A User's Guide to Make-Believe

by Jane Alexander

She sat on the slowly settling duvet. Stared up at him.

  ‘So I’m making this choice – and you know exactly what I mean. You’re doing the same.’

  Lewis finished wrestling a pillow into its case.

  ‘I think … you must have lost someone too.’

  Placed it gently at the head of the bed.

  ‘Was it hers? The bike?’

  He nodded, just once.

  ‘And she’s gone – she’s dead?’

  He lowered himself as if from a great height, onto the bed beside her.

  It was striking how much they were the same. They’d both lost someone, and found them again in Make-Believe. Except, where her connection was real, his was just memory; the memory of someone no longer living. She felt it pricking at her eyes, a great pity for him. Said it once more, and meant it this time, deep in the pit of her stomach: ‘I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.’

  ‘Me too,’ he muttered. Started to unbuckle his belt.

  Clean sheets. Soft clothes. Plenty of pillows. Water on the bedside tables, for when they woke up dry.

  She had been through all her reservations, visited them one by one. She was ready, and so close. She could almost hear his voice now.

  Cassie, I’m waiting. I’ve been waiting for ever. Up by the falls. Meet me here? If you believe in me. Meet me here.

  FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS

  Q. How safe is Make-Believe™?

  A. Make-Believe™ is the result of more than ten years of extensive research and development. The advanced biotechnology has been developed by world-leading experts and thoroughly tested to ensure there are absolutely no adverse effects. Make-Believe™ is licensed for use in the UK by the Department for Innovation, so you can rest assured there will be no unwelcome side effects – your safety is guaranteed.

  She curls into the scoop of nothing, into a blissful absence.

  There is nothing she needs. Only this.

  No such thing as future. No past. Only this.

  Bodiless.

  Free.

  Perfected.

  When her self returns, she is floating.

  She hangs in something slow like water, feels the flow of it over her skin. A silky resistance that bears her up, that swirls her hair; clear like air, so her breathing is cool and transparent, her vision unrippled. But all she sees, looking down, is herself.

  It’s harder than she remembers. If she’d expected anything, it was to be there, straight away. To find herself there, with Alan. But she is alone. She prods around in her mind, and feels nothing. There is no connection.

  She’s out of practice, that’s all. She opens her mouth: tastes green, the smell of wet leaves. Up by the falls. Meet me here? She’s imagined a beginning; now she has to keep working at it. If she can Make the setting – Believe in it – he’ll be there. He will.

  She closes her eyes, and begins.

  She starts with taste, and smell: concentrates on the damp earth, the ozone, the soft herbal notes of growing things. As she gets it right, starts to inhale the freshness of water, it makes her want to open her eyes – but not yet. Not yet.

  Next, her skin. Her feet bare, in cool grass. It flattens underfoot, tickles her ankles. A breeze feathers her, fingers her hair, strokes the backs of her legs; it catches the spray from the falls and tingles it onto her face and neck. With the spray comes sound. Tumble of water over rock, rushing and falling. She paints it in as background – and over the top she layers the tap and drip of rain on leaves. No coded message, just innocent rain, steady and gentle, present like the rhythm of her heart or her lungs. As if it hasn’t been necessary for her to Make it, but simply to pay attention.

  To attend. To notice. What she notices now – faint at first, at the edge of her hearing – is breath. Is his breathing. Calm, and slow; and clearer now, and close.

  She turns her face. Feels it: his breath on her cheek. Matches hers to his, in and out. For a while it’s all they do: breathe together.

  She should open her eyes – she should reach for him, touch – but the thought knocks her out of sync with him. Her breath comes shallower, faster. If she opens her eyes, who will she see? He has been lost for so long. He has been irretrievable. And now he is so close beside her. She thinks of the locked ward, the body wedged in a blue armchair, disguised in all its layers of flesh – and her eyelids glue themselves shut.

  ‘Hey,’ says Alan. ‘Hey, no. Don’t do that, eh? Don’t think about him. He’s nothing to do with us, not here.’

  ‘What’ll I see, if I look?’

  ‘I don’t know what you’ll see. It’s up to you, I think. I can tell you what I’m seeing?’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘You. I’m seeing you, with your hair long, streaks in it like it goes in summer. I’m seeing how you’ve been out in the sun.’

  ‘Am I burnt, then?’

  ‘Not really. More brown. And – I like that dress you’ve got on.’

  Dress. She feels it round her hips.

  ‘Like army, or safari, or something,’ he says, and she knows the one he means. Old; she doesn’t have it any more. He says, ‘You look – ready.’

  ‘For …?’

  ‘For action.’

  As he says it she feels stronger. Strong enough to open her eyes.

  ‘Now,’ he says. ‘Your turn. You tell me what you see.’

  She laughs.

  ‘OK,’ he says. ‘That could go either way.’

  ‘It’s good. It’s really good.’ And now she reaches out, touches him. He’s wearing the T-shirt her body is wearing, back in Lewis’s bed. ‘I’ve still got this,’ she says. ‘This T-shirt. You used to wear it all the time.’ It’s from a festival they went to, the summer they finished school; the line-up is illegible, faded almost to invisibility, the cotton so washed and worn it’s like touching nothing. The rain falls now on the stretched roof of their festival tent; through the shirt she feels every detail of him. The jut of his shoulder. Hard curve of his arm, where it meets his chest. The bump of his nipple, the rhythm of his ribs, the dip and stretch of his stomach. Tries not to think how all of this is lost, in the waking world. Draws up her hand to rest on his chest, feeling all the closer to his skin for the soft familiar slip of fabric between them. His heart kicks strong and steady, into her palm.

  ‘It’s you,’ she says.

  They are joined – T-shirt, dress, all clothes irrelevant – heat and light rippling from where he’s locked inside her. The smell of him fills her – sky-blue over warm, biscuity skin. She inhales deeper, deeper, breathes in home. His chin on her head, her face pressed into his neck, and at the same time she pulls back to see them. Baby monkeys, clinging close.

  ‘Will we stay like this? Stay here?’

  Her yes crashes over the both of them: no need to speak it. ‘Except,’ she says. ‘I don’t know how much time there is, and I can’t get away like I used to, from the real world. I don’t think I can stay, not like before—’

  ‘The real world,’ says Alan. ‘Why do you call it that?’

  ‘Because this isn’t—’ She stops. She can’t say this isn’t real, because it has to be. Because here is where Alan exists, where they are together. And there, in a locked ward in the middle of nowhere, is a bad joke rocking back and forth with blood beneath his fingernails.

  ‘You know I believe in you,’ she says. ‘But if you’re real, what about – the other you?’

  ‘You don’t need to think about that. He’s – a mistake. He’s not me.’

  ‘But he’s why you’re here. Isn’t he? What they’ve done to him, that’s what means we can be together now.’ She reaches out, stroking his red-gold hair, slipping her hand round to cup his head. The back of his ear is smooth. No swelling. No scar. No blood.

  ‘I told you,’ he says, hand on hers. ‘I’m not him.’

  ‘They were trying to do good,’ she says. ‘Trying to bring you back. But it didn’t work, can’t have worked, or else—’

  It’s too hard, it’s making her
head spin. She means to say, if the treatment had worked he would be himself again, wouldn’t be shut away in the locked ward. But he’s both: is himself, and not himself. Is asleep in a narrow bed in the ward, and here with her by the falls. She can’t believe in one and not the other. Can’t choose her Alan, and turn her back on the other.

  There is so much to ask, but the questions slip past like fish. She doesn’t want to think. She only wants to Believe. She pulls back so she can look at Alan, see his face, but he closes his eyes like he’s turning away from her.

  ‘Why do you think I’ve got the answers,’ he says.

  ‘But you have to know. What he’s scared of. What’s happening to him. To both of you—’

  ‘Don’t,’ he says. ‘Don’t. Just be here. Us, together. Come on: it’s not him that’s waited for you, it’s not him that’s here to meet you, that knew the place to come—’ But now she’s mentioned it, she can feel it, prickling the edges of their place. A darkness at her back. ‘Don’t,’ he says – but she turns, moves towards it. She has to know.

  The tumble of the waterfall spreads, flattens to a rush of static. Through the fuzz, voices: low, muttering, bubbling up and sinking deep back down. She reaches out, touches something soft, skinless – yielding and wet. Pulpy. Rotten. Snatches her hand back – but it clings, it’s all around her. The air is hot tar, is burning rubber. The black invades her nose, coats her mouth, turns to lead in her lungs. She is weighted, dragged down and down by the dark that wants her closer. Wants to hold her. Inhabit her. Wraps tight round her ankles and wrists, across her mouth and nose. Pulls her in, down – and she kicks against it, kicking hard towards the light that is Alan, his glow, his luminous skin, his bright gold hair. She struggles, swears, cries for help, wasted breath. Opens her mouth in a gasp; finds nothing to breathe, hunger for air a knife in her lungs—

  Alan: she focuses on him, his bright blur, strains to make the light stronger. This is her Make-Believe; she’s in control – isn’t she? She tries to concentrate, to make the light spread, make it push away the dark – and ‘Oh God,’ she says, fighting the air back into her lungs – ‘Oh God, is this what it’s like for him?’

  He catches – holds her – her chest heaves against him. His steady heart beats for her while her own runs at three times the speed. The rot is stuck, where she touched it. She panics, tries to shake it off – slime slathering her hands, black crescent fingernails—

  ‘Cassie,’ he says. ‘It’s really OK.’

  She forces herself to follow his breathing. To look at him. To open herself. To let him see inside. Shows him everything, the worst of herself. Shows the escape she’s wished for him. The escape he must surely have wished for himself, since his life became so small, so much like endurance. To escape from that body, that room – to escape, now, from this: from the creeping, swallowing dark that she can feel, still. That she can see, right at the edge of her vision, beyond the light and the leaves and water.

  ‘It’s OK,’ he says, ‘if you wished me dead’ – and she shakes her head, squeezes her eyes shut, but he won’t let her pretend, he keeps on talking. ‘No – but if you did, that’s OK. Cos it wasn’t me; it was him, eh? The mistake. I know that.’

  But it’s not OK, what she wished for him – and nor is the waiting darkness. None of it is OK. The not-OK hardens inside her. Draws her into herself, away from Alan.

  ‘I know what’s going on,’ he says. ‘In your head. You’re thinking of how you can save him. You’re planning to be a soldier, in your little army dress.’

  ‘But you understand? That I have to? That I can’t leave him – you – I mean both of you, I mean either—’

  ‘Please, Cassie. Stay. For as long as you can, for however long we’ve got.’

  ‘But—’ She shakes her head, and his face drops out of focus. She can’t feel the warmth of him any more, the reliable drum of his heart. ‘I have to try. I have to help him. It doesn’t mean – I’ll come back …’

  His voice is distant now, like he’s standing on the far side of the water. ‘I’m here because of you,’ he says. ‘Because you know me. This: this is how you save me. You have to be here. If you’re not here—’

  His words are lost. The water roars white, like static – and she can’t stay here, not now, with the darkness lapping at her edges. Stop, she thinks, stop – and the command blurs into the white roar, and perhaps that’s why it’s so sluggish – why, instead of a seamless fade-in of what they call real, there’s a stretched-out moment of two worlds swaying – a dizzying, sickening overlap like nothing she’s felt before, one reality into the other, and then—

  STOP

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  You woke back in the real world, cold and stiff—

  The noise wouldn’t stop. Shrill, insistent, refusing to let her sink into sleep. Alan, she thought, and then: Lewis. It was his flat. His front door. His doorbell someone was jabbing, drilling deep into her head.

  She reached for where he was lying – or tried to. Her arm stayed flat on the bed. Sit up, she told herself. Stayed frozen.

  Lewis, she thought again, as if he might hear his name in her head, shake her out of this paralysis.

  If she could move a finger, just one— She focused all her willpower on her right hand, on her index finger, straining for a response. The movement came suddenly, a twitch of her hand that loosened her arm, released her to push upright.

  She was sitting in an empty bed.

  ‘Lewis?’ Her voice was ghostly, drowned out by the doorbell. She coughed, cleared her throat and called again: ‘Lewis!’ The shutters were closed, a sliver of light between them. The room was dim, but she could see his side of the bed was rumpled, a soft dent in the pillow where his head had rested. Nestled in the hollow was his receiver. She lifted a hand, felt her own receiver still in place. Slipped it from her ear, and laid it alongside.

  With the doorbell still drilling, she got up, checked the bathroom. The kitchen. In the living room, she switched on the light: the cat, curled on the sofa, opened an eye, closed it again. The flat was empty, just the harsh ringing ricocheting off the walls. It came in bursts now, in dashes and dots. Just for a moment, she imagined it was Alan outside. That he’d crossed the border, was waiting on the other side of the door, ringing out a coded message. But it wasn’t Alan, of course. It was Lewis, gone for milk or croissants, forgetting his keys. He would know how hard it was to jolt someone back from Make-Believe.

  She edged down the hall, bent to look through the spyhole. Not one person but two, standing on the landing: one tall and one shorter. Though their shapes were distorted, the shorter one was definitely a woman.

  Cassie turned the snib. Opened the door.

  The woman, slight and fair-haired in a navy trouser suit, stepped to one side, and as Cassie stared at the man – who was young and smooth, and wore the uniform-smile of a mortgage adviser – somehow the woman was moving round behind her, sliding her arm between Cassie and the doorway, so that Cassie stepped forward – deferring to polish and poise, to quiet efficiency. Before she understood what was happening, she was barefoot on the concrete landing, the door to the flat closing behind her.

  ‘Hey!’ She made a lunge – lost her balance – fell with a thud against the locked door. Inside, the woman’s heels were pock-pocking against the floorboards. Down the hall, pausing at the entrance to each room, then tailing away into what must be the bedroom.

  Cassie pushed herself upright, hands pressed against the panels. She registered the detail of brush marks on the paintwork, the way colour had pooled in the indents of the beading. Then she raised her arm and slammed the wood, shaking the door in its frame.

  ‘Ms McAllister,’ said the mortgage adviser. Cassie paused, fist in the air, ready to hammer again. ‘Is this your flat, Ms McAllister?’

  She turned, letting her arm fall to her side. Stared at him, mouth open, searching for the words: Who are you, how do you know – None of your business – My friend will be back any minu
te— Before she could filter her response, decide what she should say, the click of heels on floorboards sounded behind her. She spun round, ready to fight her way back inside.

  ‘It’s your friend’s flat, isn’t it. Don’t you want to keep him out of this?’ There was no menace in his tone. He might have been asking: did she want to run the calculations again with a different mortgage product? But his words were enough to make her hesitate – enough to let the woman step out onto the landing and pull the door shut. In one hand she was holding the modified receivers; in the other, Cassie’s trainers.

  ‘Put these on, please,’ she said. She held out the shoes, fingers hooked into the heels where the linings had worn into holes. The laces swung, frayed and grey; the white rubber soles were black with dirt. Cassie grabbed them with both hands, and the three of them stood, waiting to see what would happen.

  There was no way she was going to do as she was told, but her feet were cold on the gritty concrete. She had no screen, no keys, no wallet, was wearing jogging bottoms and Alan’s T-shirt – the T-shirt he’d worn just minutes ago, body heat pulsing through the threadbare cotton. Alan, she said inside her head, casting around for anything left of him: for a murmur of his voice, an echo of his words, a residual sense of comfort. A shiver ran through her, making her conscious of the thinness of the T-shirt, of how naked she felt. She crouched down, put on the trainers. The holed linings rubbed against her heels.

  The woman moved towards the stairs, and the man gestured for Cassie to follow. But they couldn’t force her to go with them. All she had to do was wait here till Lewis came back, and together they’d be more than a match for these suited couriers. Once Lewis came back – but a sudden worry made her stomach dip. What if he hadn’t gone for croissants? It was too strange, that he should be absent when these people turned up. Though they hadn’t identified themselves, she could guess they were the trouble she’d been courting. If they knew who Lewis was, what he was to her, they might mean trouble for him too. Had they got to him, somehow persuaded him to leave her alone in his bed? But they would have had to force him. She knew he wouldn’t leave her through choice – and nor was she going to leave him. She would wait right here for him.