The Pieces of Ourselves

by Maggie Harcourt

  “Right.”

  “It’s not always easy to live with, you know. So yes, if you think he’s…going to be around for a while…then he should know what he’s getting into.”

  I stare at him in the mirror. “But he’s leaving. He’s not going to be around at all, is he?”

  “There’s leaving, and there’s leaving,” says my utterly infuriating brother.

  “But his dad, and…” I run out of oxygen. The tiny flame flickering in my heart has used it all up, burning brighter by the second. “I’ll never see him again after this.”

  Charlie mutters something under his breath, something I don’t quite catch. It could be “I doubt that”, but maybe that’s just what I want to hear.

  Either way, as he picks up my slightly crumpled (but mostly clean) hoodie from the floor and hands it to me, he looks at me kindly. “Well, if that’s true, you don’t have anything to lose, do you?”

  He turns to go.

  “Charlie!”

  My brother stops when I call him and looks back around.

  “What if…” I drop my voice to a whisper – the house is small and Hal is right downstairs. “What if he really does just think I’m crazy? Properly crazy.” I wait for Charlie to say something comforting. He doesn’t. “Does he think I’m crazy?”

  “He thinks you’re you. Whatever label you go and stick on yourself.” Charlie moves back towards the door – but before he walks out of it, he turns back with one last parting shot. “Does it occur to you that he might actually like you for who that is?”

  The stairs creak under his feet as he goes back down, leaving me alone with that thought.

  I’ve been so afraid that Hal would see the parts of me that I try to hide from the world, the parts I try to brush over and camouflage, the imperfections I can never change or mend – but maybe he saw them anyway. Maybe he just saw them as being part of the grand Flora experience and…maybe he didn’t think it was weird. Maybe to him, it’s just…me.

  He might actually like you for who that is…

  I guess there’s only one way to find out.

  Taking one last (hopeless) look in the mirror, I venture out onto the landing, pulling my hood close around my neck. It’s not that I’m cold, exactly – the weather’s too warm for that – but I feel somehow exposed, like a layer of skin has been peeled away. When I peer around the banister at the top of the stairs, I can only see the top of his head, his hair glinting copper in the front room as he talks to Felix about something. Their voices are too low for me to hear anything more than a soft mumble – of course, they’re talking quietly so they don’t disturb me, aren’t they? Charlie’s gone out through the kitchen, and there’s a clattering sound from beyond the back door. There’s birdsong and sunshine out there, and somehow that makes it feel like completely the wrong day to talk about a nervous breakdown.

  It’s never the right day to talk about a nervous breakdown. And anyway, we’re not talking about a nervous breakdown. We’re talking about me.

  I look at the back of Hal’s head, nodding at something Felix has said.

  Me. A walking, talking nervous breakdown.

  An overfull ford that floods the engine, and my brother has come and towed me out.

  He thinks you’re you.

  He might actually like you for who that is…

  I lean further out, putting too much weight on the rail, and it squeaks. Below me on the sofa, Felix’s head moves just a little, because he recognizes the sound even if Hal doesn’t. There’s a pause, then he says something to Hal before getting up and pushing his sleeves to his elbows. He makes it to the front door, which is already standing open to let in the warm air from outside, before he glances back across the room and up at the top of the stairs. At me.

  And just before he steps out through the door, he winks.

  I step down onto the next stair, hoping it will creak and Hal will know I’m there, and I won’t have to announce myself – but just for once, the stairs are completely silent. So I give up and clear my throat quietly.

  “Hal?”

  He turns and sees me.

  What does he see? Who?

  His face lights up and he jumps to his feet, almost tripping over Felix’s stacked tool catalogues as he tries to edge around the sofa, his eyes never leaving me.

  “You’re up!”

  “Charlie says you’ve been waiting.” I pick at an imaginary scratch on the banister with my fingernail. “You didn’t have to…”

  “I wanted to make sure you were okay. I was worried.”

  “Worried? About me?”

  “Well, yeah. That Albie…that what we’d read had upset you. Or maybe it was about the party, or…”

  He stops again and runs a hand through his hair, brushing it out of his eyes. His cheeks, meanwhile, turn a furious shade of red. Hal has absolutely no filter when it comes to his feelings – or does he? Because when I remember how he stared down his father, remember the way Hal slapped his hand away, I wonder whether that’s strictly true.

  Maybe it’s just when it comes to his feelings for me…?

  “It’s not about you going,” I mumble, and a frown flickers across his forehead. Just for a second.

  “Oh. Right. Well, good. That’s good. I’m…” He shakes his head and lets out something like a growl. “But, you know, way to make a guy feel special.”

  “I mean, it is, yes, obviously it’s that too, but…there’s more to it than that.” I stop picking at the banister. “It’s complicated.”

  The stairs have never felt so long, so steep. There are so many things I need to say, but all I want to do is feel his arms wrap around me and to rest my head on his shoulder.

  The clattering outside the back door gets louder. Charlie starts singing what I think might be a song from Moana, louder than he probably means to. I cannot have this conversation to a soundtrack of Disney classics – least of all one performed by my big brother.

  “Sorry. It’s his favourite. Do you maybe want to come up?” I jerk my head back towards my room.

  Through the kitchen, Charlie goes for a high note and misses by a full nautical mile.

  “I’ll come up,” says Hal.

  Whatever he thinks when he walks into my room, Hal’s face carefully doesn’t show any of it. I see him take in the open window – the mirror of the one in the attic, now I think about it, facing back towards the house – and the beams. The wonky walls with their old white paint and my battered posters. The narrow bed with its white metal frame, tucked under the eaves; the beams that criss-cross the ceiling. I spot the small heap of clothes next to my wardrobe – the ones that haven’t made it to the laundry basket yet – and wonder whether I can somehow position myself in front of it, or steer him around the room so he can’t see it…And right in the middle of me thinking all this, his eyes sweep across the room and he looks right at my dress from the party, its hanger hooked over a nail that sticks out of one of the beams.

  “You have no idea how amazing you looked in that,” he says quietly. It hangs there, silently. It almost feels like I’m standing in the room with my own ghost – the ghost of the me I could be. If I let myself.

  You can’t tell him. He won’t understand. He’ll think you’re crazy.

  What if all this being determined to tell him, to be “you” is wrong? What if you’re just going manic again? You’re not brave, remember. You’re just mental.

  I take a deep breath and, with every fibre of my being, tell my brain to shut. The. Hell. Up.

  Just for once, it listens.

  Hal, oblivious (thankfully) to everything going on in my head while I try to guess what’s going on in his, has sat down on the edge of my bed.

  “Do you want to talk about it?” he says, his head lowered, looking up at me from behind his fringe.

  “Not really.” I lean back against the window sill. “But I probably need to.”

  I’m not sure there’s a breath in the world deep enough, a moment long enough for me
to be ready. But maybe being ready – waiting to be perfect, waiting for the moment to be perfect – is overrated.

  Everything is imperfect. Everyone. That’s nothing to be ashamed of or afraid of – it just is.

  And if I’m imperfect, just like everybody else, what does that make me?

  Normal. It makes me normal.

  And when they have something to say, normal people just…talk. So I talk.

  “Yesterday, in the attic, I had a panic attack.”

  “I figured. Not that it was that, exactly, but that there was, you know, something.” There’s no question in his voice. No surprise, no judgement, no nothing. Just Hal.

  “And at the party, when I kind of…ran out of there too? And you came looking for me?”

  I have to stop running away.

  “You had one then?”

  “No. Yes. I thought I was going to – or not exactly, but…” I stop, and rub my hands over my face, hard. This is so much more difficult than I was hoping, and there’s just no easy way to do it.

  I should just say it.

  Keep my own keys. Open the doors, take down the bars.

  “Okay. So. I have a thing. In my head. You’ve probably noticed.”

  Doing great so far, Flora.

  Why, thank you, Flora.

  “And the thing in my head…it’s…it makes me act…weird. Sometimes. Not all the time. It’s a condition. You know? It’s. Umm. It’s just…” I stop and look at him, as though that’s going to help. “Are you with me so far?”

  He looks about as puzzled as I’d expect. “Maybe?”

  “I should start at the beginning. I was at school and there was…an incident.”

  “An incident.”

  “Yes.”

  “What kind of incident?”

  Papers thrown in the air, fluttering down around me.

  Head pounding, heart racing.

  Letters, stories…

  Sweat-soaked school shirt.

  Exam papers.

  Answer papers. Show your workings, five marks, ten marks, twenty marks.

  Someone shouting. Running footsteps.

  Paper fluttering like wings as it falls.

  And nothing.

  “I had an episode at school, during the exams. I…messed things up. Not just for me, but for other people. The doctor said it was probably brought on by stress; that maybe it – my condition – had been there all along, and it had just never shown up before. People usually get their first…” I try and think of another word, but there really isn’t one. “…episode somewhere in their teens. And with the stress of the exams…” I hold up my hands weakly. “Ta-da.”

  “What happened?”

  “Oh, everyone got their grades adjusted because of ‘a disturbance in the exam room’. It was fine in the end – for them, anyway. They got better grades and a story to tell.”

  “I meant, what about you?”

  “I became the story.” I drum on the window sill – and then stop, because this is exactly the kind of thing that makes people think I’m weird, isn’t it? Tuning out, skipping around the conversation. Moving on too fast.

  “You haven’t gone back?”

  “I couldn’t. I mean, they would have let me, but I couldn’t. Would you want to go back for resits, knowing everyone would be remembering the last time they saw you? What you did? Making jokes about how you were completely loopy?”

  “Didn’t your friends stick up for you?”

  Did they put her in one of those padded rooms?

  “Friends?” I don’t want it to sound bitter, so I pick my words carefully. “It’s funny how quickly people forget that they ever knew you when they think you’re mad.”

  He frowns, but it’s a different kind of frown to the one I’ve seen before. It’s a sad frown. “So you left?”

  “I came here and started doing this.” I shrug. “I started doing a hospitality apprenticeship, so I didn’t have to go back. Charlie was already here, and I started working with Mira, and she was really cool – she is really cool. And she and Barney knew, because Charlie had warned them about his loopy little sister…and they never cared.” I drop onto the side of the bed next to him – and it’s only when I’ve been sitting there for a moment that I realize I’m waiting for him to move, to flinch or edge away. He doesn’t. All he does is look at his knees.

  It feels like hours before he speaks. Days, even. A hundred years have passed and I’m still waiting for him to say something – anything. To get up and leave, to look at me differently…

  I’m not sure which would be worse.

  “You didn’t have to keep it secret, you know. You could have said something.” His voice is warm and soft, and I want to climb into it. It feels safe there. I pull the edge of my blanket up from my bed and around my shoulders instead – it feels like the next best thing.

  “It’s not the kind of thing you usually tell people you’ve only just met. ‘Hi, I’m Flora – oh, and by the way, I’m mad.’”

  “You could have told me.” His eyes suddenly lift up from staring at his knees and move to my face, searching it – for what? “You know, like Albie was saying Iris made him promise to always tell her the truth?”

  “That was different.” The blanket slips, and I tug it a little more closely around my shoulders. “And this isn’t the kind of thing you just say to someone you like.”

  “What, in case you scare them off?” He laughs.

  “Maybe,” I say quietly, and he stops laughing. He looks at me – really looks at me – for a minute, and then he reaches for the edge of the blanket closest to him, peels it back and wraps it over his shoulders too. We sit there, side by side, the blanket across our backs like a shield.

  “Do you have to take any medication?”

  “I did, for a bit. To start with.” I shrug. “I’ve been off it a while now, though. I wanted to try and manage without, if I can. And then I know that if I need it – if I get…bad again, it’s there. But nothing’s guaranteed. I just have to try and work at it. All the time.”

  “It sounds lonely,” he says.

  “It is.” A loose thread tickles the side of my leg, and I pull it away, stretching it out between my fingers and twisting it until it doubles back on itself over and over again, knotting into a tiny ball. I drop it on the floor. “You know why it’s called bipolar disorder?” I can’t look at him. I can’t. If I look at him, I won’t say it. It feels like I’m peeling back the lid of my heart and letting someone else see inside, see all my secrets and my fears – the sharp edges that cut; the cold little black ball, no bigger than the ball of thread I just dropped, that I carry around with me all the time. “It’s because if I was a compass, there’d be no east and no west. No sunrise or sunset. Just me, in the dark, with my needle spinning from pole to pole. And both poles are just as hostile, and both poles can kill you.”

  He doesn’t say anything. There isn’t much to say, is there?

  So I carry on.

  “It’s like, you know how people say nobody ever died from sadness? It’s not true. People do die from it. It eats them up from the inside and there’s just the shell of them left – whatever armour they covered themselves with, however thick a skin they grew, that’s all there is. It hurts all the time, and they just want it to stop. And it doesn’t matter whether you call it depression or something else – it all means the same thing, and that’s what it does to you.”

  I take a deep breath, and now it isn’t just Hal waiting – it’s the room, the house, the world. Waiting for me to say the things I’ve never said before – not to Charlie, not to Sanjay, not even to myself, late at night when my thoughts have been racing and my mind has been raging and I’ve wondered if it’s possible to die of thinking too fast and too much.

  “And then there’s the other bit. You know how sometimes you hear a song, and it’s a song you love and it makes you want to jump up and dance, and you feel like if you don’t, you’ll just explode? It’s that feeling. That’s what I m
ean. The kind where you think you can do anything. Like you’re somehow invincible. Except you forget that you’re not actually invincible. Most of the time, it’s fine – the world’s just that little bit more in focus, a bit brighter. But then, sometimes…”

  I know he’s trying to follow. I know he wants to and I know he’s listening – but how can I make what’s inside my head make sense to him when it barely does to me half the time?

  “I’m not explaining it properly. I’m sorry. It’s hard. How about this? There was a girl in the waiting room at my therapist’s office. She was there to see one of the other therapists every week, just the same time as me, and sometimes we’d talk. She had this scar, all the way down here.” I trace my finger down the side of his chest, from just below his shoulder, halfway down to his hip and back up again. “When she had a manic episode, she’d stabbed herself in the heart – or tried to. The scar was from the surgery to save her. She didn’t know why she did it, and she didn’t even remember doing it. She was doing okay when I met her. She was nice. I liked her. But she had this scar to remind her, every day, that she can’t always trust her own mind. And I’m scared – all the time – that the same thing could happen to me one day. That my mind could do that too, and that I wouldn’t even know. Because you don’t. I’m fine most of the time, but how would I know if I wasn’t? All the time, I’m between those two places, with both of them pulling me in different directions, and me just trying to stay where I am. Who I am.”

  My finger is still pressed against his chest, and gently – the way someone might handle dynamite – he closes his hand around mine and holds it in his.

  And that’s just it. I don’t want to be treated like I might explode at any moment, leaving everyone around me broken too. I don’t want him to be careful. I don’t want him to look at me and see someone who mustn’t be shaken or jarred, who mustn’t be upset. I want him to see me.

  “I didn’t say anything before because…well, because I didn’t want you to see that and not me. I thought I was fine, and I didn’t want it to be an issue.”

  “It isn’t,” he says quietly. His eyes seem sad, and there are things under his voice, things he’s not saying. I guess he wants to let me say all mine first.