‘And …?’ See, she missed nothing. She’d known immediately that there would be an ‘And’.
‘And say the word “spode” once a sentence, for ten sentences. I’ll come with you and invigilate.’
‘What’s a spode?’
‘It’s nothing. I don’t think it’s a word. You don’t have to say “spode”, you can pick any words, so long as they’re random and will freak him out.’
‘Okay, I’ll start with “spode”, then I’ll freestyle. Come on.’ She pulled me across the room and stood, small and tough, in front of the man.
‘Hi, there!’ He ignored Bronagh and treated me to an oily smile.
‘You’re looking very spode tonight.’ Bronagh dragged his attention back to her.
‘I am?’
‘Very spode indeed. I saw you eyeing up this little frisbee here.’
‘Frisbeeeeee …’ He sort of licked his lips. ‘Yeah.’
‘There’s a full pliers tonight,’ Bronagh said briskly. ‘Bound to send people a little off their wattage. Tray!’ She clapped her hands together in a single loud retort, making Kristo jump slightly.
He looked at me and said, with a contemptuous nod at Bronagh, ‘What’s she on about?’
‘Tray!’ I clapped my hands together. ‘Can’t you feel it?’
‘Feel it in your nimbus?’ Bronagh urged. ‘Feel it in your stripe? One, two, three, tray! Come on, clap your coconuts, clap your cassock! One, two, three, tray!’
‘How about you lose your crazy friend?’ he said to me.
‘Crazy?’ I said. ‘What the floss are you talking about? Altogether now, one, two, three, tray!’
That was it. He knew when he was beaten. He turned on his heel and walked away from us.
I tuned back in to Shannon O’Malley. The tediosity was still in full spate – ‘… you know how it is with kids, they need their space,’ she was saying – so I promptly tuned back out again.
Bronagh had been worth a thousand Shannon O’Malleys and her dullard ilk. I’d rather have no friends at all than have to listen to this sort of shite.
On and on Shannon talked while I stared at Dr Waterbury’s closed door and yearned for it to open. Finally she said the magic words: ‘He’ll see you now.’ Like we were in The Apprentice.
‘Oh Helen, hello.’ Dr Waterbury seemed happy to see me, which is odd when you think of it because when you’re a doctor no one is coming to you because they’ve got good news to share. ‘How are you?’ he asked.
‘I’ll tell you how I am. Yesterday I thought I saw a flock of vultures at the petrol station.’
He stared at me assessingly. ‘Vultures? As I remember, the last time it was giant bats.’
‘Your memory is a credit to you.’
‘Giant bats, vultures, there isn’t much difference, is there? I’m assuming they weren’t actual vultures. Seagulls? Same as last time?’
‘Seagulls. I need to go back on the Sunny Ds.’
‘Any other symptoms?’
‘Not really. I’ve a pain in my chest. Sometimes it’s hard to breathe.’
‘Anything else? How’s your sleep?’
‘I’m getting my full three hours a night.’
‘Trouble getting off? Or waking up early?’
‘Both, I suppose.’
‘How’s your appetite? When was the last time you had a proper meal?’
‘Ah …’ I thought about it. ‘April.’
‘Seriously?’
‘Seriously. But I was never one for proper sit-down food.’
‘I remember now,’ he said. ‘Cheese and coleslaw sandwiches. You live on them. What else is going on for you?’
Haltingly, I said, ‘I’m finding it hard to talk to people. I don’t really want to be with anyone. But I don’t want to be on my own either. I feel weird. Scared weird. The world looks … weird. I don’t want to have a shower; I don’t care what I wear. Everything feels ominous, like something terrible is going to happen. Sometimes I feel like it already has.’
‘How long has this been going on?’
‘Few days.’ I paused. ‘Well, a couple of weeks. A while. Please, doc, just give me the Sunny Ds and I’ll be on my way.’
‘Did anything happen to trigger this relapse?’
‘It’s not a relapse. It’s a blip.’
‘Any recent losses? Traumas?’
‘Well, my home, my flat … my electricity was cut off, my bed was repossessed.’
‘Your bed?’
‘Yeah, it’s complicated. I had to move back in with my parents yesterday. Does that count as a trauma?’
‘What do you think, Helen?’
‘Oh, don’t start that. You’re my doctor, not my therapist.’
‘Speaking of which, are you still seeing her? Antonia Kelly, isn’t it?’
‘Yes, it is, and no, I’m not.’
‘Why not?’
‘I got better.’
‘It might be an idea to give her a shout. Any suicidal ideation?’
‘Um … yes, now that you mention it. Like, I’ve no actual plans but I’d love it if I caught some strange virus and died.’
‘Hmm. Right.’ He didn’t like the sound of that. ‘That’s not so good. Would you consider going back to –’
‘No!’ Never. I couldn’t even think about it. I wished that part of my life had never happened. ‘Tell me, doc …’ This was a hard question to ask, but I had to know. ‘Tell me, am I smelly?’
He sighed. ‘I didn’t spend seven years in university to answer that sort of question.’
‘That means that I am.’
‘You’re not. At least not from here.’ But he was a few feet away, not close enough to get an accurate reading. ‘Helen … look, ask someone else. Why don’t you ask your mum?’
‘She’s old. She can’t smell so well these days.’
With another sigh he turned to his screen. ‘Let’s see. Antidepressants. The Effexor didn’t work out for you the last time. Or the Cymbalta. Or the Aponal. But you did okay on Seroxat. Let’s try that. And we’ll start you off on a fairly high dose. There’s no point messing around here.’ He started clicking away.
‘While you’re writing prescriptions,’ I said, ‘I’d really like some sleep. Any chance I could have some sleeping tablets? I promise I won’t take an overdose.’
Especially because I knew it wouldn’t work.
Amazing the things you could find out online. An overdose of sleeping tablets – if you did a survey, that would probably be most people’s preferred method of ending their own life. But they could be very wrong. Oh yes. It wasn’t like the good old days when you could rock-solid depend on a handful of sleepers to carry you off into a permanent slumber. In these litigious times drug companies are so terrified of being sued that their sedatives have a built-in ejector seat. Take too many and chances are you wouldn’t snuff it. You might just puke. Of course, you could choke on your own vomit and shuffle off your mortal coil that way, but you couldn’t depend on it. And you might have gone to the trouble of writing goodbye notes. Maybe even giving away some of your possessions.
You could end up in the awkward position of having to ask your sister to give you back your Alexander McQueen scarf.
I mean, how embarrassing.
17
I went straight to the chemist and got my antidepressants and took the first one right there in the shop, swallowing it down without water, because I was so desperate to get it into my system. As usual, Waterbury had stressed that it would take up to three weeks before there was a positive effect. But I was thinking of the medicine as a defensive shield, that it might halt my slide back down into the … horror, the hell … whatever you want to call it. I also took ownership of twelve sleeping tablets, twelve white little circles of relief. I’d have loved to take four or five of them right away and conk out for a couple of days, just cease to exist, but they were precious; I couldn’t waste them.
I got into my car and had driven halfway back to my apartm
ent before I realized what I was doing and suddenly I was very upset.
My ex-flat wasn’t much. It was just a one-bedroomed box on the fourth floor of a newly built block, but it had meant a lot to me. It wasn’t just the pleasure of living alone, which for an irritable person is a price beyond rubies. Or the pride of being able to pay a mortgage.
It was having something that I didn’t have to compromise on. I’d spent so much of my life rubbing people up the wrong way and having to tone myself down in order to survive, that making my flat into a home was my one chance to be fully me.
Even before I’d moved in, Claire was bombarding me with interiors magazines and everyone was talking about ‘opening up’ the modest-sized rooms and ‘introducing light and air’. Dad, overcome with delight that I was finally leaving home, offered to hire a van and said we should go to Ikea, all of us. ‘Make a day of it,’ he said. ‘Have our lunch and everything. I hear they do lovely Swedish meatballs. We’ll buy everything you need, even an ice-cream scoop.’
But instead of furnishing my flat along clean, bright, Scandinavian lines, I went completely the other way. I closed it down. I made it intimate and interesting and I filled it with antiques.
When I say antiques, I mean, of course, old rubbish, what with money being on the scarce side now that I had a mortgage to pay. I haunted executors’ sales, where you buy a big box of old shit for half-nothing, usually full of broken lamps and crappy oil paintings of horses, but the odd time it can accidentally contain something useful or nice. Which was how I ended up with a full-length mirror that was merely the tiniest bit fly-blown and a charming ewer set that was only slightly cracked. (Ewer set: a ceramic jug and bowl for washing yourself, from the olden days before they had showers. Could you imagine?)
My bed came from a convent that was shutting up shop; it was mahogany with black lacquer inlays on the footboard and headboard. It was actually quite fancy considering that nuns are supposed to have renounced worldly goods, but maybe it had belonged to the Mother Superior. I liked the idea of her lolling about in the ornate bed, eating crystallized fruit, sipping Madeira and watching America’s Next Top Model while, in the chilly chapel, the white-faced novices knelt on frozen peas, dreaming about a meal of boiled water.
Over several months I accumulated more furnishings. I put a big sheaf of peacock feathers by the living-room window to filter the light and make it blue. Then, in a serendipitous event, I came across a pair of peacock-patterned curtains at an auction; they would ‘go’ perfectly with the feathers. Alas, they were miles too big for the room. The pole ended up going the length of the entire wall and when the curtains were drawn it was a bit like being in a grotto, but still.
I picked my paint colours with care. As I said, I couldn’t afford the Holy Basil range, but I did my best to find cheap imitations and I obviously succeeded because Tim the decorator developed a crushing headache on the left side of his face after a morning of painting my bedroom dark red. (Holy Basil’s almost-identical colour was called Death Stench.) ‘I’m popping Migraleve like they’re Smarties,’ he said, and had to take two days off.
I became obsessed with getting a plain black duvet set and spent hours on the internet, raging against The White Company.
For a while all I did was fiddle around with my flat to make it even more fabulous. It was like being in love; I couldn’t think about anything else. In a fit of inspiration I draped a veil over the slightly fly-blown mirror so that my reflection would look like a ghost. Then I took it off again. Things had gone too far.
That kick-started a mild fit of revisionism. I threw out the cracked ewer set because it was a ewer set. And cracked. And generally just a bit gank. Then I started having doubts about my battleship-grey bathroom. So I repainted it yellow. (Official name: Buttercup.) (But it was Gangrene on the Holy Basil chart.) The hefty teak sideboard transpired to have woodworm. And the moss-coloured chenille tablecloth had mould.
All in all, my new space was a work in progress and I introduced people into it with care. I wanted them to love it as much as I did and some did, some didn’t. Bronagh, of course, thought it was fabulous, Claire thought it was fabulous, Dad – unexpectedly – thought it was fabulous, and Anna murmured, ‘Distant voices, still lives,’ which I think was a good thing.
Margaret, on the other hand, wasn’t so keen. On her first visit she looked anxiously around at the ivy-green walls and said, ‘I feel quite frightened.’ A couple of weeks later she informed me matter-of-factly, ‘I don’t want my children coming to your flat. They didn’t sleep well after the last time.’
Rachel said it was a manifestation of a diseased mind. As soon as she stepped into my navy hallway she started roaring with scornful laughter, then said grimly, ‘I’ve seen it all now.’
And when Jay Parker happened into my life, he said that spending half an hour in my living room watching Top Gear was like being buried alive.
18
Back at my parents’, Mum was waiting with a muffin for me. ‘Banana and pecan. I know it’s the wrong colour but would you try it? Are you okay?’ she asked. ‘You look a bit …’
‘Grand,’ I said. ‘It’s just the clouds. When it’s overcast like this, it does my head in.’
A strange expression passed over her face. ‘The sky is blue.’
I took a look out of the window; the sky was blue. ‘When did that happen?’
‘It’s been blue all morning.’
But it didn’t make things any better. I was still uneasy, just in a different way. The empty sky looked hard and cold and merciless. Couldn’t they have put in some clouds to soften it up a bit?
‘What did the doctor say?’ Mum asked.
How much should I tell her?
Nothing, I decided. Look at the way she’d reacted to my vulture sighting – she didn’t want this to be happening.
Two and a half years ago I’d learned to stop wanting comfort from the people around me, because they couldn’t give it. We were all too scared. I was terrified and so were they. No one could understand what was happening to me, and when they couldn’t make me better they felt helpless and guilty and eventually resentful. Yes, they loved me, my head knew that even if my heart couldn’t feel it, but there was a small part of them that was angry. As if it was my choice to become depressed and that I was deliberately resisting the medication that was meant to fix me.
Obviously everyone wanted me to get better. But once I was better – which mercifully happened after about six hellish months – no one wanted me to get sick again.
‘He’s put me back on the Sunny Ds. I’ll be fine. Listen, did Jay Parker drop in a key for me?’
‘No.’
Feck. I wanted to keep moving, keep my head active, keep the thoughts from intruding.
It was already gone ten. When exactly was he planning to give me the key? I texted him, and he texted back saying he was on his way. That could mean anything, coming from an unreliable liar like him.
‘I was wondering …’ Mum said.
I knew what she was wondering.
‘… what exactly went wrong with you and Jay Parker?’
‘Couldn’t tell you.’
‘Of course you can tell me.’
‘Can’t. I’ve completely forgotten.’ I would never tell anyone what happened with him. I hadn’t told anyone when we’d split up and I wasn’t going to tell them now.
‘It was only a year ago,’ Mum protested. ‘You can’t have forgotten.’
‘I’ve banished it from my consciousness,’ I said cheerfully.
‘But –’
‘I’ve reprogrammed my databases …’
‘But –’
‘… and rewritten my own memory of my past.’
‘You can’t do that! No one can.’
‘I’ve a strong will.’ I smiled sweetly at her. ‘I’m lucky that way. C’mere, while I’m waiting, make me have a shower and wash my hair.’
She wavered for a moment, reluctant to let go of the Jay Parker q
uestion, then said, ‘Grand, so.’ Grimly, she strong-armed me into the bathroom, like she was a warder in a women’s prison.
Mum has a strong theatrical bent and she really gets into a part. Occasionally, when I’ve been badly stuck, she’s helped me with work and she’s got quite carried away, behaving as if we were TV detectives, driving too fast and running at locked doors with her shoulder.
To be quite honest, I was a little guilty of the same thing myself. In my defence, it was only in the early days, when I was beeping my way round boardrooms and wondering when life was going to get exciting.
To my surprise (category: uncertain), when I emerged from the bathroom, Claire had appeared.
‘Clothes for you.’ She slung a bag in my direction. ‘Did my best.’
It was a while since I’d seen her, a couple of weeks. She looked great. Her hair was long and swishy, her fake tan was up to date and she was wearing slouchy capri pants, a tiny T-shirt with an Anime character on it, a pair of super-high wedges and an armload of silver bracelets inscribed with Hindu prayers. That’s what happens when you have a teenage daughter. Kate may be a hormonal nightmare but it helped Claire to keep her look bang on trend.
‘You look really skinny,’ she said, unable to keep the envy from her voice.
Yes, I was thin now, but it wouldn’t last. Once the tablets kicked in I’d be possessed with a roaring, insatiable hunger for carbs. My metabolism would slow down to zero, my face would puff up and rolls of fat would appear overnight on my stomach. I’d turn into wibbly-woman. It was fucking awful, the whole business, the sickness and the cure.
‘How are your arms so un-cellulitey?’ I asked.
‘Thousand bicep-lifts a day. Well, a hundred. Sometimes. Fighting the good fight. We must never, ever surrender.’
‘What’s new?’
‘Up to me eyes.’ She produced a tab of Nicorette and put it in her mouth. ‘Giving up smoking,’ she said. ‘Growing out my fringe. Bidding on a lampshade on eBay. Looking for a recipe for vegetarian lamb tagine. Taking the dog to be de-bollocked. Wondering if I could get Kate sent away to one of those reform places for problem teens. The usual.’ She went into her bag and produced a book which she gave to Mum.