A User's Guide to Make-Believe

by Jane Alexander

  —where she’d come back to reality two hours later, receiver still in place and the bones of her arse aching, damp creeping through her jeans – the contrast making her gasp, bending her double so she cried out as her spine locked and cracked at the too-sudden movement. The last drifts of Make-Believe tailing away, leaving her bleak and real: hollow, slumped with her headache in numb hands. Knowing that something was different, that she’d never Believed like that before. That for the very first time, she’d succeeded in imagining something so technicoloured, so perfectly realised that, even as she staggered stiff and cold back to her car, anticipation stretched inside her. Counting the hours: how long, till she could try it again? How long before she could go back?

  Cassie’s screen read 1.59. She stood, and retraced her steps to the front of the hospital.

  Reception was determinedly non-clinical. She remembered the butterfly logo, its wings outspread. The friendly yellow curve of desk in an off-white space. Eggs, sunny side up. She gave her name, told the woman behind the glass who it was she’d come to visit, and an orderly was summoned to collect her – a man in his fifties with his hair in a sleek grey ponytail. Paul, said his name tag.

  Paul led her in the opposite direction from the one she’d have chosen: into the block that formed the left arm of the hospital, till they reached a heavy door with a strip of meshed safety glass that chopped the corridor beyond into hundreds of tiny squares. He pressed his palm against the security panel, then pulled a card from the neck of his shirt and swiped it across. With a faint click, the door released. Cassie felt her hands sweating as she followed him through. Last time she’d visited, there had been a simple intercom system to gain access to the ward.

  The door closed behind them. For a moment they were nowhere. Another door faced them, identical, as though not even air was allowed in and out. The orderly checked that the door at their backs had clicked and locked before going through the same procedure again: press the panel, swipe the card.

  ‘He’s locked in here?’ she asked, and he turned, looked at her for the first time.

  ‘You’ve not been to see him before?’

  ‘Yes but – a while ago. He wasn’t here, he was—’ She gestured off to her right.

  ‘Aye, well, he’s been in the locked ward ever since I’ve been in the job.’

  ‘He used to be able to go in and out. Go outside.’

  ‘There’s a courtyard,’ said Paul. ‘But Alan’ll be in his room. Prefers to stay in his room. Some of them do.’ He checked that the second door had locked, then he started down the corridor.

  ‘You know it was his mother’s memorial today?’

  ‘I did hear she’d passed away,’ he said. ‘I was sorry to hear it. Nice lady, she was.’

  ‘So Alan wasn’t well enough to go?’

  Paul shook his head. His face said No danger, but what he actually said was, ‘Hen, you’ll need to ask the doctors about that.’

  Sweat dampened her underarms, the top of her lip; the heating was turned up to tropical. The walls were the same cheerful yellow as the desk at reception, with glass doors opening off to both sides. Through a series of large windows she glimpsed a bright room that looked like a coffee shop, with patients settled in armchairs and sofas; another room with long trestles – a cafeteria, perhaps, or an activity room. Further along, the doors changed from see-through to solid, each bearing a number, and a handwritten name on a cardboard slip.

  As they passed number 5 the door swung open, and a man stepped out.

  ‘Alright there, Jimmy?’ said the orderly.

  If Cassie was hot, Jimmy must have been melting, swaddled in layer upon layer of jumpers, sporting a blanket as a shawl. He nodded at Paul, frowned at Cassie, face settling easily into disapproving folds. She looked away, anxious that eye contact might seem like challenge, or invitation. Felt his stare on her back as they carried on down the hall.

  At number 12, the orderly stopped. Knocked on the door, and pushed it open.

  ‘Alan. I’ve brought you a visitor.’

  Don’t go, she said inside her head – please, don’t go – but Paul stepped aside, and then she was alone.

  No. Not alone.

  He was sitting with his back to a small high window, a book on his lap, one finger inserted into the pages, ready to turn over. He had lifted his head at Paul’s voice; now he looked back down again.

  She stood in the doorway, telling herself this was him. This was Alan. If she’d seen him in the street, she doubted she would have recognised him. His hair had grown long, darkened to a dull brown threaded with grey. Last time she was here, he’d put on some weight – the drugs, the lack of activity – but now he strained the seams of an extra-large plaid shirt, bulked in a chair with his stick balanced against its arm. She glanced at his feet, encased in unlaced canvas trainers, the left one still twisted inward. Remembered that long-distance call in the middle of the night, Valerie telling her Alan was fine not fine—Valerie explaining what Alan had done: how, in the flat Cassie had shared with him till she’d left for Australia, he had balanced on the first floor sill, spread his arms, leant further and further. Thinking he’d fly. Believing he’d slip into air like water.

  Now, at the entrance to his room, Cassie blinked, and for a moment saw him leaping, not from a window to the street below, but to save a goal. Monday nights, after school, she’d watch him sometimes, running forward and back in front of the net, flinging himself towards the ball, stretched out long and thin like he trusts the air to catch him. On Tuesday nights her fingers skirt round grazes and bruises, fresh pink scrapes and bluish shadows on the white of him, on the bones of his hips, his elbows and knees.

  She snapped the memory shut. Wanting to keep it intact, a perfect miniature, far away from here.

  ‘Alan.’

  Slowly, he raised his head. In the beard that trailed down to the barrel of his chest, she caught the faintest glint of red. The beard blurred his mouth, concealed the whole lower half of his face; what skin was visible was puffed, pale as a corpse. When was the last time the sun had touched him? The outside air? If she could see his eyes, she might recognise him – but they were concealed by the glasses that sat on marshmallow cheeks, thick-lensed and heavy-framed. The bright overhead light flashed off the glass, hiding him behind another layer.

  She couldn’t just hover by the door. She took a few paces into the room. It was tidy, plain: the mirror of the ward he’d been in before. A single bed, a navy blue duvet. Wardrobe, bedside table made of veneered chipboard. The chair Alan occupied was the only one in the room. She didn’t want to sit on his bed; she stayed standing, but looking down on him felt wrong, like she was threatening him, so she crouched, and then it was like talking to a child. In the end she gave up, and perched herself on the very edge of the mattress.

  He hadn’t said a word. Just watched, his finger still inside the book, ready to turn.

  ‘Hi,’ she said. ‘Do you … I don’t know if you recognise me?’

  He moved his head, slight, definite: No.

  ‘Cassie.’

  Shake: No.

  ‘Remember, from—’ Where? From everywhere; from for ever. ‘Your girlfriend Cassie.’

  No.

  ‘Come on, you must.’ She was smiling, trying to make a joke of it. But there was no joke, and no must. No rule, no law, that just because something had happened, been important, been everything, it had to be remembered. Only, if it wasn’t remembered, how could she be sure it had happened at all? If she had only herself to rely on, it might as well be something she’d imagined – her and Alan, all their years together.

  ‘Listen,’ she said, leaning in. ‘I’m so sorry about your mum.’

  His face didn’t change. She wasn’t sure which was more disconcerting: the way he’d been when he first came to Raphael House, talking with his ordinary, open enthusiasm about mutual friends who didn’t exist, about all the conversations he’d had with people who were dead, people who were famous, people who wer
e dead and famous. How he’d been on her last visit: incoherent and urgent, his stare intense and apparently unseeing. Or this. Silence. Absence. Nothing. Perhaps he didn’t understand that Valerie was gone. Perhaps she shouldn’t have mentioned it. She gazed round his room, looking for something to talk about, something that might spark some communication between them. Apart from a built-in screen there was nothing on the walls. A mug on the bedside table, and a photo of Valerie in winter hat and scarf, squinting into sun.

  ‘The guy, Paul, he said you don’t go out. In the courtyard. Don’t you miss the sun?’ She hated her voice. It was a public voice, a jollying voice, as if she were a nurse. ‘Are you – are you even in there?’

  In a film, if she was sitting at her lover’s bedside, with him in a coma or whatever – basically unable to communicate for some reason more romantic than severe mental illness – in this film, she would tell him stories from their life together. She’d say, Remember chips? She’d tell story after story, and eventually – zoom in, close-up – it would happen: a flicker of recognition, and the audience would know the happy ending was on its way.

  She leant in further, knowing she shouldn’t, unable to stop herself searching. Trying to see behind his glasses. ‘Are you in there?’

  The book slid from his lap, flipped itself shut. Cool Science for Kids.

  ‘Alan? Are you there?’

  ‘No.’

  His voice startled her. ‘OK,’ she said, and pulled away, palms up: Look, I’m backing off.

  His head was angled now so she could see through the glass of his lenses, but his eyes were squeezed shut. His hands made fists in his lap. Sealed off from her and the whole of the world – just the way she used to cut off, closed eyes and fists, hunched into herself. In Alan’s room, upstairs, in his mum’s house. She could feel the duvet tangling round her bare feet, feel her chin pushed into her knees, fists pressed against her head. The times when missing her mum had caught her afresh in its absolute unfairness, and stirred itself up with the guilt of forgetting to be sad. When Alan had said I’m here it’s OK it’s OK, his hands on her arms, and she’d wanted to lift her head, to open her eyes, to soften her fists and say Yes, say I know say I will be OK.

  And then she remembered the code.

  They’d learnt it so they could speak in maths class. Like T-shirts under school shirts: secret messages. Sitting two desks back from him, across the aisle. Tap tap, her biro on the table. Tap tap, his dancing fingers. Dash, dash, dash. Dash dot dash. Morse code.

  You could do it with drumming, with squeezing. You could do it by clenching and unclenching your fist. You could do it with your eyes closed and your knees folded up to your chin.

  Dot dash dot dot. Dash, dash, dash. Dot dot dot dash. Dot.

  And it would help: those gentle measured beats. Building them into letters, into words. Eventually she would dot dash back: O-K.

  Like sin, cos and tan, it was still there, lodged deep in her brain.

  She tapped it out on her knee, slow, careful, not sure if he’d hear. If he was even listening.

  H

  E

  L

  L

  O

  Behind the beard she could see his lips moving, straggles of hair drawing in and puffing out. Chest rising and falling. Breath coming fast. Was he trying to speak to her? His eyes stayed shut.

  She reached towards him, to the wooden arm of his chair, a couple of inches from where his elbow rested.

  O

  K

  A pause.

  O

  K

  She could hear now: he was muttering, under his breath, like a mantra or a spell. ‘No no no no no. No no no no no.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said, and began to tap again – hand close to his arm, almost touching.

  A single movement: his body jerking, his fist shooting out to punch her away – and she was on her feet, scrambling back—‘No no no no no—’ His hands were raised now, clutching his head. Scrubbing at his hair, left hand tugging and worrying. The heavy glasses jerked free, fell to the floor – and at the side of his ear she glimpsed a patch of skin, angry red. A scar, healed and re-opened – around it, hair pulled out by the roots. Fingers scrabbling, sharp-nailed. Her fists pressed to her mouth: she was backed against the door now, wanting to shout for a nurse or an orderly, wanting to escape but something making her stay where she was. Stay still, so still that the breath was trapped inside her, till he slowed the scratching, the rat-like scrabbling. Till he slowed, and stopped. Till the muttering tailed away.

  She waited another minute, then a minute more. He lowered his hands, eventually. Laid them in his lap. His eyes stayed closed. Wetness shone on his puffed-up cheeks.

  She should leave, now, right now.

  Her satchel was lying on the floor, beside his bed.

  She spoke softly: ‘I’m just going to get my bag.’

  He didn’t respond.

  She took a step towards him, then a couple more. Crouched. The lace of his shoe snaked across the carpet, grey and frayed. She looked away from the uncanny angle of his foot. Picked up the bag, and retreated once again.

  When he lifted his head, his beard was stuck in damp strands round his mouth. There was no recognition in his watery stare: if she could see anything there, it was fear. With difficulty, he bent to collect his book and his glasses. Fitted the specs back onto his face and folded the book open, seemingly at random. A greasy smear obliterated his left eye; he made no attempt to wipe the lens clean.

  There was nothing of Alan there. There was only a body slumped in a chair, waiting to turn the page.

  CHAPTER NINE

  He had thought he was on an island, awake with the book safe in his hands, but they could get in anywhere. Back again, in her disguise, making her look the way she used to, making her walk into his room in the broad daylight – wasn’t that new? But they could make the daylight too, wide as the sky, a staring eye – just as they could speak in her voice. Different from all their everyday voices which were loud, or like rusting metal, or there were many of them, all at once, saying the same things or different things, or whispering, gentling, lulling until he forgot to guard against them and then – then they burst inside his brain – exploded him into nothing, into nothing but voices; but this voice, now, was hers. It was clever, yes, very clever, light and quick – the river running low at the back of the garden. Sorry, she said, and the word sliced through him. You miss the sun, she said, and her hair would be sun flowing through his fingers, or soft so soft against his face, but they could make that happen too. But but, however clever, they’d made a mistake – because a long time ago she had flown away to the far side of the world, and her flying had fixed her. Her pinned to a present that became the past, and him moving further and further away into the future that became the present – so that when her face on the screen said come it was light from a star, it was old light, so that when she said Follow me like we agreed, so that when she said Please she was talking squint, wrong-angled – light and sound fired at the place where he used to be, coming dim from the far-off past. And that was the mistake, because now – now, the full beam of her gave them away. She was too bright too close too clear. She was too blood too breath too skin. She was too much herself, and not her self at all.

  Under his fingers was paper, were pages soft from turning. Under his fingers were facts, nailed to the page. Things that were fixed and couldn’t be altered, like page 27 the speed of light is 299,792,458 metres per second, like page 35 humans have forty-six chromosomes, like page 52 giraffes rarely sleep and never lie down. Those were the facts and so long as he kept a hold of the book they couldn’t change any of it, and that’s how he hung on to what was real – by the skin of its scruff, by the teeth of its tail – that’s how he hung on as they crawled inside and made him do what you did when you found you were not on an island after all.

  Are you in there, they said in her voice, and grew bigger and closer and stared at him out of her eyes, and he tried
to cling on but the facts slid away. He closed his eyes to keep her out but she was still there. She was breathing. They could make her breathe. They could stretch a skin of daylight across the dark, drum-tight across the squirming shuddering dark, and they drummed on it, drummed on the broad skin of the fake daylight, beat at his clenched mind, and each beat was a seed forced inside him, to crack and sprout and twist – into messages – OK into words – HELLO into lies – OK – OK – NO—

  He flung it up, a wall of NO! and the lies fell back but were buried still inside him – he could feel them itching, hatching – there, right there – and he scraped and scratched at the part of his skull where the darkness bred, till the hot red pain was like the speed of light, a fact he could hang onto – you could be on an island and then not, you could never be certain, on an island and suddenly drowning – and they would come disguised, come as Paul, Mike, Ken, as men with strong arms and a needle, and after that there would be no way out – so he hung on to the sharpness in his head, and breathed, and kept his eyes. Shut. Tight.

  Wait. Wait.

  Open?

  She was small now. Far away. Safer. She was not a fact, so he turned away from her. His book was there, on the floor. He reached for it, let the soft pages fall open. Page 14. The deepest part of the ocean is 35,797 feet. That was a fact. His left-hand nails were rimmed with red, with plasma fifty-five per cent, with erythrocytes leukocytes platelets forty-five per cent. That was another fact.