“There’s always the chance of relapse, but there’s also the possibility of what I call a reactive episode. Not a relapse as such, but…think of it as an echo, if you like, of this. A ghost.”
“And if I get one of those?”
“Then we’ll deal with it if and when it comes.”
“If I know it’s happened,” I grumble, sticking the sheet back in the folder.
“You should have a little more faith in yourself, Flora, and in the people around you. Your brother, his partner, your friends…All of them are there for you, but you have to let them in. You have to be honest with them. Even if you can’t see clearly, they can.”
What did Iris think when she read those letters, saw him coming apart through his words, just the same as we have?
I love you. I am yours – all that is left of me at the end of this is yours. All that I ever was or will be or might have been.
When he talks about coming back, he doesn’t just mean from France.
He knew.
He knew he was coming undone.
Would he ever have recovered from the shell shock? Or would he have faced a future somewhere like Fallowmill; almost able to see his home through the bars on the windows? So near to normal, but so far away from it?
How would he have lived, if he’d lived?
Albie is dead, but I can feel him in my head and under my skin anyway. He walks through my mind – officer’s cap pushed back on his head and trailing the smell of smoke and cordite – and wherever he walks the world flashes white and black. He leads me through the woods, through the deer park and through the open doors of Hopwood – but where the lobby should be is a huge and empty landscape, a road stretching ahead of me and, on either side of it, two different worlds. One is dark, the trees all black and twisted, bent double as though weighed down by the heavy black sky. The other is bright, so bright that looking at it almost blinds me. Someone calls my name, first from the dark and then from the light, and they call me over and over until the sound hammers on my brain and makes my ears bleed…and even though I start running, however hard and fast I run I can’t outrun the voice because it’s my own. Both of my siren-sides screaming at me to come to them, to step off the road as it gets narrower, narrower, narrower…
And at the point when I can’t run any more, when the voices – my own voice, echoing through every piece of me – are too much, the road snaps up in front of me, up and up until it blots out the sky; it folds around me, blocking every possible escape…and I am in the attic. The attic at Hopwood, but there’s nobody here and the space is bare. The door is open, but as I run for it, knowing with all my heart that I have to get out, it slams, and there’s the terrible grinding sound of a key turning for ever in a lock. I try the handle, I kick at the door – but there isn’t a door there now, and there never was. It’s just a wall.
I run to the window and reach it just as the bars slam down across it. In the gardens below, I can see my friends, my family, myself, all looking up at the attic. At me. And one by one they turn and walk away…and I am alone.
You have to let them in. You have to be honest with them.
When I wake to the sound of swifts and the touch of gold-yellow sunlight filling my room, my bed sheets soaked in sweat and tangled around me, I know it with absolute certainty.
I have to tell Hal. Today. Before he leaves.
What do I have to lose?
Except my mind. Same as usual.
I can’t keep running from this part of me, locking it away. I have to take hold of it before it takes hold of me. I keep my own keys.
Albie didn’t have a choice. He didn’t have a chance. It happened to him.
This is me. Part of me. I can’t cut it out or wash it away.
I have to live with it. I can manage it, sure, but it’s not going anywhere soon.
I might as well get used to living with all of me.
There’s a knock on my bedroom door and, as usual, Charlie opens it and walks straight in before I can answer, carrying a steaming mug. He seems to think of knocking as more of a last-second warning that he’s coming in, rather than a way of checking it’s okay.
I pull my sheets up over my head.
“You’re awake,” he says, and I can hear him putting the mug on my bedside table. “How are you feeling?”
“Ngggggh.” My mouth feels like someone wiped it with an old sock – a side-effect of the sedative I took after Charlie had to half-carry me through the front door, when I couldn’t stop shaking and couldn’t stop crying and I couldn’t shut the floodgates that had opened somewhere in between my head and my heart and let everything I’ve been trying to keep safely locked inside out. All the life I could have had, and all the fear I have had. All the times I’ve made myself step back, stay small and safe…
Who decides what safe is?
I do.
“Here’s your phone, by the way. I had to come in and take it after you went to sleep – it kept buzzing.”
I yank the sheet down from my face.
“What?”
“Here.” Charlie holds my phone out, and it’s all I can do not to snatch it from him. “We were worried it would wake you up.” He picks the mug back up again and hands it to me. I take it, and put it straight back on the table, cupping my phone – the same phone that for so long has made me feel even more alone. No messages, no calls. Nothing.
And now…this.
Missed calls, texts, messages…
So many of them.
Hal, over and over again.
Mira.
Are you OK? Hal said you ran off – he’s looking for you. Call me?
Hal again. And again. And then:
I’m coming over.
Charlie watches me scrolling through them, one after another, and nods.
“You were asleep. I told them you weren’t feeling well. Mira understood.”
“You didn’t tell Hal about me…?”
“No! It’s not up to me to tell him. But you should.”
“I know.” I drop my phone onto the bed next to me. “I’m going to – this morning.”
“Good idea.” He taps both his hands on his knees. “You can come right down.”
“Sorry?”
“He’s waiting downstairs.”
“He’s downstairs?”
“Yes, Flora.”
“Here?”
“Yes, Flora.”
“Now?”
“Shall I just write it on a piece of paper and hold it up for you? It’ll save us all a lot of time…”
“No. No no nononononono…” I fight my way out from the tangle of my bed. “He can’t be here. Not now! I don’t know what to say, how to…He can’t see me like…”
I run a hand back through my hair. It feels like a bad night’s sleep. In the mirror, my face manages to be both pale and flushed at once, which is an achievement. The whole look is finished off beautifully by dark purple shadows under my eyes. I sigh at my brother. “This is not how I’m supposed to look for this.” I grab a hairbrush and start forcing it through the tangled mess on top of my head.
“Look for what?”
“I mean, I actually look like a crazy person. If you were going to ask someone, ‘Hey, what does a crazy person look like?’ they would point to this.” I wave the hairbrush at…well, all of me, really. “I can’t tell him looking like this.”