by Máire Fisher
‘Take your time, Noah,’ Ms Turner says. ‘Remember, Here and Now.’
‘I need to explain something. But …’ He opens his journal. ‘Can I read it out loud?’
‘Of course.’
He looks at Ms Turner’s kind face, sees her kind eyes. Then he opens his journal to the page he thought he would never reveal.
Stop this.
The Dark is swirling closer and closer. A furious roar fills Noah’s ears, but he has the words … all he has to do is read. Noah is still in control, and this time he’s not going to be defeated.
‘Dear Ms Turner, I’m writing this in my journal because I can’t use words to talk. You say writing things down makes them easier to deal with …’
09:47
‘So, Noah. Who, or what, can keep the Dark from growing?’
He wants to answer her, but he’s exhausted. Reading from his journal was hard enough. He leans his head back, closes his eyes, and breathes, slow and regular, each inhalation steadying him. He feels for his pulse, counts the beats there. His feet are quiet on the floor.
Ms Turner allows the silence to linger for a few moments after he opens his eyes. Then she says, ‘We’ve come a long way, you and I, Noah.’
Noah agrees. Ms Turner knows what’s lurking, how hard Noah has to work to keep calm.
Does this woman know what she’s dealing with?
‘Look at me, Noah,’ Ms Turner’s saying. ‘Pay attention to me, don’t listen to anything else.’ Her voice is firm and the Dark pulls back, sulking.
‘You’ve got a phenomenal imagination, Noah,’ she’s saying now. ‘You’ve created the Dark, and you’ve given it power.’
He tries hard to listen, give her words space to land and make sense, but—
Imagination? Imagination? You’re the creator? She has it all wrong.
Noah’s shaking so hard he doesn’t think his body will ever be still again. His feet start tapping furiously, his fingers are blocking his ears, but still Ms Turner’s words get through.
‘Every beast has its nemesis, Noah,’ she says.
‘Shut up,’ he’s saying. ‘Please, please just shut up.’
Ms Turner carries on talking.
Get her out of here. Get her out—
‘What does the Dark fear, Noah? What is it afraid of?’ Her voice is insistent.
What does it fear? You’re the one who’s petrified. What does she think? That anything’s afraid of her?
And then all goes quiet.
Noah lowers his hands, looks around cautiously. Listens.
Nothing, not a sound.
‘What’s it afraid of Noah?’
‘You,’ he says. ‘It’s afraid of you.’
She smiles. ‘I’m so glad.’
She looks at him intently. ‘Now all we have to do is make it scared of you too.’
He listens. Still nothing. She’s got it well and truly whipped. He’ll pay for it later, but for now he soaks up the silence.
155.
No one comes to see Gabriel during visiting hours. No parents bring him a book to read or sweets to suck or Barley Water to add to the flat water in the jug on the pedestal next to his bed. He’s in the children’s ward, a row of beds down each side. Every hour, it seems, a nurse comes to take his temperature, just as he’s starting to doze off.
He’s lucky to be alive is what the doctor says when he does his rounds. We nearly lost you, young man.
The shimmering blur returns as the doctor speaks and Gabriel wishes he could go back to that pure and radiant light, but he’s here and he’s half-awake and half-asleep and once he’s on the mend he’ll be going back to the home.
He’s half-awake and half-asleep one afternoon when he hears voices from the bed next door. The boy in the bed next to him is never short of visitors.
Felix? Isn’t that the name of the family who—
Shush, he’ll hear you.
But Gabriel’s eyes are shut tight and after a few seconds, the first voice continues.
Burnt alive in his bed.
I know, awful. But the article I read said they found his body near the door. Scratching to get out, probably.
An old man. Left to die like that.
Behind Gabriel’s eyelids, the shimmer flares into orange.
They say she started it, but I’m not so sure. I reckon it was the kid. Little pyromaniac. She was probably covering up for him.
Look where that landed her.
And he gets away scot free. Kids and matches, never a good combo.
Especially when there’s petrol to add to the mix.
A laugh, and then, Shame. We shouldn’t jump to conclusions. Maybe he’s a different Felix.
Not a common surname, though.
A rustle of sheets being pulled straight, the soft pummelling of a pillow, the sound of a kiss landing on a cheek. Comfy, darling? Daddy will be here to see you tonight, on his way home from work.
156.
Day 51 / 09:35
‘What words does it hate to hear?’ That’s what Ms Turner asks Noah the next time he sees her. It’s a terrible question, because if he tries to answer, the Dark will return. He doesn’t like the idea of rousing it on purpose. The whole idea is to keep it at a distance, cage it if he can, fasten the latch so that it can’t slip out.
Noah hears the snap of a whip. Today, the Dark is like a ringmaster, calling in its horned furies, muscles shifting under sleek coats, lowering their heads, charging straight at him.
They come from all sides, carrying the names of all his fears: helplessness, disorder, incoherence, instability, chaos … death.
‘You can do this, Noah.’ Ms Turner’s voice breaks into his heaving mass of panic.
‘I can.’ Noah’s speaking out loud, and he says it again. ‘I can. But I have to count.’
Ms Turner doesn’t bat an eyelid. ‘That’s fine.’
He makes his way to the centre of the circle of fear and starts up with his 5s. He makes them cower, 1×1×1, and as they retreat the air around them moves from black to red, to orange to misty grey. It will never be blue, he thinks, the colour of utter safety. Noah is ever alert, waiting, always aware of the signs, feeling the Dark pushing at him, desperate to pitch him over the steep edge into a bleak hole of fear.
‘What makes it retreat, Noah?’ Ms Turner’s voice breaks through and he looks at her, dazed.
What stops that slender, vicious whip? My 5s. That’s what Noah wants to say. I gather them around me. There’s more to add, though.
1.Top of the list are his 5s.
2.And there’s his journal. Writing in it quiets the monster in his head.
3.Juliet and her incessant chatter also keeps the Dark at bay.
4.Even group, he now realises. Even during group, the noise lessens.
5.And of course, the more he talks to Ms Turner, the quieter the Dark grows.
One after the other, realisations come barrelling in and fall into place.
‘Noah?’
He blinks, shakes his head. ‘I’m not sure. I think—’
He stops. That’s enough for today.
It certainly is.
Noah gets to his feet. He needs to think everything through.
Ms Turner isn’t ready to let him go, though. She has a weirdly brilliant idea.
20:17
What is it?
It’s filmy, tired, paler somehow. Noah pauses, Ms Turner’s words from the morning loud in his mind.
‘I don’t know exactly what it is, Noah,’ she’d said, ‘but you have a sense of it in your mind, right?’
He’d nodded. He’d already said too much, daren’t let any more words escape.
She’d taken his hands in hers. ‘Okay if I do this?’
He’d lifted his head and nodded.
Her eyes had been serious. ‘I’d like you to try something. Take that image—’
‘It changes, though,’ he’d managed to say. ‘Sometimes it’s a shape, sometimes it’s sort of foggy and dark, sometimes it’s nothin
g but pitch black.’
‘Try this, Noah. Choose one aspect, the worst one.’
The Dark had twisted into being immediately. It was at its most fearsome, curling into and onto itself, ballooning out, filling every corner of her room. Noah had tried to pull back, but Ms Turner was right there, her hands still firm on his.
‘Ready?’
He’d nodded, his feet jiggling 5s.
‘Look at it, Noah.’
He hadn’t wanted to, he was scared of looking at it directly.
Good. Scared is good. Nothing vanishes just like that.
‘Now, this is the easy bit. The Dark is there, right?’
A fraction of a nod.
‘So what can you do to make it into something ridiculous? Something to laugh at? Or even something you might actually like?’
What?
Noah had stared at Freud and Jung. Behind them the Dark had tried to surge forward, carrying all that was awful with it, but he’d held onto Ms Turner’s hand, feeling her anchoring him. As he stared, he remembered lying on the lawn next to his little sister, looking up at puffy clouds floating against a bright blue sky.
‘Look, Mads, there’s an elephant.’
The Dark, backlit, began to fade.
‘And there, Noah, that one looks just like Spit with his mouth wide open.’
The memory of Maddie’s laugh had made him smile.
Ms Turner had squeezed his hand gently. ‘That’s it, Noah, you’re getting there.’
He’d swallowed, trying as hard as he possibly could to keep that elephant intact, afloat. But he couldn’t. A dark mouth yawned from behind and devoured it in one go. Spit vanished into the murk. A roll of thunder became a raging storm, one louder than Noah had ever heard, and he’d pulled his hands away, buried his head between his legs in an attempt to block out the Dark and its all-consuming rage.
Ms Turner had stood, and placed her hands on his shoulders. ‘You’re free from harm here, Noah. Everything’s all right.’
Noah had been alive with tapping, every part of his body vibrating, and she hadn’t tried to stop him. He had 1 2 3 and 4 and 5 and he’d rattled them out like crazy. Ears, cheeks, mouth.
Noah fought back and the chaos in his head had reduced to a slow simmer.
157.
Day 52 / 07:47
As a little boy, Noah was blessed and protected by the power of 5.
It saw him through those first days of school, helped him navigate strange new buildings, the playground, the distance to the gates where he waited anxiously for his mother.
Gradually, the worry that was school faded away. The days became stable and predictable and 5 could slip away. But other, smaller, less obvious compulsions took its place. His parents bought him a watch for his 8th birthday and he learnt to tell the time. From then on, he would glance at his watch and fret, waiting for the bell to ring, exasperated if it was late. He hated days that fell outside of the normal Monday-to-Friday pattern of the school week. What was the point of sports day, for example, or going to see another school’s play? School celebrations, competitions and excursions threw him off balance and left him out of sorts, but never so much that he did anything specific to set things right. Back then, he knew nothing terrible would happen if school was disrupted by an outing or a class visit from the school nurse.
He’d hug his mother and say to her that he loved her. He’d tell Maddie long and complicated stories, spend hours playing with her, help her to organise her toys or make mud pies in the garden.
He liked things to be neat and orderly – he was, as his mother often said, a real creature of habit – but his quirks and need for order didn’t paralyse or control him. The sky didn’t fall on his head when the school term ended and he had to face endless, unstructured days.
Then it all changed. Noah turned from a creature of habit into a habit-obsessed, frightened, panicked, compulsive teenager.
This is what Ms Turner needs to know more about, and he’s going to have to tell her how it happened, and soon. What brought the Dark hurtling into his life. Could it ever be persuaded to leave?
Noah ticks all the boxes that label him and slide him into a file tagged ‘Noah Groome, OCD’. He knows the date his fussy habits started to change from annoying tics into a full-blown and frightening disorder. He knows when his behaviour escalated and his obsessions began to take control. He knows when it started in earnest, the exact time that awful visitor entered his life.
He knows this, and so does his family, and therapists 1 through 4. Ms Turner too, after speaking to his mother, reading all the notes on him.
He’s getting the words out, some words, but there are piles more still locked inside him. It’s Week 8 at Greenhills for Noah, and some days do feel lighter now, less ominous. But the others? Noah can’t think about the really bad days, let alone write about them. He sighs and puts his pen in (out-in-out-in) his pocket.
158.
Day 52 / 09:51
‘Do you think I’ll ever be ready to leave?’ Noah’s asking Ms Turner a proper question. ‘I want to, but …’
He wants his head empty, its dark tenant gone, bags packed, running fast. Let it go and live inside some other sucker’s head.
Thoughts like this are dangerous. His feet and hands begin to tap, the 5s working hard for him. Slowly, the fury in his head subsides.
‘I’m so screwed,’ he says.
She tries to tell him that he’s not, but he doesn’t believe her. He’s stuck. There is no safe place waiting for him.
The sooner you learn that, the better. The better for everyone.
159.
Day 52 / 18:27
Everyone is quiet. It’s too hot to think, never mind take part in one of the spats that flare up regularly.
‘I hate it.’ Juliet’s voice cuts through the stupor. ‘Hate it. Every other day we sit in this stupid circle and all they want us to do is to talk about the past, yadda, yadda, yadda. About who we were, what we did, why we did it. Moaning and groaning about my mother doing x, my sister doing y. Whining about the fact that my father smacked me when I was three and my brother hates girls. Oh, and that my dad says I’m … a whore.’
She stops and glares at them, defiance written all over her face. ‘All the talking in the world isn’t going to help us. All the writing in our stupid journals, getting touchy-feely with our true selves. Nothing’s going to work. We all know it, so why even bother? Who wants us cluttering their perfect little lives? They certainly don’t. Oh no, it’s much better to sweep us under the Greenhills carpet, or whatever other exclusive dump they can shunt us off to. That way their friends and colleagues know we’re getting the best care possible. We’re embarrassments and they’ve found a place to hide us. Now they can snuggle into their perfect little beds and get a good night’s sleep, because – don’t you know – they’ve done everything they possibly could.’
Juliet’s on a roll, words flying, but her eyes remind Noah of the terrified dogs at tears. Newly rescued and ready to snap if anyone comes too close.
‘Aaaand now,’ she draws out the word like a professional showman, ‘ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, here we all are!’
She looks over at Noah. ‘Mr Don’t-disturb-me-I’m-counting-every-single-thing-I-can-find.’ Then she glares at Sadie. ‘And you, Miss Oh-so-needy, look-at-me, hear me whinge and whine, make sure we all hear every detail of every miserable part of your pathetic little nobody-loves-me life.’ Sadie shrinks back in her chair.
She turns her attention to Morné. ‘And then we’ve got you. My God, Morné. Why don’t you just give up now, put yourself into a corner and eat until you burst?’
Sadie’s recovering, and she’s looking at Juliet, her eyes vicious. ‘But what about you?’ Sadie says. ‘I know why you’re here. We all do. You’re hardly Miss Perfect. No, you’re more like Miss, Miss—’
‘Go on. Find an adjective, why don’t you? Rummage through that tiny pea-brain of yours and see what you can come up with.’
‘You’re sly!’ Sadie shouts. ‘You are sly and you’re slippery. My dad says you’re a slippery little minx.’
Morné smirks. Sadie looks triumphant.
‘Oh, he does, does he?’ says Juliet. ‘And when did your father come up with that description?’
‘During visiting,’ Sadie shouts. ‘He says you’re clever, sneaky. A right little minx.’
There’s a smile on Juliet’s face as she says quietly, ‘And was that before or after he said he’d like to have his wicked way with me?’
160.
Maddie wants to be part of Noah and Juliet’s adventure, she wants to do as they’ve asked, as if it’s the easiest thing in the world.
But it’s not. She has to get into the study without her dad seeing, or her mom. And her mom is always around. Except when she goes shopping or to help at one of her charities, which she does in the mornings, when Maddie’s at school. The only solution is to pretend to have a crushing headache on the same day that her mother volunteers at a shelter for abused women. It’s always short-staffed, so her mom won’t want to let them down.
‘I’ll be fine, Mom. I promise. I just want to go back to sleep.’
‘I’ll get back as soon as I can.’
Her mom’s standing over her bed now, and Maddie feels bad for deceiving her. Why couldn’t she just ask her dad for his id? She’d asked Juliet and Noah that, but Noah had been insistent. ‘I’ve tried that, Mads,’ he’d said. ‘I’ve asked him all sorts of questions. Besides, he’d want to know why.’
‘It’s true, Mads,’ Juliet said. ‘Noah showed me his emails.’ Maddie had looked at her in admiration. How had Juliet got Noah to drop his defences so quickly? He doesn’t let people in that easily. ‘But if we get his id number, we can start somewhere. It’s really important to Noah, you know that. And if that’s a dead end, at least we’ve tried.’
So now Mom’s gone and the house is quiet. Maddie’s in the study, a forbidden space. She’s never been in here on her own.
It’s just an ordinary room, she tells herself, and no one’s home but her. Maddie walks to the desk and pulls at a drawer. Locked. She tries all of them, three on one side, three on the other. Every single one is locked.