in fact it sounds almost like you think the Mychandra is a personality of itself; well, what does that mean to you? Why have you chosen the Mychandra?’
‘It’s an old word; I can’t remember where I picked it up from; I think it’s Welsh originally.’
‘Okay, but do you know what it means?’
‘Yeah,’ she looked at me expectantly, ‘it means something like smallness, contempt, loathing; just,’ I closed my eyes, ‘just hate but something, something more.’
She was quite for a long time, and I went back to my receipt, feeling the paper between my skin and the nail, watching it vanish behind the grey-white of my fingernails, and buckle at the edges as I pushed it too far and it crumpled.
‘There was something here about love,’ she said quietly; ‘where does love fit into your hate?’
‘Everywhere!’ I looked her in the face and, for a moment, was ready to spit fire; I felt the pulsing of my heart, felt the rage at the lines of people preparing to vote; felt, just for a moment, that there was an argument I could fight, an argument that was worth fighting; that it was my one chance not to be alone, not to be insane anymore; I had to make her see that hate was love, that love was the path to hate; that the happy man never achieved a thing worth a damn. I looked in her eyes, glistening, for the first time and they were cold, and hard, and a little frightened somewhere deep behind the iris and the pupil but, when I took a deep breath, and my gaze expanded to take in her face, with exhausted lines around her eyelids, a few hairs growing between her eyebrows, the small indent on her lip where she bit it from stress or worry, I realised something hard and sudden.
She didn’t care; why should she care? She had a dozen people like me in a chair like that every day; she had seen scribbled, mad handwriting before; she had looked insanity in the face and she was bored. I was wasting my time.
‘Nowhere.’ I said, and sunk back into my seat. I must have looked like a child then, trying to avoid the teacher’s raised hand as it hunted for a target, searched for anyone obviously trying to shirk from its threat.
‘Listen; I’d like you to explain to me what you do in a day again but, this time, you aren’t allowed to mention the Mychandra; not at all, not as an illness, not as a mood, nothing.’
‘I open my eyes; I get out of bed. I eat. I walk. I keep busy. I eat. I drink. I close my eyes.’
‘Is that all?’
‘Sometimes I go to the toilet; yeah, that’s it. That’s life, isn’t it? That’s what we do? I mean, isn’t that all you do every day? Open your eyes and dream of closing them again?’
‘Why do you say opening your eyes, and not ‘waking up’?’ I thought about it for a few seconds; there was something there, I could feel it in the back of my brain, something sparking and throwing off light like a broken fuse.
‘I don’t think I’ve ever woken up. I think I went to sleep a few years ago;’ I said, quietly, and she leaned forward a little, her pen resuming its mad rush across the lines of the page; ‘I think I’m asleep still, that this is a dream and there’s no point waking up because there’s nothing out there, not for me; not for anyone.’
‘Not even this,’ she paused, and quickly scanned through the page again, ‘this Victoria? Who is Victoria?’
‘She’s nobody; a dream, an illusion, an ideal – she doesn’t exist.’ I remember that it hurt to say that; but I said it frankly and honestly and looked her in the eye as I said it. She nodded, like she understood and I warmed to her then; I wondered if she had her own Victoria, her own heartbeat dreams.
‘She does appear quite a lot in your notes though; is she just a metaphor for something, something that you want but can’t find? Or is she actually based on a woman that you know?’
‘Just a dream; not even a metaphor, just a thing.’
‘I see.’ She looked down at the paper again, her pen moving on her own notepad. We sat in silence for a long time, and her eyes moved back and forth from the page to her writing, back to mine, to hers and back again.
‘Okay; here’s what I want you to do. I’d like to see you again tomorrow afternoon and tonight, after this Mychandra hits you, I’d like you to write down everything you thought about this conversation we had; you know what I mean? Was this a waste of time; did it help you to get anything off your chest? Do you feel optimistic about where we’re going with this; you know, just whatever comes to mind. I think that’d really work as the basis for something here.’ She leaned forward, laying the paper on the desk. ‘Now, I’ll be honest with you; I don’t know if there is something wrong with you, or if it is all in your head, or if you’ve got something else making you think that this illness takes over you. What I do know is that we’re going to find out. All I need to know is that you’re going to work with me on this; I don’t want to put a lot of work into researching this thing, or meeting with you on a weekly basis, if one day you’re going to turn around and say you’ve finished. If you want to do this, you need to promise me that we’re going to see it through; no half-measures, no fences, no compromises – just honesty and thought and a lot of hard work.’
‘I’ll try anything, at this point.’ I smiled at her; I meant it to look natural, but it came out tight, and I could feel my lips against my teeth. ‘I can’t carry on like this for much longer, I don’t think.’
It was the wrong thing to say; I didn’t even think about it, it just fell out of my mouth and lay there on her desk, stagnant and blinking in the harsh light of the morning. Immediately, her head tilted a little, like she could see a new me if she only came at it from a different angle. Her pupils seemed to narrow, like she had spotted a target, some worm twisting in the dawn beneath her nest.
‘What makes you say that? What do you mean by that?’
There was pleasure in her eyes; she understood it then, she knew that I was depressed and holding it back, she knew that I was self-destructing and that my illness was nothing but a manifestation of that; little more than a cry for help from a desperate man who didn’t know what else to do; the kind of man who drowned in the air; she knew it, she knew it all and the truth didn’t really matter,
‘I don’t know. Just something to say, I guess.’ I shrugged. ‘I’m agreeing with you.’
She looked dissatisfied, but she stood and made her way to the door. I reached into my bag and pulled out a few more pages, laying them on her desk; I didn’t know what most of them said; they were gibberish, prose-like stanzas of nonsense, non-sequential musings, polemics, thoughts, a few doodles as I had tried to kick my mind into obedience. They covered a good portion of her desk by the time I stood up to shake her hand. We made arrangements to meet up the next day, in the afternoon, and I said I looked forward to it.
Bernard wasn’t there, so I hung around for a few minutes. When it got to the hour mark, I stood up and walked out of the hospital. A few older people, dressed in tightly-bound gowns, scowled at me as they shuffled past with their drips and walking frames and leant on rough nurses with tired, empty eyes.
I thought about catching the bus back into town, but it wasn’t too cold, and when the breeze stilled the sun fell across my back. I felt odd; optimistic, young, like I hadn’t felt in a long time. I put my headphones in and had to try and hold back a smile all the way back to the town centre.
XIV
I am killing time. There; that is my confession. It looks fine; very fine, in black lines against this white paper. I left my notes with her, but the past hour has seen me scribbling again; it is like torture, every time I see my hand move away I hope that it is over and, for a moment, I am thankful to the Mychandra for relenting – it isn’t afraid, I can tell; with the vibrations of my body I understand that it’s laughing.
That last sentence seemed, to me, to be a full stop; some dark, bold ending, some realisation.
I am killing time; it is honest; it is fire in the air; it is written in my heart beat. It is a statement, the definition of these last few days, weeks, months; every page that has bled
from between my fingertips. With that phrase, I feel like a weight has been lifted, some blockade torn away from my spine and out of my blood. It is honest, like voyeurism and, for a few moments, I dream of exposing myself to the air, to the night, to the people around me.
I felt like I should have crossed the landing, to the top of the narrow stairs and screamed and screamed for silence until someone killed the jukebox, cut the chords out of the air. The Mychandra deep in my throat, would deliver a sermon on thought and the flesh, a sermon of iron and glass. A sermon of weakness and resistance, a sermon that spoke of endurance as a mantra.
I felt like buying everyone below me a drink, and accepting their applause, and forcing the last of my stout to crawl down my throat. I felt like smashing the glass against me teeth and swallowing the jagged shards and, broken, hurling myself down each wooden step. I felt like composing poetry, making art, with my broken limbs. I felt like I wanted to be remembered, at the least; I would go down as the man who killed himself, who was killed by his illness, in the last good pub in the rot of small-town England.
I knew why I hated them, the slack, stunned, horrified faces in the bar; I hate the jukebox, as it reels out the same imported songs; American tunes of hope and potential and of the sun coming up every morning. I knew why;