The Mirror World of Melody Black

24

WRITING

I wrote to Melody every week, starting when I was in Exeter with my mum. I addressed the letters to Dr Hadley at St Charles, and included a note saying that she could read what I’d written and decide whether or not to pass them on. I don’t know if she did. All I know for certain is I never got a reply. I must have written Melody nearly a dozen letters over the past four months, and in every one I included both my email address and mobile number. But I suppose I never really expected to hear anything back. Just writing the letters helped me, which is probably why I persisted so long. It seemed like enough of an end in itself.

And after a while it wasn’t just letters to Melody. At one point, I was writing to several different people most days – letters, not email, and always handwritten. Email is too easy and impersonal, and it can be stressful to write, as well. With letters, there’s no pressure to hit send before you’re certain you’ve finished; there’s no clock ticking in the corner of the screen. You don’t get distracted by Google alerts or multiple tabs or flashing banner adverts. When you handwrite a letter, the whole process is much more sedate.

Once I could articulate myself a little better, I wrote several letters to Beck, telling him what I was doing and trying to explain some of my reasons. After that, I wrote to my mum and Francesca – letters in a similar vein, detailed and conciliatory. I even tried to write to Daddy at one point, but this task was the opposite of sedate, and in the end it defeated me. I sent him a postcard instead. On the front was a dramatic black and white shot of the causeway being flooded, which I thought he might like, and on the reverse I added three sentences: If you’re ever making a car ad, this would be a great location. I’m doing a bit better now. Abigail x

The last, of course, wasn’t even a sentence, but I’ve decided that when it comes to my dad, less is definitely more. Postcards are probably the safest way to start rebuilding our relationship.

If my shortest correspondence was with my dad, then my longest was with Dr Barbara, to whom I wrote at least one long letter every week, usually the day after one of our telephone appointments. There are always things you forget to say on the phone, or don’t say quite right, so the letters were useful for both of us. In a way, they were also a continuation of what I’d started with Dr Hadley – a kind of ongoing exorcism by pen. Sometimes, setting your thoughts and feelings down in ink is much more effective than just speaking them.

Then there was the handful of miscellaneous letters it felt necessary to write in order to draw a line under the events of the summer. The first was to Professor Caborn, explaining and apologizing for my slightly odd behaviour – although this was one letter I decided to bin rather than send. Ultimately, I thought I’d harassed him enough, and it was better to leave things as they stood. My stream of emails, unexpected visit and complete lack of follow-up could just be a weird footnote in the journal of his career – inconsequential and quickly forgotten.

The staff at the Dorchester were another matter. They had looked after me when I needed it; they had been kind and understanding and had torn up a £600 bill I was in no position to pay. I sent them a short but insistent thank you letter, which I addressed to ‘The Night Staff, 7.6.13’. So that’s another one that may or may not have arrived at its intended destination; but it was important to try, nonetheless.

There was only one letter that felt like a complete waste of a stamp – and I knew this was likely to be the case even as I was writing it. This was the four-page missive I sent to my credit card company asking them to freeze the interest on my payments. I don’t think large corporations like receiving handwritten letters at the best of times, and the three paragraphs I got back were terse. Essentially, they told me to go fuck myself. Not their exact wording – and there was a line in there somewhere about calling a debt adviser – but the end result was still the same. After I’d read through their reply a couple of times, I binned it and then cut my credit card into four pieces with Miranda Frost’s kitchen scissors – a symbolic gesture that unfortunately did nothing to settle my debt. Which was one of the things that made me think I’d better start working again.

I’d emailed Jess at the Observer a few weeks earlier, trying to explain, as best I could, why I’d ignored the string of messages she’d sent and failed to deliver the promised article on monkeys and urban alienation. She seemed pretty understanding on the whole, but I knew I’d still done some significant damage to my professional credibility. You can’t drop off the radar for six weeks – you can’t spend a month on a psychiatric ward – without raising certain questions about your future reliability.

Still, she had told me that I could ring her any time, that she’d like to hear about any new projects I was working on. Probably, she was just being polite, but I decided to take her at her word. And anyway, sending her my new proposal did make a certain amount of sense; in a strange way, it was the long-promised follow-up to what I’d written for her back in May.

‘Lindisfarne?’ she repeated, obviously perplexed.

‘Yes, that’s right. It would be a series of features about the island, what it’s like living on the edge of such a tiny community. City girl finds herself dumped in the middle of nowhere – that would be the angle, I guess.’

‘God, I don’t know, Abby . . . It sounds like it would be a difficult sell.’

I shrugged at Colin, who had just come in through the cat-flap. ‘Why don’t I just send you something? If you decide not to use it, that’s fine. No hard feelings.’

‘No, no – you can’t go all that way for nothing.’

It took me a few seconds to grasp what she meant. It seemed I’d been so eager to outline my idea that I’d forgotten to cover the basics.

‘Oh, right. No, no problem there. I’m already here – have been for a couple of weeks now.’

There was a silence.

‘On Lindisfarne?’

‘Yes.’

‘Why?’

‘I’m looking after Miranda Frost’s cats. She lives here, but she’s in the States teaching for a semester.’

There was another small silence. ‘Okay, that’s an angle I can work. I mean, it’s extremely odd, but that’s the point. Send me a thousand words on how this happened and I’ll pitch it.’

So that was how ‘The Lindisfarne Gossip’ came about. The name was Jess’s idea: she thought that every time someone did a search for the Lindisfarne Gospels, we’d pop up as the second option on Google’s autocomplete, and this would help bring in a certain amount of traffic. The strategy seems to have worked. The column has been a surprise hit over the autumn, and a couple of weeks ago, I finally made the last payment on my credit card.

The name is also a bit misleading, of course: there’s not a lot of gossip to report from Lindisfarne. The islanders have some lottery funding to build a new village hall. No one is very happy about second home ownership. Nothing that’s going to set pulses racing back on the mainland. Most of what I’ve written has been human interest, along with a little bit of history and environment. My only directive from Jess was to ‘keep it quirky’, and so far that hasn’t been a problem. This is a place with a lot of quirks, and the islanders seem to be enjoying their moment in the spotlight. Since September, I’ve had no shortage of people wanting to share their stories.

There was a ninety-year-old man in the Crown who told me that he’d wandered over to Lindisfarne one day while hiking the Northumberland coast. That was a couple of decades ago, and he has been here ever since.

‘It was peaceful,’ he told me, ‘so I decided to stay.’

The following week, I wrote a piece entitled ‘Mrs Moses’, about a woman who had a very strange experience on the causeway one night. She’d been racing back to the island after an Elton John concert, trying to get home before the tide came in, but had been badly delayed by snow and freezing fog. When she finally made it to the coast, it was barely an hour until high tide, and she knew it was far too late to make the crossing. Except, when she drove down to where the water’s edge should have been, what greeted her instead was the most beautiful and astonishing sight she’d seen in all her fifty-five years on the planet. There, under the light of a half-moon, was a dry road cutting a valley straight through the water.

‘The sea must have been a foot high on either side,’ she told me. ‘It seemed completely impossible – a modern-day miracle.’

So she eased onto the accelerator and drove between the waves.

It was only when her headlights dipped with the dropping seabed that she saw what had happened: on either side of the road, the standing water that pools after the tide recedes had frozen solid; on top of this, a good foot of snow and slush from the road had accumulated to form a thick wall of ice, spanning the whole length of the crossing.

‘But weren’t you scared?’ I asked her. ‘What if the ice had given way?’

‘No, I knew it wouldn’t,’ Mrs Moses insisted. ‘It might not have been a miracle in the biblical sense, but there was something watching over me that night. Every so often, the universe offers you a gift, and when that happens, you’d be a fool to refuse it.’

This was a nice line to finish on, even though I disagreed with the underlying sentiments. In all honesty, I don’t think there’s a benevolent ‘something’ that sees us home safely from Elton John concerts; and I don’t think the universe offers us ‘gifts’. I think we make choices – good or bad – and live with the consequences. Which isn’t to say that there aren’t moments like the one Mrs Moses described, when decisions suddenly seem easy and obvious, as if we’re being pushed in one direction rather than another. But most of the time, I think we have to engineer these moments ourselves. We have to seek them out, instead of waiting for them to fall into our laps.

All this, I suppose, is another way of explaining what I’ve been doing with my alone time on the Holy Island of Lindisfarne – time that has now run out. In a couple of days, Miranda is returning and I’ll be heading back to the mainland. But as for what comes next – that’s one decision I’ve not yet made.