The Shock of the Fall (Special edition) (24 page)

I spent most of my time in bed, or else smoking in the caged square of concrete out the back – always accompanied by a nurse. I had a lot of time to think, and when I wasn’t thinking about Simon, who I thought about most, was Annabelle.

‘Cup of tea with the sea?’

‘What?’

‘I was going to have one. You’re welcome to join me. I can trust you, can’t I?’

The rain wasn’t so much falling, as dancing all around in a fine spray, shining silver in the moonlight. I don’t know how long I’d been crying, only that I’d stopped. I felt emptied out somehow. I felt strangely calm. Annabelle was still beside me, watching me closely.

She reached into a pocket of her bag, taking out a metal Thermos flask with a small dent near the base. She struggled for a second with the lid before it opened. It let out a squeak as the steam was released into the cold night air. That was strange in itself. Or rather, it wasn’t strange enough. I’m a person who reads a lot of meaning into stuff, forever hunting out the small print. You’ve probably gathered that by now. I don’t mean to do it, but I can’t help myself. I see symbols. I see tricks of reality. Hidden truths. But there’s no small print in a Thermos flask. Not a slightly battered Thermos flask with a lid that is tight enough to make a person struggle, but that eventually opens. Nothing – absolutely nothing – is more ordinary than that.

This was actually happening.

‘Or we can go back up to the site if you’d rather? Get some warm soup in you or something? Get you in some dry clothes. You’re soaked right through.’

‘Um— I—’

‘Of course that would mean meeting my dad too. And he’ll want to know what you were doing by the caravans. It won’t be a big deal, but he will ask. Strictly speaking, you were trespassing you know?’

‘I’m sorry, I was— I thought—’

She almost smiled. ‘What am I like? You don’t have to explain to me. I’m just trying to give you your options, that’s all. Because no way can I just leave you here. Not like this. Not to let you—’

She stopped.

I know what she was going to say though. She shook her head inside the hood of her raincoat, ‘I’m sorry. That was coming out wrong. I just mean— I’d be worried about you.’

Dr Clement let his chair drop with a decisive thud.

I could feel him mining the small twitches and movements of my face. How was I feeling in myself?

Perhaps I could have told him what it felt like to turn eighteen, incarcerated on a psychiatric ward. I was in the patients’ kitchen, watching the kettle boil, trying to hear Simon in the bubbling water. When Mum and Dad appeared in the doorway. Mum was holding a parcel wrapped in gold and silver paper with a silver helium balloon tied around it.

I hadn’t even realized what day it was.

‘Thanks Mum, thanks Dad.’

We went to my room to unwrap it. The balloon floated up to the ceiling, bouncing its way into a corner.

‘If it’s not the right one—’

‘No. It’s good.’

‘It was Jacob who recommended it actually,’ Dad explained. ‘We bumped into him the other day in town, did he tell you?’

‘I never see him.’

‘He said he was planning to come—’

‘I said I never see him, okay!’

I didn’t mean to raise my voice like that. It wasn’t their fault. ‘Sorry. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to shout.’

Dad folded the torn wrapping paper neatly, then looked around for a waste-paper bin before dropping it back on my bed and staring out of the window. Mum was sitting beside me. She stroked my hair behind my ear like she used to when I was little. ‘I think he just finds it hard,’ she said at last. ‘Jacob finds it hard. And we find it hard. It’s difficult for the people who love you.’

I stared at my helium balloon hugging the ceiling. ‘I’m finding it hard too.’

‘I know. Oh, my darling. I know.’

Dad clapped his hands together briskly, in that sudden way he does when he wants to be decisive. When he wants to save us from ourselves. ‘Shall we play it then?’ he asked.

I pushed the sadness away. I didn’t want to be upset when they were trying so hard to make it a nice day. ‘It’s a really good present,’ I said. ‘Thank you.’

I meant it too. It wasn’t so long ago when I could have wanted nothing more – a PlayStation 3 and some decent games – but now I can’t even think which games they were. What I do know is that Mum and Dad were useless at all of them. But that it was sort of fun watching them try. We’d gone down to the TV lounge to plug it in, and took it in turns to play, sitting on the sunken couch or kneeling on the carpet. And not only us, but Thomas and a couple of the other patients joined in too. Euan, I think it was. And maybe Alex. Was it Alex? It doesn’t matter, because I’ve changed all their names anyway. Nobody in this story has their real name. I wouldn’t do that to people. Even Claire-or-maybe-Anna is between two other names I can’t decide. You don’t think I’m really called Matthew Homes, do you? You don’t think I’d just give away my whole life to a stranger?

Come on.

It was funny, because whenever it was the person I’m calling Euan’s turn to play, he couldn’t sit still. He’d move around all over the place, hardly even watching the screen. And he’d make all the noises with his mouth.

‘Kerpow! Kerpow!’

He didn’t even realize he was doing it.

‘Kerpow!’

I thought about when I was younger; a time when I was poorly, genuinely poorly for once, and Mum had helped me to make a den in the living room, and we played Donkey Kong together on my Game Boy Color. ‘Do you remember it, Mum?’

She looked at me blankly. Not blankly. But sort of distant – looking right through me to some faraway place. Her voice sounded distant too. ‘I don’t think I do remember.’

She’s never kept much. Not from that time. She doesn’t know what she was like – the way she was with me. She doesn’t know how her suffering spilled out of her, filling the house. How it controlled her. ‘You were fucking mad back then,’ I said.

‘Kerpow! Kaboom!’

‘Sorry, darling?’

But perhaps it’s me who has it all muddled up. And anyway – what difference does it really make? She did her best. I guess there’s a Use By date when it comes to blaming your parents for how messed up you are.

I guess that’s what turning eighteen means.

Time to own it.

‘Pardon, darling?’ she asked again.

‘Nothing. It’s not important.’

I leaned into her, letting my head rest gently against her shoulder. I listened to her breathing. When it was my turn to play, I let Thomas take another turn instead. I nestled into the nook of Mum’s arm. Then lay on a cushion on her lap. I fell asleep like that. She’s all bones and hard edges. She’s never been comfortable, but she’s always been there.

‘Ka Blamo!’

That evening they both stayed on the ward for supper. Usually supper was just sandwiches, but to celebrate my birthday Dad bought fish and chips for the entire ward – all the staff and patients. The dining room rustled with chip paper. The whole building smelled of salt and vinegar.

Mum disappeared partway through, then the lights went out, and she came back in with a chocolate birthday cake and eighteen flickering candles. Everyone broke out in a loud chorus of Happy Birthday. Simon joined in too.

He was in the flames.

Of course he was in the flames.

A nurse grabbed hold of my wrist, leading me quickly to the clinic where she held my blistering fingers under the cold tap. I had no idea what I’d done, only that I had been trying to hold him.

My medication was changed yet again. More side effects. More sedation. In time, Simon grew more distant. I looked in the rain clouds, fallen leaves, sideways glances. I searched for him in the places I had come to expect him. In running tap water. In spilled salt. I listened in the spaces between words.

At first I wondered if he was angry with me, if he’d given up? It made me feel sad to think like that. I don’t know which one of us was most dependent on the other. Over the next few weeks, I would lie in my bed, listening to fragments of conversation drifting from the nurses’ office, to the scraping of the viewing slats. And I would watch my helium balloon slowly die.

The worst thing about this illness isn’t the things it makes me believe, or what it makes me do. It’s not the control that it has over me, or even the control it’s allowed other people to take.

Worse than all of that is how I have become selfish.

Mental illness turns people inwards. That’s what I reckon. It keeps us forever trapped by the pain of our own minds, in the same way that the pain of a broken leg or a cut thumb will grab your attention, holding it so tightly that your good leg or your good thumb seem to cease to exist.

I’m stuck looking inwards. Nearly every thought I have is about me – this whole story has been all about me; the way I felt, what I thought, how I grieved. Perhaps that’s the kind of thing Dr Clement wanted to hear about?

But what I said was, ‘I haven’t done anything wrong.’

‘Sure. Sure. But people have been worried about you. Why is that, do you think?’

‘I don’t—’

The doctor nearest me lifted my file of medical notes, but Dr Clement said, ‘It’s fine, Nicola. We don’t need to write anything. Let’s just listen to Matthew.’

She put her pen down, her face flushing pink. The doctors have a hierarchy, and Dr Clement is at the very top. He’s my consultant psychiatrist. What he says, goes.

‘I want to go home,’ I said.

‘Where’s home?’ Annabelle asked.

She had asked me to walk down to the cove with her. I didn’t protest. There was something in the way she looked at me – a look somewhere between determined and pleading. And maybe I felt that I owed her something.

The rain had stopped. The air was still. Pebbles crunched beneath our feet as we reached the shoreline, where small dark waves broke into frothy white.

‘I live in Bristol,’ I told her. ‘I’ve got my own flat. I mean— I don’t own it or anything.’

The sea looked like black silk. Or maybe velvet. I always confuse those two. It looked nice is what I’m getting at. It was the same black as the sky, so looking out to the horizon you couldn’t be sure where the sea stopped and the sky started.

And the moon was huge. And everywhere, the stars were scattered in their millions.

‘It must be nice living here,’ I said.

‘I live in a bloody caravan, Matt. With my dad. It’s not nice living here.’

‘You haven’t seen my flat.’

She laughed at that. I wasn’t trying to be funny, but it felt nice seeing her laugh. She laughed a lot. She’s a person who might say, ‘Well if you don’t laugh, you’ll cry.’

She didn’t actually say that, but I can easily imagine it. She seemed nice. I reckon anyone who would stay to comfort a stranger whilst they wept their life out must be fairly nice. It was more than that though. She had a way about her too. Like everything was important, but nothing was so important that it couldn’t be interrupted with another offer of tea from her flask, or a question about if you were warm enough because it would be really no trouble at all to go back to the site, to borrow you one of her dad’s jumpers. And she’s sorry that you’re having a hard time, she really is. But it’ll all be okay. She’s certain of it.

She’s known sadness. That’s what it is. I only just thought that as I wrote it. She’s known sadness, and it has made her kind.

‘She didn’t have a name,’ she said.

We had walked along the shore, and then back on ourselves towards the scattering of beach huts. And now we were sitting side by side on a small upturned wooden rowing boat. Our knees were almost touching.

‘She wasn’t my favourite doll. If she did have a name it would have changed every time I played with her. But when you saw us. When you watched her funeral. She was called Mummy.’

She knew that. Because they all were.

If I’d counted to a hundred the day before then I might have watched her bury a Barbie in the dirt, or the day before that a Furby, or a rabbit from the Sylvanian Families. And all of them were called Mummy.

‘Jesus,’ Annabelle said. She put her face in her hands even though it was too dark to properly see her blushing. ‘What was I like?’

The only difference with the funeral I saw, was what she kept.

‘The coat?’

‘It’s meant to be a dress.’

She took the piece of yellow cloth from her pocket, but she didn’t hand it to me. It’s strange. She trusted me enough to be alone with me in the night-time. But there was something about the way she held it, her small fist closed tightly. I knew this wasn’t an invitation to take it again. ‘We made it together,’ she said. ‘It was supposed to be a dress, but Mum let me help a bit too much and it ended up— It is more like a coat, you’re right.’

It became a comforter. Her friends teased her because she was never without it. That’s what she told me. It’s worn right through in places from where she rubs it between her thumb and fingers whenever she’s watching TV or reading. And it’s grubby too. More brown than yellow really. It even smells a bit. She laughed loudly as she said that, as she told me she’s never once put it in the washing machine in case it falls apart.

And all of this somehow made it more real. Like it couldn’t possibly be Simon’s comfort blanket because it had its own story. Because it was Annabelle’s.

‘I would never have kept it all this time,’ she said. Suddenly serious, suddenly looking straight at me. ‘I don’t suppose I would have done. Except it took on more meaning after what happened. And in a way, I suppose that’s because of you.’

Dr Clement glanced to my dad with an apologetic wince. Dad nodded slowly. ‘Let’s do this another way,’ Dr Clement continued. ‘I’d like to ask you the difficult question.’

Instinctively I found myself reaching for Mum’s hand. Not because I needed comfort, but perhaps to offer her some. This is my care plan: As a small boy I killed my own brother, and now I must kill him again. I’m given medicine to poison him, then questioned to make sure he’s dead.

Dr Clement lowered his voice. ‘Tell me,’ he said. ‘Is Simon in the room with us? Is your brother still talking to you?’

The door swung open, the student nurse bounced in, spilling tea on his hand, ‘Ouch! Here you go, Matt. Sorry it took so long.’