Page 13 of Glitterland
I opened my mouth and closed it again. There was a long silence. “No,” I said, finally.
He gave an immense yawn. “That was proper special.” Then he rolled right up close, tossed an arm and a leg over me, and fell almost immediately asleep.
I lay there in frozen horror, watching the pattern of shadows and cracks on the ceiling. This had all been a terrible mistake. And I had no idea where I was. How was I going to get away? What was going to happen? What had I done? What had made me think this would ever be all right? The image of my medication, sitting on the kitchen countertop, vivid to the tiniest detail of the prescription on the label, flashed across my mind. Fuck, oh fuck. My heart started racing. Anxiety shook itself like a wolf leaving its lair. I told myself it was psychosomatic. I was going to be fine. Yes, I’d broken all my routines, but at least I hadn’t taken any drugs. Though I resented having to feel grateful to Niall for that. But how much had I drunk? Enough to dilute the carefully modulated biochemical sanity sloshing around inside me? Oh, God, was I going to go mad? How would I tell? When I found myself in hospital, that’s how I’d know. Except, by then, I wouldn’t believe it.Please, please, I don’t want to go back to hospital. I’d rather kill myself. Wait. No, I don’t mean that. I don’t mean that.
Maybe I’d just feel shitty for a while. Crash in depression, rather than soar into mania. That would be okay, wouldn’t it? I could endure it. I’d be strong. And it would be a fair price for that split second of physical happiness. My eyes burned as I bargained desperately and silently with a God I didn’t believe in. Ah, the pitiful prayers of a rational man. If the mad can so be called.
I twisted under Essex’s arm, and his deep, even breathing gusted over my skin. The unexpected warmth raised a prickle of goose bumps across my arm and shoulder. And, slowly, impossibly, my thoughts ceased their frantic churning. My heart rate dropped.
I…relaxed. My body felt heavy, sore but—in some distant way—satisfied. It was an unusual sensation. Anxiety and depression had conspired to render me a lifetime member of Insomniacs R Us. But, somehow, on a bare mattress, in a strange house, with a strange man sprawled over me, I was slipping into sleep.
Maybe it was going to be all right.
3
After Yesterday
Days passed in a grey fog. I was becalmed. Without energy, without hope, with no sight of land. I could remember feeling better but I somehow couldn’t believe in it. There was nothing but this.
Sometimes I managed to get out of bed. Sometimes I didn’t.
Sometimes I slept. Sometimes I didn’t.
Sometimes I thought about killing myself. The idea of it circled my head, shining and lovely like a tinsel halo. How beautiful it would be if everything could just stop. If I could stop. If I didn’t have to feel like this. Yes, I thought about it and thought about it, but I was too exhausted, too depressed, to do anything about it. A paradox of such excruciating absurdity that I half-wished I believed in God. Then at least I’d know someone was laughing.
Sometimes I took out my phone and looked at grainy, flash-flooded photographs of a glittering man standing against a wheelie bin.
One day, in a fit of energetic self-loathing I didn’t want to waste, I deleted them.
Sometimes the doorbell rang. I ignored it.
Sometimes my phone rang. I ignored it, too.
Sometimes it kept on ringing but the noise came from another country, a different life.
And then I got better.
I woke up one drizzly afternoon and, although I still felt like shit, it suddenly seemed possible to function. I got up, heated some Heinz tomato soup and, giddy with triumph, ate it.
There had been a subtle realignment of the spheres. The world was somehow a place I could endure again. If life was a grey corridor lined with doors, it was now within my power to open some of them.
Having experienced such unqualified success with the “eating some soup” door, I opened the “having a shower” door, followed by the “reading the newspaper” door. Not wanting to push my luck, I then went back to bed. The next morning found me stronger still, and I risked activities as dangerous as reading my email and checking my phone. I had seventeen messages, eleven of which were Niall apologising. The rest were, variously, my agent, Max, my mother, an automated reminder from British Gas, my agent again, and static on the line.
As a terrifying demonstration of the incestuous nature of my social circle, my agent was actually Amy Miller, Max’s wife-to-be. To be fair, she had been my agent first.
Apparently my latest book had been well received, which was to say that people who liked that sort of thing had liked it; people who didn’t, hadn’t. However, it would pay the bills, which was all that mattered.
I rang Amy, so she could congratulate me and I could congratulate her and to confirm my attendance at the proposed readings, signings, and interviews. And possibly the Edinburgh International Book Festival next year, an occasion I thoroughly despised. I always seemed to get stuck next to whoever was supposed to be the new Martin Amis. As if the old one wasn’t bad enough.
“Also,” said Amy, when that was all done with, “I’m having an awful dilemma and I need your advice.”
“Oh?” I cradled the phone against my shoulder so I could dig my hands into my dressing gown pockets and wander aimlessly about the flat. “It must be exceptionally awful if you’re asking me.”
“Hah, yes. I don’t know what to call myself.”
“Amy Miller seems to be working for you.”
“Yeah, I’m pretty fond of it and I intend to cling to it. But without going full-on Up the Patriarchy, I’d like to at least acknowledge the fact I’m getting married.”
