Girl on the Landing

by Paul Torday

  Stephen Gunnerton was delighted with my progress.

  ‘A few years ago, Michael, we would have had to institutionalise you permanently. Some of the methodology of the Fifties and Sixties was by modern standards, quite brutal: electroconvulsive shock treatment, even frontal lobotomy. Your life would have been spent mostly in a room like this one,’ he waved his hands around my pastel-coloured cell, ‘and probably in a straitjacket some of the time. A hundred years ago you would have been abandoned in what they used to call a house of correction. Schizophrenia simply wasn’t understood in those days.’

  I had already realised that Stephen Gunnerton liked nothing as much as a captive audience. I could scarcely frame a whole sentence in my mind at that point, let alone get the words out.

  ‘We know a great deal more about it now,’ said Stephen, ‘thanks to major advances in antipsychotics. Serendipozan is really quite benign. It’s all to do with brain chemistry. You have a genetic anomaly somewhere in your make-up. A gene has switched off the production of certain neurotransmitters instead of switching it on, and the circuitry in your brain - your synapses - isn’t working like a normal person’s should. But now we can deal with that.’

  ‘Oh, good,’ I tried to say, although it came out as ‘Ooh goo’.

  ‘What was that?’ asked Stephen. ‘Don’t worry, your body will start to adjust to the new medication after a few months. The time will come when we might even be able to consider releasing you back into the community; with certain precautions, of course.’

  I remember he was very tanned and told me he had just been to a conference in Bermuda convened by the Tertius Corporation, the makers of Serendipozan. A few months later I was indeed ‘released back into the community’, except that I didn’t have a community to be released into, just an empty flat near Baker Street and the house in Glen Gala. I would have headed straight back to Scotland, except for two things: I had to report every other day to a social services case officer, and every week I had to go to Stephen’s consulting rooms in Harley Street. The first thing that happened was that my social services officer left the job, and they never got around to replacing him. The second thing that happened was that I met Peter Robinson. Stephen introduced us when we were both attending his clinic as outpatients.

  As a result of that meeting, Peter took an interest in me. I don’t know what Stephen said to Peter exactly, or whether Peter just decided our shared experience of mental disorders was a good basis for a friendship. I doubt it. Whatever Peter had - some form of depression - I think it was relatively minor compared with what had happened to me. No, I believe it was something in Peter’s make-up: he enjoyed control, he liked to intervene in other people’s lives and have an influence on them.

  First of all Peter made me join Grouchers, which at that time he was much more enthusiastic about than he is now. Then, he invited me to dinner. It was on the second invitation to his house that I met Elizabeth.

  When I first met Elizabeth she made little impression on me. We sat next to each other at dinner and I thought she was one of those people who have to pigeonhole everyone they meet: who were your parents, where did you go to school, what do you do, how much money do you have? I did my best to cope with her questions but I know she found me difficult, because she eventually told me so. Then I met her a few days later in the street, and everything was different. A tall, fair-haired girl came and put her hand on my arm and said hello. I started in surprise. Then, by some miracle, I remembered who she was and addressed her by her name, and got it right. She was friendly, and Rupert liked her, and before I knew what was happening I had asked her to come and have a glass of wine. I don’t know where I found the initiative to suggest such a thing. It was quite unlike me. But then we were sitting in a wine bar talking, and somehow nothing could have been easier or more natural.

  After a few weeks we had drifted into some sort of a relationship. It was difficult to define what that relationship was: it was somewhere between friendship and love in my case; and friendship and indifference in Elizabeth’s. The love I felt was, perhaps, not the same emotion that other people might describe with that word. Who can ever know what other people feel? I felt I needed her to be in my life, and as the weeks went on I felt my hold on her was slipping, that she had drifted towards me, into my life and into my bed, in a fit of absence of mind, and was about to wake up at any moment and leave me. As my grip on Elizabeth slackened, so did my desire not to lose her increase.

  One evening, Elizabeth and I were sitting in a restaurant that we both liked, a small Italian place called Alfredo’s that was close to my flat. We were talking in a desultory way and then I remembered I had something I needed to tell her.

  ‘I’m afraid I’ve got to go up to Perthshire tomorrow for a few days.’

  For a moment Elizabeth could not make the connection between me and Perthshire.

  ‘Oh, why?’ she asked. ‘No, I remember. You’ve got a house up there, haven’t you?’

  ‘Yes, and some holiday cottages, and various bits of forestry. I need to keep an eye on it all from time to time.’

  I could see that Elizabeth wanted to know more, but didn’t like to ask.

  ‘You’ve never really talked about that side of your life,’ was what she said finally.

  ‘Well, there’s not much one can say. We have about thirty thousand acres of hill and forest, and a village. Most of the houses in the village are holiday lets now, because there aren’t the jobs any more for the shepherds and the foresters that used to occupy the houses.’

  Elizabeth looked surprised.

  ‘Thirty thousand acres? But that’s enormous!’ she said.

  ‘Not really; not in that part of the world. The only things that produce any income are the holiday lets and the tiny amount of money we make from letting the stalking. You ought to come and see it some time. It’s wild country, but very beautiful. I think so, anyway.’

  I date from that conversation a renewal of Elizabeth’s interest in me. Her feelings for me did not change very much, but I could sense some calculation going on behind her eyes. She was on her way to thirty, and I didn’t think there was much money in her family. Her father had abandoned his wife and daughter to their own devices some years before. Elizabeth had a job that she liked, but worked in an atmosphere of chronic insecurity, expecting to be fired at any moment, even though the dreaded dismissal never did arrive. I think from that point on, she began to think of me in a different way, and that was what gave me the courage to propose marriage to her. I don’t think I could have done it if there hadn’t been odd moments when she dropped her habit of making bright, amusing remarks about everything, and I discerned a softer, affectionate, rather lonely person underneath the armour.

  A few months ago I realised that either my medication, or my marriage, had to go. The sense of detachment and depression that the Serendipozan gave me had never been a good basis for a relationship, and it was getting worse. Even in my numbed state of mind I could see that my relationship with Elizabeth was deteriorating. Worse than that, I could see that it hurt her. I realised through the fog that she, too, didn’t want to lose me.

  It took me a while to reach the decision to stop taking the Serendipozan. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to, although I thought I knew the risks involved. It was more the case that I found it difficult to think in a straight line about anything for more than a few moments. Even holding down the part-time job I had at Grouchers was almost beyond me, and I could never have coped with Beinn Caorrun without Mrs McLeish.

  But I did stop. I stopped taking the medication, and when I did so I remember thinking to myself that it was rather a final step: I couldn’t see myself voluntarily returning to the enslavement of the drug. All the same I didn’t throw away the medicine. I used to hide it in a secret drawer in my dressing table. Then I moved it and kept it behind some bottles in the medicine cupboard. Perhaps I wanted Elizabeth to find it; I don’t know.

  At first nothing happened, and then, aft
er a few weeks, the headaches began. They were sometimes so painful I could hardly stand it, but they were followed by periods of lucidity, of heightened perception, that I had not experienced in years. There were some odd hallucinatory effects as well, which was not unexpected, as I recalled having them on previous occasions when my condition had remained untreated.

  Those anomalies were something I felt I had to put up with and just cope as best I could. The real change in me was worth anything, any inconvenience, any danger: the numbness in my emotions and in my brain that had so deadened my life with Elizabeth was slowly lifting. I felt like someone who had been saturated in anaesthetic from head to toe, inhabiting a body that was swollen and grotesque. Then, as the anaesthetic wore off, there was a faint tingling, and sensation slowly returned to limbs and brain. That is how it was with me: suddenly I woke up one morning and realised that ten years of life with Elizabeth had gone by in a chemical dream, and I needed to live the rest of whatever time I was granted with her to the full, while my sanity was still more or less intact; before whatever had overwhelmed me before resumed possession of my mind.

  Maybe I was cured. It would be a scientific miracle, but miracles do happen. Meanwhile, life with Elizabeth was very good.

  It was in this mood of optimism that I went to the travel agents we used in Baker Street, and managed to book a long weekend in Rome, as a surprise for Elizabeth. Then I thought that Rupert could do with a really good walk.

  We walked through streets and squares towards Marble Arch, and from there into Hyde Park. I took Rupert off his lead and he walked obediently at my heel. We wandered along avenues, and on paths, until we reached the Serpentine, and I stood on the bridge looking down at the water flowing beneath. Rupert sat beside me. I could see the colours of late autumn on the trees, occasional showers of dead leaves tumbling down even though the air was hardly stirring. I could see children playing on the far side of the water, and hear their shouts as they raced around a tall figure in a dark blue coat standing guard beside a pram. I could hear the sound of hoofs from a group of horses cantering along Rotten Row. I looked up and could see how the sky was turning from pale grey to a soft blue. Gently the still air began to stir. Beside us in the road was an empty polystyrene coffee cup, lying where someone had dropped it. Suddenly it began to roll in a circle. Rupert turned to watch it too, and then a sudden gust of wind lifted it from the ground and blew it away in a series of bounds. Rupert barked and chased after it, and I whistled for him to come back. He had caught up with the cup a hundred yards away, and had seized it in his mouth. Then he dropped it, and chased it again as it blew farther away.

  I was about to go after him when a voice beside me said, not unexpectedly, ‘You might at least say hello’.

  I turned and saw the girl called Lamia, standing beside me, looking over the bridge at the water as I had done.

  ‘I didn’t know you were there,’ I said.

  ‘I’m nearly always somewhere close by.’

  ‘I ought to go and get Rupert,’ I said.

  ‘Don’t worry about your dog. You ought to be more grateful that I’m taking such an interest in you.’

  She was paler than I remembered, and her dark eyes seemed blacker. Her hair was tossed in the sudden wind. She gazed at me unsmilingly. This, I realised suddenly, was another of the anomalies that I would have to cope with.

  ‘It’s just I’m not used to being told off by one of my own hallucinations,’ I explained.

  She laughed; a cold, hard little sound.

  ‘Oh, so you think I’m a hallucination? You’d like to think that, wouldn’t you? Well, I can understand why you would jump to that conclusion. You’re going mad again, you know. Try taking your little pills and see if that gets rid of me.’

  I knew she must be a hallucination; what else could she be? Her voice was so familiar: it seemed to me as if Lamia was always whispering to me, whether I was awake or asleep.

  ‘Circumstances have brought us together, Mikey, and together we must be,’ said Lamia. She smiled for the first time, showing sharp white teeth. I wondered what age she was: she looked younger than Elizabeth, but there was something about her eyes that was very old indeed.

  ‘What were the circumstances that brought us together?’ I asked. ‘You said our first meeting was random.’

  ‘Oh, the circumstances were random. You happened to be passing and you caught my attention. That’s how life works, you know. One likes to think everything is ordered and planned. Then something happens you couldn’t have foreseen: like seeing your child being knocked down by a hit-and-run driver. Or being bitten by a venomous spider or struck down with an incurable illness. It’s the randomness of things that makes life so entertaining.’

  She looked me full in the face. She was very beautiful. As I knew she was only a hallucination, I saw no harm in going on with the conversation. After all, if that was the case, I was only talking to myself.

  ‘And what made you interested in me? Why did you decide to come into my life?’ I asked her.

  ‘It was the smell of blood on your hands. And your madness; it makes you weak, you know, and vulnerable to me.’

  I turned away in disgust at myself for carrying on this conversation. I would go and find Rupert, whom I could no longer see.

  Lamia said behind me, ‘You know there are things you must learn from me, Mikey.’

  I shook my head. She wasn’t there and I wasn’t hearing her. She was an anomaly, like Mrs Patel had been, like the voices I used to hear in Glen Gala a lifetime ago. But her voice, silvery and irritating, persisted.

  ‘You need to learn to do without those who love you, Mikey. You need to learn to do without love; to cope with loss. You don’t have any real emotions, anyway. You’re just a mimic. It’s time you understood that.’

  I walked off. A long way ahead, two or three black dogs were chasing each other, playing some complicated canine game on the grass. I hoped that one of them was Rupert. A few yards farther on, I risked a glance over my shoulder, knowing that by now the episode would be over, the delusion gone. But Lamia was still standing on the bridge. She saw my glance and gave a little wave. I walked on, and saw that one of the dogs was Rupert, thank God, and called him to me. As I knelt down to put him on his lead, I risked a further glance back at the bridge but it was empty. No one stood there giving me a mocking wave. No one had ever stood there, talking about blood or loss. I needed to become more robust about these episodes; recognise them for what they were and do my best to live with them.

  Slowly I walked back to the flat. A holiday would do me good; it would do us both good. I needed my mind to be filled with new things. I needed to be with Elizabeth and enjoy the new intimacy that had sprung up between us. I smiled to myself. It was not impossible that things would turn out well after all.

  When I returned to the flat and let myself in I saw that Elizabeth was back. Her coat was thrown across a chair and I could hear her moving about in the bathroom. Rupert padded off towards his basket for a well-deserved rest. I walked towards the bathroom door, about to say something, and then stopped. Elizabeth was standing by the washbasin, rummaging through the medicines. In her hand was the pale blue packet of Serendipozan. I tried to remember what it said on the label, and whether Alex Grant’s name was on it.

  Elizabeth raised her head and caught sight of my reflection in the mirror. She put her hand on her heart and gave a gasp.

  ‘Oh, you gave me a shock. I didn’t hear you come in. Where have you been?’

  For a moment I said nothing, and just looked at her holding the packet. Thoughts raced across my mind. I should tell her a little bit more of what this was about, shouldn’t I? But I couldn’t tell her everything, not straight away. It would be too much. Then Elizabeth would start asking questions. I knew she would. She was inquisitive, intelligent and determined. Before I could think of what to say next she said, ‘I was thinking of having a chuck-out. There’s so much rubbish in these cupboards. Are you sure you don’t wa
nt these any more?’

  She looked at me, and I knew she was waiting for me to say something, to tell her more about the pills and why I took them. In that instant I knew she had already started to ask questions. Who she had been talking to, I did not know. There were a limited number of possibilities: Alex Grant, Stephen Gunnerton, Peter Robinson. Each of them knew a part of my story, but none of them knew all of it. Elizabeth had started asking questions, and once she had started she would keep going until she thought she had all the answers.

  Clever girl.