Rhapsody on a Theme (16 page)

When they’d stopped the citalopram, it had been after Darren had…well, for lack of a better term, freaked out. He’d told Jayden later the drugs had made him not just numb, but came with the sensation of his body being suffocated in cotton wool, and the rest of him just drifting away. Like a cord had been cut between his mind and his body, and he’d flipped out one evening. He’d locked himself in his flat in his last minutes of rationality to stop himself actually…actually
killing
himself, and Jayden was eternally grateful for that, but…what he'd done to his wrist…it had looked like raw mincemeat, and Jayden had been sick when he’d seen it in the hospital at four in the morning, having hitched several rides down from Bristol in tiny increments to get there.

“No,” he said, and Mum made a little noise of relief. “But it might be not yet, you know? Rachel and I are watching him, but he’s not right, and I just…you know, especially with Dad…”

He’d never quite forgiven his father for telling Darren to get his act together. Darren had—they got on like a house on fire, because Darren was into all those bloke things that Dad liked, like cars and rugby and bacon sandwiches and stuff—but half of Darren’s bloody
problem
was that he thought in a fucked-up way about his own mental illness, and Dad didn’t help. Dad’s views on mental illness were just
backward
, and…

“Darling, you know your father doesn’t mean to be harsh.”

“Yeah, but you can’t just get over it, Mum, and I’m worried that if he says anything now, Darren’s going to take it really badly, and…”

“All right, darling. How about this? We do want to see the two of you, and it’ll do Darren some good to be reminded he’s got a family who love him, won’t it? But I’ll tell your father not to say a word about anything to do with depression. Or how he is in general. How’s that?”

Jayden worried at his bottom lip. On the one hand, Mum usually ruled Dad with an iron fist, certainly when it came to the important things. On the other hand, Dad was really, really good at saying things Mum didn’t like, just to get a reaction out of her. He liked winding her up.

“Can we play it by ear?” he asked eventually. “I’ll see how he is on Saturday morning, maybe? I mean, I’m hoping he’ll have settled down a bit, but if he’s really bad still then…”

“All right, darling,” Mum said, and Jayden kicked off his shoes and took the phone to the sofa to try and relax a bit. “How are you, anyway? You sound a bit stressed.”

He settled into the cushions. “I am,” he said and launched into his day.

For a little while, and having a good long bitch to Mum about the whole thing, he felt a little less out of his depth, a little less like this was some huge overwhelming thing that was going to eat his life until Darren either settled down and got better, or…

Or.

* * * *

The nights were the worst. In the day, Darren had to hold it together, had to relearn how to use the autopilot that had gotten him through the worst days at school and at the house on Hayley Lane, where Mother and Father might have seen. The days were empty voids of
nothing
, and he didn’t even have the energy to hate anything, but they were days.

Nights…

Night were different. On the lucky nights, he slept, and could pretend in the world between waking and sleeping, when he drifted between the two with Jayden’s heat against his back or side, that it was just a sleep-induced simplicity. And then he woke, and the emptiness failed to fill, and he knew that he was wrong.

More often, he couldn’t sleep. The drug would swing around to the other side and force him awake. At first, he had tried to keep busy—to do write-ups for work, or watch TV, or trail string on the floor for the cat, or even
read
, God forbid. But it never worked. His mind refused to focus, slipping and sliding around everything that wasn’t a hollow awareness of the
shell
he had become. His brain felt separate from his body, and he felt suddenly clumsy and out-of-control. He felt as though the strings had been cut.

Lying awake at night and staring at the ceiling, trying his hardest not to wake Jayden beside him, Darren felt that heavy weight settling in the centre of his chest again, like a familiar but loathed animal, and felt as though he had to strain to breathe. There was a band around his chest, tight and painful, and another around his brain, keeping out the entire world and preventing any escape from the darkness and the drugs.

Every night, he struggled to breathe. When he would eventually drift away and wake hours later, almost startled by it, he had to assume he had been successful.

* * * *

By Saturday, the physical side effects were…sort of wearing off. The dizziness and the nausea had subsided, but Darren still didn’t want to eat, and still was veering between sleeping like the dead and
all the time
if Jayden let him, and random fits of crushing insomnia that wound Jayden up too, because
Jayden
was stressed to the point where he’d wake up if Darren so much as moved away from him in bed and…

Saturday was a gorgeous day: icy cold, brilliantly sunny, and effortlessly still. Jayden insisted they take the train into Portsmouth and then walk down to Gunwharf Quays, where Mum had decided they’d be having lunch, and Darren didn’t argue. It was a tired sort of day.

“Are you really feeling up to this?” Jayden asked for the millionth time as they approached the waterfront.

“No,” Darren said. “But it’ll take my mind off it for a bit. And I need that as much as anything.”

Jayden squeezed his wrist. Last night, Darren had been so utterly lacklustre that he’d fallen asleep on the sofa whilst Jayden and Rachel had been making dinner, and Jayden hadn’t had the heart to move him. He’d slept downstairs too, to keep an eye out, and Darren hadn’t so much as twitched until six o’clock this morning. When he had, it had been to use the bathroom, and then he had collapsed into their bed and slept again for another two hours. And he
still
seemed tired.

“Do me a favour?” Jayden asked.

“What?”

“
Try
and eat something?” Jayden wheedled. “You’re losing weight now.” And Darren didn’t exactly have a lot of it kicking about in the first place.

Darren grimaced. “I’ll
try
.”

Jayden paused at the door to the gastropub-restaurant-place Mum had chosen. (Definitely Mum, because the menu was like eight pounds a meal, and you wouldn’t catch Dad
dead
paying that kind of money.) “I’m really proud of you, you know,” he said quietly. “I know it’s not easy and you feel crappy and I can’t really help you with it, but you’re trying, and that means…”

Darren caught his hand. He looked
haggard
somehow, lines in his face that hadn’t been there four weeks ago. He looked
older
. There were dark smudges ground in under his eyes, and those eyes were dull instead of their usual sharp, glittering sea-green, and there was none of his usual brash confidence in the way he stood.

“I don’t think this is going to work,” he said hoarsely, and Jayden squeezed his fingers. “And if it doesn’t, I’m
really
going to need you because I don’t think I can take the citalopram reaction again.”

Jayden let go of his hand and hugged him tightly, burying his nose in the cool fabric of Darren’s jacket for a moment before shifting to kiss his ear. “I’ve got you,” he whispered, and Darren was suddenly clinging back
fiercely
, like something was trying to pull him away. Jayden’s chest ached. “No matter what happens, I’m going to be there, okay? And we’ll deal with it. And maybe it will work, and if it does, then…”

“Then I’ll be a pill-popper for the rest of my life,” Darren muttered bitterly.

“Stop it,” Jayden coaxed, pulling gently on his hair before rubbing the scalp, trying to comfort and scold at the same time. “If it means you actually get to live that life instead of…instead of always waiting for the next bad day and having those shadows chasing you around…you know, isn’t that okay?”

Darren heaved a deep sigh that rattled around the base of his lungs and let go. Jayden watched that exhausted, thin face worriedly, holding on to those wide shoulders. They were slack between his hands.

“Come on,” Darren said, opening the door. “They’re waiting.”

“DAN!”

“Told you,” he said, and Rosie hit his knees. “All right, Jels?”

“Up!” Rosie implored, but Jayden picked her up instead. “Nooo, want
Dan
cuddles!”

“Remember Darren’s shoulder,” Jayden said, and she whined, twisting to reach anyway. She’d loved Darren’s cuddles from being a baby, always clamouring to be held by him, and Jayden suspected it was the heat Darren let off like an overactive radiator. Darren hugged them both as a compromise, squashing Rosie between them until she giggled and hit him.

“Hello, darlings,” Mum said as they approached the table. She rose to hug both of them, and Dad grunted in their direction, scowling at the menu. “Pick anything you like, Colin’s paying,” she said cheerfully, and Jayden laughed.

“It’s not our bloody anniversary,” Dad grumbled.

“Bad luck,” Darren said, sitting down.

“See the match last weekend?”

“Wish I hadn’t,” Darren said sourly, and they were off. Mum rolled her eyes, coercing Rosie back up onto her restaurant-provided booster seat and pulling a face at Jayden.

“How’s he doing?” she mouthed at Jayden, nodding her head towards Darren, and Jayden shrugged, waving a hand in a
so-so
motion.

“How was the battleship, Dad?” he asked instead, trying to derail the football—or was it rugby? Might have been cricket, but Darren definitely hadn’t watched any cricket matches last weekend, he always ended up fighting with Rachel over the remote if he tried…

“I missed my calling in life,” Dad proclaimed dramatically and squinted at the pair of them. “You two could do worse, you know.”

“A ship full of blokes two hundred miles from shore for months on end?” Darren said, and Jayden pinched his arm.

“Don’t even think about it.”

“There’s lasses too,” Dad said with a gleam in his eye. Mum slapped his arm.

“Colin!”

“
No
,” Jayden said sternly, and Darren cracked a smile. Dad’s eyes narrowed fractionally, and Jayden scowled at him.

But there he went. “Heard you’re on happy pills again,” he said, and Mum groaned.

“Colin!”

“Yeah,” Darren said unexpectedly. “Not much fu—er, happy about them, mind,” he amended hastily with a sideways glance at Rosie, who was busy making an origami…um…origami screwed-up-tissue out of a menu.

“Knocking you for six, huh?” Dad said.

“Yeah.”

And then Jayden blinked, brought up short, when Dad simply shrugged and said, “Worth a shot. Whatever takes the crazy off.”

“Colin,” Mum scolded. “Darren’s not
crazy
, for goodness’ sake…”

“I dunno, I went pretty crazy on the citalopram,” Darren said, and Jayden began to relax. Dad and Darren were
weird
how they connected, how they communicated, and he hesitantly took Darren’s hand on the tabletop, but let the strange conversation run. Maybe…maybe it would help? Or at least…well…something. Darren never talked to people about this, he got defensive, so maybe this was a good thing?

“You gonna go crazy again on this new crap?”

“Fluoxetine,” Jayden supplied. “You know, Prozac,” he prompted when Dad frowned.

“Maybe,” Darren said.

“We’re watching him, me and Rach,” Jayden interjected as Dad began to scowl. “The doctor suggested a hospital, but…”

“Hell no,” Dad interrupted and jabbed a stubby finger towards Darren’s face. “They get you in one of them places, kid, you ain’t coming out. They’ll have you in padded rooms for the rest of your damn life. Don’t get me wrong, s’good you’re trying, but if they ever make hospital noises, you ditch and run. Better off crazy—like you are, not proper crazy like schizos—or dead than in the loony bin.”

“
Colin
, for God’s sake, this is macabre,” Mum snapped. “Darren’s not crazy and he’s not going to a hospital. And this isn’t the fifties, the NHS doesn’t have
loony bins
like the old asylums. Honestly! Now
decide
what you want for lunch and let’s talk about something else!”

Dad huffed and obeyed, and Jayden squeezed Darren’s fingers.

When Darren squeezed back, and actually chose something off the lighter side of the menu to attempt and pick at, Jayden figured maybe Dad had worked his grumpy-old-bastard magic again.

Even if he was so
backwards
about it, honestly.

It was like suffocation.

It was like…like Darren was fifteen again, and drugged up to the eyeballs in a hospital bed after being stabbed, with the world drunkenly drifting without him and even the slightest movement resulting in a dizzying whirl around his eyes. Like his brain had been scooped out of his head, wrapped in cotton wool, and put back in to ensure that nothing—
nothing—
would get through. An insulating layer, to keep him in and the universe out.

It was far worse than any of his bad days had ever been, because not only was nothing getting through, Darren felt though he were actively sliding away. He slept purely to avoid the feeling of
slipping
, the feeling that when he lay in bed, his consciousness was slowly working its way loose of his body. A balloon on a fraying tether. What happened when it freed itself?

He was paralysed with the fear of that
coming loose
effect, the terror drowning the rational part of him that said there was no such thing as a soul and no way that he could
actually
float out of his own skin. Rationality had no place at the table. He was afraid, afraid of the numbness and the distance and the deadening of every sense he had, and he was furious with himself for being afraid at all.

At least, he was in the academic sense. In the pure, raw, emotional sense…he wasn’t even irritated. He was nothing at all. The cotton wool—the fluoxetine—crowded out even feeling, until there was nothing but a void in his head. Darren would have hated it if he’d been capable of dredging up the feeling at all. Perhaps that was the trick of it. How were you meant to feel sad, if you couldn’t feel at all?