Beside Myself

by Ann Morgan

  Oh yes, you’ve got questions. You want to know how it is that they’re sitting on that side of the desk and you’re sitting here. You want them to let you in on the secret of ‘normal’ and what it really means. You wonder how it’s possible in a world of Friends and novelty ringbinders for people to be shackled to a radiator so tightly they bleed, like the girl up the corridor was by her stepfather, or punched in the face until their bones go like jelly and the doctors have to rebuild them piece by piece.

  But you have learnt these are not the questions people like this answer. They want easy questions. Questions they can see round the edges of. Questions you could probably answer by yourself if you gave it any thought.

  So you don’t say anything. You shrug and shake your head, and let them dot the ‘i’s and cross the ‘t’s of your future as they see fit. Let them bring it, all of it, as much as they can manage: whatever it is, it can’t be worse than what you’ve already been through.

  39

  Morning. She woke up to the smell of bacon frying, a radio chattering somewhere below. She lay in the big white bed, eyes focusing, coming to, blinking in the sunlight streaming through the gauzy curtains.

  The hangover tightened around her skull as she sat up and saw her creased face reflected in the dressing-table mirror. Fragments of the night before came back: she and Nick at the kitchen table; wine; hands groping; his face moving above her in the dark. Or perhaps she was imagining that last bit. She put a hand under the covers, but the slick tenderness of her body put paid to any doubt. She sank back among the pillows and closed her eyes in an effort to block it all out. If she could only go back to sleep, perhaps things would seem better when she looked at them again.

  But her brain wouldn’t let it go. There’d been something else, hadn’t there? Another significant event. She screwed up her eyes to cancel the throbbing of her temples. Think. Think!

  The knowledge descended on her: she’d told him about the swap, about everything.

  Oh fuck. Well, that was that then. She might as well get dressed and leave right now. If he didn’t already think she was a fucking basket case, a complete, psycho loony tune, he certainly would now. She’d blown it again, like she always did when someone showed her kindness, when there was a chance of something more. She was a monster. She was shit, a leech on other people’s goodness. He’d probably only fucked her out of pity.

  She swung her feet out of the bed on to the soft, snowy rug as the sun went behind the clouds, turning the room grey.

  Wait, though. That wasn’t quite how it played out, was it? She delved through the sludge of her memories. He’d been understanding, hadn’t he? He’d seemed to get it. What was it he’d said? Oh yes: ‘You’ve been through a fuck of a time.’ An odd phrase. Maybe that was why she remembered it.

  A vision of him standing in front of her in the bedroom, a tender, searching look in his eyes, came to her. He’d been emotional to the point of tears, she remembered, as she shrugged Hellie’s top off and stepped out of her jeans. He had stared at her body with awe, as if half afraid to touch her. She had thought at the time that it had to do with the knowledge that Hellie was lying inert in her hospital bed only a few miles away. But maybe that wasn’t it at all. Now she came to think about it, wasn’t it possible that his tenderness – the way he’d trembled as he moved in to kiss her once more – pointed quite another way? She stroked the soft cotton of the bed sheet and a new idea surfaced. Wonderment. Wasn’t that what she had seen in his face? Wasn’t that the word that had echoed through the corridors of her brain as she watched him looking at her? A kind of reverence?

  Yes, she was sure of it.

  Perhaps she hadn’t been certain of it at the time because it was a sentiment she had never witnessed taking hold of another human being before. It had never made its presence felt in the glances of any of the men she had jerked and sweated with in alleyways, hotel rooms and parks. It hadn’t even been part of that magical, heartbreaking time in Amsterdam. It was new ground for her, uncharted territory. And, looking around the sterile, white room, she knew that it was new for Nick too; he could never have shared that vulnerability with Hellie. That sort of connection was beyond her, sealed as she was within the fiction of her perfect life. Their sex would have been polite and functional – dutiful even – conducted at a set time of the week and managed so as not to mess up Hellie’s hair. There would have been no shuddering on waves of sensation strong enough to sunder the self from its moorings for them. There would have been no surrender. Poor, foolish, superficial Hellie. It made Smudge almost sad, sitting there wrapped in the luxury goose-down duvet, to think how hollow and safe her sister’s life must have been. What a mean existence it must be to stay always in the shallows, bobbing on little eddies of feeling, and never weather the pitching and plunging of the open ocean and face the knowledge that events might overwhelm and wreck you.

  By contrast, what had happened last night was so much deeper and more honest than anything Hellie could have known. Because of course – the realisation burst upon her like the sun emerging now again from the clouds – it had been a homecoming for both of them. After ten years of marriage, he had finally slept with the woman who was truly his wife. It was a consummation, a transformative act. Holy, even.

  And who was to say it couldn’t mark the start of a meaningful connection now that they had found each other? All right, it was unconventional. There were those who wouldn’t approve, but that was life, wasn’t it? People screwed up in all sorts of ways and went off the script all the time. Who said this had to be a bad thing? Perhaps she’d been on the right track with her clumsy attempts to step into Hellie’s shoes after all. Perhaps the course of events was leading her inexorably back to her rightful place; to where she belonged.

  A vision came to her of the two of them standing in Mother’s living room, presenting the facts calmly as a unit. She pictured the parade of emotions across Mother’s face as the truth about their lives was told, vindication at last, the story straight. Satisfaction glimmered in the depths of her being as she envisaged what would follow: the guilt, the heartfelt apologies. Would she stand there and listen? Would she forgive? Or would she turn on her heel and walk away? Would she never see Mother and Akela again or would she and Nick make space for them in their life together? Perhaps there would be Sunday lunches and Christmases and long walks in the park. Maybe they would go and see the rightful Ellie together and stand round the bed in the fluorescent hospital light, reminiscing about old times.

  She laughed as she walked across the room with a new lightness in her step, shrugging on an outsize sweater from the back of a chair. Not since Manchester – not since the enchantment of Amsterdam – had she felt this good, this energised.

  The spiral staircase sighed happily under her weight, the books in the room below beamed in the mid-morning sunshine. The levity of a thousand Saturdays flooded her heart.

  He was sitting at the kitchen table, his head in his hands, when she came down the stairs. Around him lay the debris of Heloise’s breakfast: one of her Beatrix Potter plates streaked with egg, a colourful beaker. The bottles from last night stood on the side. She counted five. Shit! No wonder he was hungover.

  She regarded him for a moment: the neat curve of the crown of his head, the grey beginning to thread its way through his hair, his delicate artist’s hands covering his eyes. She had the feeling of being a swimmer poised on the edge of a pool, preparing to jump in. Perhaps one day they would look back on this moment fondly together and laugh.

  She shuffled, coughed. ‘Good morning,’ she said.

  He looked up. His eyes were bloodshot. Strange, but he seemed to have aged overnight. She could see what he would look like at sixty.

  ‘Bit of a crazy evening, wasn’t it?’ she said brightly. ‘Have you been up long? You look like you could do with some coffee. I know I could. I—’

  He shook his head and she stopped talking. She caught the timbre of her final words: shrill, jangling, scurryi
ng to fill the silence.

  ‘Sorry,’ she said without quite knowing why. ‘I—’

  He held up a hand. A cold wind blew through the outer reaches of her brain, trembling the vision lodged there.

  He ran a hand across his face. ‘They warned me,’ he said, as though speaking to some unseen audience, watching and judging silently in the room. ‘Margaret and Horace warned me, but I wouldn’t listen. I thought that I was clever enough not to fall for it. But I did. I’m a fool like everyone else.’

  His voice was as she’d never heard it before: hard and biting. There was a cruel set to his jaw. It was as though he were possessed – so much so that she caught herself wondering for a moment if this might in fact not be Nick but some deranged doppelgänger.

  ‘But, last night, you said…’

  ‘Last night I said a lot of things.’ He spoke through clenched teeth. ‘And none of them were really me. Understand? I don’t do things like that. I don’t sleep with my comatose wife’s sister.’ His voice broke. ‘That’s not who I am.’

  She watched him sitting there, drumming his fingers on the blond-wood table, his face twitching in agitation, his eyes refusing to meet hers. At last he looked up.

  ‘Go and see her,’ he said. ‘Just go and see her. You owe her that now. Whoever you are.’

  40

  The day arrives. You pack all your things into a Naf Naf bag they give you ’specially: clothes, sketchbooks, pencils, fifty pounds in cash, your National Insurance card, directions to the halfway house hostel place, the medication they don’t know you’ve stopped taking, a card that everyone’s signed, except for Blessings, the Nigerian woman in the third room along from yours, who’s drawn a circle instead. They all stand around in the canteen looking uncomfortable. Someone’s bought a cake from the Co-op, but it’s the kind you don’t like: coffee and walnut with the dry sponge that sticks to the roof of your mouth.

  Then it’s time to go. They take you to the entrance. The director shakes your hand and wishes you luck. Ange is going to drive you to the hostel, but there’s a problem with starting the van and while she’s on the phone to someone about it, you decide you’d rather pop off by yourself. Neater that way. No stringing it out. There’s bound to be a bus stop or something. Whatever happens, you’ll find your way.

  You glance through the office window and when Ange’s back is turned, her hand twisting the telephone cord around her fingers, you slip off down the road. You suck the morning air deep into your lungs. At last you can breathe.

  You fully intend to go to the hostel, but when you get to the end of the road it seems a shame not to explore first. There’s so much world out there you haven’t had the chance to see for years. Besides, it’s only lunchtime now. What are you going to do? Sit in the hostel all day? What’s the point of that?

  You saunter on down the busiest turning at the junction. There’s a road lined with fried chicken shops and the post office and places you can go to exchange jewellery for cash, and you follow that. Pretty soon, you’re in the town centre. There are chain stores and Spice Girls posters everywhere and people have harassed expressions, as though they’re surprised to find anyone else out and wanting to go to the same shops as them in the middle of the day. Because you can, you stop at a coffee shop – one of those new Starbucks that have been springing up everywhere and look like the café from Friends. You don’t even like coffee or sugar much, but you order the gooiest thing you can see on the menu, a white chocolate mocha, just so you can tell yourself you’re having a treat. You walk through town, sipping it and staring at the shops, and that’s when it hits you: you’re out. You’re free. This is the rest of your life. The thought is so momentous that you have to step into a little public garden and sit down on a bench dedicated to Freddie – ‘gone but not forgotten’ – to take it in. Maybe it’s the coffee or maybe it’s the largeness of what’s happening, but you start to feel a bit scattered. It’s like all your tomorrows have bundled themselves up into one mass and come barrelling at you like a giant bowling ball, knocking you sideways and making your mind shimmer. This is a great day! What the fuck are you doing, sitting in some park drinking a coffee? This is your future! This is all the shit left behind! It’s a fresh start, and you should celebrate.

  You walk down the high street buzzing, your head DJ playing a vicious beat. Your fingers clutch and unclutch the air, as you search for something worthy of the focus of all your hopes, delight and energy, something that will reflect how huge this moment is. You look at mobile phones in the window of the Carphone Warehouse. But who are you going to call? You peer at jewellery in the window of a pawn shop. But it seems too cold and finished. It’s got nothing to say to you. Then, just as you turn into the little shopping centre leading off the high street, you see it, beaming at you from the window of C&A: a dress, glinting like fishscales, suspended above a pair of silver shoes. You don’t really have to think about what happens next. It’s like the dress lassoes you with an invisible rope and draws you in. Before you know it, you’re in the store and walking to the checkout clutching it. It’s £45, which is perfect – exactly the money you’ve got left in your pocket, barring a bit of change, which you’ll use for the bus to the halfway hostel thing later. You don’t even bother with trying it on. Clearly the universe meant this to be yours.

  On your way out, you slip your fingers in the back straps of the silver shoes and take them with you. It isn’t your intention to start your new life with a crime – you certainly don’t plan on going back to the unit – but you’re sure that if anyone could see inside your brain they’d realise these shoes just have to be in your story, that they have to go with that dress, that you simply have to have them as a seal on this momentous day.

  The next challenge is to find a place worthy of the get-up. You scan the high street but the local Wetherspoons isn’t cutting it. The same goes for the Pizza Hut and Wimpy. No: you need somewhere you can shine. Then you see it, set back a bit from the road up past Somerfield, like someone shy about being overdressed at a party: the Crown Hotel. It’s got a glass front and one of those entrances with pot plants either side and a man in a penguin suit waiting to open the door. It’s perfect. Just the place to spend an hour or so before you get that bus.

  You hurry up the paved approach and push through the entrance without looking at the doorman, like you’re important and in a hurry or maybe you’re a new member of the bar staff and late for work. Whatever you make him think, it works because a minute later you’re in a cubicle in the shiny lobby loos, wriggling into the dress and forcing your feet into the shoes. You’ve got a pot of tinted lip balm and some mascara and you dab that on and run a brush through your hair. You stand back to admire the effect in the mirror over the sinks. It’s not half bad. If you turn your head to the side and squint, you could almost fool yourself you were someone else: a woman out for a business dinner or an actress on the way to a premiere. When you smile, there are even glimmers of Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman about you – not the street scenes in the wig but the stuff that comes later with Richard Gere. Oh yes, you’re something all right.

  You shove the Naf Naf bag back into the cubicle under the u-bend of the toilet. Then you head back out into the lobby and stand, surveying the scene. At the front of the hotel is a little café, where one or two couples sit forking mouthfuls of cake and pastry into their mouths and rasping their coffee cups against their saucers to stop the drips. But you’re not hungry and your brain is already working fast enough as it is without more coffee to help it on its way. Straight ahead, there’s a sort of lounge with brown-leather sofas arranged in rectangles and shelves of fake books lining the walls. You think about going and sitting in there for a while. But what are you going to do? Read the newspapers? Look at the rubbish art on the walls? It would feel like sitting in a nut doctor’s waiting room. Right now that’s the last thing you need.

  A strain of saxophone and a clink of glasses come to your ears. You turn round. Of course – the bar. Whe
re else? You push through the glass doors and strut across the carpet, gritting your teeth against the biting of the shoe straps. The bartender eyes you warily over the glass he’s polishing but you hold your nerve and look him in the eye.

  ‘Hi,’ you say. ‘I’d really like a drink.’

  The barman stares at you. ‘Sure,’ he says. ‘What do you want?’

  The bottles ranged on the bar shelves swim before your eyes. Back in the day you’d have gone for an Archer’s and lemonade but it seems a bit childish now you actually are eighteen. You play for time.

  ‘Umm. What cocktails do you have?’

  He throws his napkin over his arm and begins to count them off on his fingers.

  ‘Manhattan, White Russian, Sex on the Beach, Mojito—’

  Mojito. You’ve heard of that. And even though it sounds like mosquito and you’re not sure what you’re going to get, you clutch on to it like a life raft.

  ‘Mojito,’ you say. ‘Yes. I’ll have one of those.’

  The bartender nods and busies himself with some ice and leaves of mint. You hoist yourself up on to one of the stools at the bar, hooking the heels of the silver shoes over the rail below. At length, he turns round and presents you with something that looks like frogspawn in a glass.

  ‘Do you want to pay now or put it on your room?’

  You think of the £2.23 tucked into the pocket of the Naf Naf bag in the ladies’ loo.

  ‘Put it on the room,’ you say.

  He nods. ‘What’s the number?’

  A prickly heat runs up your arms, but you keep your gameface on. ‘145?’ you say.

  He nods again and types it into the till.

  You raise the glass, silently saluting your unknown benefactor in room 145, and take a sip. It’s actually very nice. And strong. You’re not used to drinking after more than two years in the unit and it gets you in a rush, sweeping through the channels of your brain in a sparkling flood. It’s so nice that before you have a chance to realise it, you’ve drunk it all down and your straw is rasping among the ice at the bottom of the glass. You raise your eyes for another and the bartender complies with a bored expression. Just one more, you think, and then you’ll hit the road.