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.
24
WRITING
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.
Still, she had told me that I could ring her any time, that she’d like to hear about any new projects I was working on. Probably, she was just being polite, but I decided to take her at her word. And anyway, sending her my new proposal did make a certain amount of sense; in a strange way, it was the long-promised follow-up to what I’d written for her back in May.
‘Lindisfarne?’ she repeated, obviously perplexed.
‘Yes, that’s right. It would be a series of features about the island, what it’s like living on the edge of such a tiny community. City girl finds herself dumped in the middle of nowhere – that would be the angle, I guess.’
‘God, I don’t know, Abby . . . It sounds like it would be a difficult sell.’
I shrugged at Colin, who had just come in through the cat-flap. ‘Why don’t I just send you something? If you decide not to use it, that’s fine. No hard feelings.’
‘No, no – you can’t go all that way for nothing.’
It took me a few seconds to grasp what she meant. It seemed I’d been so eager to outline my idea that I’d forgotten to cover the basics.
‘Oh, right. No, no problem there. I’m already here – have been for a couple of weeks now.’