“Of course …,” Mam says, uncomfortable with Dad’s implication that they just drove off with me.
“Yes. Your mam’s right. We had to tell someone, so we did. If your real mam and dad had shown up, we’d have handed you over. We wouldn’t have liked it. Wouldn’t have wanted to. We fell in love with you straightaway. I mean, that very instant. But we’d have done right by you. If your mam and dad had come looking for you, we’d have handed you straight back.”
Mam then starts to tell more. The adoption process. How it was “you know, a bit complicated, what with your father and all.” An understatement, I should think. The mid-eighties were, as far as I can tell, Dad’s reprehensible heyday. I remember, when I was five or six, sitting at table and Dad roaring with laughter to his friends about how he was the most innocent man in South Wales. Five prosecutions and no convictions. I should think that the adoption authorities were loath to hand a child over to someone who seemed certain to end up in jail, and any police reports they required would hardly have been flattering, but then again, when my dad wants something, he generally manages to get it. By hook or by crook.
I listen to Mam talking, but I’m not interested in the adoption process. I’m interested in me.
“How old was I?”
Dad shrugs. “No one knows. At the time we guessed two, maybe two and a half. Just going by height we were. But you’ve never been the tallest lass, have you, love, so maybe we were a bit off. Perhaps you were older.”
“Didn’t you ask me?”
“Oh, love. We asked you everything. Where your mam and dad were. Where you lived. What your name was. How old you were. Everything.”
“And?”
“Nothing. You wouldn’t speak. For—what was it, Kath?—eighteen months you wouldn’t speak. You understood things all right. You were a sharp little thing even then. And we had you tested and poked at and all. They couldn’t find anything wrong with you. Not a thing. And then one day, you just started speaking. You said, ‘Mam, can I have some more cheese, please?’ Isn’t that right, Kath?”
Mam says yes, and she echoes him. “ ‘Mam, can I have some more cheese, please?’ ”
I echo her echo. Mam, can I have some more cheese, please?
Something inside me has changed. The scene shift is complete. I can’t see or feel the old world anymore. This new world is now mine. It makes no sense. It raises a million questions. About who I was, where I came from, how I came to be in Dad’s car, why I couldn’t speak or wouldn’t. About those missing two or three years. About what happened in that time that stored up such trouble for my future life.
And yet all of that doesn’t matter, or not this minute it doesn’t.
Dad has the last few things out of his bag. The pink dress with the white bow. The teddy bear. A barrette. A pair of shiny black shoes with some white socks tucked into them. He passes them over the table to me.
My past. My mysterious past. The only clues I have.
And even as I bury my head in the pink fabric to smell the dress, I know that these things don’t matter either. What matters now is what is happening inside me. The thing that was liquefying before has melted completely. An old barrier has gone. Vanished. It’s been extinguished.
I feel strange and something strange is happening.
I pull my head up and away from the dress. I put my hands to my face and they come away wet. Something very strange is happening. A feeling I don’t recognize. I am leaking from somewhere.
And then I do know. I know what is happening.
These are tears and I am crying.
It is not a painful sensation, as I always thought it must be. It feels like the purest expression of feeling that it is possible to have. And the feeling mixes everything up together. Happiness. Sadness. Relief. Sorrow. Love. A mixture of things no psychiatrist ever felt. It is the most wonderful mixture in the world.
I put my hands to my face again and again. Tears are coursing down my cheeks, splashing off my chin, tickling the sides of my nose, running off my hands.
These are tears and I am crying. I am Fiona Griffiths. Citizen of Planet Normal.
COTARD’S SYNDROME
Cotard’s syndrome is a rare but genuine condition. Jules Cotard, a late-Victorian French psychiatrist, gave his name to it and also came up with the phrase le délire de négation, a pithier and more accurate description of the illness than anything in use today.
The condition is an exceptionally serious one. Its core ingredients are depression and psychosis. Modern psychiatrists would probably argue that it wasn’t a disease in its own right, more an extreme manifestation of depersonalization; the most extreme form of it, in fact. Some patients report “seeing” their flesh decompose and crawl with maggots. Early childhood trauma is implicated in nearly every well-documented case of the syndrome.
Full recovery is uncommon. The suicides of patients with the condition are, alas, all too frequent. Indeed, my wife, who works as a neurofeedback practitioner, worked with a Cotard’s patient who ended up taking her own life. Talking to the Dead is written, in part, to honor that patient’s courage.
Fiona Griffiths’s own state of mind is, of course, a fictional rendering of a complex illness. I have not aimed to achieve clinical precision. Nevertheless, the broad strokes of Fiona’s account of her condition would be largely familiar to anyone acquainted with it.
To N., as always
“Dance first. Think later. It’s the natural order.”
—SAMUEL BECKETT
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
HARRY BINGHAM is an author and literary consultant who runs the U.K.’s largest literary consultancy firm, The Writers’ Workshop. He has been long-listed for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award and short-listed for the WH Smith Thumping Good Read Award for previous titles available in the U.K. He resides in Oxfordshire, where he is at work on the next novel in the Fiona Griffiths series, The Coldest Place to Die.
harrybingham.com
Talking to the Dead Page 35
