The Mirror World of Melody Black

19

THE MIRROR PEOPLE

When she wasn’t in therapy or being electrocuted, Melody was almost a permanent feature of the smoking area, as constant and reliable as the twelve-foot security fence. She had an inexhaustible supply of cigarettes thanks to her mother, who brought in a couple of packs most evenings and weekends. Melody would then give them away as freely as condoms in a GUM clinic. This was one of the reasons that Melody was always worth smoking with; but it was not the only reason.

Talking to Melody, it turned out, was far preferable to talking to the sane – mostly because there was none of the usual bullshit to get through: none of the evasion or pretence; no carefully chosen words or timid circling of the point. And there was no need for the inane trivia of everyday life: What do you do? Where do you live? Conversations with Melody didn’t start on the ground floor; they started in the attic, with the stuff your family didn’t even know about, because they’d never asked – and wouldn’t like the answers.

Melody had already been on Amazon for two weeks when I arrived, and this, combined with her endless cigarettes and continual need for chat, meant that she knew pretty much everyone on the ward. She was also a terrible gossip, and before long, I had been indirectly acquainted with the backstories of most of the other inmates.

Amazon’s oldest and longest-serving resident was Mrs Chang, a fifty-nine-year-old Chinese woman who had been on and off psychiatric wards all her adult life. Mrs Chang had been on Amazon so long that she had her own chair in the dayroom – the one opposite the TV – which no one else would use out of respect. For a while, I assumed it was respect, too, that caused Melody to refer to Mrs Chang only by her surname – what with Mrs Chang being so unimaginably old. Or perhaps Melody simply didn’t know Mrs Chang’s first name. Both were reasonable guesses, but neither turned out to be correct. I later discovered that Melody did know Mrs Chang’s first name, but was unable to divulge it; all she could tell me was that it started with an X and was a real mouthful.

Then there was Jocelyn, a six-foot-tall, two-foot-wide black woman in her early thirties who, Melody said, was proper crazy – as if the rest of us were just here for a holiday. Jocelyn had been on Nile for more than a month, and could have been kept there even longer. She’d been transferred not because she was getting any better, but on the grounds that she was completely harmless. Despite her formidable appearance, Jocelyn posed no danger to anyone, least of all herself.

Then there was Paula the paranoid schizophrenic, and Angelina the regular schizophrenic, and obsessive compulsive Claire, and so on and so forth. And I had no doubt that my backstory had likewise done the rounds, since Melody didn’t know the meaning of the word discretion – literally. Within a couple of days, I was probably bipolar Abby, or Abigail Burns, or something similar. But at least it was a level playing field. Thanks to Melody, there were no secrets on the ward, and because every woman in here had attained a comparable level of craziness, there was little stigma in having your psychiatric history served up for general consumption. I never felt judged.

With the doctors, of course, the opposite was true. I felt judged every hour of every day – including the hours I spent asleep. This was not paranoia; the quality and quantity of my rest was a subject I had to discuss at great length with Dr Hadley, and she always seemed to know when I’d had a bad night, despite my unflagging assurances that I’d slept like a baby. More and more, I found that therapy with Dr Hadley was turning into a fencing match, full of feints and complicated footwork, sudden thrusts and clumsy parries. The never-ending challenge was to give her the impression that I was being open and cooperative while actually being evasive and guarded. It was a challenge that often proved insurmountable. Dr Hadley kept implying that I was being evasive and guarded.

I finally cracked in art therapy. Most of the other service users were drawing or painting; Mrs Chang was shaping an oblong of modelling clay into what appeared to be a tiny coffin. But I was trying to write. Dr Hadley had suggested, in our previous session, that this might help me, that I might find it easier than talking. This made perfect sense to her; since writing was my job, perhaps trying to write would help me to reconnect with ‘the old Abby’.

Where the old Abby would have told Dr Hadley to stop being so fucking patronizing, the new Abby nodded meekly. After all, getting a reputation for being hostile and resistant to therapy was not going to help matters.

This was how I found myself staring for the best part of an hour at a small stack of blank sheets. I could imagine the sort of thing Dr Hadley wanted from me – a mood journal or a long, emotional essay about my childhood – but when I picked up the pen, it felt like a lead weight in my hand. It turned out that it was much harder to lie in writing than it was verbally. I knew that anything I set down on paper was bound to betray me. But I had to give her something. If I didn’t, if I refused even to try, it would be yet another black mark on my record.

It was only when I’d stopped trying to write and started stabbing the pen into my palm that I hit upon an answer. I decided to write a short abstract poem. It would be extremely short and extremely abstract, possibly a haiku, and crammed full of evocative but impenetrable imagery. Then Dr Hadley could spend as many fruitless hours as she wanted trying to decipher it. More likely, she’d just be pleased that I was trying to express myself, and all I’d have to do in our next session would be to nod in all the right places and wax lyrical about how much the writing process had helped.

Unfortunately, by the time I’d settled on this plan there wasn’t long enough to implement it. Art therapy was almost over, and my next session with Dr Hadley was right after lunch. Even if I’d been in the mood, there was no time to get creative.

Instead, I wrote from memory, jotting down the following four lines:

The hopes so juicy ripening –

You almost bathed your tongue –

When bliss disclosed a hundred toes –

And fled with every one.

Under which I scrawled an explanatory note:

Dear Dr Hadley,

This isn’t my original composition; it’s from a poem by Emily Dickinson which I memorized in school. It’s about a cat stalking a robin. When I sat down to write, this is what popped into my head. I don’t think I can write anything original right now. I’ll try again tomorrow.

Abby

After art therapy was over, I slipped the single sheet of paper under Dr Hadley’s door. Then I went outside for a smoke.

Of course, it wasn’t just about a cat and a robin, as Dr Hadley was quick to point out. Neither was it a poem that had popped into my head at random.

‘It’s quite pertinent to your situation, isn’t it?’ Dr Hadley asked. Except she wasn’t really asking.

She glanced over the lines again, her eyes like little blue scalpels. I could tell from her expression that literary analysis was yet another of her strengths. She probably painted astonishing watercolours too.

‘Do you want to tell me about being manic?’

‘No, I don’t,’ I replied. Dr Hadley looked at me and waited. I shrugged. ‘Racing thoughts, rash decisions, impaired judgement—’

‘That’s not what I mean,’ she interrupted. ‘I don’t want a list of symptoms. I want to know what it feels like. Subjectively. You enjoy it?’

‘Yes. In the early stages, anyway. I enjoy it very much.’

‘Why do you enjoy it?’

I searched for the note of accusation in her voice, but couldn’t find it. She was taking a more straightforward approach than was usual, going for the direct, open question; and she waited patiently for at least a minute while I thought about my reply. The easiest way to explain would be to tell her that it felt like being on speed, but much cleaner: all of the focus, energy and confidence, none of the teeth-grinding or stomach cramps. But it didn’t seem sensible to tell Dr Hadley this.

‘I enjoy it because it’s extraordinary,’ I told her. ‘It’s like existing in a perfect little bubble. Everything feels easy, nothing hurts. If I could live my whole life like that, I would.’

Dr Hadley nodded slowly, then said, ‘But it doesn’t last, does it? Not for very long. The bubble always bursts.’

I shrugged. ‘If it lasted, we wouldn’t be having this conversation.’

Dr Hadley smiled wryly, in acknowledgement of this truism. ‘And what about afterwards? How do you feel then?’

It was the ‘then’ that allowed me to answer this. If she’d said ‘now’, I would have lied. But we weren’t talking about now. We were still talking in generalities.

‘I feel bereft,’ I told her.

She waited, and I could tell she wanted me to go on – was going to wait for as long as it took. So I gave her an analogy. She wanted a ‘subjective’ response, and this was the only way I could get close.

‘Imagine you’re walking on a sunny day,’ I began. ‘Somewhere pretty. A beach, for example. You can feel the sunlight on your face and arms, and the warm sand under your feet. Everything is extremely bright and clear. You can see thousands of individual grains of sand – that’s how clear it is.’

I’d been staring out of Dr Hadley’s window, which faced out onto a bare brick wall, but at this point I looked at her to make sure the words were all making sense. She nodded for me to continue.

‘But then, very slowly, a dark cloud starts to pass in front of the sun. The light and warmth begin to fade, the colour drains from everything, and, bit by bit, the landscape is transformed. Nothing is clear any more. The beach is flat and empty. The sea is just an endless grey sheet. And when you look up at the sky, you see that this isn’t a temporary thing. The cloud goes on for ever, stretching right back to the horizon.’

I stopped talking. This was far more than I’d intended to say, and it felt like a huge effort to get the words out. Dr Hadley must have sensed this. After a few moments of silence, she told me that she’d see me again tomorrow. In the meantime, she wanted me to keep writing. My words or someone else’s. Whatever I preferred.

It was the shortest session we’d had; the whole thing lasted barely ten minutes. But even at the time, as I rose from my chair and stepped out of the office, it felt as if something odd and significant had happened. For the first time since I’d started seeing her, I’d told Dr Hadley nothing but the truth.

It was the next day that it happened. Not in therapy; outside in the smoking area. With Melody.

I was on my own at first. Paula the paranoid schizophrenic came out for a bit, but we didn’t talk, and she sloped off as soon as she’d finished her cigarette. I think most of the other crazies were in the dayroom or exercise class. Except Melody. She was with her mother, who had a half-day off work.

I’d come out here intending to write something else for Dr Hadley, or at least to see if I could. But I never got that far. I was rummaging for a pen in my handbag, when my hand brushed instead a folded envelope. When I took it out, I discovered it was the last article I’d written – ‘Which Blue is Right for You?’ – frenetically scrawled on eight sheets of embossed Dorchester notepaper.

I spent the next ten, maybe even fifteen minutes reading through it. I took my time, and read it twice. After that, I couldn’t do anything much but sit and smoke. It wasn’t that the writing was bad; it was the opposite. And yes, it was just a throwaway fashion piece that I’d planned to hock to Cosmopolitan – but that wasn’t the point either. The prose still glittered. It was warm and witty and engaging. It was the sort of thing I could trim, type up and sell tomorrow – had I felt even the smallest desire to do so. Which I didn’t, of course. Instead, I had that desolate beach feeling again, or a weaker echo of it. I didn’t feel bereft, exactly – just dull and wistful.

I didn’t notice Melody approaching. The first moment I was conscious of her was when she plonked herself in the seat opposite. She flicked a cigarette across the table before lighting one for herself.

‘What you reading?’

‘It’s something I wrote when I was manic. The day before I came here.’

‘Can I see?’

I didn’t see any reason to refuse. Melody read through the small stack of paper while I smoked in silence.

‘You wrote this when you were nuts?’

‘Yes.’

‘It’s good.’

I shrugged. ‘A paradox.’ Then, because I was fairly sure Melody didn’t know this word, I added, ‘I write well when I’m manic. Always have. I wrote that naked in the Dorchester.’

‘Why?’

‘It was a hot day. I’d just got out the bath—’

Melody cut me off with a giggle. ‘No, that’s not what I meant. Why did you write it? What’s it for?’

‘Oh. It’s my job – was my job.’

‘You’re a writer?’

‘Yes. Freelance.’ I gestured across at the article. ‘I was planning to sell that to Cosmopolitan.’

‘Cool. How much would you get for it?’

I shrugged. ‘Not a huge amount. Maybe two hundred pounds.’

‘Holy shit!’ Melody’s jaw had dropped, which I’d always assumed was just a figure of speech.

‘It’s not a lot,’ I assured her. ‘Not when you convert it into an annual salary. I’m lucky if I sell a couple of features a week. Some weeks, I don’t sell any.’

‘Yeah, but when you do it’s like hitting the jackpot, isn’t it? It must be good being so brainy.’

As with everything Melody said, there was no hidden agenda here, no spite or sarcasm. She meant it as a genuine compliment, which left me feeling strangely embarrassed. It occurred to me, then, that this was the first time Melody and I had had a relatively normal conversation about the outside world. We’d clocked up several hours talking about lithium and ECT and self-harm and the other service users, but we’d never got round to discussing the basics. I didn’t even know her surname.

‘What about you?’ I asked. ‘What do you do?’

‘For work?’

‘Yes.’

‘Trainee nail technician. The pay’s shit, but I like the job. I get to talk to a lot of different people.’ Melody held out her left hand so I could inspect her fingernails. They were neat and well filed, but extremely short. ‘I chewed the fuck out of them on Nile,’ she explained. ‘But they used to be beautiful, trust me. You ever get your nails done?’

‘Yes, sometimes. I got them done a few weeks ago. My dad was taking me to dinner.’

‘That’s nice.’

‘Not really. It was with his new girlfriend. She’s only a few years older than I am.’

Melody nodded sympathetically. ‘My dad left me and my mum, too, when I was twelve. I didn’t see him very often after that. A few times a year. He’s dead now.’

‘Oh. I’m sorry.’

Melody shrugged, and for once her face was unreadable. She handed me back my Cosmopolitan article, then took two more cigarettes from the pack on the table. It was at this point that she started to tell me about the mirror people. I thought at first that she was trying to change the subject, because it was obvious that neither of us wanted to talk about our fathers, but I suppose, in hindsight, there was a connection of sorts.

‘Jocelyn’s got this theory,’ she began. ‘It’s really fucking crazy.’

‘Of course it is.’

‘Do you know what parallel worlds are? They’re in Doctor Who sometimes.’

‘Doctor Who?’

‘Yeah. Jocelyn’s a big Doctor Who fan.’

‘I’ve never seen it,’ I told her. ‘But I know what parallel worlds are. I understand the concept.’

Melody nodded. ‘I had to look them up on my phone. Didn’t think I’d find anything, but there’s actually a shitload about them on Wikipedia.’ Melody paused and took a long drag from her cigarette. ‘Anyway, Jocelyn thinks we’re all living in a parallel world. She thinks she got here by travelling through a portal on the Northern Line. In between Goodge Street and Tottenham Court Road.’

‘She thinks we’re all living in a parallel world?’

‘Yes.’

‘Everyone?’

‘No, not everyone. Just us. Me, you, all the other nuts on the ward. That’s what connects us. We’ve all fallen through portals.’

‘On the Northern Line?’

‘No, that’s just Jocelyn’s personal portal. They’re all over the place. In lifts and fire exits – places like that. It’s just that Jocelyn happens to know exactly where hers was. She noticed the train wobble as it went through it. She was brought to Nile not long after that.’

‘I’m not surprised.’

‘It gets weirder,’ Melody warned.

‘Go on.’

‘At the same moment Jocelyn passed through the portal, her double from this world passed through the other way. That’s how it works – kind of like a busy nightclub. One in, one out.’

‘Oh . . . Jocelyn has a double.’

‘Not just Jocelyn. We all have doubles. Everyone here has a double who’s taken over their life back in the original world. And we’ve all realized what’s going on – at least on some level. That’s why we’re here. Whereas the doubles have no idea. They think they’re the originals, so they just get on with our lives as if nothing’s happened. You know: go to work, do the shopping, pay the bills. Jocelyn calls them the mirror people. They’re identical to us in almost every way.’

‘Almost every way?’

‘Yes, except they’re not locked up on mental wards, of course. Oh, and they’re the opposite colour, too.’

‘Excuse me?’

‘Opposite colour. Jocelyn told me her mirror person is white. Sane and white.’

‘And mine?’

Melody shrugged. ‘Black, I guess. Sane and black – same as mine.’

‘Right. And Mrs Chang’s?’

‘Mexican.’

‘Mexican? Because . . . Mexican is the opposite of Chinese?’

‘Yes. According to Jocelyn.’

And that’s when it happened. I don’t think I would have even known, had Melody not pointed it out. It felt so fucking natural.

‘Hey,’ she said. ‘You’re smiling. You realize that? No, don’t stop! I was starting to think you couldn’t smile.’

I was too shocked to say anything in reply. Melody reached over the table and placed her hand on mine. It was then that I started to cry, as well. I must have cried for the next two minutes, maybe longer. But I don’t think the smile ever left my face.

That night I slept straight through for nine hours, and I awoke thinking about the mirror people. I didn’t get up straight away; until one of the nurses came in with breakfast, I lay perfectly still, staring at a single spot on the ceiling where the paint was beginning to flake away. Since I’d been admitted, I’d spent plenty of time staring at ceilings, but this was different. My mind wasn’t cold and blank. I didn’t even feel sluggish. I felt calm and alert, able to focus on a specific idea and examine it from all angles.

The more I thought about Jocelyn’s theory, the less bizarre it seemed. Yes, there were things about it that were absolutely cuckoo – Mrs Chang’s Mexican double and so forth – but still, overall the idea was not without its merits. It made a strange sort of sense to me, on an intuitive, metaphorical level. Being in here – going crazy – it did feel like your life had been hijacked in some inexplicable way. It did feel like a parallel universe, separated from the real one by only the flimsiest of partitions.

And there was something else, too: like Jocelyn, I knew the precise location of my portal, the where and when that had caused my life to veer off its regular track. Hers was on the Northern Line, somewhere between Goodge Street and Tottenham Court Road; mine was the doorway to Simon’s flat. That was where everything had started: the insomnia, Professor Caborn, the weird and racing thoughts. Admittedly, there might have been other contributing factors – other causes stretching further back in time. Yet it was hard to shake the feeling that if I hadn’t entered Simon’s flat that evening, if I’d turned and taken the mirror path back to my normal Wednesday night, then none of this would have happened. I wouldn’t be where I was now – staring at the peeling paintwork in the local mental health ward.

But yesterday the situation had changed again. I hadn’t seen it coming, of course; I’d been so focused on faking my recovery that I failed to notice I was actually getting better, albeit in tiny, plodding increments.

Now it felt as if a hairline crack had appeared in the darkness separating this world from the other; and over the following days, it continued to widen. I was soon noticing further signs of improvement. My sessions with Dr Hadley were no longer something I dreaded. I was reading more and sleeping well. I started to think about the things I might enjoy when I finally got out of this place: a decent cup of coffee, a walk to the shops – small things, but significant, nonetheless.

For a short interlude, everything was getting so much better.

That was before I discovered the truth about Melody.