I woke in a panic, plastered to Darian’s velvet-warm back, one arm draped across him, the other crooked awkwardly under the pillow, completely numb. I scrambled into a sitting position and pulled my knees up to my chest, trying to calm my body’s anxieties and my mind’s chaos. But it was no use. My heart raced. My thoughts whirled.
Darian slept on.
At least until I prodded him awake.
“Darian. Darian.”
He rolled over, tousled and lovely, blinking dazedly in the half-light. “What’s wrong, babes?”
I stared at him, for a moment utterly speechless at the magnitude of everything. “I’m going to make you so unhappy,” I blurted out.
“What? When? Can’t you like do it in the morning?”
“See,” I said, somewhat hysterically. “I’ve already started. I’m waking you up in the middle of the night.”
“S’okay,” he mumbled, also sitting up. “I ’aven’t got nuffin planned for tomorrow. Next shoot is next week, I fink.”
“I can’t do this.” I wrapped my arms tightly around my knees and huddled at the top of the bed. “I can’t be with someone. I ruin everything.”
“But I like being wif you, babes. You’re not gonna ruin nuffin.”
“You don’t understand.” He touched my arm and I shook him off. “I know Stephen Fry has you up to speed, but I’m not charmingly quirky. I’m clinically insane. I’ve been in hospital. Involuntarily. Because I was too nuts to know I was nuts.”
“We’ve all got flaws, babes.”
I glared at him. “You’re not taking me seriously.”
“Well, you just said you was mental.”
“Darian.”
“Babes.”
He wasn’t getting it. I was a muddle of longing, frustration, and pain, my mind scattering like seabirds. “I’m not a fucking plural,” I snapped.
“What?”
I pointed at myself. “Item: one babe.”
“Ahwight,” he said. “Mister A.A. Winters, Esquire.”
I folded my hands across the tops of my knees and pressed my face into them. “Please don’t laugh at me.”
“No,” he said, so gently it made me want to weep.
“You see,” I mumbled. “This is what I’m like. Niall was right about me; everything he said was true. You’ll end up hating me like he does. I don’t want to do that to you.”
“So, you don’t ’ave to.”
“I might not have a choice. And if you say we always have a choice, I’ll kill you with a pillow.”
There was a long silence. I sensed, rather than saw, Darian moving in the gloom. His smooth, naked shoulder brushed lightly against mine, sending a flare of response through the twisted labyrinth of my scars. I flinched. He kept making me feel things in ruined places.
“Look,” he whispered. “I’m not clever like you, but I fink it’s going to be ahwight. I’m wif you because I like being wif you and that’s . . . y’know . . . ahwight. And when it ain’t ahwight . . . then I won’t be wif you. I’m not gonna let you treat me bad, babes.”
“Oh great, so you’re just going to walk out on the mentally ill guy when the going gets tough?”
“Babes, I’m confused. Are you sad cos you fink I’m going to be wif you or sad because you fink I’m not?”
“I don’t know.” All my doubts and all my fears were snarled up into a matted ball like hair fished out of the bathroom sink, and I couldn’t tell which were real and which were baseless, how much I was protecting myself, or if I was—in my twisted, useless way—trying to protect him. Some distant dead end in my mind was just about capable of recognising that I did not want a martyr to my depression, but I couldn’t link my thoughts into a path that would take me there. I was a rat in the maze of my own thinking, and all the floors were electric, and all the exits were locked. “I don’t know.”
“We ’aven’t ’ardly started,” said Darian soothingly.
“But what if I go mad again? What if I get depressed?”
He shrugged. “You could get hit by a bus or summin tomorrow.”
“Thanks, that’s really consoling.”
“I’m just saying.”
I took in a deep, slow breath, willing myself to calm, to honesty, to courage. In short, all the things I didn’t have. If he left now, it would be my choice. If he left later, it would be his, and I would be helpless. And hurt. “Darian, I tried to kill myself. Niall left me in the middle of a major depression, and I tried to kill myself.” He was silent, so I went on. “He felt guilty and came back to apologise and found me.”
“Must’ve been well ’ard for bof of you.”
“Yes, death is so very ugly. They don’t tell you that. But it is.”
I remembered little. I had already been sinking, sunk. And Niall’s departure had been inevitable. Even welcomed, because he’d taken with him the last reason to keep struggling. Finally, the freedom to do something for me, only for me. My last and greatest gift: I could make it stop. I had lacked the foresight for pills. Or the courage to leap in front of a train or off a building. But, clutching a knife from the kitchen, I had felt—for the briefest of brief moments—a shining, perfect euphoria. Lost, of course, in the undignified mess that followed. And how could I forgive Niall? I hated him for every day that’s hard to live.
I searched Darian’s eyes for horror and condemnation, and found none. But then, I’d seen his portfolio. He was a model, the master of his face.
“That may well be you someday,” I said.
He nodded slowly. “I guess I’ll ’ave to see abaht it then.”
“What the fuck is wrong with you? How can you care for me when I’ve always got one foot out the door?”
“I dunno. Look, babes, I know you fink I’m a bit shallow and I prob’ly am to be ’onest wif you, but I don’t fink it’s going to be easy, and I don’t fink it’s always gonna be awhight. But even if it ain’t always awhight, that’s awhight as well, cos sometimes fings just ain’t, and that’s ’ow they are. And I defo fink there ain’t no point worrying abaht stuff that might nevva ’appen.”
“Oh, God,” I groaned. “Yoda’s back.”
“Yeah.” His fingers whispered against the side of my face in the dark until I lifted my head. He tugged me into a kiss. The angle was awkward and his mouth tasted of sleep but I didn’t care. I could have fallen into it, a sailor abandoning himself to the waves, just like in Brighton, but Darian wasn’t a stranger anymore. I couldn’t use him like that again, not when his kisses were full of promises he couldn’t keep. Not with me. I pulled away on a sigh of sheer physical need.
“I’m a terrible risk to take with your happiness.”
“I dunno,” he said. “I mean, sadness is just a fing what ’appens. And sometimes people just ’ave to go, y’know.” He shrugged. “I’m sorry fings were so bad, babes. But there ain’t no point wishing you was different, cos then you wouldn’t be you.”
“No,” I whispered. “I’d be better. I wish I’d met you before it all went wrong.”
“I don’t fink you would’ve liked me back then.”
“Do you really believe I have to be the ruin of myself to like you?”
“Naw. I just fink it’s what’s now what matters. Anyway,” he added, before I could respond to that piece of Hallmark wisdom with the contempt it deserved, “you gonna show me or what?”
“Show you what?”
His upper arm nudged against mine. “What you done.”
There was a long silence. I was glaring at him, but he probably couldn’t see it. I wondered if this was the instinctive, prurient curiosity that made people stare at car crashes. But, perhaps, just perhaps, I wanted to believe him. That, even if it wasn’t all right, it would be all right. (What did that even mean? Was he some kind of idiot savant? Or just a man who genuinely didn’t fear the pain of liking me?) But maybe the stark truth, written on my skin, would change his mind.
“Oh, for fuck’s sake. Fine.”
I uncoiled myself, leaned over, and flicked on the bedside lamp. Darian winced in the dazzle, blinking and rubbing his eyes like a child in a picture book.
I thrust out my arms, hands turned palm up, so he could see the long, white fishbone of scar and stitching that ran from my right wrist almost to the elbow, and its shorter, jagged sibling on the left. “Ugly enough for you? Or do you want the rest as well?”
He took my hands in his, holding me outstretched. Shudderingly exposed. “I don’t fink it’s ugly. It’s just there.”
“Well, I hate that it’s there.”
“Why, babes?”
“Well, not even managing to kill yourself properly is a bit of competence nadir, don’t you think?”
“I dunno, I reckon it’s pretty ’ard. I mean, being alive is like a . . . whatjamcallit . . . like blinking, y’know, just summin you do wifout ’aving to fink about it.”
I shook my head. “For most people, perhaps. For me it’s a daily commitment I sometimes don’t feel like making. But I hate that I tried. And I hate that I failed. This doesn’t represent some beautiful moment in which I chose life. It’s a fuckup, pure and simple. If it was up to me, I wouldn’t be here.”
His eyes held mine. In the circle of light from my lamp, they were greenish-blue, like looking at the sky when you’re swimming underwater. “That true, babes?”
I opened my mouth to answer, but I couldn’t meet all that sincerity, all that hope and generosity, with a lie that made things simple for me. “Sometimes,” I said, finally. “But not always. It would have been so much easier, but then—” I swallowed. “—I suppose I would have lost some moments too.”
It was strange—perhaps terrible—but somehow I found it easier to talk about wanting to die than wanting to live.
“They’re not the moments I ever thought I’d want,” I went on. “Sometimes I think they’re very small. Like the crunch of autumn leaves. And the scent of Lapsang. And writing, maybe. And you, Darian.”
He leaned over and kissed, not the scars, but the heel of my hand, as I had once, twice now, kissed him. “Aww, babes. I fink you’re amazin.”
There was another long silence.
And then his fingers touched my upper arms, the meaningless non-pattern of scars and slashes. “What abaht this?”
“That’s just old lunacy, from my first manic episode. I can’t even remember doing it. They told me later that I thought there were lost words trapped in my skin and I was releasing them back into the world. Like a flock of phoenix.” I tried to laugh, but nothing came out.
Darian’s fingertips circled and swooped, trailing a feathery warmth across my skin, lighting up the lines on the madman’s Etch A Sketch I’d made of my body. Scars or not, it felt the same. “What was the words?”
“I don’t know. I can’t read them. It’s all senseless. It always was.”
He leaned in, and I shivered self-consciously beneath such close regard. “Trying to crack the da Vinci code?” I asked.
He laughed, looked up, and kissed me with such swift cunning I had no hope of evading it. “You’re awhight, babes.”
Oh, how I wished it were true. Instead I wound myself round him like poison ivy and clung. “Barthes said language is a skin. I’m sure he never meant it quite this literally.”
“Who’s Barfs?”
“Barthes. French literary critic. Gay. Perhaps overly fond of his mother. Prone to nervous breakdowns.”
“You know such a lot of fings, babes.”
I shrugged. “He used to be one of my heroes.”
“You went off ’im? That’s a bit ’arsh.”
“He’s dead.” Safe in the gloom, I stretched up and put my lips shyly to the edge of his jaw. “He won’t mind.”
“But why?”
“He was hit by a laundry truck.”
“Yeah, har-har. I meant why’d you go off him, you donut.”
For a moment, I was silent, my head tucked against his shoulder, while I listened to the sounds of his body, magnified by the night. I could almost imagine I heard the brush of one eyelash against another, the rush of blood through veins and arteries, the cells of his body dying, dividing, and multiplying, like eggshells cracking. Finally I said, “Unhappy is the man who has need of heroes.”
“I ain’t being funny, babes, but now you’re just being clever in a way that means you don’t ’ave to answer the question.”
I kissed him under the ear. “I’m sorry, Darian. I don’t know what I like anymore. I don’t know if what I think is what I think, if what I feel is what I feel, if any of it at all is me. If there is a me that isn’t just a reflection of or a response to . . . mental illness.”
“Course there is, babes.”
“How will I know?”
“Cos you will. You’ll know when summin’s real.”
I gave a laugh so harsh it hurt my throat. “I don’t, though. That’s the fucking problem. What part of ‘insane’ did you miss?”
The next thing I knew I was on my back, Darian stretched on top of me, his hips cradled by my hips, his legs pushing mine apart.
“I reckon you’ll figure it aht.”
He caught my unconvincingly protesting hands and bore them down against the pillows. His mouth nipped its way up my neck and then settled over mine. And he held me and kissed me until there was nothing else.