The Mirror World of Melody Black (10 page)

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.

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.

Beck was still sleeping like he'd been anaesthetized. I got up, went through to the living area and sat in my underwear checking the train times. The earliest was at 5.14, which would get me into Oxford at 6.20, but that was obviously crazy. I did like the idea of wandering around Oxford in the early hours: the old buildings would be that bit more impressive when they were deserted; I could imagine it was the 1500s – but then I'd have to wait six hours to take Professor Caborn to lunch. Unless I intercepted him on his way in to work and took him for breakfast instead? No, that seemed a riskier strategy; he probably breakfasted at home. Plus Beck would worry if he woke up and I'd disappeared, even if I left a note.

Having thought about this, I decided it would be better if I didn't mention any of my plan to Beck. I was aware – dimly aware – that he might not understand the logic of it. Much better to tell him after the fact, when things had already been brought to a satisfactory conclusion. This meant I'd have to leave the flat after he did, and the first train I could realistically make was the 10.22 out of Paddington. But this was perfect. It would get me into Oxford at 11.18. Then I'd have plenty of time to get my bearings, track down Professor Caborn, and take him to lunch.

I couldn't read, which was how I would usually have passed the dead hours of the morning. I couldn't concentrate on anything for very long. I was too eager to get the day under way.

I made coffee, showered, dressed myself in tracksuit bottoms and a hoodie, intending to change later – I didn't plan to meet Professor Caborn in my loungewear – then went downstairs for a cigarette. The morning was bright and already warming up. It would have been a good morning to walk a dog or go for a run – I felt a desperate need to be out and about – but I didn't trust my lungs to cope with anything more strenuous than a flight of stairs, and I didn't know anyone in west London with a dog that I could borrow. Instead, I decided to walk to the twenty-four-hour Nisa on Uxbridge Road, where I bought bacon, eggs and more cigarettes. I then zigzagged home down the empty back streets.

It wasn't yet six o'clock when I got back to the flat. I killed some time looking at maps of Oxford and researching the layout of the psychology department, then checked my emails, just to make sure Professor Caborn hadn't got back in touch in the past twelve hours. He hadn't. As always my inbox was mostly junk; someone out there was convinced that Abigail Williams was in fact a man – a man both pitiably endowed and with chronic erectile dysfunction. But buried in there was also another email from Miranda Frost.

To:
[email protected]

From:
[email protected]

Date:
Wed, Jun 5 2013, 9:00 PM

Subject:
A modest proposal

Miss Williams,

I have a proposition. With some regret, I have agreed to spend the coming autumn ‘teaching' poetry in the States. The decision, as I'm sure you'll appreciate, was purely a financial one.

To dispense with all irrelevant details, I am looking for someone to live in my house and feed my two cats. Perhaps you would like to be that someone?

Why you? Good question. The truth, I suppose, is that the idea amused me. But there is no reason this arrangement shouldn't be mutually beneficial.

My house is rather nice. It has a garden with a view and is a very peaceful place to write. If you would like a break from the horrors of modern urban living, I'm sure it would suit you. (You could have some uninterrupted time to work on that painfully honest, semi-autobiographical novel that is no doubt languishing in a drawer somewhere.)

The position would be for fifteen consecutive weeks and comes with no pay.

Think it over.

MF

I read this quickly, digested it, and sent my one-line reply:
I'll think about it.

If I chose to interpret her latent, passive-aggressive sarcasm as a double-bluff – which I did – then it seemed Miranda Frost was suddenly taking an inordinate amount of interest in my writing; in my life in general. It was as if she were setting herself up as some kind of eccentric benefactress. Or maybe she just liked me? This was a slightly unsettling notion. Was it a compliment if a sociopath took a shine to you? Probably not, but I decided to shelve this thought and crack on with breakfast.

I was sort of on autopilot as I worked, my mind darting back and forth between several more important matters, like a skittish rabbit in a meadow, and consequently I didn't realize that I'd dispensed all twelve rashers of bacon onto the grillpan until it was too late and they were already cooking. In hindsight, I was impressed that I'd managed to get twelve rashers of bacon onto our grillpan; they were tessellated in a perfect rectangle, like a finished jigsaw. Yet when Beck came through from the hallway, he looked with a degree of suspicion at the generous plate I presented to him.

‘Er, what's this?' He was still sleepy, so I was willing to forgive the pure idiocy of the question; in a way, it was quite endearing.

‘It's breakfast,' I said. ‘I couldn't sleep and it's a beautiful morning, so I went to the shops. Surprise!'

‘Yes, it is . . .' He rubbed his eyes. ‘You couldn't sleep so you decided to cook breakfast?'

‘Yes: bacon and eggs.' I gestured to the plate with my spare hand. ‘Mostly bacon, actually. It was buy one get one free. Do you think you can manage seven rashers? I don't think I can handle more than five.'

‘Er, yeah, okay. I mean that's a lot of meat to digest on a Thursday morning, but I'll give it a go.'

‘That's the spirit. I'm fairly sure the British Empire was built on bacon and eggs for breakfast.'

‘Oh. I thought it was built on conquest and the ruthless exploitation of indigenous populations and their resources.'

I laughed. It was a very girlish laugh. ‘Yes, that too. But you can't brutalize the world on an empty stomach. Captain Cook, Sir Francis Drake, Lord Nelson' – I was plucking names out of the air – ‘they were all bacon-'n'-eggs men. Especially on a Thursday. Historical fact.'

‘I'll take your word for it.' Beck pointed at the plate. ‘But this is less breakfast and more food art.'

I shrugged. I had plated the food like a cartwheel, with a pool of scrambled egg at the hub and symmetrical spokes of bacon fanning out in an extravagant circle. There was a single leaf of parsley crowning the axle and seven blobs of ketchup marking the circumference, as if it were an unfinished dot-to-dot picture.

‘I couldn't just heap up seven rashers of bacon in a tower,' I explained. ‘It would have looked ridiculous. Do you want coffee, too? I've just made a fresh pot. It speeds up the metabolism, so it will help you digest your food.'

Beck gave me a quizzical look, but I'd been on enough crash diets to know what I was talking about here.

Paddington, 9.54. I bought a first-class return to Oxford because it was too hot a day to suffer second class; it was also too hot a day to be worrying about money. I was sick of watching every penny. Anyway, I reasoned this trip would pay for itself, several times over. Plus I'd probably need the free Wi-Fi and a table, and plenty of coffee to keep me sharp. You could never rely on the buffet trolley in standard, which always felt like a dreadful lottery. No, first class was justified on so many levels. And since this was a work trip, I could take the £65 out of my taxable income, so there was another incentive. My father would be proud.

Paddington, like so many of those grand old Victorian stations, was slightly shit in various ways. Peeling paint, blackened glass and brickwork, dirty, dusty, draughty, fumy. Nowhere to smoke. I hadn't been through the overground part of the station for several years, but it was just as I remembered it: basically, a vast glorified barn with one end offering up a tantalizing semi-circle of daylight and open space. Frankly, I don't know what Isambard Kingdom Brunel was thinking. I couldn't wait to be away, but since the train wasn't yet boarding, I went on a hunt for the bronze statue of Paddington Bear, which proved elusive. In the end, I gave up and went to the first-class lounge, where I availed myself of the first-class toilet, which was worth the ticket price all by itself. They had two types of hand lotion and theatre lights around the mirror. I touched up my lipstick, tucked away the few strands of hair that had blown loose in the Tube tunnels, pouted, and felt generally good about the girl who pouted back. She was wearing a fuchsia vest top with a sea-green A-line skirt – thin, floaty and falling just above her knees. It was a bold combination, but well judged, and clearly the most vivid colouring her skin tone would allow. The large pale pink flower on her hairclip sang of summer, while her glasses added just the right note of quirky bookishness. Her footwear wasn't quite visible in the mirror, but I suspected she was wearing turquoise sandals with heels large enough to lengthen her legs, but modest enough to suit the gaze of an ageing professor of evolutionary science. Her earrings and bracelets were also turquoise.

Satisfied that everything was just so, I picked up my laptop bag from beside the sink – black, unfortunately; white would have worked much better – and went to find my train.

It was all going very well for the first fifteen minutes. I drank one cup of coffee and got an immediate refill. I found and ordered two new laptop bags, one in white and one in taupe. I made small talk with the woman opposite as the semi-detacheds of Berkshire blurred across the window. She laughed when I told her she looked a bit like the Queen. I was having a perfectly harmonious journey until Slough, where three men entered our carriage and seated themselves at the table across the aisle.