There was another prescription. There were more pills. There was more Sanjay.
Suddenly Flora’s Craziness was real. It wasn’t just in my head – even if it sort of was. It had a label and a name. Even if I didn’t recognize it, couldn’t figure out what it meant or whether I was supposed to just live with it now…or why it had landed on me.
One thing never changed. I might have had a head full of crazy, but I also had Charlie.
It was Charlie who sorted out the mess with school, who tried to get me to go back and resit. Charlie who drove me from appointment to appointment in his old Land Rover that makes you feel like your bones are being shaken loose. Charlie (and Felix) who moved me into the spare room in the cottage in the Hopwood grounds when Mum said her job was being relocated up north, and wouldn’t it be better for me to stay here, somewhere familiar? I remember hearing the fight between Mum and Charlie from my old bedroom and I’ve never heard him as angry as he was then, accusing her of running away. I don’t blame her. I’d have run away from me too if I could. I ran away from everything else.
It was Charlie and Felix who put me back together. Charlie sat on the floor of my room and read to me when all I could do was stare at the ceiling; he held my hair back when the medication I’d been given to help flatten out the roller coaster in my head made me sick for twenty-four hours straight. Felix dragged me out of the house and along with him on his regular tours of the estate – pointing out trees and badger setts and rabbit tracks, calling out bird songs as he heard them, making me hear them too.
Together, they made me remember who I am – who I really am, rather than the ball of misfiring mental wires that looked a little like me. They gave the world shape again. They gave me shape again. Because roller-coaster Flora wasn’t quite me – she was just a fraction of me, a faction of me.
So now I am me again. But I’m just…not always good at holding on to the actual me. And that’s what this is about – Charlie and his deal, the checklists, the constant self-analysis and self-editing. It’s about holding my shape, keeping me together. Stopping another Incident, even though that’s what being bipolar is: a cycle, a roller coaster, a constant orbit around my very own axis. I just wish I could do that without all the questions I have to ask myself every time I feel anything – good or bad: is this a balanced reaction? Does my mood match the moment?
Finally, Charlie reties his bandana round his head, and looks me up and down. “Okay,” he says.
“Okay?” I blink at him. “No checklist?”
“You say you’re all right. I don’t have much choice except to believe you, do I?”
I shrug. “I just got a bit…flustered. That’s all. Look, I have to get back to work.” I turn back to the hotel and mutter: “And also kill Mira for making me tell you.”
“You leave Mira be,” Charlie calls after me. “She’s looking out for you. We all are.”
At a jog, I shove through the glass front door into the lobby – it’ll be far quicker than taking the staff entrance, and I need to get back up to the second floor before Mrs Tilney does her first round of the day – but halfway across the polished wooden floor, I freeze.
A new arrival is standing beside the soft velvet sofas by the window; an expensive looking leather bag and a smart backpack stacked on top of each other by his feet, a bundle of papers on the low coffee table in front of him.
Red hair, sunglasses pushed up onto the top of his head.
Oh no.
With a sinking feeling, I step back from the door and lean out into the sunlight to check the drive. There it is: the squashed-frog car.
When I creep back into the lobby, he has pulled off his sunglasses and is watching me. His gaze is direct, unflinching.
He recognizes me.
Oh god.
“Mr Waverley? I’m Barney, the general manager. Welcome to Hopwood Home…”
The voice comes from behind me as Barney strides across the lobby from his office. He passes me, shoes clicking against the polished floor and walks up to the guy, holding out his hand to shake. I dart for the staff door behind the check-in desk, but even when the door has closed behind me, I can still feel those pale eyes on me.
Upstairs, Mira has already finished room fifteen and is packing all our cleaning stuff back into the trolley. “Quick, you said,” she snorts, throwing a towel at me as I walk in through the open door.
“And I would have been, if you hadn’t dropped me in it with Charlie.”
She pouts, looking about as unapologetic as it’s possible to be when something is technically your fault. “He needed to know.”
“Did he, though? I mean, did he?” I wave the plug of the vacuum cleaner at her.
“Yes.” She pouts some more, and I sigh.
“How can I disagree with an argument like that?”
She throws another towel – and it’s right when I bend over to pick them both up that Mrs Tilney appears from nowhere in the doorway.
“Flora? Barney would like to see you in his office, please. Now.”
The door to Barney’s office is firmly closed, the little brass plaque in the middle that reads Barney Scott, General Manager gleaming at me like an eye. I straighten my already-straight uniform for the third time and knock.
“Come in.”
Barney is sitting at his desk, stacks of paperwork piled up across the wooden top in front of him, his back to a big window that overlooks the drive and gardens. He looks up and smiles as I close the door. Which is a more promising start than I’d expected.
“Flora. Take a seat.” He gestures to the old leather chair in front of his desk and shoves one of the paper stacks aside.
“Mrs Tilney said you wanted to see me?” The chair makes an alarming creak as I sit down.
“I did. It’s about a guest who checked in this morning.”
Of course it is. He’s complained. I knew he looked like a complainer.
I stare at the edge of Barney’s desk, waiting.
He reaches into one of the drawers, pulling out a stapled form and turning the pages to read them. I catch a glimpse of my own handwriting – or at least, my handwriting from a couple of years ago, when I applied for the Saturday job here.
Overthinking things is what I do, but having your boss pull your job application form out of his desk is probably not good.
“There we go – that’s what I thought,” he says, more to himself than to me. “On your form, there’s a section for awards and achievements, and you’ve put winner of regional school history competition.” He lowers the papers and looks at me over the top. “Maybe you could tell me a bit more about that?”
“Umm…”
What is there to say? That my history teacher had cornered me at the end of class one day and told me I should enter – that it was something she thought I’d be interested in, and good at? And I was. Out of all the projects submitted, from all the schools in the whole south-west, mine won. I spent weeks working on it, researching it, drawing little maps, putting together the perfect project on all the places Jane Austen lived in Bath. I remember how much I loved doing it…but maybe that was just a little light mania and I didn’t know it. Maybe every time I’ve thought I’ve been good at something, I’ve actually just been mad. Maybe it was the mad bit of me who won.