It is called integration, the bug woman tells me. It happens, sometimes, in situations like ours. Integration sounds like something that happens in a factory. I think they just wanted to be together, Olivia and the other one. Anyway, Olivia is gone and she won’t be back.
The bug woman always tells me to let feelings in, not shut them out, so that is what I try to do. It hurts.
There are other voices, among Olivia’s recordings – ones that I don’t know. Some don’t use language, but grunts and long pauses and clicks and high songs. Those are the ones that move through me moaning like cold little ghosts. In the past I tried to shut them in the attic. Now I take time to listen. I’ve spent too long covering my ears.
Dawn wakes me these days. I surface slowly from a dream full of red and yellow feathers. My mind echoes with green sounds and thoughts that are not my own. I can taste blood in my mouth. I never know whose dreams I am going to get in the night. But the body actually gets to rest, these days, instead of being used by someone else while I sleep. So it’s worth it.
Other things are different too. Three days a week I work in the kitchen of a diner across town. I like the walk, watching the city slowly grow up around me. Right now I just wash dishes, but they tell me that maybe soon I can start helping the fry cooks. There is no work today – today is just for us.
Without plywood over the windows, the house seems made of light. I get out of bed, careful not to tear the staples that run down my side. Our body is a landscape, of scars and new wounds both. I stand and for a moment there is a wrestling in the depths of us. The body sways dangerously and we all feel sick. Sulky, Lauren lets me take control. I steady us with a hand on the wall, breathing deeply. The day is full of these seismic, nauseous struggles. We are learning. It is not easy to hold everyone in your heart at once.
Later today, maybe Lauren will take the body. She will ride her bike and draw, or we will go to the woods. Not to the glade, though, or the waterfall. We don’t go there. The blue dress of rotting organza, her old vanity case, her bones – they must be left alone so that they stop being gods and return to being just old things.
We will walk under the trees and listen to the sounds of the forest in autumn.
The tired possum detective and the police are searching the woods near the lake. They want to find the little boys Mommy took. They think there might have been as many as six, over the years. It’s hard to say because children do wander off. They were mostly boys from sad families, or who had no families. Mommy would have chosen the ones who wouldn’t be missed. Little Girl With Popsicle was a big deal because she had parents.
Maybe one day the boys will be found. Until then I hope they are peaceful under the forest green, held by the kind earth.
In the late afternoon perhaps Night Olivia and I will doze on the couch, watching the big trucks. When darkness falls they will hunt. A moment of unease travels through me, like the brush of a wet leaf on the back of my neck. Night Olivia is large and strong.
Well, it’s a beautiful day, and it is breakfast time. As we pass the living room I peer in, and take a moment to admire my new rug. It’s the colour of everything – yellow, green, ochre, magenta, pink. I love it. I could have thrown away that old blue rug any time since Mommy left, I guess. Strange that it never occurred to me until after everything happened.
We go into the kitchen. So far we have only discovered one thing that all of us like to eat. We have it together in the morning, sometimes. I always describe what I’m doing as I do it, so that we all remember. I don’t need to record my recipes any more.
‘We’re going to make it like this,’ I say. ‘Take fresh strawberries from the refrigerator. Wash them in cold running water. Put them in a bowl.’ We watch them gleam in the morning sun. ‘We can dry them with a cloth,’ I say, ‘or we can wait for the sun to do its work. It is our choice.’
I used to saw the strawberries into quarters with a blunt knife, because there was nothing sharp in the house. But now I keep a set of chef’s knives in a block on the counter. ‘This is called trust,’ I say as I slice. ‘Some of us have a lot to learn about it. See my point?’ I guess that is what Lauren calls a dad joke.
The blade reflects the red flesh of the fruit as it slides through. The scent is sweet and earthy. I feel some of them stir with pleasure within. ‘Can you smell that?’ I have to be careful with the knife near my fingers. I don’t give my pain to the others any more. ‘So we slice the strawberries as thin as we can and pour over balsamic vinegar. It should be the kind that is old and thick like syrup. Now we take three leaves from the basil plant that grows in the pot on the window ledge. We slice these into narrow ribbons and breathe the scent. Now add the basil to the strawberries and balsamic vinegar.’ It is a recipe, but sometimes it sounds like a spell.
We let it sit for a few minutes, so the flavours can mingle. We use this time to think, or watch the sky, or just be ourselves.
When I feel it’s ready I say, ‘I’m putting the strawberry, basil and balsamic mixture on a slice of bread.’ The bread smells brown and nutty. ‘I grind black pepper over. It’s time to go outside.’
The sky and trees are flooded with birds. The song flows and ebbs around us, on the air. Lauren gives a little sigh as the sun warms our skin.
‘Now,’ I say. ‘We eat.’
Afterword
If you haven’t finished The Last House on Needless Street yet, please don’t read on – what follows is one long spoiler.
This is how I came to write a book about survival, disguised as a book about horror. In the summer of 2018 I was writing about a cat and I couldn’t work out why. I had always been fascinated by the apparent ease with which those who lack empathy form strong, passionate attachments with their pets. Serial killer Dennis Nilsen’s dog, Bleep, was the only creature he could be said to have had any functional relationship with. He loved Bleep and the fate of the dog was the only thing he was concerned with after his arrest. So I thought, Maybe this is the right story, the one I should be working on. Olivia the cat, who lives with Ted and gives him comfort, even though he took a young girl named Lauren and keeps her captive. But it wasn’t working. Ted didn’t seem like a murderer, or a kidnapper. I kept finding pockets of compassion for him. His story felt like one of suffering and survival, not like that of a perpetrator. And Olivia didn’t really behave like a cat. She did have cat-like qualities but her voice seemed neither human nor feline, but something other. She seemed like a part of him. So did Lauren, the girl who was ostensibly Ted’s prisoner.
I was researching the effects of childhood abuse when I came across a video online of a young woman named Encina, who has dissociative identity disorder, discussing her condition. She talked with great frankness and compassion about her younger alter. She treats her as her child, adopting a maternal attitude, taking care of her, making sure she’s not scared, or faced with activities she can’t accomplish, like driving. The younger alter came forward, for a time, and spoke. She talked about how lonely she is, because no other children want to play with her, because the body she’s in is big and they don’t understand. I felt that my outlook on life changed as I watched them talk. The video is listed in the bibliography (What It’s Like To Live With Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID)). I realised that the book I was writing had never been about a cat named Olivia, a girl called Lauren and a man named Ted. It was about someone who had all these personalities within them. It wasn’t about horror but about survival and hope, and how the mind copes with fear and suffering.
I had heard of DID before. It’s the staple of many a horror plot. But watching Encina’s system describe how their personality had diverged in order to deal with abuse, I felt that a piece of the world I had never understood had fallen into place. The world felt stranger now, but also more real. It was a kind of miracle, but it also made perfect sense, that the mind should do this.
I rang a friend of mine who is a psychotherapist. She has worked with, among others, survivors of trafficking a
nd torture. ‘Is this real?’ I asked. ‘I mean, is this a real thing?’ I wasn’t very articulate.
‘In my experience it’s absolutely real,’ she said.
For over a year I went down a long rabbit hole, reading everything I could get my hands on to do with DID. I suddenly understood what the book was, and where it needed to go.
There are people in the therapeutic community and the world at large who firmly believe the disorder doesn’t exist. DID seems to threaten people’s worldview. Maybe it’s because it interferes with the concept of the soul – the idea that there can be more than one person in a body is somehow terrifying. It certainly disrupts the underlying tenets of many religions.
The stories that accompany this disorder are without exception horrific. It’s the mind’s last resort, when faced with unbearable pain and fear. I am particularly grateful to First Person Plural, one of the major support groups for people with dissociative identity disorder in the UK, for helping me better understand this intricate condition. Their website and online resources are listed at the back of the book.
I spoke with someone who has dissociative identity disorder and works with others who have it, over the course of a long afternoon. They have asked not to be named. We met for the first time at a train station and went to a café nearby to talk. We were both flustered and shy at first. It’s an intimate thing to discuss between strangers. But they laid open their past, and their life, with unflinching honesty.
They talked about how DID isn’t a disorder when it first comes into being. It saves a child’s mind from unendurable strain; it performs a life-saving function. It’s only later in adult life, when it’s no longer necessary, that it becomes a disorder. They talked about one of their alters, ‘Legs’, who doesn’t talk. Legs’ only function had been to get them back to bed after the abuse. They described how, while the abuse was happening, they would send all the different parts of their body away. All they held onto was the big toe, which they used to draw the body back together again afterwards. They told me that some alters used to despise the parts who experienced the abuse. Some of them don’t understand why they’re in a body that doesn’t reflect who they are in age, gender or appearance. It makes them angry. Some of them have tried to hurt the body. Other alters try to maintain a distance, ‘vacuum-packed’, sealed off from the rest of the system. They want to live a separate, parallel life. The purposes of the different alters are clearly defined. The alter who goes to work will be cold towards family or a partner if they ring or come to see them during the day. The work alter does the job, just that.
They described how differently memory works for them. Each alter holds certain experiences. Memory is not linear, but nested in a series of compartments. ‘I will never know what it feels like to remember things like you,’ they told me. It can make seemingly simple tasks difficult. When following a recipe, for instance, they can’t remember more than four ingredients at a time. Retaining too much information is dangerous because it means they might have to remember other things too. Sometimes they leave a gap between switches, leaving the body vacant for a moment, so that alters don’t have to share knowledge. They described how difficult it is to pack for a holiday; remembering to put everyone’s different things into the suitcase, clothes for all the alters of different ages. They described their own inner worlds, where their alters convene: a farmhouse at the centre of a crossroads, where approaching enemies can be seen from any direction; a playground guarded by armies; a beach.
They told me that they were healing. The alter who used to rip up photographs, trying to destroy the past, has stopped. After years of therapy and with a family of their own, they are learning to live together as one.
Towards the end of our meeting I asked, ‘What would you like people to know about the disorder, that you don’t feel is understood?’
‘I’d like people to know that we are always striving towards the good,’ they said. ‘We are always protecting the child.’
It could take a lifetime to understand this complex disorder. There seem to be many variations between cases, and a multitude of different ways in which dissociative identity disorder can manifest. Ted is not based on a particular case. He is wholly imagined and any mistakes are all my own. But I have tried to do justice in this book to the people whose lives are touched by DID – to hold onto what was said to me that afternoon, over our cooling cups of coffee. Dissociative identity disorder may often be used as a horror device in fiction, but in my small experience it is quite the opposite. Those who survive, and live with it, are always striving towards the good.
Acknowledgements
To my wonderful agent Jenny Savill whose faith in Ted, Olivia and Lauren kept me going, and who fought for them all the way, I can only say thank you. The stars must have been aligned the day we met. My amazing US agent Robin Straus and her colleague Katelyn Hales worked tirelessly to bring this book to the US. I am eternally grateful.
The tireless, redoubtable Miranda Jewess edited this book firmly and gently into its final form. It must have been like driving a team of octopuses down Piccadilly. I am full of admiration for her, Niamh Murray, Drew Jerrison and all the Viper team who have worked so hard to support this book. The Last House on Needless Street found its perfect US editor in Kelly Lonesome O’Connor, and the best US home with Tor Nightfire. It is so rewarding to work with these wonderful publishers.
Love and thanks go as ever to my mother Isabelle and my father Christopher, for all their help since the very beginning. Their support sustains me, as does that of my sister Antonia and her family – Sam, Wolf and River.
To my shining, good-hearted and very impressive friends, thank you. I am so grateful to Emily Cavendish, Kate Burdette, Oriana Elia, Dea Vanagan and Belinda Stewart-Wilson for their willingness to listen, a place to lay my head in tough times, many words of comfort as well as more caustic observations, wine and much wisdom. Natasha Pulley has my deepest gratitude for our long talks, for her excellent ideas and endless wit. Gillian Redfearn’s support and friendship has been a lifeline. My earliest readers were Nina Allan, Kate Burdette, Emily Cavendish and Matt Hill – their encouragement spurred me on. Eugene Noone’s joy, creativity and friendship inspired me for many years and his memory will continue to do so. He is deeply missed by me, and many others.
I am profoundly thankful for my endlessly talented, wonderful partner Ed McDonald – for his support, generosity of spirit and keen editorial eye. I am so very lucky. I can’t wait for more adventures together.
The charity First Person Plural provided me with invaluable resources on DID and gave me insight into what it’s like to live with this complex disorder. They helped to bring dissociative identity disorder to life for me; I hope I have done them justice.
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