The Pieces of Ourselves

by Maggie Harcourt

  Just like me, he’s afraid of it. But here we are.

  “Okay.” He draws his shoulders up almost to his ears, then lets out a long, long sigh. “Okay.”

  He stretches towards the pieces of paper – then stops. His hand reaches for me, and his fingers curl through mine and hold them tightly.

  “Together,” he says.

  And I don’t know whether it’s because he can’t do it on his own, or because he doesn’t want to, but we turn the page together.

  The handwriting is neat and clear – but smudged in places.

  “It’s from a nurse,” he says. “Look, it’s signed Sister something. Alice? Agnes?”

  “Agnes, I think. Why’s a nurse writing to Iris?”

  “It wouldn’t be to Iris, remember. Too risky.” The top’s too smudgy to read. “I reckon it must be to Albie’s family.”

  My heart crawls up into my mouth. “He’s not…? Is he?” I can’t bear to look.

  Hal’s eyes skim down to the end of the page and straight back to the top again, reading and rereading, trying to see past the smudges and gaps.

  “No,” he says after an eternity. “He’s in hospital. Kind of. A ‘casualty clearing station’, they call it. See here?” He points at a line I can’t even read. His finger shakes. “Lieutenant Albert Holmwood…damage to the lungs and neurasthenic breakdown.”

  “What’s that?”

  “It’s what they called shell shock when officers had it. It was on that site I pulled up…” He starts to fumble for his phone. “You want to read it?”

  I shake my head. “I really don’t.”

  “It looks like Dougie was right when he said in his letter Albie wasn’t doing so well.”

  “But what’s the thing about his lungs?” I squint at the page, trying to make anything else out, but it might as well be written in German.

  Hal shakes his head sadly. “Gas.”

  “Gas?” A foggy memory of an English lesson one rainy afternoon a lifetime ago swims up through my mind – a poem about coughing and masks and a gas attack. A war poem. He must have been caught in a gas attack.

  Hal frowns at the page. “Hang on.”

  “What?”

  “This says…” He gulps and looks up at me again, his eyes locking onto mine. “This says they’re going to send him home as soon as he’s able to travel.”

  “It can’t!”

  “It does – right here.” He bangs his fingertip down on the paper so hard that he almost tears it. “See?”

  I can’t see it – not at all. Maybe it’s because the paper’s too old, too fragile, too smudgy…or maybe it’s me. Maybe my mind’s too fogged up to focus. Maybe my eyes are. I don’t know.

  I reach for the last page. It’s a hundred miles away and it’s right in front of me. It’s a hundred years ago and it’s now.

  All the colour drains from Hal’s face as his hand moves in slow motion, reaching for me, for the last piece of the puzzle, for the past.

  “Together.”

  We turn the page over, and somewhere very far away and very near all at once, a bell rings.

  It’s a simple scrap of pinkish paper, yellowed by time. A telegram, sent all the way from August 1916. Some of the words are missing where the typed message strips have fallen off and been lost.

  The missing words don’t change the story.

  Albie never made it home.

  All the air is sucked from the room. I hear it go with a loud hiss, carrying something I’d only just found away with it. Hal’s lips are moving, but no sound comes out. Shadows press in on the edges of the world, on the edges of my vision, and everything starts to blur.

  It’s over. Everything. It’s over.

  “I…I need…I just need…”

  My heart thuds against my ribs so hard I’m afraid it’ll shatter them.

  “I’ll…I’m going to…” The words stick to the roof of my mouth, to my tongue. They clog up my throat. The air in here is choking me and I have to get out. I have to. If I don’t, I’ll suffocate. “I have to go. Sorry. I have to.”

  I do what I do best.

  I run away.

  I move feet that feel like they belong to someone else; move them towards the door, towards the stairs and down. Down and down and out…the corridors blurring, everything blurring…and then I’m outside on the front drive, the air clean in my lungs…and even then I can’t stop. I keep going, round the hotel and past the terrace, through the gardens and out, down, further and further until I reach the glasshouse. Gravel ricochets off the glass as I pull the door open. The air inside is humid and warm. Soft. Safe.

  “Charlie?” My voice is swallowed by the benches full of tiny plants. “Charlie!”

  There’s no answer, but a noise from the far end of the space, in a sheltered corner behind tall plant support frames, means someone’s there.

  “Charlie? Is that you?”

  I thread between the benches full of delicate plants, eyes on the corner, trying not to run.

  “Charlie!”

  Suddenly he sticks his head out from behind a frame, a piece of string between his teeth and a pair of earphones around his neck. I’m so close that I almost crash into him. He twitches as I swerve, only just missing the tomato plants he’s tying to the supports.

  He picks the string out from between his teeth and drapes it over the end of a frame. “Bloody hell, Flora. You nearly gave me a heart attack. What’s the matter?”

  My head is pounding, my heart is pounding, my mind and body are screaming at me to run away as fast as I can and to drop to the ground with my arms around my head all at once. The air is too thin and too thick and I can’t get enough of it into my lungs, and I can’t.

  “Okay. Okay. You’re okay. You’re okay.” My brother’s hands press on my shoulders, rooting me to the spot. “You’re having a panic attack. Breathe.”

  How can something as simple as breathing suddenly be so hard? It’s breathing. But I can’t remember how to do it – at least, not right. The air comes in gasps and hiccups and black spots prickle across my vision.

  “Listen to me, Flora. You’re safe. You’ve done this before. You know what it is. Don’t fight it – let it pass.”

  But all I want to do is fight. How can I not?

  Charlie’s voice is low and soft. “Listen to my voice. Can you hear me? What else can you hear? The birds outside? Hear them?”

  Somewhere, very far away, the swifts are screeching mid-flight.

  When swifts die, they fall; one moment freewheeling, crashing to earth the next.

  High to nothing in a heartbeat.

  Do they know they’re falling, or are they just…gone?

  I shake my head, hard. Charlie’s grip on my shoulders tightens.

  “Stop. Flora. Stop. You can do this. You’re safe. I promise you’re safe. You’re in the glasshouse, with me – can you smell the tomato leaves? And where the soil’s damp from the watering pipe?”

  Slowly, slowly, the world comes back into focus. The air becomes itself again, neither thick nor thin but just plain old boring air, and the horror behind my eyes fades into the dark.

  I can smell the tomatoes. I can smell the wet earth. I can hear the birds wheeling above, chattering outside. I can feel Charlie’s hands on my shoulders, and slowly, slowly, the pressure inside my skull eases away to nothing.

  “See? You’re okay. It was just a panic attack. That’s all.” He bends his knees a little, drops his face level with mine. “Better?”

  I nod, because I can’t put the words together. I just had a panic attack.

  In front of Hal.

  I couldn’t stop it; I didn’t even see it coming. One minute I was fine, the next I thought I was going to die.

  I lean into my brother’s shoulder. It feels reassuringly solid and real as another tidal wave of panic crashes over me.

  “Can you take me home?”

  Albie is dead, but he still follows me into my sleep, along with his letters. His words so full o
f both love and fear at once. And…what did Dougie call it? “The collywobbles”?

  There’s no shame in it, no weakness. The opposite, to tell the truth.

  Is that really true? Maybe it was for Albie, after everything he went through. But what about me? What excuse do I have?

  I am not Albie Holmwood. He is not Flora Sutherland. His life and mine couldn’t be more different, and even if we had somehow found ourselves in the same time and the same world, we would never have met…But…

  My heart hurts for him.

  Our last session; me sitting in the plastic chair like always, Sanjay sitting in the cushioned chair next to his desk, his notepad on his lap.

  “What if I get bad again? How will I know?”

  “You might not.”

  “I might not. So I might completely freak out at any point and there’s no warning, no anything?”

  “The brain doesn’t work like that, Flora.”

  “But you just said…”

  “I just said you might not know. A condition like yours can be unpredictable. You might go years without having another manic episode, or another depressive one – you might never have one again. Or it could be a regular repeating cycle. Until we’re further down the line, there’s no way to be sure – and you might not be in a position to recognize it until afterwards. That’s why it’s important you have this.”

  He hands me a folder. It contains only one page, printed in clear black ink on soft yellow paper. A checklist, with tick boxes alongside it. My name at the top, followed by a question.

  Are you experiencing (or have you recently experienced) any of the following symptoms?

  And there they all are, in black-and-white – or black-and-yellow, anyway.

  Racing thoughts, heightened senses, seeing things, hearing things, talking too fast, panic attacks, flights of ideas and disorganized thinking.

  Tick, tick, ticky ticky tick.

  A score of several positive responses, experienced continuously over a period of time, may indicate the onset of a bipolar episode. Please advise your next of kin as discussed in your relapse-prevention plan, and arrange an appointment with your mental health professional as soon as possible.

  “So this is it? For ever? I have this…thing, and it could just jump up and bite me whenever it feels like it?” I wave the sheet at him.

  Sanjay half-smiles. “That’s a very negative mindset, Flora. We’ve talked about that.”

  “Well, this doesn’t look very bloody positive, does it?” I roll my eyes…then, seeing his raised eyebrow, add a muttered, “Sorry.”

  “There’s always the chance of relapse, but there’s also the possibility of what I call a reactive episode. Not a relapse as such, but…think of it as an echo, if you like, of this. A ghost.”

  “And if I get one of those?”

  “Then we’ll deal with it if and when it comes.”

  “If I know it’s happened,” I grumble, sticking the sheet back in the folder.

  “You should have a little more faith in yourself, Flora, and in the people around you. Your brother, his partner, your friends…All of them are there for you, but you have to let them in. You have to be honest with them. Even if you can’t see clearly, they can.”

  What did Iris think when she read those letters, saw him coming apart through his words, just the same as we have?

  I love you. I am yours – all that is left of me at the end of this is yours. All that I ever was or will be or might have been.

  When he talks about coming back, he doesn’t just mean from France.

  He knew.

  He knew he was coming undone.

  Would he ever have recovered from the shell shock? Or would he have faced a future somewhere like Fallowmill; almost able to see his home through the bars on the windows? So near to normal, but so far away from it?

  How would he have lived, if he’d lived?

  Albie is dead, but I can feel him in my head and under my skin anyway. He walks through my mind – officer’s cap pushed back on his head and trailing the smell of smoke and cordite – and wherever he walks the world flashes white and black. He leads me through the woods, through the deer park and through the open doors of Hopwood – but where the lobby should be is a huge and empty landscape, a road stretching ahead of me and, on either side of it, two different worlds. One is dark, the trees all black and twisted, bent double as though weighed down by the heavy black sky. The other is bright, so bright that looking at it almost blinds me. Someone calls my name, first from the dark and then from the light, and they call me over and over until the sound hammers on my brain and makes my ears bleed…and even though I start running, however hard and fast I run I can’t outrun the voice because it’s my own. Both of my siren-sides screaming at me to come to them, to step off the road as it gets narrower, narrower, narrower…

  And at the point when I can’t run any more, when the voices – my own voice, echoing through every piece of me – are too much, the road snaps up in front of me, up and up until it blots out the sky; it folds around me, blocking every possible escape…and I am in the attic. The attic at Hopwood, but there’s nobody here and the space is bare. The door is open, but as I run for it, knowing with all my heart that I have to get out, it slams, and there’s the terrible grinding sound of a key turning for ever in a lock. I try the handle, I kick at the door – but there isn’t a door there now, and there never was. It’s just a wall.

  I run to the window and reach it just as the bars slam down across it. In the gardens below, I can see my friends, my family, myself, all looking up at the attic. At me. And one by one they turn and walk away…and I am alone.

  You have to let them in. You have to be honest with them.

  When I wake to the sound of swifts and the touch of gold-yellow sunlight filling my room, my bed sheets soaked in sweat and tangled around me, I know it with absolute certainty.

  I have to tell Hal. Today. Before he leaves.

  What do I have to lose?

  Except my mind. Same as usual.

  I can’t keep running from this part of me, locking it away. I have to take hold of it before it takes hold of me. I keep my own keys.

  Albie didn’t have a choice. He didn’t have a chance. It happened to him.

  This is me. Part of me. I can’t cut it out or wash it away.

  I have to live with it. I can manage it, sure, but it’s not going anywhere soon.

  I might as well get used to living with all of me.

  There’s a knock on my bedroom door and, as usual, Charlie opens it and walks straight in before I can answer, carrying a steaming mug. He seems to think of knocking as more of a last-second warning that he’s coming in, rather than a way of checking it’s okay.

  I pull my sheets up over my head.

  “You’re awake,” he says, and I can hear him putting the mug on my bedside table. “How are you feeling?”

  “Ngggggh.” My mouth feels like someone wiped it with an old sock – a side-effect of the sedative I took after Charlie had to half-carry me through the front door, when I couldn’t stop shaking and couldn’t stop crying and I couldn’t shut the floodgates that had opened somewhere in between my head and my heart and let everything I’ve been trying to keep safely locked inside out. All the life I could have had, and all the fear I have had. All the times I’ve made myself step back, stay small and safe…

  Who decides what safe is?

  I do.

  “Here’s your phone, by the way. I had to come in and take it after you went to sleep – it kept buzzing.”

  I yank the sheet down from my face.

  “What?”

  “Here.” Charlie holds my phone out, and it’s all I can do not to snatch it from him. “We were worried it would wake you up.” He picks the mug back up again and hands it to me. I take it, and put it straight back on the table, cupping my phone – the same phone that for so long has made me feel even more alone. No messages, no calls. Nothing.

  And now…t
his.

  Missed calls, texts, messages…

  So many of them.

  Hal, over and over again.

  Mira.

  Are you OK? Hal said you ran off – he’s looking for you. Call me?

  Hal again. And again. And then:

  I’m coming over.

  Charlie watches me scrolling through them, one after another, and nods.

  “You were asleep. I told them you weren’t feeling well. Mira understood.”

  “You didn’t tell Hal about me…?”

  “No! It’s not up to me to tell him. But you should.”

  “I know.” I drop my phone onto the bed next to me. “I’m going to – this morning.”

  “Good idea.” He taps both his hands on his knees. “You can come right down.”

  “Sorry?”

  “He’s waiting downstairs.”

  “He’s downstairs?”

  “Yes, Flora.”

  “Here?”

  “Yes, Flora.”

  “Now?”

  “Shall I just write it on a piece of paper and hold it up for you? It’ll save us all a lot of time…”

  “No. No no nononononono…” I fight my way out from the tangle of my bed. “He can’t be here. Not now! I don’t know what to say, how to…He can’t see me like…”

  I run a hand back through my hair. It feels like a bad night’s sleep. In the mirror, my face manages to be both pale and flushed at once, which is an achievement. The whole look is finished off beautifully by dark purple shadows under my eyes. I sigh at my brother. “This is not how I’m supposed to look for this.” I grab a hairbrush and start forcing it through the tangled mess on top of my head.

  “Look for what?”

  “I mean, I actually look like a crazy person. If you were going to ask someone, ‘Hey, what does a crazy person look like?’ they would point to this.” I wave the hairbrush at…well, all of me, really. “I can’t tell him looking like this.”

  “Mmmm.”

  “What does that mean? You don’t think I should?”

  “I absolutely think you should. You can be quite a…”

  “Quite a what, Charlie?”

  In the mirror, his reflection chooses his words carefully. “Challenge. I was going to say, challenge.”