‘I’ve missed you,’ I say.
Melody doesn’t reply. Instead she takes her cigarettes from her bag and passes me one. ‘You haven’t quit, have you?’
I laugh. ‘No, I’m giving myself three more years. I read somewhere that as long as you stop by the time you’re thirty the long-term effects are tiny. So that’s my goal.’
Melody nods. ‘Yeah, that sounds sensible.’ She takes a deep drag and blows the smoke out through her nose. ‘They had me on patches for weeks. It was a bloody nightmare.’ She holds up her left palm so that I can see her scar, which is more or less a mirror of my own. ‘Haven’t hurt myself for ages, though. Not even a tiny cut.’
‘That’s good,’ I tell her. ‘That’s really good.’
‘How about you? How are you doing?’
‘Oh, you know. Still finding my feet, but generally better.’
‘You said you’re back with the boyfriend – the one who dumped you?’
‘He didn’t dump me, not exactly. But yes, we’re back together. Three months and counting.’
‘How’s that going?’
I think about telling her the same thing I told Dr Barbara: that it feels much more stable this time round. But that would require further explanation. Because for most people, stable isn’t a word that conjures up a wealth of positive connotations. It’s an in-between sort of word, the word they use in hospitals when progress is uncertain – could be better, could be worse – and the value I’d be placing on the word would be something quite different. So in the end, I opt for a much simpler response.
‘We’re happy,’ I tell her.
Melody smiles again, and for a few moments we just smoke in silence. Then she starts tapping a foot. ‘So, what now? You want to go get a drink or something?’
The bar at the corner of the Serpentine is packed – of course it is, on a day like this – so after a while, we decide to go for a walk instead. It feels nicer, anyway, to be out and moving in all that wide green space. We walk the full length of the lake, and then, without discussing it, round the shore and start walking back. Walking with Melody – having somewhere to walk to – is a novel experience, but other than that, everything feels comfortingly familiar.
We talk almost non-stop, mainly about St Charles. At some point, I tell her that I still dream about it every other night: the long blank corridors, the smoking area, the security fences. In turn, she tells me that there are mornings when she wakes up and thinks she’s still there, expecting one of the nurses to come bustling in at any minute.
‘But that’s only when I’m half asleep,’ she explains. ‘Most of the time, St Charles feels like a different world – like Jocelyn’s mirror world. It starts to feel like that the second you’re out.’
I smile at this; because here, in the bright spring sunshine, Jocelyn’s Mirror World sounds like an attraction you’d find at a seaside funfair, and just as innocuous.
‘I think I saw one of Jocelyn’s portals this morning,’ I tell Melody, gesturing vaguely in the direction I guess Park Lane to be.
‘Cool.’ She sounds impressed. ‘What did it look like?’
‘Well, actually I didn’t see it, as such. It was more that I could feel it, hovering there in front of me. I find that happens sometimes. There are these little moments when I can see into the gap that separates this world from Mirror World. Do you understand what I mean?’
Melody considers this for a while, before saying, ‘Yeah, I think I do. Like, there are lots of times when I sort of imagine doing things that would probably lead back there. So, for instance, if I was to take off my dress right now and get into the lake, that’s all it would take: I’d be back in St Charles by teatime. Is that what you mean?’
I smile again. ‘Yes, that’s pretty much it.’
‘Is it nuts to even have thoughts like that?’
‘No. I think it’s only nuts if you act on them.’
‘Hmm.’ Melody shrugs. ‘So you think normal people have those thoughts, too? Or is it just us – you know, people who’ve been over to the other side?’
I can’t answer this, obviously, not without doing some sort of survey. My hunch is that it’s a matter of degree – that everyone gets these weird, intrusive thoughts sometimes, but few have to keep a permanent vigil against them.
‘Please don’t jump into the lake,’ I tell her, and a moment later I feel her slip her hand into mine; this, I think, is her way of telling me she won’t.
And we walk on like that, hand in hand, and Melody continues to turn heads every now and then. But aside from the fact that one of us is wearing a cobalt-blue cocktail dress, I don’t imagine we look very different to anyone else walking along the lakeside on this sunny afternoon. Just two more girls in the park, pretty unremarkable. Which, I decide, is not such a bad thing to be.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
‘You have a choice about what you put into the public domain.’ That’s what Dr Barbara tells Abby quite early on in this novel, and usually I’d agree with her, or at least share her implicit concerns. I’m basically quite a private person. I’m not on Facebook or Twitter, and, as a rule, I find writing as someone else more fun, more comfortable, and often much easier than writing as myself. But I’m also aware that there are certain subjects in fiction that are almost guaranteed to provoke curiosity regarding the relationship between an author’s work and an author’s life. Mental illness, I suspect, is one such subject. Put more simply, I can’t imagine publishing this book without being asked at some point – more likely many points – to talk about my own experience of mental illness.
So I’ve decided to talk about it here, as briefly as I can without leaving out any of the relevant details.
Back in January 2009, I went nuts. Not Abby nuts – I wasn’t on a psychiatric ward and I didn’t want to kill myself – but her story certainly has its roots in my own. If you were to reduce our experiences to a list of symptoms (depression, insomnia, hypomania), then the two of us have a lot in common. And, like Abby, I can mark the precise moment when it started; or, to be more accurate, I can tell you the short-term trigger.
It was New Year’s Eve 2008. I stayed up for the best part of three days. I took half a dozen ecstasy pills, and God knows how much speed. Unsurprisingly, this was followed by a pretty awful comedown, and by 5 January I was feeling extremely depressed. It wasn’t the first time; I’d been depressed off and on since my late teens, and I think the weeks leading up to New Year hadn’t been great either. But what was different this time was that it led, very swiftly, to a long period of hypomania. I went to sleep sad and anxious, and I woke up feeling good almost beyond description. At the same time, my thoughts were moving so fast I could barely keep up with them. It was as if my brain had gone into overdrive and was processing ten times more information, but with no conscious effort on my part.
For the next week, I didn’t sleep for more than three or four hours a night, because suddenly that was all the sleep I needed. I kept waking up at two or three in the morning with a head bursting with ideas and so much energy I didn’t know what to do with it. Then, at some point, I decided I was going to walk around the coast of Great Britain. Here’s a letter I wrote about it on 13 January:
Dear Sir or Madam,
This may be a strange request, but here goes.
For some time now my girlfriend and I have been planning to walk around the coast. Unfortunately, we are quite broke – a situation that I’d imagine is not uncommon in those who entertain dreams of walking around the coast. Consequently, we’re looking for corporate sponsorship.
The coast of Great Britain is approximately 5,000 miles long. Based on the assumption that we can walk 25 miles per day every day, I should think the entire walk will take 200 days, or just under 7 months. Where there is no direct coastal path or beach, we will keep as close to the coast as physically possible.