My heart is beating so fast it’s going to trip over itself and stop. Everything is hot and dark. I’ve been buried alive. I’m already dead.
I have just enough grip on reality to discard these notions, but it doesn’t quell my horror. My mouth is dry, strange and sour, my tongue thick as carpet. Alcohol-heavy breath drags itself out of my throat, the scent of it churning my stomach. I’m pickled in sweat. And there’s an arm across my chest, a leg across my legs. I am manacled in flesh.
god, god, fuck, god, fuck
My body is far too loud. Blood roaring, heart thundering, breath screaming, stomach raging, head pounding.
I’m going to have a full-blown panic attack.
The first in a long time. Not much consolation.
Where am I? What have I . . .
out, fuck, have to get out
I twist away from the arm and the leg, rolling off a bare mattress onto the bare floorboards. Maybe my first instinct was right. I am dead and this is hell. The darkness scrapes against my eyes. Where are the rest of my clothes?
And breathe, I need to breathe more. Or breathe less. Stop the light show in my head. My vision sheets red and black, like a roulette wheel spinning too fast, never stopping.
god, fuck, clothes
Scattered somewhere in the void. Trousers, shirt, waistcoat, jacket, a single sock. My fingers close over my phone. A cool, calming talisman.
Half-dressed, everything else bundled in my arms, I ease open the door, dark spilling into dark and, like Orpheus, I’m looking back. The shadows move across his face, but he doesn’t stir. He sleeps the perfect, heedless sleep of children, drunkards, and fools.
My footsteps creak along a narrow hallway of peeling paintwork and I let myself out onto a wholly unfamiliar street.
Breathe, just keep breathing. Keep breathing, and get away.
I stumbled down the pavement, the awfulness of this—this and everything—hanging off my shoulders like a rucksack full of rocks.
Still no idea where I was. Suburbia spiralling away in all directions. And, at the horizon, a haze of pale light where the distant sea met the distant sky. I fumbled for my phone. 3:41.
god, fuck, god
There was a single blip of battery left. I called Niall. He didn’t answer. So I called again. And this time he did. I didn’t wait for him to speak.
“I don’t know where I am.” My voice rang too high even in my own ears.
“Ash?” Niall sounded strange. “What do you mean? Where are you?”
“I just said. I don’t know. I . . . I’ve been stupid. I need to get home.”
My breathing was going wrong again.
“Can’t you call a cab?”
“Yes . . . no . . . I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know the number. What if it doesn’t come? I don’t know.” Anxieties were swimming around inside me like jellyfish, but I was usually better at not confessing them aloud.
It hadn’t occurred to me to get a taxi, but even the idea of it seemed overwhelming in its magnitude. A quagmire of potential disaster that was utterly terrifying.
“Can you come and get me?” I asked.
Later I would see how pathetic it was, my desperate pleading, the weasel thread of manipulative weakness running through my words. Later, I would remember that calling for a taxi was an everyday event, not an ordeal beyond reckoning. Later, yes, later I would drown in shame and hate myself.
A hollow sigh gusted over the line. “Oh God, Ash, can’t you—”
“No, no, I can’t. Please, I need to go home.”
“Okay, okay, I’m coming. Can you at least find a street sign? Give me some idea where you are?”
Phone clutched in my sweat-slick hand, I ran haphazard along the houses. The curtains were shut as tight as eyes.
“Marlborough Street,” I said. “Marlborough Street.”
“All right. I’ll be there. Just . . . I’ll be there.”
I sat down on a wall to wait, irrational panic eventually giving way to a dull pounding weariness. There was a packet of cigarettes in my jacket pocket. I wasn’t supposed to have cigarettes, but I was already so fucked that I lit one, grey smoke curling lazily into the grey night.
Don’t drink, don’t smoke, don’t forget to take your medication, don’t break your routine. Nobody had ever explicitly said, “Don’t have casual sex with strange men in unfamiliar cities,” but it was probably covered in the “Don’t have any fun ever” clause. The truth was, casual sex was about the only sex I could stand these days. On my own terms, when I could control everything. And myself.
But tonight I’d broken all the rules and I was going to pay the price. I could feel it, the slow beat of water against the crumbling cliffs of my sanity. I was going to crash. I was going to crash so hard and deep it would feel as though there was nothing inside me but despair. The cigarette, at least, might hold it off until I got home.
I lost track of time, my nerves deadened with nicotine and my skin shivering with cold. But, eventually, Niall pulled up, and leaned across the seats to thrust open the passenger door.
“Come on,” he said.
He was shirtless and tousled, a pattern of dark red bruise-kisses running from elbow to shoulder.
“I’m sorry.” I stamped out my cigarette (how many had I smoked?) and climbed in.
He didn’t reply, just shifted gears abruptly and drove off. I rested my head against the window, watching the streets of Brighton blurring at the corners of my eyes. The motorway, when we came to it, was nothing but a streak of moving darkness.
Niall’s fingers were tapping a tense rhythm against the steering wheel. He’d known me since university, back when I was different. We’d been friends, lovers, partners, and now this. Pilgrim and burden.
“I’m sorry,” I tried again.
Silence filled up the car, mingling with the darkness.
“You can’t keep doing this to me,” Niall said, finally. “You’re . . . it’s . . . ruining my life.”
“You seem to be doing a pretty good job of ruining your own.” I turned away from the window. Touched a piece of shadow on his upper arm that might have been a mark. “I suppose you were with Max.”
I’d never meant to hurt to Niall, but it had been inevitable that I would. In some ways, that only made it worse, as though I’d been careless with something precious. The truth was, sometimes I found it hard to even like him anymore. He’d seen me at my worst, but that only made me feel resentful and ashamed, as if the memories of a thousand mortifications were lurking behind his eyes like a swarm of silver fish.
“So what if I was?” he said.
“He’s going to be married.”
It had made a certain amount of sense that Niall and I would get together when they let me out of hospital after my first manic episode. He had made me feel something close to human again, and it had been easy enough for me to confuse gratitude with love. I didn’t know what Niall had been looking for. Absolution, perhaps. Of course, he was still in love with Max. He always had been. I was supposed to have been his consolation prize, but I turned out to be a poor bargain.
“He can still change his mind.” There was an ironic twist to Niall’s mouth as he spoke, but I could tell he half believed it was a possibility.
“He’s not going to change his mind. He wants to be with Amy.”
“Filthy bisexuals,” he muttered. Like all our jokes, it was an old one, and it had stopped being funny a long time ago.
I tried to smile, but it felt like too much effort and my mouth refused to cooperate. Niall and Max had slept with each other intermittently at university as part of a general culture of everyone sleeping with everyone, but Max’s liberality with his cock protected a heart that loved only cautiously.
“You need to stop waiting for him,” I said.
“Fuck you.”
“Right.”
There didn’t seem much else I could say to that.
“If you love someone, then you fight for them.” Niall’s eyes were locked on the road.
“Or you let them go before you fuck up their life.”
Niall laughed, sharp as knives. “That’s fucking hilarious coming from you.”
I closed my eyes for a moment, searching for the peace of a private darkness.
“You can’t get through a night out without phoning me,” he said.
I couldn’t do this now, but a sour sense of injustice filled the back of my throat like vomit. “I didn’t want to come.”
“Can’t you think about somebody else for half a fucking second? Max wanted you here.”
“Ah, yes, Max. Always back to Max.” I had no idea why I said that.
The needle on the speedometer was trembling. Eighty. Ninety. I didn’t think Niall had even noticed. The engine thrummed heavy through the fresh silence.
“So when you went completely batshit,” Niall said, conversationally. “And I visited you in the fucking loony bin nearly every day. That was about Max, was it? And when I found you in the hallway unconscious and covered in blood. That was about Max? And all the times you’ve been too depressed to eat or leave the fucking house and I’ve come to take care of you. That was about Max? Every time I’ve stopped you hurting yourself. Max. Making sure you didn’t get institutionalised again. Max. Picking up your medication for you when you can’t. Max. Getting you to counselling. Max.”
“God,” I said, petulant as a child, “if I’m such a horrendous waste of your time, why do you bother?”
Once upon a time he might have said: Because I love you.
Once upon a time he might have said: Because I care about you.
“Because I feel guilty all the fucking time,” he snapped. “And because the last time I didn’t bother, you tried to kill yourself.”
The words echoed through my head. I tugged at my cuffs, pulling them down until they hung over the heels of my hand. One of the unadvertised advantages of bespoke tailoring. All my shirts were cut this way.
“That had nothing to do with you,” I said quietly.
He didn’t answer.
And now there really was nothing left to say.
The night ebbed slowly away, fading into a silver-grey London dawn. The rising sun gleamed dully from behind a sheet of heavy cloud, casting vague-shaped shadows across the sky like images from a magic lantern.
Niall dropped me off outside my flat and drove away like a man determined not to look back. I let myself inside and climbed the stairs. I’d always found something comforting in repetitive physical action. It provided an anchor point when all other certainties were uncertain. I felt sodden with exhaustion, weighed down by my own flesh and at the same time insubstantial, as though my fingers would unravel into mist if I stopped concentrating on being alive.
I carefully fit my key to the lock, turned it, heard it click. Pushed open the door. Stepped inside. Let the door swing closed behind me. The familiarity of walls.
Normal people didn’t sit in their hallways. But I couldn’t find the energy to go further. I lay down on the floor, stretched my fingers over the stripped wooden floorboards, rough and smooth, knots and whorls, the occasional deep gash like a scar. I was terrified of thinking. Terrified of memory. I wanted to cry, but I had long ago run out of tears.
In the past, we are drinking tea in my oak-panelled rooms, where the wisteria creeps beneath the arched windows, filling the air with scent.
In the past, Max and Niall are dancing at the centre of a sea of flesh beneath multicoloured lights.
In the past, I walk between green lawns, surrounded by golden stone.
In the past, I am brilliant and I am happy and my every tomorrow is madness.
In the past, words shimmer around me on silver threads and I pluck them like summer peaches.
In the past, the universe is a glitterball I hold in the palm of my hand. I am the axis of the world.
In the past, I am soaring, and falling, and breaking, and lost.
Then there are grey walls all around, a sullen haze of medication where minutes and months lose all their meaning.
Afterwards, I performed the halting ceremony of betterness in a crawl of grey days. Somehow, I started writing again, laying words out like cutlery. Niall moved in. And then out again.
And now there was this. And yesterday.