my feet like a feather.
“Flora!”
Not Mira. Not Charlie. Not Barney.
Hal.
Hal is in my head. It doesn’t matter where I go, or what I do, I can’t outrun him.
“Flora? Are you there?”
He isn’t in my head.
He’s here.
Somewhere…
Peering down into the maze, I can’t see any movement.
No. I must have imagined it…
“Flora! Over here!”
At the very edge of the maze, all the way back at the entrance, I see him. His hair and the white of his shirt gleaming in the torchlight. He’s waving.
“Are you okay? How do I get to you?”
How do you get to me?
How does anyone?
Why would you even want to?
I can’t let him. He’ll only see what they see – and then he’ll never want to look at me again.
I lean a little further over the wall and shout back to him, my voice carrying on the still air. “You don’t.”
“What’s wrong?” His voice has rough edges when it’s raised, and my tightly-knotted heart shakes itself loose inside my ribs.
I ignore it. “I just need…”
What? What do I need? To be normal? To not have this thing in my head? This part of me that talks too fast and feels too much and can’t bear to wait for the world, moving and thinking a million times slower than I am, to catch up? From the outside, it probably looks obnoxious. Like I’m obnoxious.
How can I tell him what it’s like when it’s too fast even to feel it coming? It’s shiny and bright and it flashes like a fairground ride, making the world whistle and spin. From outside, maybe it doesn’t even look so bad.
But like a fairground ride, all you can do is hold on tight, and hope that when the mania has burned itself out, it hasn’t taken all of you with it; that there’s something left that you can salvage…that there’s time before the bipolar pendulum swings the other way, dragging you back into the dark where everything is cold and empty.
What do I need?
To not feel like I’m faulty, I guess.
To feel like what I am is enough.
I’d almost convinced myself that that might even be true – that maybe he would think so. Stupid me. How could he? How could anyone?
“I just needed…to be on my own for a bit.”
“Can I come in?”
“Into the maze?”
“That’s the idea.”
“You’ll never get through to the middle.”
“Try me.”