“I said I don’t need the checklist.” This is so humiliating.
“Part of the deal.”
“Well, the deal sucks too.”
“Flora…”
“And it’s not like you’re Dad or anything…”
“So stop making me have to behave like I am!” he groans.
I look at my shoes, feeling a stab of guilt. Charlie’s nothing like our dad. He’s still here, for a start, and he’s probably the closest thing to a proper father I’ve ever known. Our actual father decided that he didn’t really want to do the parent thing again when I came along ten years after my brother – an accident apparently – so he left. I wouldn’t have taken it personally, except he set up a whole new family pretty quickly after that, one we’ve never met. So I guess it wasn’t that he didn’t want to do the parent thing again – he just didn’t want to do it for us. For me.
“Sorry,” I mumble.
Charlie pulls his bandana off his head and his hair flops across his face.
“I don’t want to have to nag you. Christ, I’m not the life police. You’re entitled to do your own thing, have your own space – but you know the rules. You don’t want to get ill again.”
No. I don’t. That’s why I’m here, isn’t it? Because everything out there is…too much.
“And a bus full of the kids you used to go to school with – who were all there – I think that counts as something you should mention, don’t you?”
“Yes, Charlie.” I make a circle in the dusty gravel of the path with my shoe. “Sorry, Charlie.”
“And you can drop that attitude while you’re at it.” He shakes his head in frustration, suddenly sounding a lot more than ten years older than me. “I just want you to be all right. You’ve been doing so well lately – you’ve been so stable. I promised Mum when she moved…I promised her that Felix and I would make sure you were okay…”
“You promised you wouldn’t let me spiral up or down, I know. Look, I’m not going to totally lose my mind in the next fifteen minutes. That’s not how it works.”
“That’s not what I meant.”
I can see the tension in his face – in the set of his jaw and the little vertical lines above the bridge of his nose. He gets them every time we have to talk about my condition – even more so if the “Incident” comes up. It’s not like I ever want to talk about it either, or even think about it – all it does is remind me of another life. My other life. A life with messages and phone calls, with cinema trips in a group all sharing popcorn and going to get food and to dissect every minute of it afterwards; with shopping, with music and gigs and shouting across the seats of the bus and…
“I’m fine. It was just a lot. Especially with suddenly having a total stranger in my face and being a nightmare.”
“You’re sure?”
“Which one of us is living in my head?” I snap back. “Me or you?”
“Flora…”
“Me. Exactly. So which one of us is likely to know whether I’m fine or not?”
He doesn’t respond. All I can hear is the cry of the swifts overhead and a sudden clatter of crockery from the breakfast room nearby.
Finally, he scrubs a hand back and forth across his face. “You know the answer to that,” he says softly.
And however much I hate it, and hate him for saying it – maybe even hate him more for knowing it – he’s right. It’s not me.
There was an Incident – The Incident. Halfway through my GCSEs. Halfway through an actual paper, in fact. I don’t really remember it. I don’t really remember much for weeks before it either, other than the constant trickle of pre-exam stress – an ever-present prickle of panic under the top layer of my mind…And then suddenly it all went away. I wasn’t stressed any more, wasn’t panicked about my exams or revising or any of it – I just knew I could do it. Better than that, I wasn’t just going to pass, I was going to pass amazingly. Of course I was. It all suddenly made sense, like someone had switched on a light in a dark room, or opened a magical door that had everything behind it. The world was brighter, louder and sharper. Everything was clearer – so clear that I wanted to run down the street shaking people and telling them to look…
And then it all went wrong.
I went wrong.
Actually, that’s not true. It wasn’t me that went wrong, it was my wiring, the switches, the tiny little invisible lights that come on and go off inside my brain which broke. And when they stopped working properly, they took me, Flora Sutherland, down with them.
I’ve tried to piece it all back together from what Charlie’s told me, from what the doctor and Sanjay, my therapist, have said. It’s not easy because even the things I remember feel wrong, like I’m looking at the memories underwater – the edges of them are too sharp and too shiny, and they don’t feel like they happened to me at all.
I know I was revising beforehand. I didn’t sleep much – a couple of hours a night at most – but I wasn’t tired. At all. I sat my first few exams and I was fine. More than fine. I had so much energy, and everything seemed so easy all of a sudden. I was even the first one to finish, by a long way. Like, an hour early. In a two-hour paper.
The morning it happened, I got up and went to school – like I had done every other day. I sat down and waited for the exam to start – like I had done every other day. I started writing – like I had done every other day.
And just like that, “every other day” became something that only used to happen.
After that, there were waiting rooms – I remember that much. Blue plastic chairs and wall-mounted bottles of antibacterial handwash.
And then there were pills: a prescription from the GP, who handed the slip over with a smile and a “Let’s see how you do with these.”
He referred me to Sanjay, in his little office in the corner of the surgery building, where the blinds were always drawn. “Mania,” he called it, this thing that had stripped me away from myself. It was mania that took “every other day” away. It was mania that meant I wouldn’t – couldn’t – be on that bus with everyone else who had sat those exams. I thought too quickly, spoke too quickly, jumped from idea to idea way too quickly. My brain had got stuck in high gear and nobody could keep up with it – not even me.
And everyone, everyone I knew…they all saw it.
I didn’t care at the time. I was moving too fast and burning too brightly. In my head, I was a superhero. I was a genius. I was a comet, a sun, a shooting star…
But even suns burn out, and shooting stars fall to earth, and comets are nothing but exploding ice; enormous dirty snowballs crashing through space. And so after the high came the low, and the weeks when even breathing hurt; where every thought felt like it was wrapped in mud and all I wanted to do was sleep and sleep and sleep. To lie face down on the floor and never get up again. Ever.
So. Back to the doctor.
“Mmm. Everything you’re telling me – the heaviness, the slowness, the exhaustion – sounds like a classic depressive episode,” he said, nodding at me. “Mania and depression in a cycle like this?” He typed something into his computer. “I think we’re looking at bipolar disorder here. Bipolar II.”