And whatever the reason they’re coming, a ten-night stay means they’re obviously loaded.
Room fifteen is up on the second floor of the hotel, overlooking the gardens at the front. For guests, it’s lovely because it’s reached by the grand staircase in the lobby, then by another secret, narrow, wooden one hidden behind a bookcase at the end of the first-floor landing. Checking in and being led up the stairs for the first time must be pretty magical. For housekeeping staff, however, who have to get a laundry trolley up there, the journey is slightly less magical because it involves the ancient freight lift, which can only take one person and a trolley and always sticks between the basement and the ground floor. I draw the short straw and get lumbered with the trolley, so by the time I get to the room Mira is already waiting, the key in her hand. She tosses it to me, then knocks on the door. We both wait.
“Who do you think it is coming? Somebody famous?”
“Why would somebody famous – who could go literally anywhere – come here?” With no answer from the room, I fumble with the keys until the lock clicks and the door swings open.
We’ve just finished stripping the bed and straightening the mess left by the last guest when a scraping noise drifts up through the open window, along with faint whistling. Someone’s working on the flower bed below.
Charlie.
His parcel! The parcel I promised I’d drop off with him before I started my shift!
Mira hears him at the same time I do. “You didn’t give it to him, did you?”
“I completely forgot. With the bus, and the car, and then being late…”
“It can’t wait until we’ve got a break?”
“No. It’s…” I lower my voice, just in case. “It’s their anniversary today.”
“He forgot?” Mira’s eyes widen.
“Again. Felix will kill him.”
“Go.”
“Two minutes,” I promise, backing out of the room. “I’ll be quick.”
I make it down to the locker room, grab the parcel and run out to Charlie in record time. He leans on his rake as he watches me sprint round the corner from the staff entrance, his wavy hair pushed back from his face by a green bandana that matches his gardener’s uniform.
“Did you get it?”
“Here,” I pant, holding it out to him.
“I owe you one. I don’t think Felix would forgive me if I forgot again this year.” My older brother winces, taking the box and tucking it into his wheelbarrow.
“What is it, anyway? It better be worth it.” I decide not to tell him any more about my morning – despite the quizzical look he shoots me – and point at the parcel in the wheelbarrow. “It’s not another T-shirt, is it? Tell me it’s not another T-shirt.” Felix’s collection of Metallica shirts is already out of control.
Charlie beams. “Original nineties Burn your fingers design. He’s wanted one for years.”
“Oh.” As presents for Felix go, that one’s pretty much perfect.
Charlie studies me carefully. “What’s wrong?”
Obviously my attempt at misdirection has not worked.
Above us, Mira sticks her head out of the window of room fifteen. “Tell him.”
“Mira!” I hiss back up at her – but it’s too late. The damage is done, and Charlie’s expression has already changed from interest to concern.
“Tell me what?”
“It’s nothing.”
“Tell me.”
“I said it’s nothing. It was just the school bus, that’s all. It went past. No big deal.” I shrug and try to wave the question away, wave the whole memory away…but it hovers above me like a stubborn wasp.
“Flora.”
“And then there was this guy with a car, and…” I pause to choose the right words; ones that won’t make Charlie freak out and tell me to go through the checklist. “And it was…fine?” This comes out less confidently than I had hoped – mostly because as soon as I even start thinking about the bus and that guest with the car, my stomach turns cold and fills with acid and twists itself into a tangle.
It all replays inside my head, scene by scene in bright colours and extreme close-up. The faces inside the bus. The car hooting. The guest getting out of his car. Oh, god. Was I all right? I told him to leave, didn’t I? Is he going to arrive at the hotel and tell them how awful I was?
The questions form a staircase, each step lower than the one before and leading me down, down, down inside my mind.
Is this a balanced reaction?
Charlie leans his rake against the barrow. “You know you’re meant to tell me if something—”
“I said I’m FINE!” I snap.
Charlie just blinks slowly at me, his expression carefully neutral. Waiting.
“I was coming out of the post office, okay? And the bus was there, and it stopped, and I saw a bunch of people from school, and they saw me. And they were staring, and basically it sucked. Okay? And I didn’t want to have to come running to you and talk about it, because it sucked.”
“I understand that. Have you gone through your checklist?”
“I don’t need the checklist.”
“It’s part of the deal. Anything that upsets you, you’re supposed to go through the checklist and decide whether you’re reacting to it…” He hesitates – then stops altogether.
I finish his sentence for him. “Like a not-crazy person?”
“I was going to say, like someone who has a more balanced view of the world. But sure…” He smiles at me. “Not-crazy works too.”
“I said I don’t need the checklist.” This is so humiliating.
“Part of the deal.”
“Well, the deal sucks too.”
“Flora…”
“And it’s not like you’re Dad or anything…”
“So stop making me have to behave like I am!” he groans.
I look at my shoes, feeling a stab of guilt. Charlie’s nothing like our dad. He’s still here, for a start, and he’s probably the closest thing to a proper father I’ve ever known. Our actual father decided that he didn’t really want to do the parent thing again when I came along ten years after my brother – an accident apparently – so he left. I wouldn’t have taken it personally, except he set up a whole new family pretty quickly after that, one we’ve never met. So I guess it wasn’t that he didn’t want to do the parent thing again – he just didn’t want to do it for us. For me.
“Sorry,” I mumble.
Charlie pulls his bandana off his head and his hair flops across his face.
“I don’t want to have to nag you. Christ, I’m not the life police. You’re entitled to do your own thing, have your own space – but you know the rules. You don’t want to get ill again.”
No. I don’t. That’s why I’m here, isn’t it? Because everything out there is…too much.
“And a bus full of the kids you used to go to school with – who were all there – I think that counts as something you should mention, don’t you?”
“Yes, Charlie.” I make a circle in the dusty gravel of the path with my shoe. “Sorry, Charlie.”
“And you can drop that attitude while you’re at it.” He shakes his head in frustration, suddenly sounding a lot more than ten years older than me. “I just want you to be all right. You’ve been doing so well lately – you’ve been so stable. I promised Mum when she moved…I promised her that Felix and I would make sure you were okay…”
“You promised you wouldn’t let me spiral up or down, I know. Look, I’m not going to totally lose my mind in the next fifteen minutes. That’s not how it works.”
“That’s not what I meant.”
I can see the tension in his face – in the set of his jaw and the little vertical lines above the bridge of his nose. He gets them every time we have to talk about my condition – even more so if the “Incident” comes up. It’s not like I ever want to talk about it either, or even think about it – all it does is remind me of another life. My other life. A life
with messages and phone calls, with cinema trips in a group all sharing popcorn and going to get food and to dissect every minute of it afterwards; with shopping, with music and gigs and shouting across the seats of the bus and…
“I’m fine. It was just a lot. Especially with suddenly having a total stranger in my face and being a nightmare.”
“You’re sure?”
“Which one of us is living in my head?” I snap back. “Me or you?”
“Flora…”
“Me. Exactly. So which one of us is likely to know whether I’m fine or not?”
He doesn’t respond. All I can hear is the cry of the swifts overhead and a sudden clatter of crockery from the breakfast room nearby.
Finally, he scrubs a hand back and forth across his face. “You know the answer to that,” he says softly.
And however much I hate it, and hate him for saying it – maybe even hate him more for knowing it – he’s right. It’s not me.
There was an Incident – The Incident. Halfway through my GCSEs. Halfway through an actual paper, in fact. I don’t really remember it. I don’t really remember much for weeks before it either, other than the constant trickle of pre-exam stress – an ever-present prickle of panic under the top layer of my mind…And then suddenly it all went away. I wasn’t stressed any more, wasn’t panicked about my exams or revising or any of it – I just knew I could do it. Better than that, I wasn’t just going to pass, I was going to pass amazingly. Of course I was. It all suddenly made sense, like someone had switched on a light in a dark room, or opened a magical door that had everything behind it. The world was brighter, louder and sharper. Everything was clearer – so clear that I wanted to run down the street shaking people and telling them to look…
And then it all went wrong.
I went wrong.
Actually, that’s not true. It wasn’t me that went wrong, it was my wiring, the switches, the tiny little invisible lights that come on and go off inside my brain which broke. And when they stopped working properly, they took me, Flora Sutherland, down with them.
I’ve tried to piece it all back together from what Charlie’s told me, from what the doctor and Sanjay, my therapist, have said. It’s not easy because even the things I remember feel wrong, like I’m looking at the memories underwater – the edges of them are too sharp and too shiny, and they don’t feel like they happened to me at all.
I know I was revising beforehand. I didn’t sleep much – a couple of hours a night at most – but I wasn’t tired. At all. I sat my first few exams and I was fine. More than fine. I had so much energy, and everything seemed so easy all of a sudden. I was even the first one to finish, by a long way. Like, an hour early. In a two-hour paper.
The morning it happened, I got up and went to school – like I had done every other day. I sat down and waited for the exam to start – like I had done every other day. I started writing – like I had done every other day.
And just like that, “every other day” became something that only used to happen.
After that, there were waiting rooms – I remember that much. Blue plastic chairs and wall-mounted bottles of antibacterial handwash.
And then there were pills: a prescription from the GP, who handed the slip over with a smile and a “Let’s see how you do with these.”
He referred me to Sanjay, in his little office in the corner of the surgery building, where the blinds were always drawn. “Mania,” he called it, this thing that had stripped me away from myself. It was mania that took “every other day” away. It was mania that meant I wouldn’t – couldn’t – be on that bus with everyone else who had sat those exams. I thought too quickly, spoke too quickly, jumped from idea to idea way too quickly. My brain had got stuck in high gear and nobody could keep up with it – not even me.
And everyone, everyone I knew…they all saw it.
I didn’t care at the time. I was moving too fast and burning too brightly. In my head, I was a superhero. I was a genius. I was a comet, a sun, a shooting star…
But even suns burn out, and shooting stars fall to earth, and comets are nothing but exploding ice; enormous dirty snowballs crashing through space. And so after the high came the low, and the weeks when even breathing hurt; where every thought felt like it was wrapped in mud and all I wanted to do was sleep and sleep and sleep. To lie face down on the floor and never get up again. Ever.
So. Back to the doctor.
“Mmm. Everything you’re telling me – the heaviness, the slowness, the exhaustion – sounds like a classic depressive episode,” he said, nodding at me. “Mania and depression in a cycle like this?” He typed something into his computer. “I think we’re looking at bipolar disorder here. Bipolar II.”
There was another prescription. There were more pills. There was more Sanjay.
Suddenly Flora’s Craziness was real. It wasn’t just in my head – even if it sort of was. It had a label and a name. Even if I didn’t recognize it, couldn’t figure out what it meant or whether I was supposed to just live with it now…or why it had landed on me.
One thing never changed. I might have had a head full of crazy, but I also had Charlie.
It was Charlie who sorted out the mess with school, who tried to get me to go back and resit. Charlie who drove me from appointment to appointment in his old Land Rover that makes you feel like your bones are being shaken loose. Charlie (and Felix) who moved me into the spare room in the cottage in the Hopwood grounds when Mum said her job was being relocated up north, and wouldn’t it be better for me to stay here, somewhere familiar? I remember hearing the fight between Mum and Charlie from my old bedroom and I’ve never heard him as angry as he was then, accusing her of running away. I don’t blame her. I’d have run away from me too if I could. I ran away from everything else.
It was Charlie and Felix who put me back together. Charlie sat on the floor of my room and read to me when all I could do was stare at the ceiling; he held my hair back when the medication I’d been given to help flatten out the roller coaster in my head made me sick for twenty-four hours straight. Felix dragged me out of the house and along with him on his regular tours of the estate – pointing out trees and badger setts and rabbit tracks, calling out bird songs as he heard them, making me hear them too.
Together, they made me remember who I am – who I really am, rather than the ball of misfiring mental wires that looked a little like me. They gave the world shape again. They gave me shape again. Because roller-coaster Flora wasn’t quite me – she was just a fraction of me, a faction of me.
So now I am me again. But I’m just…not always good at holding on to the actual me. And that’s what this is about – Charlie and his deal, the checklists, the constant self-analysis and self-editing. It’s about holding my shape, keeping me together. Stopping another Incident, even though that’s what being bipolar is: a cycle, a roller coaster, a constant orbit around my very own axis. I just wish I could do that without all the questions I have to ask myself every time I feel anything – good or bad: is this a balanced reaction? Does my mood match the moment?
Finally, Charlie reties his bandana round his head, and looks me up and down. “Okay,” he says.
“Okay?” I blink at him. “No checklist?”
“You say you’re all right. I don’t have much choice except to believe you, do I?”
I shrug. “I just got a bit…flustered. That’s all. Look, I have to get back to work.” I turn back to the hotel and mutter: “And also kill Mira for making me tell you.”
“You leave Mira be,” Charlie calls after me. “She’s looking out for you. We all are.”
At a jog, I shove through the glass front door into the lobby – it’ll be far quicker than taking the staff entrance, and I need to get back up to the second floor before Mrs Tilney does her first round of the day – but halfway across the polished wooden floor, I freeze.
A new arrival is standing beside the soft velvet sofas by the window; an expensive looking leather bag and a sma
rt backpack stacked on top of each other by his feet, a bundle of papers on the low coffee table in front of him.
Red hair, sunglasses pushed up onto the top of his head.
Oh no.
With a sinking feeling, I step back from the door and lean out into the sunlight to check the drive. There it is: the squashed-frog car.
When I creep back into the lobby, he has pulled off his sunglasses and is watching me. His gaze is direct, unflinching.
He recognizes me.
Oh god.
“Mr Waverley? I’m Barney, the general manager. Welcome to Hopwood Home…”
The voice comes from behind me as Barney strides across the lobby from his office. He passes me, shoes clicking against the polished floor and walks up to the guy, holding out his hand to shake. I dart for the staff door behind the check-in desk, but even when the door has closed behind me, I can still feel those pale eyes on me.
Upstairs, Mira has already finished room fifteen and is packing all our cleaning stuff back into the trolley. “Quick, you said,” she snorts, throwing a towel at me as I walk in through the open door.
“And I would have been, if you hadn’t dropped me in it with Charlie.”
She pouts, looking about as unapologetic as it’s possible to be when something is technically your fault. “He needed to know.”
“Did he, though? I mean, did he?” I wave the plug of the vacuum cleaner at her.
“Yes.” She pouts some more, and I sigh.
“How can I disagree with an argument like that?”
She throws another towel – and it’s right when I bend over to pick them both up that Mrs Tilney appears from nowhere in the doorway.
“Flora? Barney would like to see you in his office, please. Now.”
The door to Barney’s office is firmly closed, the little brass plaque in the middle that reads Barney Scott, General Manager gleaming at me like an eye. I straighten my already-straight uniform for the third time and knock.
“Come in.”
Barney is sitting at his desk, stacks of paperwork piled up across the wooden top in front of him, his back to a big window that overlooks the drive and gardens. He looks up and smiles as I close the door. Which is a more promising start than I’d expected.
The Pieces of Ourselves Page 2