The Mirror World of Melody Black

by Gavin Extence

  I knew I didn’t have to worry about any of this with Miranda Frost. I’d tell her what had happened and she’d have some sort of immediate reaction that I didn’t have to spend hours decoding. But I suspected, too, that her reaction would not be a bad one. I have a sixth sense that has grown pretty reliable in these matters. Even if Miranda hadn’t had personal experience of mental illness – which I thought she probably had – then I was sure she’d know people who’d had similar breakdowns at one point or another; she’d probably driven a fair few of them to it herself.

  My lack of worry was well founded.

  I sent her the following message:

  To: miranda@mirandafrostpoetry.co.uk

  From: abbywilliams1847@hotmail.co.uk

  Date: Sat, 13 Jul 2013, 6:40 PM

  Subject: RE: Cats?

  Miranda

  Sorry for the delayed reply. I went crazy and was on a psychiatric ward for a month. I’m better now, and would very much like to take care of your cats – assuming you’re still okay with this?

  And within a couple of hours, I had her response:

  To: abbywilliams1847@hotmail.co.uk

  From: miranda@mirandafrostpoetry.co.uk

  Date: Sat, 13 Jul 2013, 8:27 PM

  Subject: RE: RE: Cats?

  Abigail,

  It’s okay with me. I assume you’re well enough to take care of two cats; otherwise you’d still be locked up.

  Are you on medication? If you need a chemist, there isn’t one in the village. However, Berwick is only a short bus or taxi ride away. It’s quite easy to get there and back in a morning. If this is not a problem for you, I’ll send more information tomorrow.

  Miranda

  If only everyone had reacted like that.

  My mum and sister spent the next fortnight trying to persuade me that I was not capable of living on my own right now. Even Dr Barbara was against it, and didn’t soften her stance until I agreed to have phone appointments twice a week. But Beck’s reaction was the most vehement, as I knew it would be.

  ‘Why?’ he asked, in one typically circular and frustrating phone conversation – the same one we had over and over until the day I left. ‘You hate the north! You get a migraine if you have to travel up to Birmingham for a couple of hours. Are you trying to punish yourself?’

  ‘No, of course not. It’s . . . I don’t know what it is.’

  There was a five-second silence down the line.

  ‘Abby, I’ve tried – really, I have. I’ve given you space. I’ve hardly seen you for two months. But we can’t go on like this. I can’t go on like this. It’s not fair.’

  ‘I know. And I’m sorry, but I can’t help it. This is just something I need to do.’

  ‘You don’t need to do it. You’re choosing to do it. At least be honest about that.’

  I didn’t say anything.

  ‘You know, Abby, sometimes you’re just completely fucking impossible.’

  Then he hung up.

  To be fair, I didn’t explain things all that well. But then, I didn’t really understand myself – not until I got here.

  There are different ways of being alone, and being alone is not synonymous with being lonely. That’s something I realized quite recently. I’ve not felt lonely since I arrived here, not in all the hours I’ve spent by myself. But there are plenty of times when I’ve felt lonely in London. In London, you can feel painfully lonely on a Tube train, penned in by hundreds and hundreds of people.

  Here on Lindisfarne, I’ve taken to seeking out new ways of being alone. Since the tourist season ended, I’ve spent consecutive hours sitting on my own in St Mary’s Church – outside service times, of course. It’s not that I’ve found God or anything weird like that. But there’s something very calming about sitting in such an old and impressive building, with all its statues and stained glass and towering stone columns. I think it must be something to do with the sense of history and shared endeavour that infuses the place. In St Mary’s, you can sit in absolute silence and solitude and still feel part of a much larger story.

  Then there’s the beach past the sand dunes at the north-east corner of the island. It’s a good mile from the village, so you only get the odd dog-walker there, and not very often. Most of the time, you can sit at the foot of the dunes and see nothing but sand, sea and sky. It’s another place that’s nice to visit on the rising tide; the water comes in quite rapidly, making you very aware of the land shrinking minute by minute. In a way, I suppose this visceral feeling of being cut off is what draws a lot of people to Lindisfarne in the first place, and certainly those who have decided to live here. Being geographically isolated for up to six hours is an oddly comforting feeling. It’s crazy, but from London, six hours would be more than enough for me to get to a whole other continent. But here, I find myself increasingly appreciative of these long stretches when my entire world is limited to just four square kilometres of sand and rock.

  The truth is I’ve never been on my own before – not for any significant amount of time. In fact, since the age of fifteen, I’ve never been out of a relationship for more than two weeks. I’ve just sort of fallen from one into the next, often with some overlap in the transition – though obviously this is not something I’m particularly proud of. I’m not proud of my record in general.

  I have over a decade of relationship experience spread across approximately a dozen sexual partners; I tried to make a more accurate count, but in all honesty, I think I might have forgotten one or two somewhere down the line. But the exact number is less important than the general trend. If you discount Beck – we’ve been together for over three years, so he skews the statistics – I’ve spent the last decade getting through boyfriends at the rate of about one every nine months. My conclusion is that I’m not good at relationships. Actually, that’s a conclusion I reached some time ago.

  Quite early on, not long after I started seeing her, I told Dr Barbara that I was very bad at relationships. More specifically, I told her that I’d never felt like I could rely on any of my boyfriends to make me happy – and I was even more certain that I couldn’t make any of them happy, not in the long run.

  I remember her exact response: ‘Abby, you’re absolutely right, but not in the way you think you are. You can’t make anyone happy, just like no one else can make you happy. Because real happiness doesn’t work like that. You have to learn to be happy on your own. Then you can start worrying about being happy with somebody else.’

  I didn’t really understand what she meant at the time, but now I think I do; and it’s a big part of what I was unable to explain to Beck and my mother and my sister when I decided to come here.

  I’m learning to live alone, to be happy all by myself, and here there’s almost nothing to distract me from that task. There’s just me, Miranda Frost’s cats and a flat empty horizon.

  If anyone were to ask me now why I came to Lindisfarne, I’d tell them this: I’m trying to be better.

  It’s the most complete answer I can give.

  24

  WRITING

  I wrote to Melody every week, starting when I was in Exeter with my mum. I addressed the letters to Dr Hadley at St Charles, and included a note saying that she could read what I’d written and decide whether or not to pass them on. I don’t know if she did. All I know for certain is I never got a reply. I must have written Melody nearly a dozen letters over the past four months, and in every one I included both my email address and mobile number. But I suppose I never really expected to hear anything back. Just writing the letters helped me, which is probably why I persisted so long. It seemed like enough of an end in itself.

  And after a while it wasn’t just letters to Melody. At one point, I was writing to several different people most days – letters, not email, and always handwritten. Email is too easy and impersonal, and it can be stressful to write, as well. With letters, there’s no pressure to hit send before you’re certain you’ve finished; there’s no clock ticking in the corner of the
screen. You don’t get distracted by Google alerts or multiple tabs or flashing banner adverts. When you handwrite a letter, the whole process is much more sedate.

  Once I could articulate myself a little better, I wrote several letters to Beck, telling him what I was doing and trying to explain some of my reasons. After that, I wrote to my mum and Francesca – letters in a similar vein, detailed and conciliatory. I even tried to write to Daddy at one point, but this task was the opposite of sedate, and in the end it defeated me. I sent him a postcard instead. On the front was a dramatic black and white shot of the causeway being flooded, which I thought he might like, and on the reverse I added three sentences: If you’re ever making a car ad, this would be a great location. I’m doing a bit better now. Abigail x

  The last, of course, wasn’t even a sentence, but I’ve decided that when it comes to my dad, less is definitely more. Postcards are probably the safest way to start rebuilding our relationship.

  If my shortest correspondence was with my dad, then my longest was with Dr Barbara, to whom I wrote at least one long letter every week, usually the day after one of our telephone appointments. There are always things you forget to say on the phone, or don’t say quite right, so the letters were useful for both of us. In a way, they were also a continuation of what I’d started with Dr Hadley – a kind of ongoing exorcism by pen. Sometimes, setting your thoughts and feelings down in ink is much more effective than just speaking them.

  Then there was the handful of miscellaneous letters it felt necessary to write in order to draw a line under the events of the summer. The first was to Professor Caborn, explaining and apologizing for my slightly odd behaviour – although this was one letter I decided to bin rather than send. Ultimately, I thought I’d harassed him enough, and it was better to leave things as they stood. My stream of emails, unexpected visit and complete lack of follow-up could just be a weird footnote in the journal of his career – inconsequential and quickly forgotten.

  The staff at the Dorchester were another matter. They had looked after me when I needed it; they had been kind and understanding and had torn up a £600 bill I was in no position to pay. I sent them a short but insistent thank you letter, which I addressed to ‘The Night Staff, 7.6.13’. So that’s another one that may or may not have arrived at its intended destination; but it was important to try, nonetheless.

  There was only one letter that felt like a complete waste of a stamp – and I knew this was likely to be the case even as I was writing it. This was the four-page missive I sent to my credit card company asking them to freeze the interest on my payments. I don’t think large corporations like receiving handwritten letters at the best of times, and the three paragraphs I got back were terse. Essentially, they told me to go fuck myself. Not their exact wording – and there was a line in there somewhere about calling a debt adviser – but the end result was still the same. After I’d read through their reply a couple of times, I binned it and then cut my credit card into four pieces with Miranda Frost’s kitchen scissors – a symbolic gesture that unfortunately did nothing to settle my debt. Which was one of the things that made me think I’d better start working again.

  I’d emailed Jess at the Observer a few weeks earlier, trying to explain, as best I could, why I’d ignored the string of messages she’d sent and failed to deliver the promised article on monkeys and urban alienation. She seemed pretty understanding on the whole, but I knew I’d still done some significant damage to my professional credibility. You can’t drop off the radar for six weeks – you can’t spend a month on a psychiatric ward – without raising certain questions about your future reliability.

  Still, she had told me that I could ring her any time, that she’d like to hear about any new projects I was working on. Probably, she was just being polite, but I decided to take her at her word. And anyway, sending her my new proposal did make a certain amount of sense; in a strange way, it was the long-promised follow-up to what I’d written for her back in May.

  ‘Lindisfarne?’ she repeated, obviously perplexed.

  ‘Yes, that’s right. It would be a series of features about the island, what it’s like living on the edge of such a tiny community. City girl finds herself dumped in the middle of nowhere – that would be the angle, I guess.’

  ‘God, I don’t know, Abby . . . It sounds like it would be a difficult sell.’

  I shrugged at Colin, who had just come in through the cat-flap. ‘Why don’t I just send you something? If you decide not to use it, that’s fine. No hard feelings.’

  ‘No, no – you can’t go all that way for nothing.’

  It took me a few seconds to grasp what she meant. It seemed I’d been so eager to outline my idea that I’d forgotten to cover the basics.

  ‘Oh, right. No, no problem there. I’m already here – have been for a couple of weeks now.’

  There was a silence.

  ‘On Lindisfarne?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I’m looking after Miranda Frost’s cats. She lives here, but she’s in the States teaching for a semester.’

  There was another small silence. ‘Okay, that’s an angle I can work. I mean, it’s extremely odd, but that’s the point. Send me a thousand words on how this happened and I’ll pitch it.’

  So that was how ‘The Lindisfarne Gossip’ came about. The name was Jess’s idea: she thought that every time someone did a search for the Lindisfarne Gospels, we’d pop up as the second option on Google’s autocomplete, and this would help bring in a certain amount of traffic. The strategy seems to have worked. The column has been a surprise hit over the autumn, and a couple of weeks ago, I finally made the last payment on my credit card.

  The name is also a bit misleading, of course: there’s not a lot of gossip to report from Lindisfarne. The islanders have some lottery funding to build a new village hall. No one is very happy about second home ownership. Nothing that’s going to set pulses racing back on the mainland. Most of what I’ve written has been human interest, along with a little bit of history and environment. My only directive from Jess was to ‘keep it quirky’, and so far that hasn’t been a problem. This is a place with a lot of quirks, and the islanders seem to be enjoying their moment in the spotlight. Since September, I’ve had no shortage of people wanting to share their stories.

  There was a ninety-year-old man in the Crown who told me that he’d wandered over to Lindisfarne one day while hiking the Northumberland coast. That was a couple of decades ago, and he has been here ever since.

  ‘It was peaceful,’ he told me, ‘so I decided to stay.’

  The following week, I wrote a piece entitled ‘Mrs Moses’, about a woman who had a very strange experience on the causeway one night. She’d been racing back to the island after an Elton John concert, trying to get home before the tide came in, but had been badly delayed by snow and freezing fog. When she finally made it to the coast, it was barely an hour until high tide, and she knew it was far too late to make the crossing. Except, when she drove down to where the water’s edge should have been, what greeted her instead was the most beautiful and astonishing sight she’d seen in all her fifty-five years on the planet. There, under the light of a half-moon, was a dry road cutting a valley straight through the water.

  ‘The sea must have been a foot high on either side,’ she told me. ‘It seemed completely impossible – a modern-day miracle.’

  So she eased onto the accelerator and drove between the waves.

  It was only when her headlights dipped with the dropping seabed that she saw what had happened: on either side of the road, the standing water that pools after the tide recedes had frozen solid; on top of this, a good foot of snow and slush from the road had accumulated to form a thick wall of ice, spanning the whole length of the crossing.

  ‘But weren’t you scared?’ I asked her. ‘What if the ice had given way?’

  ‘No, I knew it wouldn’t,’ Mrs Moses insisted. ‘It might not have been a miracle in the biblical
sense, but there was something watching over me that night. Every so often, the universe offers you a gift, and when that happens, you’d be a fool to refuse it.’

  This was a nice line to finish on, even though I disagreed with the underlying sentiments. In all honesty, I don’t think there’s a benevolent ‘something’ that sees us home safely from Elton John concerts; and I don’t think the universe offers us ‘gifts’. I think we make choices – good or bad – and live with the consequences. Which isn’t to say that there aren’t moments like the one Mrs Moses described, when decisions suddenly seem easy and obvious, as if we’re being pushed in one direction rather than another. But most of the time, I think we have to engineer these moments ourselves. We have to seek them out, instead of waiting for them to fall into our laps.

  All this, I suppose, is another way of explaining what I’ve been doing with my alone time on the Holy Island of Lindisfarne – time that has now run out. In a couple of days, Miranda is returning and I’ll be heading back to the mainland. But as for what comes next – that’s one decision I’ve not yet made.

  25

  REFUGE

  That morning, I woke up just before seven, as I’d done every morning for the past four months. After I’d fed Jasper and Colin, I went to check the weather forecast, which confirmed what I thought I could see from the bedroom window, though it was too dark to be certain. The satellite images showed that the sky was completely clear, and would remain so for the next twenty-four hours at least. There was hardly any wind, and the temperature was high for December: nine Celsius at lunchtime, dropping to around five by the early evening.

  The next task was to check the tides. I knew the approximate times, of course – since I knew when Miranda was due back – but with the new idea that was taking shape in my head, I thought it would be wise to note down the specifics. The next low tide, it turned out, was at 10.22, with high tide six and a bit hours later, at 4.39. That meant I had until early afternoon to cross the sand flats, and I knew from talking to the locals that the whole walk shouldn’t take more than two hours, even at a tourist’s pace.