‘My personal therapist thinks it could be as soon as next week. But she’s also said that they won’t discharge me until I feel ready, and . . . well, I’m not sure.’
I could see that he was turning this statement over in his mind, searching for the implications.
‘Actually, I’m a little terrified of coming out,’ I blurted. ‘I mean, there’s a lot of stuff I’ll have to deal with. Stuff that—’
‘That we’ll have to deal with,’ Beck corrected – and it was such a sweet and generous correction that it made me hate myself for what I had to say next. But I didn’t have much choice. He wasn’t yet in a position to understand what he was offering.
‘Listen,’ I began. ‘It’s not that I don’t appreciate everything you’ve done— No, I’m sorry. That’s wrong. That makes it sound like you’re doing me a favour, and I know this is so much more. Let me try again.’ I closed my eyes and took a breath to steady myself. ‘You’ve been incredible, and it’s much more than I deserve.’
‘Don’t—’
‘No, please let me finish. This is hard enough already.’ I waited for a few moments until he nodded for me to continue.
‘You’ve been incredible,’ I repeated. ‘But there are some things I need to come to terms with on my own. My medication, for one.’
‘You’re going to stay on it?’ His voice was measured, but there was still an undertone of alarm there that made me feel oddly vindicated.
‘I’m going to try,’ I told him. ‘The way I’ve felt over the past few weeks, since I came here, I don’t ever want to put myself through that again. But that still doesn’t make the decision easy – and yes, I know how hard that is for anyone else to understand. But there are things that I’m going to miss – that I already miss. I can’t help it. I feel diminished, and that’s something I’m going to have to learn to live with.’
Beck didn’t say anything for a long time, and neither did I.
‘Do you know what the worst thing is, for me?’ he asked eventually.
‘I can think of a dozen things,’ I said.
‘It’s being held at arm’s length all the time. As soon as you feel hurt or scared or threatened it’s like this barrier comes up and nothing’s getting through. The last couple of weeks, not even being allowed to see you – well, I wish I could say that came as a shock, but it didn’t. It felt pretty typical.’
‘There’s nothing you could have said or done. I was suicidal. I could barely communicate.’
‘God, Abby – you’re so bloody dense sometimes! It’s not about anything I could have said or done. You didn’t have to go through that alone. I could have been there with you. Wouldn’t that have made some sort of difference?’
‘I still would have been alone,’ I told him.
I could see how much the words stung, but I had to be honest at this point. It would be kinder in the long run. Anyway, there was worse to come; and I thought if I didn’t tell him now, then I wouldn’t tell him at all.
‘There’s another reason you being here wouldn’t have been helpful,’ I said. ‘For either of us.’
He looked at me but didn’t say anything. I think he must have known from my tone that this conversation wasn’t going to get any gentler.
‘The night I walked out . . .’ I began. ‘I don’t know what Dr Barbara has told you – not much, I’d imagine.’
Beck laughed, humourlessly. ‘Patient confidentiality again. She said you were safe and hadn’t come to any serious harm – anything else would have to come from you, when you were ready.’
‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I know that can’t have been very reassuring.’
‘No. It wasn’t.’
‘I booked myself into the Dorchester. Did she tell you that much?’
‘Yes – or she said that’s where she picked you up. But that was all.’
‘Okay.’
For the next five minutes, Beck didn’t say anything. He just sat very still while I gave him a complete account of what had happened that night. He stopped making eye contact when I got to the man in the bar – the man whose name I couldn’t even remember – but I don’t think that made it any easier to go on. The only small consolation I could find was that he must have been prepared for a worse ending than the one I gave him.
‘We went back to my room,’ I said. ‘We kissed, he touched my breasts – but that was as far as it went. I stopped things before they got any further. Actually, I started screaming the place down. Some of the night staff came in. That was when I called Dr Barbara.’
The silence when I’d finished speaking seemed to hang in the air like a storm cloud.
‘That’s everything?’ Beck asked.
‘Yes.’ The only detail I’d left out was that he’d hit me, but I didn’t think it was fair to bring this up. I didn’t deserve to look like a victim in any of this.
Beck looked at me again, his face more or less blank. ‘I don’t know what I can say.’
‘You can say whatever you feel like saying. Shout if you want. You have every right to.’
‘Do I?’ He let the question hang for a few seconds. ‘You see, that’s the problem, isn’t it? I honestly don’t know how much of that was you and how much was . . . I don’t know – illness, mania, something separate.’
‘Neither do I,’ I said.
‘Can you even tell me what was going through your head at the time? Can you give me any idea?’
‘My head was all over the place. I was really out of control – drunk, confused, hyperactive, but . . . God, this just sounds like I’m making excuses, and I don’t know that I can. The truth is, there was a part of me that knew exactly what I was doing. But I still couldn’t stop it, or I didn’t want to stop it. I don’t know which. It was completely irrational and self-destructive. I suppose the closest I can come to explaining is to say that I didn’t really care what happened. I didn’t have the capacity to care. Except this isn’t the full story either, because obviously there was a part of me that did care too.’
I fell silent. As messy as this explanation was, it was the only honest answer I could give, and I think Beck understood this – although I could see that he was still at a loss as to how to respond. So I thought I’d make it easy for him.
‘Listen,’ I said. ‘I need some time alone to get my head straight. And so do you. When I get out of here – whenever that is – I think it would be better if we spent some time apart.’
He left soon after that, and I immediately went outside for a smoke. Melody was already there, as predicted. She smiled as I walked over, and I smiled back.
‘How’d it go?’ she asked.
‘As well as could be expected.’
‘That bad?’ The way she delivered this line made me certain that she must have heard it on TV or in a film. But I still found it oddly endearing. The truth is, I was glad she was there to talk to.
‘I think it might be over,’ I told her.
‘Shit.’
‘Yes, it is.’
‘My boyfriend dumped me, too,’ Melody told me, to convey solidarity, I think. ‘That’s when I started cutting again. We’d been together ages. Seven, no, eight months.’
‘Beck didn’t dump me,’ I corrected. ‘We’ve agreed to spend some time apart. It was a mutual decision.’
‘Mine was by text,’ Melody said. ‘Turned out to be fucking awful timing too. It was only like a week before . . . Well, before I came here.’
There was something missing in this account, I knew, but it wasn’t the first time Melody had been vague about the circumstances that led to her being admitted here. It always struck me because it was pretty much the only area in which Melody was vague. With everything else, she was insanely forthcoming. I knew about the thirty-two paracetamol, of course – almost the first thing she told me – and I knew she’d been cutting from the age of fourteen and on medication by the time she was sixteen; we’d exchanged extensive notes on the various antidepressants we’d both tried. But there was still this conspicuous gap when it came to the days just before her suicide attempt. The only other topic on which I could remember her ever being cagey was her personal therapy, which was fair enough, really. When I asked her, one time, what she talked about in her sessions with Dr Hadley, she gave me the exact same answer I’d given her: ‘Daddy issues mostly.’