A Heart in Two Cities

by Angela Peach

  She hadn’t seen me. She would see me soon enough but she didn’t then and, in my head, I screamed for her to notice me because if she saw me, then I was real.

  I would never be real.

  I feel like I am a figment of someone else’s imagination but I’m real! I have feelings! My heart beats and breaks like everybody else’s!

  My Helena. My Helena! She can make me real.

  I’m thrown out of the cab, my smile becoming a frown and there it is. That tiny voice telling me I am wrong, that everything I have hoped for has gone and I am going to be shut into a corner and kicked to death.

  It’s not possible. I have shown Nikki I am a force to be reckoned with, even though I am soft. She doesn’t have the power to kill me, just as I cannot kill her.

  When you lose someone that you hate, you find a strange connection between push and shove. You need and you don’t need. You love and you hate. I hated Nikki but I had learned that I loved her, too. When I felt the push of her, I shoved back and when I shoved, she pushed.

  We were a symmetry neither understood.

  I welcomed the icy, wet rain on my face, back to the cold I was used to. I am a creature of habit and I hadn’t liked being away from my flat. It was the four walls I felt safe in. The safety of four walls is often underestimated but not me, I knew where I couldn’t be hurt.

  I pushed the front door to the building, my rucksack catching as the door swung shut behind me.

  “Fuck sake,” I muttered, shifting my shoulder to unsnag it and I walked to Freya’s door, trying to hide a smile as I knocked.

  I remembered the night I had stood there with four cans of lager in my hand, Ethel so pleased that I had finally agreed to have dinner with my attractive Norwegian neighbour, and that same shiver of excitement ran through me, fireworks of memory. I felt myself waiting.

  And waiting…

  And then the smile faded because I knew my feeling that things were wrong were more than just a feeling. I began to bang my fists on Freya’s door, all the while thinking, ‘No, Nikki wouldn’t come here. She wouldn’t leave her comfort zone.’

  Would she?

  Would I leave the safety of my four walls?

  “Fuck!” I shouted, running up the stairs, shrugging off my rucksack, finding my door ajar. I stopped. What had she done? Could she have hurt Freya?

  Could she?

  Could I have hurt Ness?

  It was like talking to a mirror, I realised, my heart sinking with all the fear I could feel. And that was a lot of fear. Every fear was in opening my door, not knowing what I might see.

  How can I go on? I have no choice, like everybody else. I go on because I am real. Because every emotion inside of me is as real as the next person’s and my loves and hates are just as powerful as the next woman’s. Every time my heart beats, someone else’s heart beats somewhere else.

  And as I push open the door to my flat, the four walls that have held me together for so long, through every heartache and anguish anyone could imagine, find me.

  I can hear Joy Division on the radio with Ian Curtis telling me that “Love will tear us apart again”.

  I step forward, every second in slow motion, as the door edges back revealing the scene in my safe haven.

  There is no scream left in me.

  My eyes fall straight in front of me to my bed where my nemesis lies, her fucking killer blue eyes tightly shut, a smug smile on her sleeping face. Nikki is lying next to Freya, my Freya. Why is my Freya in a bed next to Nikki?

  I feel a heartbeat begin to choke in my throat.

  And then I turn my head to the left and see Helena lying on my wooden floors, a stagnant pool of dark, red blood that has made its way from her stomach surrounding her.

  I don’t even realise I am crying as I run to her, throwing myself to my knees, my jeans soaking in the blood as I skid towards her.

  “No! No, baby! No!” I scream, in my tears and in my broken heart and with every single fear alive.

  Helena is lying still, staring at my ceiling. But her face has been bashed in, the bruises long set. I hold her once pretty face in my hands, kissing her, to bring her back to life.

  Like the cold of Scottish rain, I know the cold of her blood and I whimper as I cradle her. My poor baby is dead. How could this have happened? Why would she be here?

  I laid her head back on the floor, closing her eyes, droplets of my tears wetting her face. I’d never see her smile again. I’d never feel the joy from that cheeky wink she’d give me. Her warm arms would never find their way around me.

  But more than that, I lost the hope for a future. A future where we might have been together and lived happily ever after with the dead child in her stomach. I could have loved that baby. I could have loved Helena forever. We could have been a family.

  I could’ve, I could’ve…I turned my head and only then did I notice the tiny cut on Freya’s head. Freya, who was in bed with Nikki.

  Nothing was making sense. I felt the hysteria build in my chest as I began to hum, standing up from Helena not knowing what I should do or where I should be or what I should be feeling. Helena was dead and there was nothing I could do to save her. There was no forward wind for our love to sail us forward.

  But Freya? We might’ve had a chance.

  If I want to hate Nikki, I have to love Nikki, I have to feel Nikki.

  I took the deep breaths I needed to calm the horror of anxiety that might overtake me.

  Please let me have four safe walls!

  I am Nikki. What am I going to do? I’ve seen Ness in blood and I’ve known I could’ve been ended. I’m Nikki, what do I do?

  I do what I would do because I am Nikki. I’d get on a plane and I’d kill the thing I loved the most — Helena — and then I’d try to fuck up whatever love I might’ve had with Freya.

  My feet had worked their way to Freya’s side of the bed. I put my fingers to her neck, feeling the beat of blood pulsing through her. I had to save her, so I got my hands under her armpits and I dragged her, not caring about the bruises she might have as I bounced her down the stairs to her flat. Away from us, she was safe.

  Her keys had been lying in a pile where her clothes were and I had managed to get everything back into Freya’s flat without anyone noticing. I had lain her on top of her bed, kissing her, knowing she would wake up soon, never knowing I had been back and hoping it stayed that way.

  I went back to my flat, closing the door and locking it from the inside. I looked again at Helena. I had fallen in love with her as a child really and now, as an adult, I didn’t love her any less but I didn’t love her any more.

  Love was a constant that I had no control over.

  It didn’t stop my heart from breaking. A love lost will always bring a heart to breaking point. It’s how you cope that determines the outcome of your love.

  There was a naked woman in my bed and her name was Nikki.

  There was a naked woman in my bed and her name was Nick.

  Who would kill who?

  I had to kill Nikki because she killed Helena because I killed Ness. And if Helena was dead, I had to die. It was clear and unclear.

  The difference is that there is no difference.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  The corridors shone white, the brilliant walls and ceilings interrupted only by a stray streak of sunshine that dared puncture the sterility with heat. A faint clip-clop could be heard in the distance, growing louder as the seconds ticked by, introducing footsteps marching in tandem to a destination marked as ‘Number Forty-Seven’ on a door. The footsteps ceased and silence crept in once more but in these corridors of brilliant white, a silence never lasted for long.

  There was a man, a doctor, obvious in his white lab coat and clipboard. His thick glasses lay heavy on the bridge of his nose and every night when he got in bed, finally removing them, he’d have a dent where they had sat. But he didn’t care. His nose was the least of his worries.

  He tapped his clipboard with his pen, get
ting the attention of his students as planned, before clearing his throat to speak.

  “This here is Nicola X,” he said, pointing his favourite pen at number forty-seven’s door. “Who can tell me about her?” he asked the eager to impress students of psychiatry.

  Every one of the six raised their hands in the air, desperate to show their superior how much they had learned.

  Dr Hunter pushed his glasses up his nose to focus and chose Tina because she looked like his ex-wife, when she was younger and thinner and still loved him. He blinked, seeing a softness in her lips that reminded him of days gone when his wife would have let him kiss her.

  “You,” he said, gruffly.

  “Patient’s name is Nicola X. She was admitted approximately eleven months ago following a complete mental breakdown. Currently she exhibits the symptoms of multiple personality disorder with bipolar disorder and a bit of anxiety thrown in for good measure,” Tina reeled off, proud of her extensive knowledge of the patient.

  Dr Hunter nodded. “Tell me about her alternate personalities.” Maybe he would ask Tina out for a drink.

  Tina smiled up at Dr Hunter. She was twenty-four and in awe of the older man showing her favouritism. These tight tops had worked to her advantage, she thought, making her degree irrelevant. They looked at her chest before they looked at her accomplishments.

  “When Nicola was admitted, she was exhibiting signs of an alternative personality that did not fit with the description from her mother. Nicola was insistent her name was Nick. She spoke this in a thick, Scottish accent, despite having lived here in Birmingham her entire life. She claimed at that point that Nick was being terrorised but wouldn’t go into details about this.

  The following day, when I spoke to her, she said (this time in an American accent) that her name was Nikki and she had no idea why she was here, that she had a painting to finish and a date that she’d like to make and could she please be let out. She was pleasant, non-obstructive and seemingly had no knowledge of prior events leading to her hospitalisation.”

  “Very good, Tina,” Dr Hunter smiled. He was definitely going to ask her out.

  *** *** ***

  They tell me my name is Nicola. They tell me lots of things but they don’t know the whole story. They only ever see a third.

  I am Nicola and I am Nikki and I am Nick. And I will tell you why.

  When I was a little girl, I lived with my mother and father and I did everything that normal little girls do, except I knew I wasn’t a normal little girl because I had friends that no-one else could see or hear.

  These friends would whisper to me, like an angel and devil on each shoulder, as I would nod and listen to them.

  As I grew older, the voices grew quieter and I knew then that my friends had left me. Teenagers are not known for their patience and I was no different. I had plenty of real friends, who would come to my bedroom and listen to music. My best friend was called Nina and she would bring her David Bowie and the Flaming Lips albums to my house, with a bag of crisps for us to share. We would laugh, lying back on my bed listening to our favourite songs over and over again. Nina told me that she wanted to drive a motorbike across the sandy, desert roads of Oklahoma, feeling the heat on her leather-clad legs as the engine drowned out all other sounds.

  “Why?” I asked, thinking how pretty her face was. I could’ve lifted a pencil to sketch her if I’d had the courage then to ask.

  Nina felt like a guiding light across the desert of my life then, her bravery and strength finding an envy inside me that made my heart tremble with jealousy. I wanted what Nina had: that carefree life, that ability to throw off worries, the freedom to be who I wanted to be.

  I knew I’d never have that. I could hear the bells tolling in my ears, ringing like memories. I would never have it unless I…unless I…split myself.

  I could be happy. I could be successful.

  I could be sad. I could be unrealised.

  I could experience every emotion and yet none could touch me.

  I could hold a pencil in my hand and draw the face of the woman I loved, if I could take my heart and understand that there would be more than one woman in it.

  I began to laugh. If only I could take a woman and she could realise I had more than one heart. How to tell?

  Nina took my hand, and in taking my hand, she touched me right through to my heart. A touch can carry weight when it’s beginning is anchored in love.

  Her eyes were all I needed to fall in love. Isn’t that how you fall in love? By staring at the monster who has possessed you? Every lover is a monster out there to take control of your love. And the only difference between you and me is that I know the monsters who are inside me. I can see them and love them.

  But more than that, I let them live.

  My girl, Nina, she would stand and wait for my arms to envelope her. She came to me with her arms open and invited me in. For months, we were as happy as two women together can be until the problems found a way in.

  When Nina turned her arms from me, I turned my mind from her because I don’t understand how to love someone with all of my mind. But part of my mind? I can do that.

  Nina didn’t stay. I looked at my face in the mirror, seeing the pain I was left with and knew I needed another love.

  I needed love.

  Here in my mind I felt love tear me apart. I shut it down and I opened it back up. A mind inside a head is all about the thoughts and dreams and memories. I made them all for Nikki and for Nick.

  There came a day when I could not bear the pain of being without Nina anymore. I had taken a razor blade to my thigh and watched as the blood had run down my leg, feeling nothing.

  I had to make myself feel something but my heart was dead. Without Nina, I was nothing, I felt nothing.

  Nina. Malena. Helena.

  Love unsure. Love. Love gone. Love come back.

  From Nina, a woman I had grown to love, were women in my head growing for me to make love. I was seeing that I could have Nina in so many different ways.

  I could meet her as the love of my life, after a succession of relationships, where I would have to find myself through briefly loving others. You have to know love to know when it is real and large.

  I could love her as a child, through my teens into the life I had now, where years were magic numbers that I had to imagine in my mind.

  I had to imagine it all in my mind.

  My mind is a world where families could grow, loves could be found and dreams could be realised.

  As soon as I shut my eyes, it was all there.

  *** *** ***

  Dr Hunter smiled at Tina before her spoke. “Have you been talking to it?”

  Tina felt her smile falter as she heard her patient referred to as “it”. She had grown attached to Nicola X, from weeks of trying to interact and her silent observation.

  “Nicola is a highly intelligent individual. She’s just traumatised. I believe if we can remove or reduce the trauma, her fractured mind will gather itself, adjust and like a jigsaw will piece itself together,” Tina said.

  Dr Hunter chuckled and Tina saw then the arrogance in his gritted smile. He was a man who had never been happy around women, a man who used his fragile power to get the upper hand because he was a scared little boy beyond the title he hid behind.

  “And how will it piece itself together?” Dr Hunter asked.

  “With love,” Tina said, quietly, hating herself for speak the truth and loving herself for being able to.

  Dr Hunter looked at Tina, his eyes lingering a moment longer on her chest than they should have. “Would you like to come out tonight for a drink with me?” he smiled.

  Tina smiled back, playing the game of medical politics, answering, “I’m sorry. I have a date tonight.”

  She found a perverse pleasure in seeing Dr Hunter’s face fall when he had been so sure of her agreeing.

  “Of course,” he said, regally, sweeping his hand across his clipboard, like Tina meant nothing. Bec
ause, to him, she really did mean nothing.

  Tina smiled.

  *** *** ***

  The moon was full and bright. White and large and speaking hope in its purity. The light it gave off guided the footsteps of those who trod in the dark of corridors that blinked white when the sun had its time.

  There was the rattle of fake lights, a poor man’s path to an enlightenment that would never come. You could smell the disappointment as you walked the corridors in the hospital, rooms separated by nothing more than bricks that made up walls.

  There was no competition to the bricks inside the minds of patients that made walls no man could penetrate.

  No man.

  But maybe a woman?

  Tina crept along the corridors she knew so well, having done so every night for months, watching her step as she tip-toed her dance to the paths that seemed so loud during the day. How could darkness quieten her feet?

  In the black of night, is the only sound that a lover hears the beat of their heart’s desire?

  At the door of ‘Number Forty-Seven’, Tina stopped her steps, looking left and right, before she slipped her key in the lock of the door.

  As she shut the door behind her to watch Nicola X, she was ignored. Nicola X ignored her because she was in her world. A world that Tina didn’t yet fit into.

  Tina whispered, “Nicola, it’s me,” as she sat down at the end of Nicola’s bed. Tina sat here every night and Nicola ignored her every night but Tina was confident her persistence would win through.

  Nicola sat on her bed, staring, talking to someone who wasn’t there.

  Tina held her hand. She could wait. Anything good in life was worth waiting for. Tina knew she shouldn’t feel connected to a patient but there was something different here, a movement, a turn of the head from Nicola that had hit her in her guts.

  Where does love begin and end?

  Is it the drop of an eyebrow or a harsh word spoken in defence? Who knows the magic unless you are a magician, a skilled manipulator of a heart that can contain a tiny bit of love, waiting to find the one who will ignite you?

  A magician or a doctor who has studied for months to find the specimen for their thesis and who has crept in during the quiet nights to sit with a patient no one else could engage with.