Don't Be Afraid

by Daniela Sacerdoti

  Wait. There was somebody there, somebody who wasn’t Angus or Morag. In my house, I mean. Or at least, there had been while I was lying semi-conscious in the unmade bed, among the orange pills. It was a vague memory, something I couldn’t completely recall . . .

  “Angus,” I began, and then, as I assembled the thoughts, an image exploded in my mind. The memory came back, whole and disconcerting.

  In my mind’s eye, I saw the woman who’d come to visit me – I recalled her hand in my hair, the way her voice had slowed my heart. Her mossy eyes, her calm, calm smile – and then sleep, and the first peaceful dream I’d had in a long time. The ponds of shimmering water and the multicoloured clouds. The sense of contentment.

  “There was someone with me,” I said tentatively.

  “Earlier on? A nurse, you mean?”

  “No. I mean at the house. A woman was inside the house, in our bedroom. I don’t know who she was.”

  “It must have been Morag. She found you.” He rubbed his eyes with his hands once again – every gesture suggested his lack of sleep.

  “No, it wasn’t Morag. It was someone else.”

  “A paramedic, maybe . . . Or either you were dreaming.”

  I thought for a moment. Of course, I must have been dreaming, or hallucinating. And still, it had felt so real. “Angus?”

  “Yes, my love,” he leaned towards me and caressed my face in a way that broke my heart – how, how could I make him suffer this way?

  “I won’t try it again,” I said. The words came out by themselves, from the bottom of my soul. In my husband’s eyes I had seen a reason to live, a reason to be.

  He placed a light kiss on my forehead. “Bell?”

  “Yes?”

  “How do I know you’re telling the truth?” he asked, and his face was so full of pain, I couldn’t take it. He was desperate for a promise. And I could, yes, I could promise. Because I really, really, really wanted to try to live. Most of all, I didn’t want to hurt him, ever again.

  “Because I promise you,” I said, and I meant it. Unexpectedly, unbelievably, I meant it. I’d gone from despair at being alive to relief for having being given another chance in the space of a few hours. Somewhere inside me there was a spark that refused to be extinguished. I wanted to go home. I wanted to be with Angus.

  Still holding my hands, he locked his ice-blue eyes on mine. “I want to believe you, Bell, but I don’t know if I do.”

  I took his hand and I placed it on my chest, right over my heart, right where the black flower was. “I’ll try. I’ll try so hard to recover,” I said. I’d even try to take the medicines, every last one of them.

  “I know. I believe in you,” he replied. But that was another lie, like the ones he’d told the doctor to help me come home. Because in his eyes I didn’t see belief – I saw fear.

  5

  Voices

  Your words come

  Like raindrops in a desert

  To Isabel.C.Ramsay@gmail.com

  From Emer88@iol.ie

  Hey Bell! My brother was going through old pictures yesterday and he found the ones of that time we dressed as merry maidens and made him dress as a knight and we put on a play for my mum and dad! How old were we, twelve? You were Isabeau, I was Emerine and poor Cal was Lancelot! Remember? Remember we swore eternal loyalty to each other that day? You and me, not Cal, he was off to play with the neighbours as soon as we finished tormenting him! It was so much fun. God, how much I miss you. Why oh why did you have to go back to Scotland? Anyway, I still have those costumes, you know that? Look, I know you’re not well, but please, drop me an email. You haven’t written in ages and I’m worried. I’ll go on tour with Spiorad soon, but we’ll only do Ireland this time, for a couple of weeks. Next year, though, it’s America. Things are picking up quite fast with Spiorad. They love the idea of a blind harpist! Roots Magazine called me “the new Turlough O’Carolan”. I’m just thankful I’m not called Turlough, now that would be bad. Maybe not worse than being blind. But worse than having red hair. By the way, have you noticed how the two people you LOVE THE MOST in the whole world are both red-headed AND musicians? That would be me and Angus. Me more, of course! Let me know if I can come and visit you.

  Please write,

  Emer(ine)

  PS. My mum saw your dad, Maura and Gillian in Eyre Square. I suppose you don’t want to know, but my mum said that he didn’t look very well.

  To Isabel.C.Ramsay@gmail.com

  From JSimpson@artistcom.com

  Hi Isabel,

  Just checking in with you – Marina from Usborne is a bit concerned she hasn’t received your work for the Scottish Legends book yet. We are late as it is. I might get you another extension, but you need to try to pick up the pace. I hope all is well with you. Give me a bell if I can help in any way.

  Joanna

  6

  Useless love

  I feel you slipping from my hands

  The more I cling to you,

  The farther you fall

  Angus

  My love was useless, because it couldn’t save her. It couldn’t save Bell from herself. But never, never in a million years could I have imagined she would try . . .

  I didn’t even want to say it.

  Maybe if I didn’t put it in words, it never really happened.

  I’d tried to be with Bell all the time, but to be beside her twenty-four hours a day as her own black hole engulfed me slowly was a special kind of torture there was no name for. If you sleep beside someone every night, and spend every day with them, you end up swallowing their joys and sorrows. And with Bell, it had nearly only been sorrow for the last three years or so.

  My work helped me to deal with her illness, but there was a chance I might have to give it up, after what happened. I couldn’t even think about that, anyway – all that mattered was Bell.

  I’d stopped counting how many times my mother and my sister, Sheila, had asked me to leave her. Which was out of the question, of course. But that was how they saw it: like putting down a horse with a broken leg.

  In the beginning, they were all sympathy. When Bell first started showing signs of depression they came to visit us, they bought her books and flowers. She was their charity case of the moment, and they’d help me fix her. And then things started getting really, really hard. Bell wouldn’t let anyone in our bedroom – then she wouldn’t let anyone in the house at all, which offended my mother to death. My mother just couldn’t understand that Bell didn’t mean to be offensive, that she was ill. That refusing to see people, refusing to invite people into our house had nothing to do with bad manners and everything to do with her distress. We lost nearly all our friends like that – only the most faithful ones remained. And that was fine, that’s the way it is with people and mental illness.

  No, wait a minute, that’s not fine at all. That’s awful.

  Okay, what could we do? People are stupid. But my own mother and sister, they turned their backs on Bell, mistaking her pain for ignorance, not bothering to even try to look beyond. To their eyes, the pretty, sparky Isabel, fresh out of Glasgow School of Art and full of talent and potential, had turned into some Mrs Rochester figure, barricaded into our home. All of a sudden, she was an embarrassment. My wife, so dear to my heart, so beloved, had turned into a big problem for them. “Angus’s wife has issues,” they would say to their friends and to the rest of our family, hush-hushing the whole thing because they were inconvenienced, they were ashamed.

  And still, my mother and Sheila used to love Isabel, in spite of what she’d done – what we’d both done – to Torcuil. They’d never showed much empathy with my brother, or consideration for him. They’d always openly favoured me, my sister following our mother’s lead – which had always upset me, because I could see how much it hurt Torcuil. They’d barely noticed Torcuil’s fiancée, but they certainly noticed Angus’s wife. That was the way their perception worked.

  Coming back to Bell – my mother and sister did love her . .
. or maybe they simply accepted her. I don’t know, because certainly if you love someone you don’t throw them away when they’re ill. Like an old, broken toy. So first they accepted her, then they tolerated her while she sank deeper and deeper into depression. But then they resented her, and they couldn’t hide it. Actually, they didn’t bother trying to hide it. If only their resentment had had its roots in their love for me, some sort of twisted, selfish-by-proxy protective instinct, maybe I could have tried to understand – but all they could think of was, I knew for sure, our family’s status. And having a madwoman in the attic was not good for our family’s reputation, my mother would have said if she had truly spoken her mind.

  The only one who stuck by us was Torcuil, my brother. Even with the pain Bell and I inflicted on him years ago, when she left him for me, he still stood by me, loyal and steadfast. I don’t know what I would have done without him.

  Nothing, nothing could ever stop me from loving Bell, nothing could ever make me want to leave her. Not even what she had just done – especially what she had just done.

  Not even if she’d tried to kill me, by killing herself.

  There, I said it.

  Because if she died, I would die too.

  Let’s not talk about that anyway. Let’s talk about Bell, my Bell – the woman I married. She was a talented artist, her work was published all over the world and her books made many children happy. She had a studio in the attic, lying dormant and waiting for her to come back. Its door was closed, and I prayed and prayed that one day I would come back from a gig and I would see it open, and I would see Bell’s fingers stained with paint again. And that expression on her face – that mix of concentration, bliss and exaltation, with a touch of absence, as if her body was there and her mind somewhere else – the expression she wore when she was drawing, lost in the process of creation.

  I had an image of her burnt into my memory – well, I had many, but this one jumped out at me all the time, since she’d been ill – you know when you see something and it sticks in your mind, for some reason? One afternoon I came back from a work trip to London and she ran downstairs from her studio to say hello. She had paint on her face and in her hair, and her fingers were all the colours of the rainbow, and when she threw her arms around me she said, “Today I’ve been painting dragons.”

  That moment stuck in my mind. The way the sun shone in her long hair, the colour of ancient gold, the way she left smudges of paint on my hoodie, the way she smiled, the way her eyes looked full of joy, full of life.

  Yes, that was my Bell.

  And I prayed I would get her back, because life without her had no colour. Not even my music could give me anything more than a temporary respite; it couldn’t save me from the absence of her.

  Once I’d read an article about a whale whose song was on an entirely different frequency from every other whale’s. Because of that, nobody could hear her. She sang and sang, but nobody picked up her voice except cold, soulless human instruments. And so the whale couldn’t communicate with any other whale and she ended up isolated, incapable of sharing in a pod’s life.

  Bell was like that, I thought. She called out the reason for her distress in a frequency that only I could hear. If I stopped listening, she would be all alone. It would be as if nobody could hear me playing the fiddle – as if I played and played, but nobody could hear me at all, or they could only hear squeaks and strident sounds. It would be hell.

  That was the way her life was, but I hoped not forever. I would help her find her voice again, in any way I could. I was afraid, but I had hope, even after what happened. Especially if she had no hope herself – I would be the keeper of her flame.

  No, I would never leave her, certainly not if my mother asked, and not even if Bell herself asked me over and over again to go and let her be, to go and build a home and a family for myself. Because she said that: she said I deserved a family, that I shouldn’t waste my time – her words – with someone like her. When she was really low, she said I deserved a real wife.

  Well, I had a wife, and she was very real. I had a family.

  I had a wife, a family and a home, our whitewashed cottage on the loch shore in my native village of Glen Avich. My wife was a beautiful, talented woman who, one day, went inside the woods and got lost, terribly lost, until she couldn’t find the way back any more. But she would. She would find the way out. And we would all be there for her when she came back: me, and Torcuil, and Emer, and all the watercolours and pencils and unfinished illustrations that lay abandoned in her study.

  One day she would find her way back to me, my Bell.

  There was one thing, though, that I dreaded giving up, even for her: my music. Without it I’m pretty sure I would have lost my mind. The time I spent playing all over the country, all over the world, kept me sane and strong enough to go back to her. In fact, even before her illness, I lived and breathed music – it had always been like that for me. I was sure that if it weren’t for my music, with the way things were, I’d follow her down the black hole she had fallen into.

  I still remember the first time I picked up a violin myself, after hearing my grandfather and then my father playing for years. I think I must have been five years old, and the violin was too big for me to handle – my father crouched beside me and helped me hold it. After that, I never wanted to put the violin down, so I was given a child-sized one, and that was the beginning. Music was in my veins; I was genetically hardwired for it – I could never imagine doing anything else. But it was also a way to escape a fractious family life, my parents’ unhappy marriage and my mother’s domineering ways. I was sent to boarding school and then I went straight to Glasgow to study music. Torcuil stayed behind, too sick with asthma and allergies to go to boarding school, and then he was tied to home by my father’s long illness. As much as I wanted to be near my father and Torcuil, playing my violin always came first – I suppose that was selfish, but I couldn’t help it. I still couldn’t help it. I’d made so many sacrifices for music, it had become second nature, as necessary as breathing.

  Sometimes, to my shame, I thought that maybe even Bell had to come second sometimes, compared to the privileged place the violin had always had in my life, because when she was slowly sinking into depression, and I could see it happening, I was still away most of the time. I was in denial. Being away for work so much, for gigs and tours, had never been a problem before; we both pursued our passions, and she was perfectly happy to live as a musician’s wife, with all that entailed. But when her illness began, she tried to keep me at home.

  Bell was proud, and it was hard for her to show her vulnerability that way. And still, I didn’t listen.

  I wished I had.

  And so we created our sick, bizarre routine, revolving around Bell’s phobias. She didn’t get out of the house, not even into the garden, so when I was away, Morag, our neighbour – a no-nonsense, practical woman who seemed pretty much unfazed by Bell’s illness – would check on her and bring her groceries. I phoned Morag every evening to make sure everything was okay. Bell never called me; she was scared of the phone for some reason, but not of emails or texts, so that was how we communicated. It troubled me, to know that she wouldn’t answer the phone if I called, but in a way, it helped to keep some distance from her when I was gigging. I knew that if I heard her voice, if she told me what was going through her mind, I wouldn’t be able to concentrate, I would just drive straight back to her.

  What she did changed everything, of course. Maybe, thinking about it, something was bound to happen, to disrupt the weird, unhealthy life that had been slowly suffocating us. Maybe the pressure had been building up all around us, waiting to erupt into something terrible, something life-changing.

  The day before, the sky had fallen on me. Morag called my mobile and said that Bell was in hospital, that they wouldn’t tell her exactly what happened because she wasn’t a close relative, but that she could guess. She didn’t spell it out to me, but I understood. I kept the phon
e to my ear for a long time without saying anything, with Morag saying my name over and over again to see if I was still there.

  “I’m here,” I said finally. “Tell her I’m on my way.”

  “They won’t let me see her,” Morag said, her voice shaken. It was so strange to hear the normally unflappable Morag sound so vulnerable.

  “I’ll come as soon as I can.”

  A few hours later I was at Bell’s bedside. She was asleep, peaceful, no sign of illness or pain on her body – except for a line in her hand and the pallor of her face. She was so white, her hair loose on her pillow, so thick it made another pillow itself, one hand resting, open, on her chest. I noticed she wasn’t wearing her wedding ring. There was a hospital bracelet around her wrist.

  I sat beside her bed, mute, frozen with pain and disbelief. I had never thought it would come to this. I realised how naive I’d been – how stupid, even – to never imagine that she would want to take her own life. I knew she wasn’t taking her medication; she’d kept saying that it made her feel ill and, stupidly, I’d let her get away with it instead of convincing her, pressuring her. I’d thought we would just plod on, survive the best we could, and one day this whole thing would go away as suddenly as it had started. But she did what she did.

  So here we are, now.

  On the edge of the black hole, ready to swallow us both.

  7

  Brothers

  Let me wake you

  Sleeping girl

  Angus

  A hand touched my shoulder lightly and I jumped – I’d been dozing in the chair. It was a nurse. She smelled of nicotine and something vinegary.