Page 84 of Mad About You

She hoped not to be intercepted by Cal once she got home, but he bounded out of the sitting room as soon as he heard the front door close.

‘Just wondered. Need a hand? When you move?’

‘No, thanks. Think I’ve got it covered,’ Harriet said, with the kind of brittle, concertedly perky brightness that hovers right on the edge of primal screaming.

‘Are you sure you want to go? There’s no rush.’

‘Yes! Honestly. It’s fine.’

‘OK.’ Cal opened his mouth and then shut it again. He looked at her from under his brow but – perhaps detecting her turbulence – was deterred.

She nodded by way of a conclusion, and made her way past him and up the stairs.

‘Are you alright?’ Cal said, frowning after her, and part of her yearned to fall into his arms, sobbing: NOPE. She’d put too much on him already. He was herlandlord,for God’s sake, not her Emotional Support Turkey.

‘Yes! Fine,’ Harriet said, unconvincingly. She glanced back and smiled, a forced, closed-mouth, brave-soldier smile. A smile that was as much a KEEP OUT sign.

She got upstairs, closed her door gently, turned the key and put music on softly as muffling device, then, when it was safe, burst into near-silent tears. Empty, hopeless, jaw-stretching tears, tears that came from the chest, a borderline howl that pulled her face into strange shapes. She covered her eyes with her hands and let it out: the isolation, the hopelessness, her own sheer ludicrousness.

It was as if she’d made her home on the edge of a cliff and was watching it fall, piece by piece, into the sea.

She has a way of making herself the victim.

She’d lost Roxy, or at least, there was now a distance between them that was likely permanent.

She needed her closest friends to understand – or if not understand, respect – that Scott wasn’tjustan ex and they didn’tjustend on bad terms.

When she finished it with Scott, Harriet interrupted a process where, had it continued, eventually would have led to no Harriet to rescue.

Harriet cried herself to sleep and when she awoke, after an anxiety dream about being naked in the middle of The Reliance, she could tell the house was empty. Cal must be off seeing Nameless Girl Pal.

She wasn’t hungry, and alcohol would only lower her further into the well. She lay in the gloom and scrabbled for her phone. If nothing could help, if all was lost, why not succumb to the temptation of the absolute worst thing she could do? She navigated back to Scott’s post.

It was like picking a scab, except that didn’t get close to the sense of self-harm – picking a scab, as you lay in a ditch waiting for the paramedics.

The shares and Likes had plateaued, but Harriet saw reams of fresh theorising about her specific, colourful mental problems and vicious nature. She’d now stage-managed attending the same wedding as Scott, in order to ‘try to blow up his life’, and those schooled in the law on harassment offences were advising how to handle stalkers, because H would definitely strike again. Harriet was starting to wish she went by the mononym H, avenging wronged women while dressed in Lycra.

Her eye was drawn to a recent comment, only an hour old, sitting a few places from the end of the thread.

Nina Jackson

Hi everyone! I’m not ‘H’ and I have no idea if any of this is true, but for what it’s worth, I dated Scott Dyer for almost 3 years out of college, and they were by far the worst years of my life. TBH everything he’s describing here sounds like the way behaves in a relationship, so I’m wondering if he’s having a full Edward Norton/Brad Pitt Fight Club meltdown. Either way, he’s not your hero of abused men, of that I’m sure. You’ve all got yourselves an unreliable narrator. Nina xoxo

As Harriet blinked in wonder at this burst of pure magic, it vanished.

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Where did it go? Where was it?! Harriet hit refresh like a demented woodpecker and it remained stubbornly not present, as if she might have conjured it as a comforting mirage.

Except she hadn’t, as she now scanned the few responses to Nina, all displaying the online trademark of bullish confidence:

Bye ‘Nina’, ya troll

Hey everyone, H has got herself a sock puppet!

Believe it or not, you don’t have to be perfect to be a victim. This is victim blaming. I Stand With Scott

Scott must have deleted Nina’s post. The fucker had deleted it, and here was the thing – the very fact he’d deleted it told Harriet it was genuine. It was good to think of him rattled, attacked by a raptor in this Jurassic Park of hostility he’d created artificially in a lab.

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