“It sounds lonely,” he says.
“It is.” A loose thread tickles the side of my leg, and I pull it away, stretching it out between my fingers and twisting it until it doubles back on itself over and over again, knotting into a tiny ball. I drop it on the floor. “You know why it’s called bipolar disorder?” I can’t look at him. I can’t. If I look at him, I won’t say it. It feels like I’m peeling back the lid of my heart and letting someone else see inside, see all my secrets and my fears – the sharp edges that cut; the cold little black ball, no bigger than the ball of thread I just dropped, that I carry around with me all the time. “It’s because if I was a compass, there’d be no east and no west. No sunrise or sunset. Just me, in the dark, with my needle spinning from pole to pole. And both poles are just as hostile, and both poles can kill you.”
He doesn’t say anything. There isn’t much to say, is there?
So I carry on.
“It’s like, you know how people say nobody ever died from sadness? It’s not true. People do die from it. It eats them up from the inside and there’s just the shell of them left – whatever armour they covered themselves with, however thick a skin they grew, that’s all there is. It hurts all the time, and they just want it to stop. And it doesn’t matter whether you call it depression or something else – it all means the same thing, and that’s what it does to you.”
I take a deep breath, and now it isn’t just Hal waiting – it’s the room, the house, the world. Waiting for me to say the things I’ve never said before – not to Charlie, not to Sanjay, not even to myself, late at night when my thoughts have been racing and my mind has been raging and I’ve wondered if it’s possible to die of thinking too fast and too much.
“And then there’s the other bit. You know how sometimes you hear a song, and it’s a song you love and it makes you want to jump up and dance, and you feel like if you don’t, you’ll just explode? It’s that feeling. That’s what I mean. The kind where you think you can do anything. Like you’re somehow invincible. Except you forget that you’re not actually invincible. Most of the time, it’s fine – the world’s just that little bit more in focus, a bit brighter. But then, sometimes…”
I know he’s trying to follow. I know he wants to and I know he’s listening – but how can I make what’s inside my head make sense to him when it barely does to me half the time?
“I’m not explaining it properly. I’m sorry. It’s hard. How about this? There was a girl in the waiting room at my therapist’s office. She was there to see one of the other therapists every week, just the same time as me, and sometimes we’d talk. She had this scar, all the way down here.” I trace my finger down the side of his chest, from just below his shoulder, halfway down to his hip and back up again. “When she had a manic episode, she’d stabbed herself in the heart – or tried to. The scar was from the surgery to save her. She didn’t know why she did it, and she didn’t even remember doing it. She was doing okay when I met her. She was nice. I liked her. But she had this scar to remind her, every day, that she can’t always trust her own mind. And I’m scared – all the time – that the same thing could happen to me one day. That my mind could do that too, and that I wouldn’t even know. Because you don’t. I’m fine most of the time, but how would I know if I wasn’t? All the time, I’m between those two places, with both of them pulling me in different directions, and me just trying to stay where I am. Who I am.”
My finger is still pressed against his chest, and gently – the way someone might handle dynamite – he closes his hand around mine and holds it in his.
And that’s just it. I don’t want to be treated like I might explode at any moment, leaving everyone around me broken too. I don’t want him to be careful. I don’t want him to look at me and see someone who mustn’t be shaken or jarred, who mustn’t be upset. I want him to see me.
“I didn’t say anything before because…well, because I didn’t want you to see that and not me. I thought I was fine, and I didn’t want it to be an issue.”
“It isn’t,” he says quietly. His eyes seem sad, and there are things under his voice, things he’s not saying. I guess he wants to let me say all mine first.
“It is. It becomes an ‘issue’. I become an ‘issue’. And I’m not an issue. Issues don’t have dreams or things they’re scared of. Or dirty laundry on their floor or, you know, a life.”
He squeezes my hand, just once, and lets go, slipping out from under the blanket and walking over to the window; leaning on the sill, his back to me, he stares out at the park, the gardens, all the way to the house.
“It was Albie’s letters, wasn’t it? I knew they bothered you. I should have asked or said something.”
“Why? You didn’t know. It was my head, not yours.”
“But that’s what it was, right? It was the stuff about shell shock?”
“A bit. But it’s more than that. It’s bigger.”
Bigger. Darker. Scarier.
More complicated.
But for once, it’s not just black-and-white – it’s a hundred different kinds of grey.
“I’m sorry,” he says, and his voice is thicker than usual, and he has to stop and clear his throat. “I’m sorry,” he says again, “that you have to deal with all that.” He turns around to face the room, face me, and his cheeks are flushed. “And I’m sorry that you have to live with it…” The red in his cheeks deepens by three shades. “But if you…I mean, I…aaagggh.” He groans, and runs his hands back through his hair. “You don’t have to deal with it by yourself, is what I’m saying.”
But before I can say anything, his expression shifts. Something in his face changes, first to confusion…then to complete amazement as he stares at a spot on the sloping ceiling.
“Flora.”
“What?”
“Flora, come here.”
“What?”
“Come here!” He waves an arm at me, and I untangle myself from the folds of blanket.
“What? Is there a spider? Because I hate to break it to you, but I always get Mira to—”
He turns me round, then lifts his arm up and around me, pointing to a spot where two beams meet just above our heads. The wood is old and cracked, and covered in scratches and dents and holes made by everyone else who’s ever lived here.
“I don’t get it…”
But suddenly I do – and the second I see it, I wonder how the hell I ever missed it, because it’s right there.
They are right there.
The scratches on the beam in my ceiling rearrange themselves, as if by magic, into two pairs of letters. Initials.
I spin back around to face Hal so quickly that our faces almost collide.
IC and AH.
Iris and Albie.
The letters might as well be written in fire, they blaze out at us so brightly. How have I never seen them before?
They were here. Both of them.
And they have been all along.