by Ann Morgan
The room starts to feel like a friendly place. Someone’s turned some music on – the sort of easy-listening, Magic FM pap you’d have sneered at if Hellie tried to play it in your room at Mother’s house, but you have to admit it’s all right here.
You glance at the clock beside the bar. Half-past three. They’ll be doing afternoon activities at the unit now – group therapy sessions and gardening. You get a pang as you think about hanging around in the kitchen for a cup of tea after an afternoon out in the cold, but you push it from you. The unit’s finished. That’s done. You’re not going back. Now it’s the rest of your life.
You take another sip of your mojito and your stomach grumbles. You realise that you’re hungry and that you didn’t have lunch. That was something you and Ange talked about – the importance of sticking to a routine and making sure you eat at sensible times. Only thing is you weren’t hungry at lunchtime. At the unit, you didn’t have to think about it. Meals just appeared and you ate them or you pushed them round the plate. There was none of this getting organised bollocks. Well, sod it. You want to eat now. You’ll eat now.
You pick up the bar menu and see the words ‘club sandwich’. They make you want to burst out laughing. What you’re imagining is one of those chocolate join-our-Club biscuits – two of them actually – between pieces of buttered bread. You can barely contain yourself it’s so hilarious. You catch the bartender’s eye.
‘A club sandwich, please,’ you say, trying to keep a straight face.
He gives you a weird look but he turns round and bustles off through the swing doors into the kitchen all the same. A clash of pots and pans escapes into the bar, then it’s calm again, with just the music piping on – Whitney Houston’s ‘I Will Always Love You’, so tinny it sounds as though it’s being played on a mouse’s ghettoblaster. You swing your feet. You drum your fingers on the bar. You feel good. You feel good. You feel good.
A note of alarm sounds somewhere faintly at the back of your mind but you shrug it off. All right, so technically you know from the buzzy feeling in your fingers and the way you’re still giggling to yourself over the club sandwich that you’re having one of your slightly up times. You and Ange have talked about this – about what to do when they come, about the breathing exercises and focusing on slowing everything down and about how if they come more and more you should go and see a doctor because there’s more medication that might help you keep it under control. The thing is, though, right now it doesn’t really seem to matter. You’re actually quite enjoying it. You don’t see why it’s such a bad thing. All right, so you know you’re speeded up and everything’s a bit hectic in your head, but if you don’t mind, you don’t see why anyone else should. All it is, is like someone’s pressed the fast-forward button on your life, that’s all. Like someone’s put your brain on a rollercoaster or set your mind to the spin cycle. Sure, you wouldn’t want to be like this all the time, but for now, today, it’s fun. You feel powerful. You feel capable of achieving anything. It’s good. In fact, you suspect the reason why people like Ange are so down on it is because they’re jealous, because they’re scared. They can’t have it so they don’t want you to. They’re frightened of your potential when you’re in this state, like you have access to reserves of energy they can only dream of. Selfish, that’s what they are. Stealers of fun. That’s why you stopped taking the meds a few weeks back, flushing them down the toilet after breakfast: you didn’t want to be controlled by other people’s fear.
A man and woman walk into the bar and sit down at one of the tables across the other side of the room. You stare at them angrily, watching for signs that they are out to contain you, but they just talk between themselves and don’t seem to notice you at all. Good.
The club sandwich comes and you wolf it down, even though it’s crap. You even eat the garnish on the side – the dried-up cucumber and tomato cut to look like a flower. Then you order another drink on room 145. The alcohol streams through you, bearing up the bright boat of your mind on its oily sea. You look at the clock and find it’s suddenly after five. Also, there are other people round about you now that you hadn’t noticed before.
One of them, a middle-aged man in a suit, lumbers up on the stool next to you and gives you a fat grin.
‘Here for the conference?’ he says, inclining his head towards a board rigged up in front of a pair of glass-panelled doors that you hadn’t previously clocked. ‘Boundless possibilities: middle management and the information superhighway’, it reads.
‘Nah,’ you say.
The man nods. ‘Me neither,’ he says. ‘At least, the wife thinks I am, but I’m not if you know what I mean.’
You raise your eyebrows and try to look wise.
‘Drink?’ says the man.
You shrug. Sure, why not. Give poor old 145 a break.
He orders something sour and unpleasant, but you drink it all the same, feeling his gaze running up and down your body as you do. Something about him – the red-rimmed eyes, perhaps, or the way he fumbles with the swizzle stick – tells you that this isn’t his first drink either.
When you put the glass down, he says, ‘OK, cut to the chase. How much?’
For a moment, you think he’s asking you to guess the price of the drink. But just as you open your mouth to answer, another possible interpretation swims up from the depths of your mind. You remember Hailey the girl in the unit; you remember what she used to do before she got caught up with that snuff film. You sit twisting your glass on the bar so that the wet ring at the bottom of it spreads across the wooden surface. An instinct to spit in his face streaks through you, but you rein it in: if you learned anything during your time at the unit it’s that it pays to keep your cards close to your chest. An idea occurs to you.
‘Fifteen hundred,’ you say.
Even buzzed up as you are, you know it is an obscene amount. But he doesn’t flinch. ‘How about for one hour?’ he says.
‘Fifteen hundred,’ you say again, scenting an opportunity.
He gives a low whistle. ‘Classy girl,’ he says. ‘Well, I hope I’ll be getting something extra special for that.’ He looks round. ‘OK then,’ he says. ‘I’ve got a room upstairs – a suite actually – come on.’
In the lift, panic flushes through you briefly as you wonder what special services he has in mind. But you keep your face blank and don’t give anything away. You shoot him a bored look as the doors slide open on the fifth floor, like you do this all the time, like in your mind you’re already finished and on to the next gig.
It turns out you’ve got nothing to worry about: it’s all over in a few puffs and he peels off the money from a wad of fifties in his jacket pocket and hands it over without you asking. He makes you feel a bit stupid actually with how honest he is – you realise you should have got the financials locked in before. Like a real pro. Like in Pretty Woman.
You think about hanging around and helping yourself to some more of the cash, but it seems a bit harsh, so as soon as he starts to snore you straighten your dress, stick the heels on and stalk back out to the lift. When you get to the entrance lobby there’s an argument going on with someone at the front desk. A couple of staff members are staring blankly at a computer screen as a man with a cricket jumper slung over his shoulders gesticulates in rage.
‘But I never ordered a club sandwich!’ he says as you walk by.
You keep on going, out on to the marble steps. The doorman gives you a smile and suddenly you’re in the street again and it’s dark, but the lights are so bright that for a moment it seems like the sky has come down to meet the earth and you are walking among the stars. You stroll down the high street, looking that way and this: McDonald’s, HMV, W. H. Smith, Mothercare, Radio Rentals. It’s all here. So much life. So much possibility. In the face of it, the halfway house is just a speck; one dot among a hundred billion. A green glow appears up ahead, a big glass wall: the bus station. Coaches lined up with all sorts of promises written on them ‘Glasgow’, ‘Plymou
th’, ‘Southampton’. You wander in and stroll along their ranks. At random, you stop by one and look up. ‘London’ it proclaims. In a second you’re inside and handing over a fifty to the driver. He raises his eyebrows and makes a show of grubbing around his cashbox for change, but the dress keeps him quiet and he doesn’t say a word.
You go and sit down on one of the red-and-purple-patterned seats, drumming your fingers on the seal along the edge of the window to make the seconds pass. Other people get on and choose their places but you don’t look at them. They’re not in this story. You’re writing it and you’ve decided the characters in advance. You have control. It feels good.
It’s only when the coach rumbles into life and the backdrop of the bus station slides away that you remember you left the bag in the toilet cubicle at the hotel. The knowledge sinks into you like a rag in a dirty pond, leaving no impression. You shrug. You don’t care: it already belongs to someone else.
41
The hinges groaned as she turned the key and pushed her way in. She walked through to the living room and stood in the middle of the space looking around: armchair, scarred table, battered gas fire. Its bareness was shocking. It seemed smaller too, as though without her it had shrunk, like the skin on the bones of the dead fox she’d discovered in the park as a child.
She put her hand in her coat pocket and felt the handful of notes there – the remains of the contents of Hellie’s bag. The old impulse to go to the corner shop for vodka flamed briefly and guttered. It seemed threadbare, not enough to lose herself in any more, not enough to blot out the image of Nick’s face as it had been that morning. She slumped, defeated, into the armchair. Something crackled beneath her. Reaching down the side of the cushion, she pulled out the envelope addressed to Helen Sallis in Hellie’s rounded scrawl.
She stared at it. The blandness of the writing was maddening – people pleasing, crafted for top marks, contrived. It was the way Hellie had been from the beginning, or from the start of everything that mattered at least. It was her game plan spelled out. And yet Mother, Akela and now Nick thought Smudge was the one scheming and plotting. They thought that she, this mess, was the one setting out to do people harm.
In a gust of rage, Smudge snatched up the envelope and slit its guts. Scraps of paper slewed out on to the carpet. For a moment she stared down at them confused: receipts mingled with architectural plans and pages of TV scripts. She bent down and picked up an old shopping list. Milk, bread, nappies, aubergines.
Puzzled, she turned the paper over. A cold thrill passed through her. Written from edge to edge, the back of the list was covered in a jagged, savage little hand; a hand that had scrambled its way across sheet after sheet, stabbing holes and ripping slashes where ‘i’s had to be dotted and ‘t’s crossed; a hand that had scrawled arrows and squiggled stars and contrived a baffling system of numbers and letters to show how the chunks of text were linked. It filled the back of every last scrap: urgent, surging, running on. It tripped over itself in its eagerness to express as biro after biro sputtered and gave out. It demanded to be read and defied decoding. It was as familiar as it was strange. It was as unmistakable as it was illegible. And its manic style had a meaning all of its own.
42
You take a room above a drycleaner’s just off the Edgware Road. If anyone asks, you say your name is Veronica – you don’t know why, you just like how improbable it is. It cracks you up seeing people struggle to fit such a knick-knacks and pot-pourri name to you, a hard-faced girl with MONSTER tattooed on her head. It makes you sound like that woman in the BBC sitcom, the one who’s always answering the phone in a poncy voice and singing at the frightened neighbour.
Mostly, though, no one does ask. The people in the lodging house don’t hang around. Almost every morning there’s the sound of bags and boxes being dragged up or down the staircase, gouging the Anaglypta on the walls. Sometimes in the middle of the night too. Most of them are foreign, from what you can make out – people far from home, on the way to elsewhere. This place is just a stop on a long journey for them. Ask them about it next week and they won’t remember a thing.
The furniture is like that too: battered and scratched with handles snapped off and broken drawers. It’s crap chucked together any-old-how, all its goodness long since used up. Once, a child used to keep her toys in the little white cupboard in the corner with transfer stickers of fairies on its door. Now, the cabinet groans under the weight of clothes and bags that are too big for it. Tinkerbell is scuffed blind.
You go out when you want to, walk around the streets. You map London one footstep at a time: the Houses of Parliament, Oxford Street, Piccadilly Circus, Trafalgar Square. Sometimes you go into galleries and museums and spend afternoons in the reverent hush, drifting from one display to the next. You stare at paintings and follow the lines, unpicking the thinking of the maniacs who obsessed over putting them together centuries ago. You spot the flaws – the sea that looks like fixed resin rather than sloshing liquid, the hand fumbled. A lot of them, you realise, are rubbish. Confidence tricks thrown together to take people in, stuff any idiot could do. But now and then something leaps out and shocks you with the purity, the brilliance, of what it is. In particular, there’s this painting in the National Gallery of just a table with some fruit on it in front of a window open to a landscape outside. Anyone else would have homed in on the landscape, but this artist doesn’t do that. He leaves it there, suggested with a few rough brushstrokes, and instead focuses on the fruit and the crumby plate left by someone who has just pushed their chair back and gone out of the room. But even so the way the light glints on the grapes and the plum lets you know it’s morning and makes you feel the breeze blowing in at the window, bringing with it birdsong and the whisper of the sea. You stand looking at that painting for hours, right until they put an announcement out on the Tannoy saying the gallery is closing in fifteen minutes. And when you have to be guided away, muttering, by a security guard, the image stays etched on your mind. It’s the simplicity of it. That’s what gets you – how obvious and yet how right the artist’s technique is. By focusing on something off to the side of what really matters, he manages to bring out things he could never paint. He knows the truth is round the edges, in the things you never look straight in the face.
When you need money, you put the dress on and go and hang around in hotel bars. You charge much less than you did that first, giddy time – you quickly get wise to your market value – but you still make plenty. You forget the men as soon as their room doors shut behind you. They blend into one faceless figure – interchangeable, unremarkable, all the same. No one is special, you learn. Not underneath it all. When you strip reality down to its boxer shorts, people are boring and predictable.
You don’t trust the lodging house – the lock on your door gives under the slightest pressure – so you rip a hole in the lining of an anorak you find in a skip and stuff the proceeds in there. You reckon there’s probably less chance of you leaving it somewhere in one of your times than there is of someone coming in and going through your room when you’re out. Not that it matters much either way: if you need more cash you’ll just go out and make some more.
Some days, you don’t get out of bed. You lie under the frayed counterpane as the beam of light that comes through the gap in the curtains makes its way around the room, listening to traffic outside: the car horns, the farts of buses, the sirens that rake the air. You know once the noise reaches a certain pitch and the light hits the chest of drawers that the day is lost, that you’ll stay there until the sounds ebb away and the city empties of life, and sleep creeps out of the orange shadows of the night to drag you away.
But there are times when energy prickles in your fingertips and you feel your brain gathering speed, picking up momentum like a bicycle barrelling down a hill. Those are the moments when your mind flits to pages of blank paper and you find yourself thinking of trips to the art shop you spotted in a side street a couple of streets away. Those are the
occasions when images invade your brain and your hand fidgets with the urge to get them down. A couple of times you think about giving in, about letting yourself run riot with shapes and colours. It would feel, you think, like nicotine to a smoker or alcohol to someone addicted to booze. But you always stop yourself before it’s too late. You draw the line at drawing a line. Because you are not here – that’s the truth of it. None of this is real. You don’t exist and so nothing can touch you – not the past, not the future, not any of the men who pay to arch and twist above you. You are out of it all – floating in a blind, white mist rolling in off a boundless sea. You are immune. And you prove that to yourself every day by refusing to leave a mark.
43
(2) I was thinking about that time in the park the time we were riding down the hill on the park you were riding down I was riding down was it you or was it me I get confused sometimes do you get that? a Dad was there. Father. b I’ll call him Dad. c Father was telling us about free-wheeling, putting your foot on the pedals and just coasting with the hill but the way he was explaining it was so chaotic so full of other things that it was hard to follow. It made no sense to little-girl brains. So you didn’t get it I didn’t get it d So there we were you riding down me riding down one of us maybe both (except it couldn’t be both because one was watching, I have the pictures from one watching head) little legs going faster and faster round and round grass the air squinting against the sun the hill tilting away and suddenly… airborne… flying like a kite… the trees… before the bump and scrape of the ground. And then the other one running – HERE’S WHAT I REMEMBER MOST, I JUST DON’T REMEMBER WHO – getting there before Father-Dad. Little arms going round shuddering sobs. All right. All right. It’s going to be all right. Love. That’s the point. Love. I should write a poem about it I could write a poem about it if the words didn’t come so fast I would write a poem about it. All I can do is hold on to the handlebars and see where it will take me next. It’s tiring but it’s a fantastic ride like cycling among the stars like swinging by the moon. You understand, don’t you? What was I saying?