The Mirror World of Melody Black (27 page)

Milk, bread and other essentials can be bought in the village, but I have everything else delivered. You'll find contact details for the delivery man enclosed, and since he'll be coming once a week with cat food, I imagine it would be easiest if you simply add anything else you require to the existing order.

I also enclose my mobile number. Call me in an emergency but not otherwise.

Miranda

P.S. Very occasionally, you might get a goggle-eyed tourist poking around the garden or knocking at the door asking to look around. I'm not joking. They treat this whole island like it's a bloody museum. Use your good sense and do not let strangers into my home.

P.P.S. If you go crazy again, there's a doctor in the village. She's retired but she once helped me out with an allergic reaction to a bee sting. I'm sure she'd be able to see you if it was critical (number and address also enclosed).

Tentatively, and from a very safe distance, I found myself warming to Miranda. Yes, she was still a sociopath, and God help her students in the States; being taught by the woman, I could only imagine, would be four months of creeping psychological torture. Nevertheless, at least she was honest. With Miranda, you didn't have to worry about what she was really thinking. This was one of the reasons I knew I could tell her the truth when it came to my recent stay on the psychiatric ward.

Of course, there's still a certain stigma attached to mental illness, but this isn't something that bothers me all that much any more. I've been periodically crazy since my mid-teens, and any feeling of awkwardness on my part long ago lost its sting. But what you can't prevent is the awkwardness of other people – their embarrassment, their hang-ups. They start tiptoeing – and even healthcare professionals are guilty of this sometimes – as if the smallest comment, a misworded question, might be enough to push you back over the edge. Every so often, you have to remind people that you're not all that different from them: same complicated tangle of blood vessels, thoughts and emotions. You have to remind them that seeing a psychiatrist or taking medication is not the same as having had your former personality surgically removed.

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:
[email protected]

From:
[email protected]

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:
[email protected]

From:
[email protected]

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.

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.