The Mirror World of Melody Black

23

MIRANDA FROST’S CATS

They’re called Jasper and Colin, and they live in a two-bedroom cottage on Lindisfarne, a tidal island a couple of miles off the Northumberland coast.

I’d heard of Lindisfarne before I arrived, but I had no idea what a tidal island was. Turns out it’s pretty straightforward, and obvious when you think about it. Lindisfarne is a tiny finger of land poking out into the North Sea, which becomes cut off from the mainland twice a day by the rising tides. There are two routes on and off the island: you can drive along the causeway, which has carried road traffic since the 1950s, or you can walk across the sand flats, where a rough path is marked out by tall wooden posts that have been driven into the ground every twenty metres or so. Both routes are submerged for up to twelve hours a day, by over six feet of seawater at the highest tides. There are three little huts on stilts – one at the roadside and two spaced out over the sand flats – which serve as refuge points for stranded walkers and motorists, but the locals tell me that it has been a while since they’ve seen a car stuck in the sea. A couple of years ago, the council invested in a large electronic sign that flashes the safe crossing times day and night, and apparently there have been far fewer incidents since then.

Still, even without the odd four-by-four stuck in several feet of rising water, there’s something pleasingly apocalyptic about watching the road get swallowed by the sea every day. I’ve been down to the causeway to watch the water rushing in over the road at least once a week since I arrived here, and it really doesn’t get boring. I even wrote an article about it. It was called ‘Imagining the End of the World’.

A little more than half a year ago, Miranda Frost told me that she lived miles from anywhere, and this was not too much of an exaggeration. Hers is the last house on a lane that rapidly becomes a dirt track and then a footpath leading down to the sea. The nearest building – a barn – is about two hundred yards away, and the nearest streetlight is a further two hundred yards back towards the village. The village, I should add, has no name and doesn’t need one because it is the only settlement on Lindisfarne. The island’s entire population numbers fewer than two hundred people, plus maybe a couple of thousand sheep.

Of course, there were many more people in the late summer and early autumn – I think the car park outside the village can accommodate several hundred vehicles – but they were always clustered in the square, or at the castle or priory. It was still rare to see more than a handful of hikers passing down this road at any one time. Since November, whole days have gone by when I haven’t seen a soul.

Aside from the lack of people, the thing that most struck me when I arrived was the darkness. The darkness and the silence. Both, at times, can be absolute.

It’s ironic, but after so many nights in London praying for peace and quiet and darkness, I found that the first few nights here I couldn’t sleep. The truth is I’d had no prior experience of this kind of environment. I’ve always lived in the city, and I wasn’t prepared for how the total absence of sound and light would feel. On nights when there isn’t any wind or rain, you can’t hear anything beyond your breath and the occasional creak of a cooling floorboard. On nights when there isn’t a moon, you can’t see even your own body in the darkness. You feel as if you’re nothing more than a thought in the void.

That first night, I didn’t fall asleep until the sun came up and the birdsong started. The three subsequent nights, I slept with the landing light on.

I’ve never been good at identifying accents, especially northern accents. Yorkshire, Lancashire, Geordie – they all sound pretty much the same to my ear. After more than three months on this island, I think I’m getting slightly better, but I still couldn’t say for certain whether there is a specific local accent, much less describe it. All I know is that everyone I’ve spoken to is from the north, and every time I open my mouth, I might as well be holding up a sign that reads NOT FROM AROUND HERE.

I speak the Queen’s English, and I’ve always taken this fact for granted. But what I’ve become aware of, more recently, is that people from outside London and the Home Counties actually regard this as an accent. It was brought to my attention in the Crown and Anchor one evening, when I got into a small argument with one of the barmen and confessed that, as someone without an accent, it’s quite difficult for me to differentiate between the various regional dialects.

He looked at me with this slightly irritating smile on his lips, then said, ‘But you do have an accent, pet.’

I’ve since discovered that if a man addresses you as ‘pet’, it means he’s from Newcastle.

‘Excuse me?’ I replied.

‘You do have an accent.’

This was so patently absurd that I assumed, for several moments, that he must be winding me up. That or there was something wrong with him.

‘No, I don’t. Of course I don’t. What accent do I have?’

He shrugged. ‘A posh one.’

I spent the next ten minutes trying to explain the difference between being ‘posh’ and having clear enunciation, but I’m sure the distinction was lost on him.

Of course, when I first arrived here, I didn’t even have to open my mouth to identify myself as an outsider. The problem was I’d had very limited packing space, and most of the clothes I had packed were inappropriate. I was still going through the phase where I was hyper-conscious of my appearance; I was making an extra effort to take care of myself, and a big part of this was ensuring I looked nice every day – because I knew how easy it was to let things slide. One day you go without make-up, and before you know it, you’re wearing last week’s jeggings and haven’t washed your hair for three days.

So the first time I walked into the village, I was probably a little overdressed. Not London Fashion Week overdressed – just my smart three-quarter-length coat, pumps and some moderately expensive fitted jeans – but still. In a place like this, anything more than a fleece is considered glamorous. And I suppose the fact that I’d painted my nails a sparkly silver the night before did not help.

The man behind the counter in the post office looked me up and down, slowly and without subtlety.

‘Hello,’ I said. ‘I’d like a book of twelve first-class stamps, please.’

It took him a couple of seconds to nod and snap into action. No one here does anything quickly.

‘You here fo’ jus’ the dee?’ he asked.

Scottish is one of the few accents I can identify with some confidence. In fact, I can even draw some sort of distinction between the different areas of Scotland: if you sound a bit Scottish you come from Edinburgh and if you sound extremely Scottish you come from Glasgow. But that doesn’t mean I’m able to decipher it at pace, and by the time I’d started to translate what was being asked of me, the man had already moved on.

‘It’s jus’ that the tide’ll be in soon. You’ll no’ want to be leaving it too late.’

‘Oh. Right.’ I obviously looked like a rescue mission waiting to happen. ‘No, actually I’m staying for a bit. And I know about the tides.’

The man squinted at me for a while.

‘You in film?’

‘Excuse me?’

‘Film, TV. We get a lot o’ film and TV people on the island. Lots o’ those historical pictures.’

‘Oh. I see. No, I’m not in film.’

‘Ah, you’re a pilgrim, then?’

This, I think, was intended as a joke.

‘No. Clearly not.’

‘On the run?’

‘Escaped from a psychiatric ward.’

‘Ha!’

‘Actually, I’m a house-and cat-sitter. Miranda Frost’s house and cats. Do you know her?’

‘Aye. One o’ the few that do. Strange lady. Bit of a recluse.’

‘Yes, that’s her.’

‘You a friend o’ Miranda’s?’

‘No, not exactly. Not at all, actually. We’ve only met once. For work. It’s a little complicated. I’m a journalist – that’s the day job when I’m not cat-sitting. I interviewed her.’

It was a lot of information, I knew, but with each additional sentence, the man looked a little more bemused.

‘You interviewed her?’ he asked eventually.

‘Yes.’

‘Why?’

‘Excuse me?’

‘Why would you interview Miranda?’

‘Er . . . the usual reason, I suppose.’

He looked at me blankly, still squinting.

‘She’s a poet,’ I pointed out. ‘She’s one of the most prominent poets in the country, right behind Andrew Motion and Carol Ann Duffy.’

Nothing.

In every future encounter, I ditched the more convoluted backstory and just told anyone who asked that I was Miranda Frost’s niece. Except this rarely helped matters, either. It’s astonishing, really, but on this minuscule island with its minuscule population, I’ve met perhaps five people who are aware of Miranda Frost’s existence; and only one of them knew she was a poet.

It might have been a quip, but the Scot in the post office was not the first to suggest I could be running away from something. My mum, Dr Barbara, Beck – they all questioned my coming here. I’ve questioned it myself – or I did in the first couple of weeks. I think it was the legacy of how I left London, the day I got out from St Charles.

I didn’t see Beck that day, although it wasn’t as if I planned it like that; not exactly. I was released on a Friday morning while he was at work. He wanted to be there – we talked about it on the phone the night before – but in the end I told him I wasn’t sure I could handle it. I thought it would be easier if we stuck to what we’d agreed: space and time, for us both.

It wasn’t easy. There was an eerie quiet in the flat. Not the same quiet I’ve experienced here, of course, but a London quiet – the white noise of traffic heard through glass. Nevertheless, after weeks spent on a hospital ward, everything suddenly seemed very still.

I’d left my mother parked right outside the building, telling her I’d only be five minutes. But I think I was in and out of the front door in three. I grabbed a rucksack that had been squashed at the bottom of the wardrobe, filled it with clothes – just clothes, whatever was closest – and then left.

‘That’s it?’ my mum asked after I’d slung the bag onto the back seat.

I shrugged. ‘There’s not much I need.’

‘Oh.’

I could tell she wanted to add something for the next fifteen minutes, but it was only when we were on the motorway and leaving the city that she said, ‘Darling, are you absolutely sure you’re going about this the right way . . . ’

I love my mum, and I’m very grateful to my mum; she dropped everything and came to rescue me when I needed her. However, nothing tells you that your life’s gone off track like waking up in a parent’s spare bedroom with only a bag of crumpled clothes for company.

Technically, I kept telling myself, I wasn’t moving back in with my mother; I couldn’t be since I’d never lived in this house before. My mum relocated to Exeter shortly after I left for university, and I’d only ever stayed here as a guest – a couple of Christmases and the odd week in summer. So it wasn’t as if I had to suffer the indignity of moving back into my childhood bedroom or anything like that. Still, what with her bringing me a cup of coffee every morning, and opening the curtains and preparing my breakfast, it was difficult not to feel like I’d regressed by a decade.

Then there was the constant issue of how much I was smoking – sometimes voiced, sometimes conveyed in a glance, or just through the knowledge that I was being watched. I knew it was all born of the same concern, the same impulse to take care of me that was so evident in the neatly folded clothes that appeared on my bed every few days, or the lunchtime phone calls from work, just to check how I was. But after a week or so, I was finding it increasingly hard to bear.

It was in this mindset that I embarked on the mammoth job of working through my backlog of emails. There were 804 of them, spread out over 23 pages. The sheer number was enough to make my head reel, and after half an hour of staring at all those neat but incomprehensible rows and columns of text, it was clear this was yet another task I could not face alone. So I enlisted my mum’s help. More specifically, for the next hour or so she sat at the screen while I issued instructions from the armchair.

I suppose it’s a generational thing, but I’m continually baffled by my mum’s inability to apply the common sense she uses in every other walk of life to the realm of IT. The really puzzling thing is that she manages to use a computer every day at work, just like the rest of us. In fact, she works for a marketing consultancy, so she even has to advise other people on online profiles and social media and the like. God help the soon-to-be-bankrupt firm that knows less about social media than my mother.

‘Okay,’ I told her. ‘It’s probably simplest if you start by just deleting all the junk.’

‘Very well.’ My mum waited expectantly. I nodded for her to proceed. She clicked her tongue a couple of times. ‘So what needs to go first?’

‘Just start with the stuff that’s obviously junk.’

‘Abigail, this is your email, not mine. How am I supposed to know what’s junk and what isn’t?’

‘Because it will be obvious. It will be really obvious.’

My mother sighed with unwarranted exasperation. ‘Give me some examples.’

I massaged my temples for a few seconds to let her know how dense she was being.

‘Start with all the generic mail from eBay and Tesco and Amazon. Then delete anything from a bank or credit card company that isn’t NatWest. Then delete anything about PPI or compensation for an accident at work.’

‘You had an accident?’

‘No, of course I didn’t! Delete anything that says I’ve won the lottery. Delete anything from a pharmaceuticals company. Delete—’

‘Oh, really, Abby! Why would there be mail from a pharmaceuticals company? What on earth have you been buying?’

‘Delete anything referring to Viagra or hot singles or penis extensions.’

‘You don’t have to get crude.’

‘Jesus, Mum! It’s the internet; crudity’s the fuel that keeps it running. Delete anything with a subject heading that’s all in capitals. Delete anything that uses more than one exclamation mark . . .’

After an hour, 804 emails had become 77. This was the fallout from the past month and a bit. A fair amount of work stuff, a lot of where are yous. Two credit card statements that made my eyes hurt. The emails from Beck and Francesca, and even one from Daddy. That was probably the worst thing I had to deal with: his attempt at sensitivity, read aloud by my mum, was so cringe-inducing that I found myself being almost swallowed as I sank deeper and deeper into the armchair.

‘He does try, you know,’ my mother said. But she did not sound convincing.

And somewhere in the middle of all this was the email from Miranda. It was dated nine days ago, and the subject was Cats? But there was no message beyond that.

‘It’s completely blank,’ my mother told me. ‘Nothing. I think she must have hit send by accident.’

‘No, she didn’t. It’s all right. I know what that’s about.’

Needless to say, I’d completely forgotten about Miranda Frost’s rather odd proposition. But hers was the first email I replied to. And it was by far the easiest.

There was no crossover between the two of us. Due to a combination of train, plane and tide times, she was several hours gone by the time I arrived on the island. After a seven-hour journey from Exeter to Berwick, I took a taxi to her cottage. She had left the front door key under a plant pot and a note on the kitchen table:

Abigail,

Cats are not like human beings. They are natural grazers and prefer to eat little and often. For this reason, I usually feed Jasper and Colin three small meals a day at 7 a.m., 1 p.m. and 7 p.m. These times are, of course, only suggestions, but you’ll find that if you delay the morning meal much later than 7, Colin (the larger of the two) will come to get you. Please do not leave him scratching at the bedroom door. They have wet food – half a pouch each – for every meal, and you should also ensure their biscuits and water are topped up every evening. Do not be alarmed if Jasper disappears for 24 hours every now and then. He likes to hunt. If you find any dead rodents in the garden (he seldom brings them into the house), there is a small shovel next to the compost bin.

Milk, bread and other essentials can be bought in the village, but I have everything else delivered. You’ll find contact details for the delivery man enclosed, and since he’ll be coming once a week with cat food, I imagine it would be easiest if you simply add anything else you require to the existing order.

I also enclose my mobile number. Call me in an emergency but not otherwise.

Miranda

P.S. Very occasionally, you might get a goggle-eyed tourist poking around the garden or knocking at the door asking to look around. I’m not joking. They treat this whole island like it’s a bloody museum. Use your good sense and do not let strangers into my home.

P.P.S. If you go crazy again, there’s a doctor in the village. She’s retired but she once helped me out with an allergic reaction to a bee sting. I’m sure she’d be able to see you if it was critical (number and address also enclosed).

Tentatively, and from a very safe distance, I found myself warming to Miranda. Yes, she was still a sociopath, and God help her students in the States; being taught by the woman, I could only imagine, would be four months of creeping psychological torture. Nevertheless, at least she was honest. With Miranda, you didn’t have to worry about what she was really thinking. This was one of the reasons I knew I could tell her the truth when it came to my recent stay on the psychiatric ward.

Of course, there’s still a certain stigma attached to mental illness, but this isn’t something that bothers me all that much any more. I’ve been periodically crazy since my mid-teens, and any feeling of awkwardness on my part long ago lost its sting. But what you can’t prevent is the awkwardness of other people – their embarrassment, their hang-ups. They start tiptoeing – and even healthcare professionals are guilty of this sometimes – as if the smallest comment, a misworded question, might be enough to push you back over the edge. Every so often, you have to remind people that you’re not all that different from them: same complicated tangle of blood vessels, thoughts and emotions. You have to remind them that seeing a psychiatrist or taking medication is not the same as having had your former personality surgically removed.

I knew I didn’t have to worry about any of this with Miranda Frost. I’d tell her what had happened and she’d have some sort of immediate reaction that I didn’t have to spend hours decoding. But I suspected, too, that her reaction would not be a bad one. I have a sixth sense that has grown pretty reliable in these matters. Even if Miranda hadn’t had personal experience of mental illness – which I thought she probably had – then I was sure she’d know people who’d had similar breakdowns at one point or another; she’d probably driven a fair few of them to it herself.

My lack of worry was well founded.

I sent her the following message:

To: miranda@mirandafrostpoetry.co.uk

From: abbywilliams1847@hotmail.co.uk

Date: Sat, 13 Jul 2013, 6:40 PM

Subject: RE: Cats?

Miranda

Sorry for the delayed reply. I went crazy and was on a psychiatric ward for a month. I’m better now, and would very much like to take care of your cats – assuming you’re still okay with this?

And within a couple of hours, I had her response:

To: abbywilliams1847@hotmail.co.uk

From: miranda@mirandafrostpoetry.co.uk

Date: Sat, 13 Jul 2013, 8:27 PM

Subject: RE: RE: Cats?

Abigail,

It’s okay with me. I assume you’re well enough to take care of two cats; otherwise you’d still be locked up.

Are you on medication? If you need a chemist, there isn’t one in the village. However, Berwick is only a short bus or taxi ride away. It’s quite easy to get there and back in a morning. If this is not a problem for you, I’ll send more information tomorrow.

Miranda

If only everyone had reacted like that.

My mum and sister spent the next fortnight trying to persuade me that I was not capable of living on my own right now. Even Dr Barbara was against it, and didn’t soften her stance until I agreed to have phone appointments twice a week. But Beck’s reaction was the most vehement, as I knew it would be.

‘Why?’ he asked, in one typically circular and frustrating phone conversation – the same one we had over and over until the day I left. ‘You hate the north! You get a migraine if you have to travel up to Birmingham for a couple of hours. Are you trying to punish yourself?’

‘No, of course not. It’s . . . I don’t know what it is.’

There was a five-second silence down the line.

‘Abby, I’ve tried – really, I have. I’ve given you space. I’ve hardly seen you for two months. But we can’t go on like this. I can’t go on like this. It’s not fair.’

‘I know. And I’m sorry, but I can’t help it. This is just something I need to do.’

‘You don’t need to do it. You’re choosing to do it. At least be honest about that.’

I didn’t say anything.

‘You know, Abby, sometimes you’re just completely fucking impossible.’

Then he hung up.

To be fair, I didn’t explain things all that well. But then, I didn’t really understand myself – not until I got here.

There are different ways of being alone, and being alone is not synonymous with being lonely. That’s something I realized quite recently. I’ve not felt lonely since I arrived here, not in all the hours I’ve spent by myself. But there are plenty of times when I’ve felt lonely in London. In London, you can feel painfully lonely on a Tube train, penned in by hundreds and hundreds of people.

Here on Lindisfarne, I’ve taken to seeking out new ways of being alone. Since the tourist season ended, I’ve spent consecutive hours sitting on my own in St Mary’s Church – outside service times, of course. It’s not that I’ve found God or anything weird like that. But there’s something very calming about sitting in such an old and impressive building, with all its statues and stained glass and towering stone columns. I think it must be something to do with the sense of history and shared endeavour that infuses the place. In St Mary’s, you can sit in absolute silence and solitude and still feel part of a much larger story.

Then there’s the beach past the sand dunes at the north-east corner of the island. It’s a good mile from the village, so you only get the odd dog-walker there, and not very often. Most of the time, you can sit at the foot of the dunes and see nothing but sand, sea and sky. It’s another place that’s nice to visit on the rising tide; the water comes in quite rapidly, making you very aware of the land shrinking minute by minute. In a way, I suppose this visceral feeling of being cut off is what draws a lot of people to Lindisfarne in the first place, and certainly those who have decided to live here. Being geographically isolated for up to six hours is an oddly comforting feeling. It’s crazy, but from London, six hours would be more than enough for me to get to a whole other continent. But here, I find myself increasingly appreciative of these long stretches when my entire world is limited to just four square kilometres of sand and rock.

The truth is I’ve never been on my own before – not for any significant amount of time. In fact, since the age of fifteen, I’ve never been out of a relationship for more than two weeks. I’ve just sort of fallen from one into the next, often with some overlap in the transition – though obviously this is not something I’m particularly proud of. I’m not proud of my record in general.

I have over a decade of relationship experience spread across approximately a dozen sexual partners; I tried to make a more accurate count, but in all honesty, I think I might have forgotten one or two somewhere down the line. But the exact number is less important than the general trend. If you discount Beck – we’ve been together for over three years, so he skews the statistics – I’ve spent the last decade getting through boyfriends at the rate of about one every nine months. My conclusion is that I’m not good at relationships. Actually, that’s a conclusion I reached some time ago.

Quite early on, not long after I started seeing her, I told Dr Barbara that I was very bad at relationships. More specifically, I told her that I’d never felt like I could rely on any of my boyfriends to make me happy – and I was even more certain that I couldn’t make any of them happy, not in the long run.

I remember her exact response: ‘Abby, you’re absolutely right, but not in the way you think you are. You can’t make anyone happy, just like no one else can make you happy. Because real happiness doesn’t work like that. You have to learn to be happy on your own. Then you can start worrying about being happy with somebody else.’

I didn’t really understand what she meant at the time, but now I think I do; and it’s a big part of what I was unable to explain to Beck and my mother and my sister when I decided to come here.

I’m learning to live alone, to be happy all by myself, and here there’s almost nothing to distract me from that task. There’s just me, Miranda Frost’s cats and a flat empty horizon.

If anyone were to ask me now why I came to Lindisfarne, I’d tell them this: I’m trying to be better.

It’s the most complete answer I can give.