The Mirror World of Melody Black

8

SKYPE

Fran Skyped me that evening. If it had been left to me, I wouldn’t have answered. I’d already switched my mobile to silent, as soon as Beck got home, and had no intention of talking to anyone else. It was hard enough as it was, trying to act normal. But I’d decided, earlier, that Beck didn’t need to know how awful I was feeling. After all, it was mostly my own fault – I’d engineered this situation – and it wasn’t as if either of us could do anything to make it better. This slump, I knew, was purely chemical in its origin, and if I ate enough cottage cheese it would pass. Of course, Beck realized that I wasn’t one hundred per cent, but I’d managed to imply that this was largely a matter of overtiredness. If I seemed distant, that was the reason.

The water pressure had returned, so I’d had a long, burning-hot shower, thinking this might help me.

It hadn’t.

I was drying my hair in the bedroom when Beck came in and told me that Fran wanted to talk to me. If I’d been more quick-witted, I’d have refused – said I was just about to go to sleep or something. But I was caught off guard, and instead found myself waiting dumbly while Beck brought the laptop through.

Francesca was in her kitchen. From what I could make out of the background, she might have been standing in her kitchen. But I didn’t bother to ask if or why this was the case. Probably another trick she’d learned at work, projecting a strong self-image or some such bullshit. You could bet that Fran’s work was full of people who habitually stood up for Skype calls.

‘I was checking my email and I saw that you were online,’ she told me.

‘I wasn’t online,’ I replied. ‘I forgot to turn my laptop off.’ My voice was still devoid of emotion, but I think Fran interpreted this as hostility.

‘You’re busy?’

‘No.’ I couldn’t lie. I didn’t have the brainpower. ‘I’m just not really up to this right now.’

‘Up to what? Abby, it’s a conversation with your sister, not armed combat.’

I shrugged in an attempt to show that I didn’t see the distinction.

‘Could you at least adjust your screen? I can only see half your face.’

I had no idea why this was important to Fran – it seemed a very trivial detail – but I wasn’t going to make a fuss about it. I tilted the screen. ‘Better?’

‘Much. Now listen: I want to apologize.’ Fran was the only person I knew who could make an apology sound like a rebuke. ‘We need to clear the air.’

‘Okay.’

‘Okay? As in . . . ?’

‘I accept your apology.’

I thought this would be the quickest way to end the conversation, but Fran kept staring at me in a way that told me things weren’t going to be that easy.

‘What?’ I asked.

‘I don’t feel good about what happened, believe me.’

‘I do believe you.’

‘It was just terrible timing.’

‘Yes. I know. It was terrible timing and it wasn’t your fault.’

‘Abby, don’t.’

‘Don’t what?’

‘The passive-aggressive routine. Let’s just skip it.’

‘I’ve accepted your apology. What else do you want from me?’

‘I want you to talk to me. Shout at me. Anything. You can’t just say you accept my apology. It doesn’t mean anything.’

I thought this was pretty typical of Fran, wanting to dictate the terms by which I could accept her apology – the terms by which I was permitted to be upset with her.

‘I don’t need to shout,’ I told her. ‘I’m fine. I’m over it.’

‘Oh, please! You’re clearly not fine. You’re still angry about what happened.’

‘I’m not angry. I’m . . .’

‘What?’

Hollow, depleted, empty.

‘What are you?’

‘Nothing. I’m nothing.’

‘Abby, please. Can we at least try to sort this out like adults?’

I didn’t know how to reply to this. Fran started to say something else but I wasn’t really listening. A thought had occurred to me.

‘Have you spoken to Daddy?’ I asked.

There was a small hesitation, one that probably had nothing to do with the fact I’d cut her off mid-sentence.

‘Daddy? No. I wanted to speak to you first.’

‘You haven’t spoken to him at all?’

‘Well, we’ve messaged each other, but, no, we haven’t actually spoken spoken.’

‘Oh.’

‘Oh, what?’

‘Oh. Just oh.’

‘Listen, I know what you’re thinking, but Daddy and I have plenty of conversations that are not about—’

I realized there was no point going on with this any longer. But, equally, I had no idea what I could say to make Fran stop talking.

I hung up.

Then I shut down my laptop and put it on the floor next to the bed.

Several minutes passed. I lay perfectly still, with my eyes closed, waiting to see if the landline would ring and wondering what I should do if it did. But, thankfully, there was nothing. Just the ongoing groan and hiss of the traffic below, like someone’s damning judgement on a piece of third-rate theatre.

I tried to work out if Fran was right, if I was still angry with her. I suppose there must have been some ember of resentment, buried deep, but, right now, it seemed a very small and insignificant thing, lacking any particular colour or shape. And it wasn’t as if any of Fran’s actions over the past few days had come as a surprise. The plain truth was that she had her own life – a busy, successful life – and I was not a major part of it. Little more than an afterthought, really. So why should I feel let down?

It seemed almost unthinkable now, as if I must be misremembering, but I knew for a fact that Fran and I were close once. When I was thirteen and she was seventeen, she was everything I wanted an older sister to be. She guided me through my first boyfriend drama. She showed me how to get my make-up right, at an age when all the other girls in my class looked as if theirs had been fired on with a cannon. She looked after me when I was at my gloomiest – always had time to listen.

Then when she was about to leave for university, in the summer just after the divorce, I remember her telling me that things really wouldn’t be all that different. She’d only be a phone call away. And if necessary, she could hop on a train and be back in London within an hour.

I only took her up on the second offer once, aged fifteen, when I phoned her in floods of tears to tell her that I’d managed to lose my virginity at a friend’s drunken house party. She turned up that afternoon with a morning-after pill, and to this day our parents haven’t found out about it. Fran didn’t even lecture me; she just took me for a long walk in Regent’s Park and made me promise never ever to do anything that stupid again.

It was a promise I’d been struggling to keep ever since, and that was a big part of the problem, I supposed. In my late teens, my sister was more able to forgive my various failings: the recklessness, the irresponsibility, the lack of direction, the mood swings, my absolute refusal to speak to our father. And yes, I could be selfish and attention-seeking and narcissistic – but I was an adolescent; this wasn’t exactly uncharted territory.

It was only a few years later, when I was in my early twenties and still ‘acting up’, that the rift between Fran and me had turned into a chasm. She no longer had the time to deal with the never-ending melodrama of my emotional life. She didn’t understand why I still behaved more like a child than an adult half the time, why I could never hold down a job for more than a few months, was permanently in debt, went from bad relationship to bad relationship, acted in a way that was so patently self-destructive. Even after my diagnosis, she found it difficult to accept that there might be some element of this that was beyond my control. She thought I should just snap out of it; she even told me once that it wasn’t fair of me to sabotage my own life in this way, not when there were so many people in the world living in poverty, all of whom would kill to have the opportunities I was born into. But, then, Fran was never someone who was likely to understand her little sister’s mood disorder. In terms of her own mental health, she was the equivalent of the person who has never caught a cold. Actually, she was like that with her physical health, too. I was fairly sure that Fran had never in her life taken a sick day.

So I had no intention of trying to explain to her how I was feeling right now. It would be like trying to explain colour to someone born blind. About the best I could say for Fran was that now, unlike five years ago, she at least accepted that I experienced feelings she did not, that lay outside her emotional range. On occasion, she had even managed to identify such feelings in me, painstakingly, like someone trying to read music for the very first time. But not today, obviously. She assumed I was being passive-aggressive, and, right now, I had neither the energy nor the desire to tell her otherwise. It was just easier this way.