Page 67 of Glitterland
I opened my mouth to answer, but I couldn’t meet all that sincerity, all that hope and generosity, with a lie that made things simple for me. “Sometimes,” I said, finally. “But not always. It would have been so much easier, but then—” I swallowed. “—I suppose I would have lost some moments too.”
It was strange—perhaps terrible—but somehow I found it easier to talk about wanting to die than wanting to live.
“They’re not the moments I ever thought I’d want,” I went on. “Sometimes I think they’re very small. Like the crunch of autumn leaves. And the scent of Lapsang. And writing, maybe. And you, Darian.”
He leaned over and kissed, not the scars, but the heel of my hand, as I had once, twice now, kissed him. “Aww, babes. I fink you’re amazin’.”
There was another long silence.
And then his fingers touched my upper arms, the meaningless non-pattern of scars and slashes. “What abaht this?”
“That’s just old lunacy, from my first manic episode. I can’t even remember doing it. They told me later that I thought there were lost words trapped in my skin and I was releasing them back into the world. Like a flock of phoenix.” I tried to laugh, but nothing came out.
Darian’s fingertips circled and swooped, trailing a feathery warmth across my skin, lighting up the lines on the madman’s Etch A Sketch I’d made of my body. Scars or not, it felt the same. “What was the words?”
“I don’t know. I can’t read them. It’s all senseless. It always was.” He leaned in, and I shivered self-consciously beneath such close regard. “Trying to crack the Da Vinci Code?” I asked.
He laughed, looked up, and kissed me with such swift cunning I had no hope of evading it. “You’re awhight, babes.”
Oh, how I wished it were true. Instead I wound myself round him like poison ivy and clung. “Barthes said language is a skin. I’m sure he never meant it quite this literally.”
“Who’s Barfs?”
“Barthes. French literary critic. Gay. Perhaps overly fond of his mother. Prone to nervous breakdowns.”
“You know such a lot of fings, babes.”
I shrugged. “He used to be one of my heroes.”
“You went off ’im? That’s a bit ’arsh.”
“He’s dead.” Safe in the gloom, I stretched up and put my lips shyly to the edge of his jaw. “He won’t mind.”
“But why?”
“He was hit by a laundry truck.”
“Yeah, har-har. I meant why’d you go off him, you donut.”
For a moment, I was silent, my head tucked against his shoulder, while I listened to the sounds of his body, magnified by the night. I could almost imagine I heard the brush of one eyelash against another, the rush of blood through veins and arteries, the cells of his body dying, dividing, and multiplying, like eggshells cracking. Finally I said, “Unhappy is the man who has need of heroes.”
“I ain’t being funny, babes, but now you’re just being clever in a way that means you don’t ’ave to answer the question.”
I kissed him under the ear. “I’m sorry, Darian. I don’t know what I like anymore. I don’t know if what I think is what I think, if what I feel is what I feel, if any of it at all is me. If there is a me that isn’t just a reflection of or a response to…mental illness.”
“Course there is, babes.”
“How will I know?”
“Cos you will. You’ll know when summin’s real.”
I gave a laugh so harsh it hurt my throat. “I don’t, though. That’s the fucking problem. What part of ‘insane’ did you miss?”
The next thing I knew I was on my back, Darian stretched on top of me, his hips cradled by my hips, his legs pushing mine apart.
“I reckon you’ll figure it aht.”
He caught my unconvincingly protesting hands and bore them down against the pillows. His mouth nipped its way up my neck and then settled over mine. And he held me and kissed me until there was nothing else.
