Fierce Fragile Hearts

by Sara Barnard

  I dress in a pair of pyjamas Sarah’s left for me, put on a dressing gown and go into the living room, where she’s watching a weather report. I settle myself beside her, tucking my shins underneath me, and lean my head against the back of the sofa. Henry Gale decamps himself from Sarah’s lap on to mine, purrs vibrating through his warm little body.

  ‘Are you ready to talk about it?’ Sarah asks.

  ‘Not yet,’ I say.

  I sit in the garden the next day, the cat splayed out in the sunshine beside me. I make my way through all the messages that have accumulated on my phone while I’d cut myself off. There are so many, the increasing worry radiating out of the screen, that they make me feel a bit panicky. Brian, Caddy, Rosie, Kel, Matt, even Farrah from work. I’m replying carefully to each message, making sure I sound as OK as possible, when Sarah comes out with two cups of tea.

  ‘Listen,’ she says, and I know what’s coming. I put my phone down and pull my knees up to my chest. ‘I need to talk to you about what happened. I have to ask you something important, something that’s really worrying me.’

  ‘OK,’ I say. I wait for her to ask me exactly what I was doing those nights I wasn’t sleeping; who I was with.

  There’s a beat of silence before she speaks, like she’s gathering herself. ‘Did you speak to Rosie or Caddy when you started to feel low?’

  This line is a surprise. ‘Um. No?’

  ‘OK. Did you call your brother?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Anyone?’

  My chest has tightened. ‘No.’

  ‘Suzie.’ My name as a sigh. ‘Do you know why that is incredibly frightening for me? Can you see that?’

  I let my shoulders lift and then fall.

  ‘Please, I really need to know this. Why not? Why didn’t you come to one of us?’

  I don’t know how to answer this. Why didn’t I? Did I even think about doing it? No, not consciously. And when they tried to call me, I ignored them.

  ‘Did you think we wouldn’t help?’ she presses when I don’t reply.

  ‘No,’ I say eventually, and my voice sounds all hoarse. I swallow. ‘It’s more like …’ I take a breath, slow and even. Come on, be honest. ‘It’s more like I knew you would.’

  ‘OK,’ she says, and there’s a kind of energy in her voice now, like she thinks we’re getting somewhere. ‘OK. So, on some level, you didn’t want help?’

  This is what people like Sarah will never understand. What none of them will ever understand. How you can want help and not want it at the same time. It’s not even about levels. It’s just confusion all the way down.

  ‘We all love you, Suzie. So much.’

  ‘Too much.’ I don’t mean to say this out loud, but the words spill anyway.

  ‘No,’ she says immediately, but firmly. ‘Not too much. Why do you think that?’

  Because I don’t deserve it. Because I’m a burden. Because them loving me just makes those things more true.

  ‘I just …’ I begin, but there are just too many words and none of them are the right ones, not ones she’ll understand.

  ‘Darling,’ she says, and I think about my mother using that word, every now and then. Just every now and then. ‘You have to let people love you.’ When I don’t reply, because I don’t know how, she says, ‘Sometimes that means letting yourself be helped. You don’t have to do this on your own. You’re not on your own.’

  My voice comes out very small. My hands are inside my sleeves. ‘It feels like I am.’

  ‘Then I’m sorry. I’m sorry that it feels that way. But you can always come to me. Always. I’m right here. You know I’d have you back here living with me if I could.’

  I try to smile. ‘Because that worked out so well last time?’

  She doesn’t smile back. Her face is so serious. ‘Things are different now. It won’t ever be like it was then. I promise you that.’ I look down at my lap so she can’t see that I’m crying again. ‘Oh, Suzie,’ she says, so soft. She hugs me in tight and kisses the side of my head. We’ve never done this before. I’ve never let her this close, not ever.

  I manage, ‘Can I stay another day?’

  ‘You can stay as long as you need,’ she says.

  13

  ‘Secret for the Mad’

  dodie

  When I get back to Ventrella Road, the first thing I do is knock for Dilys. Guilt for missing our usual laundry day is eating me up and all I want to do is apologize and see her smile at me. I’ll tell her about Kacie-Leigh, I’ve decided. She won’t be over the top with her sympathy, but she’ll understand why I got so upset, I’m sure. She’ll make me tea. She’ll let me cuddle Clarence.

  That’s what I should have done in the first place, obviously. I realize that, now I’ve calmed down. I should have just come straight downstairs, knocked for Dilys and asked to play with Clarence. Everyone knows dogs are good for depression.

  There’s no answer, so I wait for a while, imagining Dilys making her slow way across her large flat, until it occurs to me that there’s no barking coming from the other side of the door. If there’s no barking, there’s no Clarence. And if there’s no Clarence, there’s no Dilys. She must be out walking him.

  Disappointment floods in and I sigh, touching my fingertips to the door. This isn’t our usual time to meet, and it was stupid to assume she’d be available to me just because I needed her. It’s not like her sole reason for existence is the bedsit girl without a washing machine.

  I go upstairs to my flat and let myself in, dropping my bag on the floor and stepping up on to my bed. It’s not as comfortable as the bed at Sarah’s, and already I miss the sounds of another person in the same space. I settle back against the wall and allow myself a self-pitying sigh, closing my eyes against the empty room.

  Maybe more than anything else, I’m frustrated. I feel like I’ve somehow undone months of progress. It’s been three years since I left Reading and my abusive home. Three years. Two since Gwillim and therapy. One since I really started to feel like I had moved past the time in my life when I was prone to panic attacks and the kind of spiral that swallowed my week. But one news story, one passing comment from a colleague, and I’m spun. I’m triggered. I’m gone.

  I try to think it all through rationally, now I’m actually able to do that again. What made it so bad this time? Would the same thing have happened if I’d still been in Southampton with Christie and Don? No, my brain says immediately. OK, but why not? Because you’d have talked to Christie about it.

  It’s not like I’m missing out on people to talk to here, though. Sarah would listen to me. Kel, too, though he probably wouldn’t know what to say, and I’d worry about how much would get filtered back to Caddy. And there’s Dilys, of course. I could talk to her if I wanted. But the thought of cracking myself open like that in front of her, letting her – letting anyone – see how fragile I really am, is unbearable. There’s a reason it’s easier with professionals.

  I chew on my thumbnail for a while, staring at my phone, before I gather every part of me that’s mature and sensible and call my personal adviser. It goes to voicemail, so I leave a rambly, probably incoherent message about wanting to get a therapist or a counsellor. Miriam calls me back within the hour and we talk through the options. I obviously can’t afford a private therapist and on the NHS it would likely be an eight-week round of CBT sessions, which, after being at Gwillim House, would be like learning the seven-times-table to take a Maths degree. Miriam suggests group counselling, but I did enough of that at Gwillim and I know it’s not quite what I need right now.

  ‘Hmm,’ Miriam says. ‘Let me look into it, OK? We’ll find a way. Is there anything you want to talk about with me? We could meet for coffee?’

  ‘Maybe,’ I say. ‘I’ll see when I’m working.’

  We both know I won’t.

  When I hang up, I see a message from Kel on my phone inviting me to a last-minute Halloween party at his house, and I’m sick of dwelling on my own misery,
so I go. I wear a sequinned black skirt and a long-sleeved Superman jumper, which isn’t exactly Halloweeny, but I don’t care. When I arrive, I decide on a whim that I won’t drink, and I spend most of the night on the sofa beside Kel, playing FIFA with him and a bunch of his friends.

  Apart from when I first walk through the front door, Kel doesn’t ask me endlessly if I’m OK, where I was, what happened. Every now and then I feel him look at me until I turn and catch his eye, and he smiles and I smile back.

  ‘Do you have any sisters?’ I ask him, when most people have left and he’s brought me a blanket so I can sleep on the sofa.

  ‘Three,’ he says. ‘Why?’

  ‘It shows,’ I say.

  In the morning, we go on a McDonalds run together. His car smells of the Jelly Belly air freshener he has hanging from the rear-view mirror, and there are textbooks all over the back seat. We’re waiting in the drive-thru queue when he says, ‘You can come to mine any time you want, you know. Literally any time.’

  I’m not sure what to say, so I don’t reply.

  ‘Even if there’s not a party or whatever,’ he says. ‘You can just come and hang out. If you ever need …’ He trails off. ‘There’s always someone awake at our place. And even if there isn’t, you can play on the Xbox or something. I can get you a spare key, if you want.’

  I bite down on the side of my thumb, because I can feel tears coming, the type that come from kindness.

  ‘Caddy told me about how you both used to hang out at night when you lived here before,’ he adds.

  ‘Oh God,’ I say, finding my voice with a smile. ‘I was the worst.’

  ‘That’s not how she tells it,’ he says. We’ve reached the drive-thru window and he rattles off our order, interrupting himself midway through to tell the server that he likes her Totoro pin. I watch him, wondering what it’s like to be so comfortable with the world and everyone in it.

  I go home later that afternoon, but there’s still no answer when I knock on Dilys’s door. No barking, either. I dither nervously in the hallway, wondering whether I should be worried or not. They could be out for a walk together. She might be seeing friends. If there was barking and no answer, that would be reason to worry. She’s probably just gone away for a few days and not had a chance to tell me.

  The next day, when there’s no answer on my way to work and no answer when I get back, I write a note – Let me know when you’re back! Suzanne x – and slide it under the door. I’m trying not to overreact, but my head keeps leaping to worst-case-scenario mode. I mention her absence to Sarah, hoping for reassurance. ‘If she’d died,’ she said, ‘there’d be a lot of people coming and going into the flat. No news is good news.’

  That weekend, Brian drives down from Cardiff to visit for a couple of days. He sleeps in Sarah’s guest room but spends the daytime with me. I show him my flat – his face flashes with alarm when he first walks inside, but he tries to hide it – and take him on a Brighton tour, stopping into Madeline’s so he can see where I work. He’s in full older brother mode, protective and concerned, checking through my rental documents and even my work contract, buying me lunch, borrowing tools from one of the flats downstairs to fix my window frame, which has been loose since I first moved in. We don’t talk about Kacie-Leigh, or our parents, or how close I’d come to collapsing. I tell myself there are some things we just don’t need to talk about, and he’s here, and that’s enough.

  On Sunday, after a roast dinner at Sarah’s, Brian comes back to my flat one last time before he leaves to drive back to Cardiff.

  ‘Listen,’ he says, looking around my flat. ‘I just want to say, because I don’t know if you realize, that you’re doing really well.’

  I’d been expecting him to give me a lecture about not taking care of myself properly. His words are such a surprise, I just blink at him.

  ‘Honestly, Zannie,’ he says. ‘Living on your own like this, and having your job and everything. I’m proud of you.’

  ‘You are?’ Proud of me. Proud. ‘But I haven’t done anything.’ Brian got a first-class degree. My parents went to his graduation. There’s a photo of all three of them; I’ve seen it on Brian’s desk. When I think of ‘proud’, I think of that photo.

  ‘You’ve survived,’ he says. ‘And you’re still just as brilliant and funny and sweet as you were when you were eight. That’s pretty amazing. All things considered.’

  ‘All things considered,’ I repeat. The compliments are nice, and they’re warming up the parts of me that are still cold after my spiral, but does he have to be so vague at the same time? Can’t he just say it?

  ‘You know what I mean,’ he says. So, I guess, no. He can’t say it.

  ‘Because I was in care?’ I ask. ‘Or what got me there?’

  Brian’s face gives a reflexive wince, just a tiny one, like he’s bracing himself against me elaborating further. What a weird thing this is, the distance of our adult lives. How strange it must be for him, to have a sister who’s a care leaver when he isn’t. To have come from the same place but ended up in such completely different circumstances. To have been the lucky one. I wonder how he explains that to his friends, to potential girlfriends. He probably doesn’t mention it at all.

  I don’t push him. ‘Thanks. I’m trying.’

  ‘I know,’ he says. He pulls me in for a hug. ‘And you know you can talk to me any time, right? I’m always here for you.’

  I nod, smiling.

  ‘Stay safe, OK?’ He’s putting on his jacket, glancing at his phone to check the time. He flashes a grin at me. ‘Don’t make me worry about you.’

  The thing is, I know he’s kidding. I know this is just a throwaway comment for him, that he doesn’t mean it in a bad way. He means to be affectionate and brotherly. But really, what it does is remind me that he does worry about me, that I’m a person to be worried about, and that he thinks him worrying about me is something I make him do on purpose. And that all sucks, to be honest. That’s all the things I hate about myself, all there in a six-word sentence.

  But of course I don’t say any of that. ‘Only on Tuesdays,’ I say, and even though it doesn’t make any sense, he laughs and we say goodbye and he leaves. I’m on my own again, and everything is quiet.

  I take a breath, sit on my bed and pick up my phone. When I scroll, I get to Caddy’s name first. I press call. She picks up almost immediately, her happy voice sounding in my ear. ‘Suze!’

  ‘Hey,’ I say. My eyes have teared over but I blink a few times to clear it, settling back against the wall, imagining Caddy in her little student bedroom, stopping whatever she’s doing to talk to me. ‘How are you?’

  14

  ‘Call It Dreaming’

  Iron & Wine

  It’s not until Tuesday that I get home from work to see Dilys’s door open. There’s a leap of joyful relief in my chest and I rush forward, leaning my head around it.

  ‘Dil—’ I stop. There are two men standing in the living room, but no Dilys, and no Clarence. ‘Oh.’

  ‘Can I help you?’ one of the men asks. He’s middle-aged, with thinning dark hair and a thick, short beard. The second man is holding a clipboard, and he looks bored.

  ‘Who are you?’ I ask. Nerves make my voice tense because I know, I just know, that he’s going to tell me that Dilys is dead, that she died while I was off getting wasted in some random bar because somehow I still haven’t learned how to deal with my own head.

  ‘Who are you?’ he responds.

  ‘Suzanne,’ I say, resisting my usual instinct to be difficult. ‘I live upstairs.’

  He squints at me. ‘You’re the one who left the note under the door? Laundry girl from the bedsit?’

  I nod. ‘Where’s Dilys?’ I’m thinking about Sarah saying that it would be a bad sign if there were other people in the flat. My heart is pounding.

  ‘In hospital,’ the man says. ‘I’m her nephew, Graham.’

  I take this as an invitation and walk into the flat, trying as I d
o to control my rising panic. ‘In hospital’ is bad, but it’s not that bad. ‘In hospital’ means ‘not dead’. ‘Is she OK? What happened?’

  Clipboard Man is looking at me with undisguised disdain, probably brought on by the word ‘bedsit’, so I glare back.

  ‘She had a stroke,’ Graham says. ‘She’s fine, but she needs a lot of assistance in her recovery.’

  Oh God. ‘Another one? What kind of assistance? What kind of recovery? Where’s Clarence?’

  Graham’s face tightens like I’m annoying him. He glances at Clipboard Man, and they share the kind of look that only middle-aged men being bothered by teenage girls can truly master. ‘Yes, another one. The stroke has affected her mobility and communication. Clarence is actually at my house, being spoiled by my daughters.’

  I don’t know whether it’s safe to be relieved or not. ‘She’s OK?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What are you doing here, then?’ The question is probably rude, but I don’t care.

  Clipboard Man lets out a cough, which is probably meant to be subtle, but isn’t. ‘Let me give you a moment,’ he says, turning away from us and walking towards the window.

  Graham bites back a sigh of impatience. ‘I’m overseeing the sale of this flat,’ he says, lowering his voice. ‘After Dilys had her first stroke, we made a plan for if she had another, more serious one. And she has, so here I am.’

  ‘She’s not coming back?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Ever?’

  ‘She’ll be moving to a care home,’ he says. ‘I can see this is a shock for you, but there’s no need to worry. We’ve been preparing for this for some time. Dilys has visited the home in the past and discussed her potential circumstances with them – and me – at length. We’re selling the flat to help fund her care.’