The Mirror World of Melody Black

by Gavin Extence

  These were arguments I’d already rehearsed for when Beck read the follow-up; I was making him wait, too. Yet based on this trial run, I thought my explanation could do with some fine-tuning. Dr Barbara still looked sceptical.

  ‘I’ll reserve judgement until I’ve read the article,’ she said.

  Outside, the sky was starting to darken. There had been only a little high cloud when I’d entered Dr Barbara’s office, fifty minutes ago, but now it was dim enough that she had to switch on both of the floor lamps. As she did, I thought idly about how the session had not quite met my expectations. True, I was used to Dr Barbara challenging my thinking, on most topics, but today there was something else. I’d been left feeling defensive and a little misunderstood, as if my words weren’t having the effect I intended for them. It was in this mindset that I decided to mention that my libido seemed to be coming back. I wanted to give her some unequivocal good news, proof that despite everything – despite the arguments with Beck and the anxiety dream and Simon’s corpse – I was feeling generally better. But even here, Dr Barbara’s reaction was guarded.

  ‘I think that’s something else we need to keep an eye on,’ she told me.

  ‘It’s a good thing,’ I assured her. ‘I mean, I actually want sex again. I’m enjoying it – really enjoying it – for the first time in months. I’ve had three orgasms in the past fortnight. I think it’s a pretty clear sign that my mood’s improving.’

  Dr Barbara frowned a bit as she settled herself back in her chair, but she didn’t blush. It was impossible to make Dr Barbara blush, as I’d discovered months ago. She knew, of course, that my sex drive was the first thing to go when I was getting depressed. I’d told her that before Christmas; it was as predictable as the tides. Her response was that I should focus less on the physical side of things and more on the emotional closeness that making love could bring. This almost made me blush; it certainly made me cringe, which caused Dr Barbara to posit that I might have ‘intimacy issues’. (Paradoxically, she also thought I had an unhealthy dependency on romantic relationships, since I hadn’t been out of one for more than a fortnight since I was about fifteen.) But the only issue for me was Dr Barbara’s choice of vocabulary. I didn’t think a doctor should be using a phrase like making love. In all honesty, I didn’t think it was a phrase that had any place outside pre-1950s literature, where the meaning was different and less cloyingly euphemistic.

  Contrarily, I assumed it was my diligent logging of orgasms, this focus on the physical, that was now causing Dr Barbara to frown like that; though, in truth, her frown was difficult to read. It was also possible that she had more general concerns about my sudden uplift in mood. This was understandable, of course, but that didn’t make it any easier to deal with. It was frustrating to feel reined in like this, to have every emotion – even the positive ones – viewed as a potential symptom.

  ‘Is there anything else you’d like to talk about before we finish?’ Dr Barbara asked.

  I was feeling slightly petulant at this juncture, but at the same time I still wanted to win back Dr Barbara’s approval before we ended the session. This is why I started to tell her about the speed – how there’d been a couple of instances in the past fortnight when I’d wanted to take it, but both times I’d resisted. It was an achievement of sorts, though I realized, halfway through my story, that it was unlikely to be met with any great approbation. Dr Barbara’s frown deepened, losing all traces of its previous ambiguity. In retrospect, it was stupid of me to expect anything else. When it came to drugs, Dr Barbara and I were never going to agree; we couldn’t even agree on terminology. I talked about recreational use and blowing off some steam; she talked about ad hoc self-medication and comorbidity.

  When I had finished my exposition, she sat for a moment in stony-faced silence, then said, ‘Okay, that’s something we really need to keep an eye on.’

  So that was three eyes now: sex and drugs and insomnia. We were fast running out.

  ‘I think you’re missing the point,’ I told her, after waiting calmly for a few seconds. ‘I decided not to take it, despite being exhausted and stressed out of my mind. A few months back, I wouldn’t have given it a second thought. But on this occasion, I decided that given the time of day and general circumstances it would be better – in the long run – not to. That’s progress, don’t you think?’

  This last was said jokingly, to try to force a wobble in Dr Barbara’s anxious pout. But it wasn’t a joke. I wanted to make her see that things were getting better, for her to give some indication that she agreed with me, even in a very limited sense.

  She didn’t.

  ‘Abby, this is lunacy. As I’ve told you again and again, I’m not going to be happy until you’ve stopped entirely. The amphetamines, the MDMA – all of it. It sets you back a long, long way every time you take it.’

  ‘Which I didn’t,’ I noted, since this emphasis was getting rather lost.

  ‘Wonderful. So why not go one step further and just get rid of it? Take away the temptation.’

  ‘I’ve told you. It keeps me on an even keel. Sometimes it’s the only thing that does. Besides, it’s much better for me than too much drink. I know that from experience.’ I pointed to the scar in the centre of my right palm, a perfectly circular white disc, about the size of an ibuprofen. ‘I’ve never wanted to do anything like that on speed, and certainly not on ecstasy.’

  Dr Barbara acknowledged this fact with a curt nod. But I don’t think she was any closer to accepting the broader picture I was trying to paint.

  I left feeling vaguely dissatisfied.

  6

  DADDY

  I wanted to kill my sister.

  She called me the day before the family meal – the day before! – to tell me that some work thing had come up. She was being flown out to New York that very evening. It was something she simply could not get out of.

  ‘You bitch! You absolute bitch!’

  There was a long unruffled silence down the line. ‘Listen, Abby. I know it’s a pain. I’ll make it up to you, I promise.’

  ‘You’ve spent the last fortnight haranguing me over this. How could you?’

  ‘It’s work. I don’t have a choice. It’s not as if I wanted to pull out. Daddy’s gone to a lot of effort, booked a really nice restaurant. I was looking forward to it.’

  ‘Great. So how about you go to dinner with Daddy and I’ll fly out to New York and eat canapés and hobnob with a bunch of idiots and close whatever stupid fucking deal it is you have to close?’

  My voice was getting increasingly shrill. I was very aware of this, but I couldn’t do a thing about it. Francesca, in contrast, had started using her telephone voice – which was so enunciated you’d have thought she’d been taught it in finishing school. In actual fact, I think she’d been taught it on some moronic assertiveness course at work. It was the voice she slipped into whenever things got heated, and it always made me feel like I was eleven and she was fifteen again, and there was this unbreachable gulf that existed in our relative levels of maturity.

  The more I thought about it, the more I was convinced that this four-year age gap had defined all the major differences between us. It had definitely defined our different attitudes to our father. Francesca had been eighteen when he left us; by that time she had gone up to Cambridge. She had more important things to worry about than the final death rattles of our family. I had been fourteen, and was left wondering, Why now? The answer, I could only assume, was that my sister had been the mysterious glue that kept my parents together. And her relationship with our father had emerged from the divorce pretty much unscathed. Twelve years later, she still called him ‘Daddy’ like she was a girl from Beverly Hills asking for a lift to the Prom. When I called him ‘Daddy’, I was being Sylvia Plath.

  ‘Abby, you’re being very unreasonable about this,’ my sister continued.

  ‘I’m being unreasonable? I’m not the one who’s spent the past two weeks going on about how important these
horrendous family get-togethers are. I’m not the one who drops every other commitment the second work calls.’

  ‘Oh, come on. That’s hardly fair. Our jobs are very different. Yours is much more . . .’

  ‘More what? More frivolous? More dispensable? More of a hobby, really?’

  ‘It’s more flexible. You don’t have things like this dropped on your plate at the last minute. You get to work to your own schedule. You should count yourself lucky.’

  ‘Jesus! Do you know how patronizing you sound?’ The weary sigh down the phone suggested she didn’t. ‘That’s it – I’m not going either!’

  ‘Don’t be silly. You have to go. Daddy’s already called the restaurant to change the booking. They were really good about it. And you must know how difficult it is to get a table there. They’re always booked up months in advance.’

  ‘Oh, yes. I’m sure it was nearly impossible for them to change a table for six to a table for five.’

  ‘Four.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘A table for four.’

  ‘Fucking hell! Adam’s not coming either?’

  ‘No, of course not. Why would he go without me? That would be weird. You wouldn’t make Beck go to a family dinner if you had to pull out.’

  ‘Yes I bloody would! I’d make him go and take notes and report back on the whole sorry affair.’

  ‘Ha ha.’

  ‘I’m not joking.’

  I heard another deep breath down the line. ‘Listen. When did you last see Daddy?’

  ‘Don’t guilt-trip me. You have no right.’

  ‘When was it?’

  ‘It was recent enough.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘Around Christmas.’

  ‘That’s not recent.’

  ‘I didn’t say recent. I said recent enough.’

  ‘He’s worried about you. He asks how you’re getting on all the time, whenever we speak.’

  I didn’t say anything. It probably wasn’t true. But there was a part of me that wanted it to be true. And I hated that part of me very deeply.

  I felt hollow in the pit of my stomach, like I was going to cry.

  I didn’t cry. Instead, I told my sister that she wasn’t getting a birthday present this year. ‘You don’t deserve one and I can’t afford one.’

  Then I hung up.

  I was lying, of course. I wouldn’t have made Beck go to the meal without me. I couldn’t have, not at the moment. He still hadn’t forgiven me for the second article.

  So far as I could tell, his main grievances were as follows: 1) I was dramatizing my life – our life – no matter how I chose to dress it up. 2) I’d written about private conversations and given too much personal information. 3) I’d made a couple of passing references to our sex life – even though I hadn’t said anything bad about our sex life. (Admittedly, this could have been included under the previous point, but I knew from his tone that it should stand as a complaint all by itself.) 4) I was being deliberately provocative. 5) Neither of us came off well.

  But, really, it seemed to me that this was all just one mammoth, repetitive, mostly unreasonable grievance. Every point could be subsumed under the single theme that it was wrong for me to write about my life in a national newspaper.

  ‘Who are you trying to be?’ Beck asked me. ‘Katie fucking Price?’

  This was extremely unfair.

  I wasn’t trying to be anyone. I was just being myself, writing something open and honest. It wasn’t as if I were standing on a table flashing my tits.

  ‘That’s exactly what you’re doing,’ Beck told me.

  I was flashing my literary tits.

  Six days after the article had been published, as we took a taxi through the narrow streets of Soho, we had argued ourselves to a frosty impasse. Tacitly, I think we’d agreed to stop talking about it for the time being. We’d stopped talking in general. It was getting us nowhere.

  We had to take a taxi to the restaurant because walking, even to a bus or Tube station, was completely out of the question. I was wearing five-inch heels, which would go some way to narrowing the height difference between Marie Martin and me (assuming that she wasn’t also wearing five-inch heels; I didn’t think she would be because that would make her three inches taller than my father, and he was far too vain to feel comfortable with this arrangement). I’d spent at least a couple of hours getting ready for this ridiculous meal, and I knew most of my preparation was for her benefit.

  This did not make me feel good about myself. And I felt myself sinking even lower as we pulled up outside the restaurant. I could tell straight away that I hated it. The façade was mostly glass. It was trendy. There was minimalist furniture and abstract art everywhere. One glance at the table of diners nearest the entrance confirmed that there wasn’t a round plate to be seen. The crockery was all quadrilaterals – squares and rectangles mostly, but I could have sworn I also glimpsed a rhombus at one point.

  My father and Marie Martin were waiting for us in the bar area. She looked incredible, needless to say. She was in a black halter neck that clung to the narrow curve of her hips like a second skin. Her make-up looked like it had been done by a professional and her hair was swept over one shoulder in a cascade of elaborate ringlets. She looked immaculate, airbrushed, as if she’d stepped straight out of one of her adverts. The only consolation I could find was that her breasts were no larger than mine; they were possibly a little smaller, depending on how much padding she was wearing. Definitely no more than a B-cup, though.

  I don’t know why this mattered to me, but it did.

  My father and I hugged with the stiff, awkward hug we’d been perfecting over the past twelve years – the kind of hug you could imagine Angela Merkel and Silvio Berlusconi exchanging for the benefit of the assembled cameras before heading backstage to discuss fiscal austerity. Except I was nothing like Angela Merkel.

  Marie moved in for the French double kiss, but I’d anticipated she would and was ready with my brusque British handshake. She stared at my extended left hand for several seconds, smiling an amused little smile, then countered with a flawless curtsy. This, of course, left me nowhere to go. I nodded in acknowledgement of her victory and withdrew my hand with all the good grace I could muster.

  My father, meanwhile, was administering several over-enthusiastic slaps to Beck’s arm, allowing him to miss, or pretend to miss, all this embarrassing power play. Maybe I should have delivered a few friendly blows to Marie Martin’s arm. That would have been a better rejoinder to that stupid curtsy. But the moment had long passed. She was now double kissing Beck, a manoeuvre that he made no attempt to forestall. It was hard to tell in the too-dim violet and turquoise lighting of the bar, but I thought he blushed a little, which I supposed was forgivable. At least I’d be able to ask him how she smelled later on.

  I ordered a double vodka and Coke before we were taken across to our table.

  Our table seemed to be in the exact centre of the room, which made me feel exposed and vulnerable. It didn’t help, either, that Marie inevitably attracted a lot of staring. Some people were clearly trying to place her, to work out why she looked so familiar; others were just gazing at her, the way you might gaze at the roof of the Sistine Chapel, in awe that such a thing existed. And yet she seemed completely oblivious to the attention she was garnering. She was chatting to the sommelier in French; it sounded vaguely flirty, but then French usually does. I supposed she must be used to all this attention. She probably took it for granted. My father, however, was a different matter. I knew that he wasn’t oblivious to the gawking. It would be like a dozen different fingers all massaging his ego. Though, surely, he must have felt just a tiny bit uncomfortable as well? A fair share of those onlookers must have been trying, unsuccessfully, to work out the peculiar dynamics of our table. The obvious assumption would be that this was a father taking his three similarly aged children to dinner – except no daughters would ever dress the way Marie and I had dressed for the benefit of their
father. And there was zero chance the two of us shared a mother.

  I glared at the pretentious menu while my father attempted small talk. How were things? What had we been up to? After less than five minutes of staccato chit-chat, he had moved on to work and money, the two themes that were never far from his mind.

  ‘If you’re struggling, Abigail, I can always find you some work writing copy. You only have to ask. We always need writers.’

  ‘We’re getting by.’

  ‘Yes, I’m sure. But you could be doing so much more than just getting by. You know, you could earn twice as much writing for advertisers than you do with the papers. At least. It’s worth thinking about.’

  Beck nodded. It was a small, diplomatic nod, not very effusive, but it still annoyed the hell out of me.

  ‘I’ve thought about it,’ I said, ‘and I’m not interested.’

  My father cracked his knuckles, then sipped his wine. ‘I just think it’s a shame, that’s all. You have a way with words – that’s a marketable skill. Finding the right phrase, the right slogan to grab someone’s attention, that’s a talent worth having. You shouldn’t waste it.’

  ‘Waste it how? By writing about things that actually interest me? That I care about?’

  ‘That’s not what I meant. Of course you can do that too. This would just be a sideline, another source of income. What’s wrong with that?’

  ‘Daddy, I don’t want to write pointless trash I don’t believe in – to sell pointless trash I don’t believe in.’

  The look of incomprehension on my father’s face was so pure it could have been miniaturized and used as an emoticon. ‘I just want you to be a little more comfortable, a little happier,’ he concluded.