Page 73 of Glitterland
And another.
Anything to keep me afloat in this sea.
Somehow I ended up on the edge of a group of people I vaguely recognised from university. The conversation—politics, literature, the state of the economy, what had happened to so-and-so—washed over me. Bored. I was so bored.
“Ash Winters,” drawled a voice that sounded gratingly posh to my ears and yet seemed familiar, “we must stop meeting like this.”
I gazed into a face I might once have found attractive. Brown eyes, brown hair, sharp, clever features, a thin blade of a mouth, whimsical and cruel.
“Quite,” I said. Who the fuck was he?
“Hugh,” he said, a smile concealing what was clearly irritation. “Hugh Hastings.”
Nope. Not a clue. “Of course.”
“We met in Brighton.” He smiled again. “We went to the same college.”
Oh, that Hugh. Right. The one I hadn’t pulled at the stag party.
“You know, after you left with that—” He waved a hand as if Darian defied mere description. “—I remembered how I knew you.”
“You did?” A vague sense of unease uncoiled like a serpent. It was just anxiety. Paranoia. Relax. Breathe.
“Yah, you were the one who had the complete psychotic break, right?”
Suddenly I was the centre of a circle of curious, glistening eyes. Somebody could have mentioned Robbie Williams, but there was nothing, just a hungry silence. I felt a shamed flush sear my cheeks. My head spun. My mouth filled up with the taste of bile.
“Yes,” I said, with broken-glass calm. “Yes, that was me.”
“Oh, you’re that fellow.” A different voice. “You poor bastard. Are you all right now?”
I’d had this nightmare before, but I’d always woken up. I smoothed my cuffs. “Yes. Yes, I’m fine.”
Another voice? The same? It didn’t matter. “What was it like?”
I was still smoothing my cuffs, and even I could see how it looked, a tic turned habit turned compulsion.Stop smoothing your cuffs. But I couldn’t, I just couldn’t. I couldn’t even look at them. “What do you mean, what was it like?”
“Did they lock you up?”
“Was it likeOne Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest?”
“How did you get out?”
Breathe, Ash, breathe. “I dug a tunnel into the sewer system from beneath a poster of Rita Hayworth.”
There was a long silence as everyone tried to work out if the clinically insane were allowed to be sarcastic. It might have worked, too—I could have deflected them, and held them at bay instead of the other way round—but my breathing was too shallow, my voice too unsteady. It wasn’t a joke anymore, it was another piece of derangement. I might as well have been standing there in white pyjamas.
(Another myth. They let you wear whatever you want, and you still dress like crap because nobody cares and neither do you.)
I swallowed. “I got better, so they let me out.”
“Can they do that?” asked Hugh.
It took everything I had, but I risked a glance at him. Just then, I was not too proud to plead.Don’t do this to me. He had liked me once. But his face reflected only the blank, uncomprehending confidence of the wholly unhurt, and a touch of private malice. It seemed that being slighted by a lunatic was not something easily forgiven.
“I thought,” he said, “once you were in the system, it was impossible to get out again. I read a book by this American journalist who pretended to be batshit so he could expose what it’s really like for mental patients but, of course, once he was admitted, he couldn’t prove he wasn’t meant to be there.”
Murmurs rising like the sea to engulf me.
