MY BED IS A BLACKHOLE
HADLEY WICKHAM
First published in Great Britain in 2017 by
The Book Guild Ltd
9 Priory Business Park
Wistow Road, Kibworth
Leicestershire, LE8 0RX
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Copyright © 2017 Hadley Wickham
The right of Hadley Wickham to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Design and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, transmitted, or stored in a retrieval system, in any form or by any means, without permission in writing from the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
ISBN 978 1912362 745
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
For You
Contents
Acknowledgements
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
Acknowledgements
There are so many people that I want (and need) to thank, and listing you all would leave me terrified of forgetting anyone. Yet, there are a few who I must mention by name.
My most indebted thanks to my first readers: Shannon Verhagen, Anna Barnett, Emily Beeby, Craig Churcher, Veneesha Robertson, Paulie Savvas, Grace Plajzer, Katrina Lawrence and Jon Stynes. Your support, advice and criticism has made this book a reality. To Kirsty Waughman, Emma McKerrell, Roy Lee, Sophie Smith, Ruby Harris, Tania Woodcock, Ann-Kristin Lillegraven, and Johanna Lee; for your friendship, trust, laughter and the odd hug in hopeless times, I’ll always be grateful. Thank you to the team at The Book Guild, especially Jeremy Thompson, Jack Wedgbury, Hannah Virk, Philippa Iliffe and Katherine Ward, for your incredible support and enthusiasm.
Finally, to the two people without whom this book would not exist: Mum and Dad, my most heartfelt and loving thanks.
BLACK•HOLE (blak•hohl) noun 2 (lowercase) any usually wretched place of imprisonment or confinement.
1
What is happiness? I’m not trying to trick you, the question isn’t philosophical; I’m honestly asking because I really need to know the answer. If you thought reading this – whatever this is – would be easy then you are wrong. I am not only assuming that you can read but I’m also assuming that you can think. Without thought these words mean nothing; I mean nothing. I am nothing more than these words on the written page and yet I exist in your mind. How I exist is completely up to you for this is not a happy story, nor is it a sad one. Rather this is a story about my completely ordinary existence, the universe inside my head and the Blackhole in my bed.
I can’t describe the Blackhole; it’s what I call the feeling inside me. A feeling that is itself devoid of any description but I can assure you of one thing: the Blackhole is not happiness. Nobody sets out to lose their happiness. It’s something that’s taken from you and the truly terrifying thing is, anything can take it. Sometimes you’ll know the particular thief; it could be illness or the death of a loved one. Yet there are rare occasions when the thief is a shadow; when your happiness is not stolen outright but rather taken piece by piece, until the day arrives when you realise you have nothing left and wake up thinking, “How the fuck did I end up here?”
That was the question I had woken up to every day for past 18 months of my life. It was the question that made getting out of bed in the morning the hardest thing I had to do. I wouldn’t have minded, had I not had to do it every day. Every day I was confronted with the sickening task of pulling myself out of my Blackhole, of untangling my legs from the shackling sheets and fighting against the overwhelming gravity which never wanted to let me go. It was easier to fight when I had a reason to get up, a reason to go out and live my life, but lately those had been harder to come by. Or perhaps now the Blackhole was winning and had become stronger than the things I had previously lived for. What I lived for now I had no idea because, honestly, I was afraid it was nothing.
The Blackhole made me an excellent liar, so good in fact I no longer recognised the face I saw in the mirror. I moved my left hand, she moved her right. That was me but how could I not recognise my own reflection? I suppose it was because I didn’t want to accept that the vacant eyes staring back at me were my own. I recalled a reflection not so different to the one which confronted me now, yet those subtle differences meant everything. I remembered a girl with delicate features and a pointed, slightly upturned nose. Her hair was sun-bleached; she was slim and vacantly pretty. I called the girl I am remembering, or perhaps imagining, Miranda.
Miranda’s not my name and she’s not the person I am now. Miranda was the girl I wanted to be and that name belonged only to her. My real name didn’t belong to me. I had one as every person does but my name, along with everything else I was, had been stolen by a Blackhole. Hello, my name is not-Miranda.
This was the girl I saw in the mirror: slightly chubby, her delicate features drowned in puffy cheeks and a soft jawline. Her hair hung in lank strips to her shoulders and was the unfortunate colour of dirty dishwasher to match her eyes – eyes that were permanently bruised and deep-set in sallow skin. I painted the girl’s face just to remove the traces of the Blackhole from it, not to make her pretty, though there was little risk of that. Friends of my mother’s had frequently described me as “pretty” yet never directly to me, only to her. I had not the heart to tell her that it was a purely vapid comment, perhaps even mocking, but I cared very little about what the friends of my mother thought, and even less about her.
I belonged to a happy family and lived with my mother, Sarah, my dad, Will, and my younger brother, Henry. My mother was a bank clerk, my dad a civil engineer and Henry, nine years younger than I, was still in primary school. They were all sitting at the dining table in our rather lovely home in Fremantle when I made my entrance this morning and the performance of normality began.
Fremantle is a little coastal town at the end of the world. It had once been rather pretentious and upmarket but like all things that give in to their egotism it had experienced a property market crash and was now inhabited by the polar opposites of society: the relatively wealthy and the destitute poor. This social dynamic made it perhaps the singularly most intriguing town in Western Australia; inhabited by hipsters and filled with every number of peculiarities which made it endearingly charming. I had lived here my entire life and loved it. I loved the patchwork society and history which crumbled under progress made for the future. We lived on the north side of town, on a short sweeping street which lay at the top of a hill overlooking Fremantle port and the ocean beyond. Our home was a quintessential Fremantle dwelling. My parents had bought it when they’d first moved here, a dilapidated Federation-period home which they had lovingly brought back to life and it was the only tangible proof I had of my mother’s patience. A small red-brick driveway guarded by a rickety and sunken fence led onto a sweeping timbe
r porch where a wicker outdoor setting had cemented itself. Walking inside, a long corridor ran down the spine of the house onto which every room connected. The central family area rested in the exact middle of the house while my room was the furthest on the left. The dining room connected onto the kitchen extension my parents had built, and that was where I was standing now, gazing into the fridge and trying to decide on what I wanted for breakfast.
In truth I wasn’t particularly hungry. I’d eaten far too much for dinner last night and assumed I was still digesting my very health-conscious mother’s take on cottage pie, which replaced mashed potato with cauliflower. I had a strange sense of satisfaction to witness my mother’s confused glance at her daughter every morning as she wondered how, on such a healthy diet I still managed to be slightly chubby. My mother was the type of woman to inspire envy; she was slim, smart, ambitious and quite pretty, though I wouldn’t go as far to say she was beautiful. She was small, with narrow shoulders and hips but with large eyes which dominated her delicate facial features. She dyed her long hair to resemble the colour of caramel and was always put together. I loved my mother, as every child is expected to. To some people she was efficient, proactive and pragmatic yet to me she was controlling, serious and judgemental. She cared about everything too much and, for someone who cared about nothing, it was impossible to be in the same room as her. I wished she’d go away and just leave me alone. I’d dare say my life would certainly be easier without her caring so much.
My dad on the other hand was quite the opposite of my mother in both looks and personality. He was tall, with broad shoulders but the narrow torso and slim legs of a runner. He had a wide, yet angular face and eyes the colour of honey, while his ash-blond hair was beginning to turn grey. Dad was exceedingly intelligent but also considerate, funny and charming; he had the fortunate talent of being able to talk about anything to anyone. I hoped that people thought I took after him, if not for the compliment then for the fact it meant I wasn’t anything like my mother.
My little brother Henry was perhaps the member of my family I liked most. This was solely because he was too consumed by childhood naivety and selfishness to ever consider that something may be wrong with his big sister. He was very much like Dad in every way but had the pointed, slightly upturned nose of our mother and a smattering of freckles across it. He was cheeky and took delight in being as disobedient as possible, even when such disobedience was to his own detriment. I’d witnessed him eat, and then throw up, an entire tray of koeksisters just to spite our mother and that singular act of defiance and malignance had endeared him to me for eternity.
I think my parents were convinced I was all right; objectively, there was no reason for them to think otherwise. My grades, though slowly falling, remained relatively consistent and I suppose they thought I spent the inordinate amount of time in my room studying. I didn’t blame them for not noticing, I didn’t want them too. If they did notice they’d want to help, but in truth I had no idea how they could; I didn’t know what I wanted. I wanted to be happy but that was the solution. What I couldn’t determine was the problem and without it I was stuck in this torturous prison that I called a Blackhole.
It was next to Henry that I sat down to breakfast with my bowl of banana, yoghurt and honey. I’d never noticed how yellow it was. Wasn’t yellow supposed to be a happy colour? In that case my day started with shoving happiness in my mouth by the spoonful and feeling it get stuck in my throat. I think that yellow’s colour association with happiness may be a recent thing though. I remember in high school my English teacher had told me that yellow was traditionally associated with sickness, like the plague. The irony made me smile; was happiness a sickness? If so I’ve got the best vaccine on the planet.
2
I was in my second year at university, attending the second best institution in the state and the only thing that meant was that I didn’t attend the best. Murdoch University honestly wasn’t that bad; we had the only veterinary college in the state and our chiropractic school was exceptional. If I studied either one of those courses then perhaps my “second rate” institution would pass, yet because I studied psychology all I got asked was: “Why aren’t you at UWA?” The irony of my course wasn’t lost on me. I profiled students according to what they studied: education students had issues of control, law students were narcissists and arts students were naïve. The majority of psychology students only studied it because they wanted to self-diagnose, I think it was denial that made me say I was not one of them. The reason I studied psychology was because I found it interesting and I wanted to help people. I wanted to ensure that no one else would have to feel the way that I felt everyday with the Blackhole. With that logic perhaps I should study art.
Being unhappy is a very solitary lifestyle. You can give the appearance of happiness easily, it’s not a hard thing to do; you smile, laugh, make conversation but the price you pay is exhaustion. It is physically exhausting pretending to be happy and consequently you’ll do anything to avoid social interaction. Solitude allows the Blackhole to exist in all its ravenous fury and you need not hide it from anyone. Yet normal people, specifically happy normal people, cannot exist in isolation – they require friends. Do not misunderstand me, I did have friends, they were just very few and all of them I kept in darkness. My best friends from high school were three girls: Laura, Mel and Josie. I can honestly and genuinely say that I loved them. They had been there before the Blackhole and knew me, the real me, not this empty shell of a person. As they knew the real me they were the most dangerous and I tried to keep our social interactions to biannual meetings over coffee. That way I could act like the person I had used to be; I pretended to be Miranda and they were none the wiser. Pretending to be Miranda wasn’t necessarily a bad thing, she was quite akin to a social conscience, protecting me from any social slips that could reveal the Blackhole but also providing inspiration for the person I wanted to be again.
My friends at university were quite a different story. The Blackhole had begun to form when I was in my first semester and as a result this was the only version of me they knew; not the Blackhole of course, but the girl I pretended to be because of it: Miranda. I was standing in line for coffee next to my friend Glen, a tall, gangly Asian with a mop of jet-black hair which always covered his eyes. Glen studied sport science, though initially he’d been studying medicine at UWA. He dropped out after his first year despite maintaining nearly perfect grades. Glen told strangers that the reason he’d dropped out was because he’d simply grown disinterested in medicine, yet as his friend I was privy to the real reason. Just before the end of his first year he’d performed CPR on a kid who overdosed on eccies in a club. The kid was all right, Glen had saved his life, but he’d gone into renal failure and as a result ended up on the kidney transplant list. The episode had seriously fucked Glen up and he’d dropped out of medicine a month later. I liked Glen; he was inherently selfish and therefore didn’t do anything he didn’t want to do. To know that he willingly hung out with me was perhaps the most flattering compliment I would ever receive. The majority of people found Glen arrogant and haughty, yet I found their opinions defensively heightened my regard for him; he really was an all right guy once you got to know him. The real reason I liked Glen was because his inherent selfishness made him the least threatening being on the planet to my Blackhole because he simply didn’t care. Glen took everything at face-value; if you said you were fine, you were fine and he didn’t think otherwise.
A tap on my shoulder made me turn around in line and I found myself uncomfortably close to the pretty face of a girl with red hair.
‘Hey Abby,’ I greeted.
‘Have you got me my coffee?’ the girl asked.
I nodded my head. ‘Yep, just waiting for it now.’
I had met Abby on my first day at uni. We both studied psychology and as a result found ourselves in the same tutorial classes. For some reason she had taken a liking to me and we’
d been inseparable ever since. Abby was British; she had immigrated with her family when she was twelve from Brighton or Bristol… somewhere beginning with “B”. She was slightly taller than I, though that wasn’t much as I was quite short, and had the most magnificent shock of deep red hair which she assured me was completely natural. Abby had a wide-set nose yet a small, sweetly shaped mouth and combined with large brown eyes, made for a very pretty face. Abby said she’d had curves from the moment she’d hit puberty and was certainly never short of male attention. That certainly worked in her favour; after having her heart broken by her long-term boyfriend, Todd, last Christmas, Abby had made it her personal philosophy to fuck whomever she liked. I couldn’t say I approved. I found her actions rather emotionally abusive; at least to the boys who actually invested time in her. The ones who were using her for exactly the same reason as she was I didn’t really care about. I found her perfectly agreeable and liked her vapid opinions and interests. Abby was a friend that required little effort on my part to engage in conversation and her lack of acute perception perfectly supported my ostensible happiness. Abby’s vapid opinions were also represented in her personality; her interests seemed to exist on monthly rotation. The only reliable thing about her was that she adhered to whatever thing was most popular at the time. Objectively Abby wasn’t exactly the easiest person to get along with. Like Glen she was selfish, though as I previously explained that made her quite perfect for me and I would be lying if I said I didn’t enjoy her company at least some of the time.
‘Number six,’ a barista called out, and Glen braved the crowd gathered at the counter to retrieve our order. Dispersing the cups between us he was left with his own and one that belonged to our other friend, Doug.
‘Should we wait for Doug here?’ Abby asked, and I found Glen looking at me for the answer.
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