Beside Myself

by Ann Morgan

She held his gaze for a time, grinning. His smile wavered.

  ‘Well, I won’t keep you,’ he said, glancing down at his half-finished crossword on the counter. ‘You take care now. Mind how you go.’

  She burst from the shop wreathed in smiles. It couldn’t have gone better. She couldn’t have done better. Here she was at last taking control of her life, being her actual self, and the world was welcoming her with open arms. The universe was smiling upon her. The links between things shimmered, revealing reality as a web of gleaming connections. The film of her life was building to its inspiring climax. It all made complete sense.

  She whirled round, the chiffon skirt flaring, the bag holding the chocolate dog bashing at people passing by.

  ‘Whoa there,’ said a woman’s voice with a faint Australian twang. ‘Are you OK?’

  Smudge saw blonde dreadlocks, a nose ring, a bright, tie-dyed top, a hand clutching a sheaf of yellow flyers.

  ‘Yes,’ said Smudge, beaming.

  Colours bloomed, splashing the shop fronts pink, purple, aquamarine – a special psychedelic light show just for her, a welcome back to the world.

  ‘Are you sure?’ said the woman, glancing down at Smudge’s bare feet. ‘You look a bit… hectic.’

  ‘Sure I’m sure I’m sure,’ said Smudge. ‘It’s such a brilliant day. It’s such a brilliant life. And I’ve just seen how it all links up. I’ve seen the truth behind it all. And I’m just so grateful. I’m so amazingly grateful.’

  She was gabbling, like a soundtrack played at double speed, but there was so much to say and each word carried such a tiny amount of significance on its own that she had to talk fast to get them out, to stand a chance of making it all heard.

  ‘Seems like you’re freaking out a bit,’ said the woman. ‘Here, why don’t you come with me? My studio’s just through that archway. You could sit down for a minute. We could get you some water.’

  She took Smudge’s arm and tried to steer her towards the side street. Smudge shook her head. Around her, time jumped and bucked like a scratched record. (‘Lose her,’ urged a voice, ‘She’s getting in the way. She’s trying to take you off track from who you really are.’) ‘No!’ shrieked Smudge, wrenching her arm free and jerking around, so that the woman’s leaflets whirled up into the air. She set off up the pavement at a run, lurching in between the shoppers, one of the yellow flyers flattened to the front of the Hellie dress. At the corner, she pulled it off and stared down.

  Patterson’s Walk Artists’ Collective’s Open House, it read in bold type. Artworks available to buy from £50. She shook her head and dropped the slip of paper into the gutter. She’d had a lucky escape. The time for distractions was over.

  32

  They take you into the dining room and shut the door. Outside, you can hear Mother pacing, the rumble of Akela’s voice. They start a video for Richard in the living room – the room Mother calls the lounge – and you hear its music playing through the walls: ‘Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles. Heroes in a half shell. Turtle power!’

  You look round at the furniture: the cabinet with the Sunday-best crockery – covered in primroses and rimmed with gold – the sideboard that houses Akela’s whisky and the gin. Under other circumstances you might be tempted to have a gulp, but today everything feels sealed off and out of reach. The lace curtains on the French doors shrug disapprovingly in the breeze, the clock above the sideboard tuts with each second that passes. There is no place for you here.

  You go away in your mind for a while to a blank sea shore and when you come back, you hear the wail of a siren and unfamiliar voices in the hall. You expect that they’ll all stay outside in the street with Hellie and leave you alone, but after a while you hear footsteps approaching and the door cracks open.

  ‘In there, Officer,’ says Mother in a distant voice.

  The policeman takes you by surprise. You seem to do the same to him, because he comes in, blinking, and sticks to the corner of the room by the door as though you are a wild animal that might at any moment pounce. His fear sets off fireworks in your brain.

  ‘Nooo!’ you scream, and you shove past him and out into the hall.

  You’re up the stairs before you know it and into the bedroom – your bedroom – gripping the bookcase for all you’re worth. The books tremble and flutter at you like birds. Hands are on you, pulling you away, voices urging, soothing, cajoling. But you won’t hear it and you won’t listen. You hang on for all you’re worth, your feet digging into the wood at the base, gouging a scar. A voice shouts over and over again: nonsense sounds, mad sounds. It might be Hellie’s; it might be yours. Who gives a shit? It goes on. But in the end they’re too much for you and they prise you away and bundle you down and out to the waiting car. Your breath rasps like an animal’s. A hand presses down on your head and they slide you in. The postbox on the corner purses its lips.

  As the car pulls away, you look back at the house. Mother is standing there on the doorstep her chin raised, staring out into the gathering dusk. You try to find her eyes, but the light from the hall behind makes it impossible, turning her into a flat, black silhouette.

  33

  The next night, she had another crack at Hellie. She waited until Nick finished clattering in the kitchen and the light went on in the garden office. Then she let herself out and teetered off to a small pub just off the high street. She sat in the corner staring up at a screen showing a football match, inhaling the sour smell of booze. After a while, a guy in a suit came over and stood in front of her, obscuring her view.

  ‘Has anyone ever told you you look exactly like Helen Sallis?’ he began.

  She stared up at him and saw he was young and a little bit drunk, his eyes beginning to swim behind his glasses and his tightly knotted tie ever so slightly askew. Easily handled.

  She yawned. ‘Yeah, I get that all the time.’

  (‘Smooth,’ remarked a voice and she smiled.) She looked good today and she knew it, wearing a tight little top and ra-ra skirt she’d found tucked at the back of one of the wardrobes – outrageous, flamboyant, the sort of things you had to be famous to get away with. She’d remembered shoes this time too – a pair of Hellie’s stilettos that she’d been practising wearing about the house this morning when no one else was in. She was quite confident in them now. Every hour, it seemed, she’d been adding another skill to her Hellie repertoire.

  The young man nodded. ‘Drink?’

  ‘I—’

  But he was already turning and making some improbable gesture to the barman.

  ‘So,’ he said, plonking himself down beside her on the padded bench. ‘What’s a pretty lady like you doing in a place like this?’

  She twisted her mouth in an effort not to laugh. ‘Oh, you know,’ she said, shrugging.

  He nodded. ‘Myself, I’m a journalist,’ he said, and then watched her face for the reaction.

  ‘Oh,’ she said, mustering some sort of grimace. ‘That’s—’

  ‘Yes,’ he said firmly. ‘It is.’

  A beat of silence. The football crowd roared. His eyes drifted towards the screen.

  ‘So, um, what title do you work for?’ she said in her best Hellie voice. It sounded so professional and polished in her head that she might as well be interviewing him for ITV.

  He looked back at her as if surprised by her presence. ‘Oh… ah, here are our drinks.’

  ‘Two double vodka and tonics,’ said the barman, setting a pair of brimming glasses down on the table.

  She held up a hand. ‘Actually, I’m on the lime and soda waters.’

  Her companion looked at her. ‘Why?’ he said, with a worried glance at her abdomen. ‘You’re not pregnant, are you?’

  She shook her head.

  ‘Well, bollocks to that then. Cheers!’ And so saying he gulped half his glass before setting it down with a pantomime ‘Ah!’

  Her drink sat in front of her on the table. She could smell its petrol fumes.

  ‘So,’ said the young man, turning ba
ck to her with renewed enthusiasm. ‘Where were we?’

  ‘Er,’ she said quickly. ‘You were telling me what newspaper you work for.’

  He coughed. ‘Oh yeah,’ he said, and mumbled something.

  ‘What?’ she said.

  ‘Waste Management Monthly,’ he said. ‘It’s based in Croydon.’

  ‘Oh,’ she said. ‘That must be—’

  ‘Yeah, it is,’ he said breezily. Then his face fell. ‘Actually, who am I kidding? It’s shit, all right? Like, literally. It’s really boring and everybody hates me and now I’ve got this fucking two-hour commute just because I didn’t know where anything was when I moved to London. But I can’t leave because I only moved into my house share last month and besides, like, Mum and Dad have told everyone I’m this big-shot journalist in London, so basically I’m screwed.’

  They looked at each other and burst out laughing so loudly that the people at the nearest table turned round to look. A reckless feeling came over her and she reached for her drink and knocked it back in one long draw. The alcohol seeped through her, stirring up velvet violence. When she put the glass down, he was staring at her.

  ‘Wow, that was hardcore,’ he said. He narrowed his eyes. ‘You know, you really do look like Helen Sallis.’

  She stared at him. Things were glittering on the edge of her vision. ‘How do you know I’m not?’ she said.

  He blinked. ‘Well, because… wasn’t she in a car crash?’

  Smudge touched the scar on her temple. ‘Yeah, several months ago.’

  ‘Blimey,’ he said. ‘In a bar drinking with Helen Sallis. Facebook status gold.’

  On a whim, she leant over and kissed him full on the mouth, licking his lips with her tongue.

  ‘In a bar snogging Helen Sallis,’ she said.

  ‘Bloody hell,’ he said, adjusting his glasses. ‘But hold on. Aren’t you married?’

  She shrugged. ‘So what if I am? Does it make a difference?’

  He took a deep breath and looked up at the ceiling as though calculating a hard sum. ‘Not in the fucking slightest,’ he said, looking back at her with flushed cheeks. ‘Actually, I think it’s hot.’

  She seized his wrist. The need to act without thinking – to make Hellie do something extreme – was strong upon her. ‘Come on then,’ she said, dragging him up.

  ‘But where are we—?’ he burbled as he stumbled after her across the pub. ‘Oh,’ he said as they got to the toilet door. And then with a blaze of pride: ‘This really is London living, isn’t it?’

  She pushed him inside and into a cubicle. There was someone at one of the urinals, but she didn’t care. All the better. Let it be shocking, in your face, something to put a stamp on the day. Let them call the police if they wanted, drag her off for a night in the cells. That would really smear Hellie, wouldn’t it? That would bring her under her control. That would show her.

  With the door pushed to behind her, she set about his belt in a business-like manner. He had other ideas, however, and launched himself at her face, slobbering on her mouth like an over-enthusiastic Labrador puppy. She endured his tongue probing her gums for a few moments, his teeth clinking against hers, then she pressed on, eager to get it over with before the wave of purposefulness left her.

  The belt undone, she popped open the button at the top of his trousers, unpeeled the fly and stepped back. He stood before her, his erection nudging against the newly exposed fabric of his underwear, a half-excited, half-pained expression on his face. His shirt was tucked into his Y-fronts, revealing a teenage leanness to his body that it would take a year or two of sinking pints and kebabs to fill out. But it was the Y-fronts that made her pause: gleaming, soft and pressed even this late in the day, pristine beyond the capabilities of laundry mouldering on the radiators of a shared house. They spoke of washing taken home on the weekends, of a mother humming to herself over the ironing board, of Sunday lunches where the family gathered like in the Oxo ad, brimming with pride at the achievements of its young son: a journalist, in London, imagine! Faced with them, she felt grimy, unclean, more Smudge-like than ever. She was not equal to them and the vulnerability and strength they revealed. She was not worthy. A gust of sadness bellied up through her and before it rattled her to pieces, she turned to go.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, fumbling open the cubicle door. ‘I can’t.’

  Outside, the man at the urinal turned, a lewd comment dying on his lips as he caught sight of her face. She pushed past him and on, out, through the pub, elbowing her way until she reached the street. A car drew up and she saw her face reflected in the passenger window: haggard and lined beneath Hellie’s foundation, the MONSTER beginning to loom through. In the orange streetlight the clothes made her look like a wizened teenybopper and gave her a pathetic, desperate air. Then the window wound down and Nick leant over to glare up at her.

  ‘What the hell are you doing?’ he shouted. ‘Get in!’

  34

  There are interviews in a series of fluorescent-lit rooms with plastic chairs. They assign someone called an appropriate adult to you: a woman with straggly grey hair and a lumpy cardigan who looks as though she’d rather be in bed. She comes along and listens as they ask you things and you reply with whatever comes into your mind, watching their expressions to see what they’ll do. There are forms and assessments and people talking in hushed voices in the corners of rooms. For a while it looks like you might have to go to juvenile court and maybe some detention centre. Then they decide you’re too crazy for that. The talking continues, back and forth. The same questions over and over, as if they hope you’ll morph into someone else and give different answers if they keep asking long enough.

  When at last they get bored, they take you to a grey, boxy building somewhere just inside the M25 and leave you there. There’s a common room and a games room and something called a chill-out garden laid out in front of a thick hedge behind which the traffic whizzes by. Look at it one way and you’d think it was a sort of holiday camp, like the PGL place you and Hellie went to once in primary school. The thing that gives it away, though, is the bedrooms: blank cells with thick doors like on submarines and a little observation hatch that can be pulled open at any time. ‘You are trapped,’ these rooms whisper. ‘You are here to be watched and scrutinised and talked about in low voices. They might even carry out experiments on you when you’re asleep. And there’s nothing you can do.’

  That’s what keeps you spouting crap whenever the staff ask you questions – wacky statements about aliens and monsters, things nicked from video games and films. If you keep shifting ground, you think, they won’t be able to pin you down and no one will be able to touch you. There’s a fat one called Ange who clearly fancies herself as some sort of counsellor, the way she keeps on at you, the way she doesn’t give up. Sometimes you let her think she’s winning. Sometimes you soften your face and make as if you’re going to cry, but it’s never real. You’re always standing outside yourself, watching, laughing at how Ange gets taken in. It’s always only a matter of time before you whirl off into some nonsense or other, leaving her spinning in your wake.

  It’s harsh but the only way to stay sane is to keep yourself to yourself. Stay behind the mental wall. Don’t engage. Don’t look at the other inmates. Don’t get sucked into anyone else’s lies or their shit smearing or their cutting or any of the fighting, kicking and thrashing that sets the alarm system shrieking. Don’t become part of the crises that send the staff thundering up the corridor at night, voices raised with the bluff confidence mixed with adrenaline you grow to hate.

  You spend a lot of time in your room, staring at the walls. You learn where the cracks are, the weaknesses – the places that might crumble and offer you an escape route in the event of a security breach or, say, a nuclear attack. You watch for signs of this or some other disaster. You make notes and tuck them under your mattress where no one else will see. Some days you listen to Radiohead’s ‘Creep’ over and over again on your headphones, the sou
nd turned up as loud as it will go, the lyrics drilling into your brain. It calms you. You prefer it to Kurt Cobain these days. It’s more where you are.

  Twice a day you line up with the rest to take your medication under supervision. It’s a selection of pills – one large as a hockey puck – and a cup of brown liquid.

  ‘You know what they’re doing to us with these, right?’ whispers the girl behind you in the line on the third day. ‘Mind control. Pure and simple. All these drugs.’ She prods you on the arm to emphasise the point. ‘Lithium, right, is what they use to stop coyotes killing sheep. No word of a lie. One dose on a sheep carcass is enough to make a dog so sick he never touches the animals again. Seriously. That’s what they think of us. That’s the kind of shit they’re trying to pull. You should do what I do – tuck it in your cheek and spit it out down the toilet. Don’t let them win.’

  But you’re not interested in making friends and when you get to the drugs table you look her in the eye and down it all in two gulps. Even though you know it’s going to screw with you. Even though you can already feel it shaving off your hard edges and turning the volume down on who you are.

  You don’t hear anything from home. The others get letters and phone calls sometimes, although visitors are rare (having relatives who are both mad and bad seems to be more than most people can take face to face), but there’s never anything for you, not even on your birthday. Especially not then.

  Christmas at the unit is particularly shit: balding tinsel and a plastic tree and value mince pies from the convenience store up the road. You wonder why they bother. All their efforts just make everything seem worse, like make-up over a black eye. It would be better to flip the calendar forward a month and do January twice.

  You know you’re not going to get any presents from outside, but here’s the thing: it still hurts when they go round giving the parcels out on Christmas morning. Some little part of you clearly hasn’t given up hoping it lives in a different world with a family that loves and understands you, despite all the rubbish you’ve been through, despite all the evidence to the contrary. That’s the worst thing about that day – discovering again how fucking stupid you are, that you’re really just a mug no matter how much you try not to care. And no amount of Accessorise crap wrapped up to look like more than it is by the staff can make that better.