The Mirror World of Melody Black

by Gavin Extence

  From: miranda@mirandafrostpoetry.co.uk

  Date: Sun, 2 Jun 2013, 11:03 AM

  Subject: (No Subject)

  Bravo, Miss Williams

  My editor tells me that I’m currently number one on Amazon’s poetry bestsellers list (another oxymoron I’m sure you’ll appreciate). We’re in danger of hitting five figures. I think I may have underestimated you. Turns out the cliché is true: any publicity is good publicity. Who’d have thought it?

  I trust your career is likewise flourishing.

  MF

  P.S. Do you like cats?

  I stared at the email for about ten minutes, as if it were a cryptic crossword clue, then hit reply.

  To: miranda@mirandafrostpoetry.co.uk

  From: abbywilliams1847@hotmail.co.uk

  Date: Mon, 3 Jun 2013, 2:40 PM

  Subject: RE: (No Subject)

  I like cats very much. They’re much easier than people.

  AW

  It took me a long time to write this because my mind felt like it was full of treacle. But after rereading the message three times, I was at least satisfied that I’d written two coherent sentences.

  Jess’s email was more complicated still.

  To: abbywilliams1847@hotmail.co.uk

  From: jessica.pearle@observer.co.uk

  Date: Mon, 3 Jun 2013, 10:13 AM

  Subject: More, please!

  Abby

  I’ll get straight to the point. Have you been looking at the online responses to your articles? We’ve had several hundred, with more coming in all the time. If you haven’t looked, just be warned: a fair proportion of them are hostile. But I’m sure you’ll appreciate the bigger picture. A lot of people are reading you.

  So how about a follow-up? Any ideas? Something on a related topic would be ideal, but don’t feel constrained. We can give you a lot of freedom on the subject matter: life, death, sex, general cultural commentary – you name it. Very keen for you to write something else for us, though. There could even be a regular column in this.

  Let me know.

  Jess

  I supposed this was good news. It was hard to tell because I didn’t have any emotions at the moment. People talk about dark moods, black moods, all the time. But depression isn’t a dark mood. It’s an ash-grey mood, or possibly some type of beige.

  There was too much information to process in Jess’s email. I didn’t reply at once. I opened a new tab, found the Simon article and started reading through some of the comments.

  TheodoraEdison: Is this for real? It reads like fiction. Another frustrated wannabe writer?

  EastofJava: Hate it. HATE it. What’s the world coming to?

  0100011101000101: @ EastofJava: Totally agree. I hate this so much I had to read it twice. Can’t believe it.

  JamesWoliphaunt: This comment was removed by a moderator because it didn’t abide by our community standards.

  Doctoroctopussy: Did anyone else find the part where she smoked the dead guy’s cigarettes ever so slightly sexy?

  ExistentialSam: What’s the point of this?

  I stopped reading. At least Doctoroctopussy found some merit in my work. He was clearly a pervert, but, right then, I was willing to take whatever praise I was given.

  I reopened my email and concentrated very hard.

  To: jessica.pearle@observer.co.uk

  From: abbywilliams1847@hotmail.co.uk

  Date: Mon, 3 June 2013, 2:58 PM

  Subject: RE: More, please!

  Hello Jess

  I may have a follow-up. It’s about monkeys. Actually, the monkeys are incidental. It’s about how we’re not designed to live in cities. Give me a few days.

  Abby

  It seemed a reasonable response.

  I finished my cake without really tasting it, then went back to the Co-op to buy more cottage cheese.

  I felt watched again, all the way home. I knew it was just paranoia, the fact that my brain was not working properly, but knowing this didn’t change a thing. I still felt watched.

  I plugged myself into my iPod, listened to some Tori Amos and tried to block out most of the external world.

  It didn’t work.

  When I got back to our building, I was as tense as a tightrope. I hadn’t been back to the launderette yet; I wanted to drop my laptop back home first so that I had less to carry.

  I knew something was off as soon as I stepped in from the street. There was a draught carrying voices down the stairwell, but I couldn’t make out what was being said. I removed my earphones, waited for a few indecisive moments, then crept up the stairs.

  Simon’s door was open. In the gloom of his hallway I could see two men and a woman.

  ‘. . . you come this way, we have a modern, open-plan living area. Very low maintenance. Ideal for . . .’

  The man stopped speaking and looked at me. I stood staring, just outside the door. He was wearing a suit, despite the fact it was a hot, muggy day. The other man and the woman were casually dressed, in a T-shirt and shorts and a skirt and a camisole respectively.

  ‘Hello,’ I said. It was only the second time I’d spoken that day. My voice was as flat as a pancake.

  ‘Hello?’ the suited man repeated. He said it like a question.

  I looked at the woman. ‘Are you moving in?’

  ‘Er, just looking at the moment. Do you live here?’

  ‘Yes, next door.’

  ‘Oh, how nice. We might be neighbours.’ She giggled nervously.

  ‘We might be.’ I couldn’t think of any other response.

  There was a silence.

  The estate agent cleared his throat. ‘Erm, was there something you wanted?’

  ‘No. I just saw the door was open and . . .’ I tried to think how to end this sentence. The estate agent stared at me. ‘I guess I was a little creeped out. I was the one who found the body.’

  ‘The . . . body?’ This was the other man. I noticed the woman had taken hold of his hand.

  I didn’t really want to continue this conversation, but there wasn’t much choice.

  ‘Simon,’ I explained. ‘The guy who used to live here. He died.’ I gestured at the interior doorway that the estate agent was standing in. ‘Through there.’

  ‘That’s . . .’ The man looked at his wife. I assumed it was his wife. She looked like a wife. ‘Actually, I don’t know what that is.’

  ‘No, me neither.’

  The estate agent shot me a look that I couldn’t decipher.

  ‘I’d better go,’ I said. ‘I have some laundry to collect.’

  Back in my flat, I put my laptop down, then pressed my ear to the front door and waited for them to leave. I waited another five minutes after I’d heard their footsteps descending the stairs, just to be sure, then went back to the launderette.

  When I returned to the flat for the final time, I saw that a note had been pushed under the door.

  YOU NEED HELP

  I reread it a couple of times, then folded it and put it in my purse, next to Beck’s note from earlier.

  After that, I lit a cigarette and sat down in the spotless living area. I listened to Johnny Cash’s cover of ‘Hurt’ on loop while reading some more of my online hate mail. I must have listened to it six or seven times. I knew I was self-flagellating, but I couldn’t help it. I wanted to stop and pick up the phone and call Dr Barbara. That would have been the sensible thing to do. But I couldn’t face it. I couldn’t face any more talking.

  I smoked another cigarette and closed my eyes and waited for the evening to come.

  8

  SKYPE

  Fran Skyped me that evening. If it had been left to me, I wouldn’t have answered. I’d already switched my mobile to silent, as soon as Beck got home, and had no intention of talking to anyone else. It was hard enough as it was, trying to act normal. But I’d decided, earlier, that Beck didn’t need to know how awful I was feeling. After all, it was mostly my own fault – I’d engineered this situation – and it wasn’t as if either o
f us could do anything to make it better. This slump, I knew, was purely chemical in its origin, and if I ate enough cottage cheese it would pass. Of course, Beck realized that I wasn’t one hundred per cent, but I’d managed to imply that this was largely a matter of overtiredness. If I seemed distant, that was the reason.

  The water pressure had returned, so I’d had a long, burning-hot shower, thinking this might help me.

  It hadn’t.

  I was drying my hair in the bedroom when Beck came in and told me that Fran wanted to talk to me. If I’d been more quick-witted, I’d have refused – said I was just about to go to sleep or something. But I was caught off guard, and instead found myself waiting dumbly while Beck brought the laptop through.

  Francesca was in her kitchen. From what I could make out of the background, she might have been standing in her kitchen. But I didn’t bother to ask if or why this was the case. Probably another trick she’d learned at work, projecting a strong self-image or some such bullshit. You could bet that Fran’s work was full of people who habitually stood up for Skype calls.

  ‘I was checking my email and I saw that you were online,’ she told me.

  ‘I wasn’t online,’ I replied. ‘I forgot to turn my laptop off.’ My voice was still devoid of emotion, but I think Fran interpreted this as hostility.

  ‘You’re busy?’

  ‘No.’ I couldn’t lie. I didn’t have the brainpower. ‘I’m just not really up to this right now.’

  ‘Up to what? Abby, it’s a conversation with your sister, not armed combat.’

  I shrugged in an attempt to show that I didn’t see the distinction.

  ‘Could you at least adjust your screen? I can only see half your face.’

  I had no idea why this was important to Fran – it seemed a very trivial detail – but I wasn’t going to make a fuss about it. I tilted the screen. ‘Better?’

  ‘Much. Now listen: I want to apologize.’ Fran was the only person I knew who could make an apology sound like a rebuke. ‘We need to clear the air.’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘Okay? As in . . . ?’

  ‘I accept your apology.’

  I thought this would be the quickest way to end the conversation, but Fran kept staring at me in a way that told me things weren’t going to be that easy.

  ‘What?’ I asked.

  ‘I don’t feel good about what happened, believe me.’

  ‘I do believe you.’

  ‘It was just terrible timing.’

  ‘Yes. I know. It was terrible timing and it wasn’t your fault.’

  ‘Abby, don’t.’

  ‘Don’t what?’

  ‘The passive-aggressive routine. Let’s just skip it.’

  ‘I’ve accepted your apology. What else do you want from me?’

  ‘I want you to talk to me. Shout at me. Anything. You can’t just say you accept my apology. It doesn’t mean anything.’

  I thought this was pretty typical of Fran, wanting to dictate the terms by which I could accept her apology – the terms by which I was permitted to be upset with her.

  ‘I don’t need to shout,’ I told her. ‘I’m fine. I’m over it.’

  ‘Oh, please! You’re clearly not fine. You’re still angry about what happened.’

  ‘I’m not angry. I’m . . .’

  ‘What?’

  Hollow, depleted, empty.

  ‘What are you?’

  ‘Nothing. I’m nothing.’

  ‘Abby, please. Can we at least try to sort this out like adults?’

  I didn’t know how to reply to this. Fran started to say something else but I wasn’t really listening. A thought had occurred to me.

  ‘Have you spoken to Daddy?’ I asked.

  There was a small hesitation, one that probably had nothing to do with the fact I’d cut her off mid-sentence.

  ‘Daddy? No. I wanted to speak to you first.’

  ‘You haven’t spoken to him at all?’

  ‘Well, we’ve messaged each other, but, no, we haven’t actually spoken spoken.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘Oh, what?’

  ‘Oh. Just oh.’

  ‘Listen, I know what you’re thinking, but Daddy and I have plenty of conversations that are not about—’

  I realized there was no point going on with this any longer. But, equally, I had no idea what I could say to make Fran stop talking.

  I hung up.

  Then I shut down my laptop and put it on the floor next to the bed.

  Several minutes passed. I lay perfectly still, with my eyes closed, waiting to see if the landline would ring and wondering what I should do if it did. But, thankfully, there was nothing. Just the ongoing groan and hiss of the traffic below, like someone’s damning judgement on a piece of third-rate theatre.

  I tried to work out if Fran was right, if I was still angry with her. I suppose there must have been some ember of resentment, buried deep, but, right now, it seemed a very small and insignificant thing, lacking any particular colour or shape. And it wasn’t as if any of Fran’s actions over the past few days had come as a surprise. The plain truth was that she had her own life – a busy, successful life – and I was not a major part of it. Little more than an afterthought, really. So why should I feel let down?

  It seemed almost unthinkable now, as if I must be misremembering, but I knew for a fact that Fran and I were close once. When I was thirteen and she was seventeen, she was everything I wanted an older sister to be. She guided me through my first boyfriend drama. She showed me how to get my make-up right, at an age when all the other girls in my class looked as if theirs had been fired on with a cannon. She looked after me when I was at my gloomiest – always had time to listen.

  Then when she was about to leave for university, in the summer just after the divorce, I remember her telling me that things really wouldn’t be all that different. She’d only be a phone call away. And if necessary, she could hop on a train and be back in London within an hour.

  I only took her up on the second offer once, aged fifteen, when I phoned her in floods of tears to tell her that I’d managed to lose my virginity at a friend’s drunken house party. She turned up that afternoon with a morning-after pill, and to this day our parents haven’t found out about it. Fran didn’t even lecture me; she just took me for a long walk in Regent’s Park and made me promise never ever to do anything that stupid again.

  It was a promise I’d been struggling to keep ever since, and that was a big part of the problem, I supposed. In my late teens, my sister was more able to forgive my various failings: the recklessness, the irresponsibility, the lack of direction, the mood swings, my absolute refusal to speak to our father. And yes, I could be selfish and attention-seeking and narcissistic – but I was an adolescent; this wasn’t exactly uncharted territory.

  It was only a few years later, when I was in my early twenties and still ‘acting up’, that the rift between Fran and me had turned into a chasm. She no longer had the time to deal with the never-ending melodrama of my emotional life. She didn’t understand why I still behaved more like a child than an adult half the time, why I could never hold down a job for more than a few months, was permanently in debt, went from bad relationship to bad relationship, acted in a way that was so patently self-destructive. Even after my diagnosis, she found it difficult to accept that there might be some element of this that was beyond my control. She thought I should just snap out of it; she even told me once that it wasn’t fair of me to sabotage my own life in this way, not when there were so many people in the world living in poverty, all of whom would kill to have the opportunities I was born into. But, then, Fran was never someone who was likely to understand her little sister’s mood disorder. In terms of her own mental health, she was the equivalent of the person who has never caught a cold. Actually, she was like that with her physical health, too. I was fairly sure that Fran had never in her life taken a sick day.

  So I had no intention of trying to explain to her how I
was feeling right now. It would be like trying to explain colour to someone born blind. About the best I could say for Fran was that now, unlike five years ago, she at least accepted that I experienced feelings she did not, that lay outside her emotional range. On occasion, she had even managed to identify such feelings in me, painstakingly, like someone trying to read music for the very first time. But not today, obviously. She assumed I was being passive-aggressive, and, right now, I had neither the energy nor the desire to tell her otherwise. It was just easier this way.

  9

  SLOUGH

  By Thursday morning I had bounced back to normal. Actually, I had bounced back a little beyond normal, but I thought this was all relative. After two and a bit days of torpor, waking to find that my brain had apparently rebalanced its books was an enormous relief. By comparison alone, I felt tremendous.

  I awoke at 3 a.m. that Thursday, my mind already racing with the beginnings of a plan.

  Professor Caborn had stopped replying to my messages. Lunch, pudding, port, cheese, cigars – the man was unbribable. I now realized that there was zero chance of my convincing him to submit to an interview via email. Email was too easy to ignore. To get him on board, I’d have to talk to him face to face. I felt one hundred per cent confident that if I could see him – if he could see me – I’d be able to persuade him of the worthiness of my request. I could be extremely charming when I wanted to be.

  The only problem was getting that face time.

  Except it was no problem at all. This is what I realized that Thursday morning.

  What was to stop me from simply turning up at his lab in Oxford and taking him to lunch? Why would he refuse? I could go that very day. It was only an hour or so on the train. Worst-case scenario: it would be a short, wasted journey. But I’d still get out of London for a few hours, which was worth the ticket price in itself. I could spend the day appreciating the amazing architecture and go for a drink in that pub where J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis used to drink.

  The idea of the day spread out before me like an astonishing picnic blanket. I felt bright and refreshed and ready to go. Except I couldn’t go, of course; it was still technically the middle of the night – despite strong evidence to the contrary leaking through the curtains. This country was insane in June. How was anyone supposed to sleep through the night when the sun only set for a few hours? I guessed this must be yet another way in which modern life was at odds with the natural world, since our ancestors had evolved at the equator and wouldn’t be equipped to deal with these ridiculous seasonal variations. I made a mental note to ask Professor Caborn about it later.