Chapter 22
Mallory
I am meeting him in exactly four minutes.
He seems to like being outside. And there are lots of pot plants in here. Hanging baskets.
It would be good for him to feel safe. That would be helpful.
I am sweating.
I look up to see a waitress wiping crumbs with blue roll off my little wooden table straight onto the floor, avoiding my notebook (it has a paisley pattern) that I have placed neatly in the corner.
‘Hi!’ I say. ‘Could I get two menus please?’
She looks about sixteen and appears as if she would rather eat her own hand than give me eye contact, let alone a menu.
Her glazed expression must either be from too much vaping (I can see the coloured plastic poking out of her apron’s front pocket) or from the avocado-and-boiled-eggs trance she’s been put into from scraping plates.
Either way, I can’t blame her. Her name badge says she’s called Chloe, right under the word Cuckoo.
Cuckoo Chloe.
She vacuously points up to the blackboard behind her head. ‘It’s all up there,’ she says with the faintest edge of I hate you, you’re ruining my life. ‘Order at the till.’
‘Thanks!’ I return, brightly. Without looking at me, nor with any shame, Cuckoo Chloe takes her vape from her pocket and disappears into the disabled bathroom.
I keep glancing at the digits of the clock on my phone.
Checking the door. Finding myself cursing under my breath at a mother who enters with a baby in what I know is an incredibly expensive body-wrap-sling-accessory thing, because Ronan once googled the exact same one and showed me. ‘You’d suit that colour,’ he said.
It was grey.
Two minutes. Leo should be here in two minutes.
I have a few set questions I’d like to ask him. To help, of course. I want him to be OK, and I’m not sure he has been.
I have brought worksheets. I saved them from one of my therapy seminars. They are about impulse control and breaking negative thought patterns. I think it’s a good place to start with him.
It’s been hard logistically, following him.
Following might be a bit extreme, actually.
More observing him. That might be a better way of putting it.
Leo is hard to keep up with. And because Ronan is so particular, I worry he can sense exactly when I’ve been out of the house, just by the way the air feels inside it.
There are many reasons Ronan cannot know, but for now, let’s just say: I really don’t want to be sectioned again.
He instigated the last one.
I remember him picking up his phone in the kitchen, thinking he was calling his mother by the way he was speaking, only to find out it was my mother.
Asking her to come and watch me. Watch me.
And of course she did it. She would do anything he asked her to.
She’s had a crush on him since the day they met.
And when she came, with her herbal teas and lavender pillow mist, I asked her to leave.
I dropped a glass in the kitchen, and suddenly the police were there. In my house. Calling me love.
Come with us, love.
It’ll be safe where we’re taking you. Love.
And Ronan and my mother watched. Both of them. Standing by the sink.
I can’t have it happen a second time. That time was enough. It was hell. It was worse than death. It was long, drawn-out torture without the opportunity of death to end it all. It just went on and on. White walls and injections.
It wasn’t my fault. I know people who get sectioned often say this – I am well aware – but I was an exception. A section exception. I just fell victim to a crappy system and people who apparently cared too much.
So I’ve had to be stealthy today and exhibit some behaviours that are possibly secretive in nature, and that I do not feel entirely proud of.
One being that I bought a pair of leather gloves.
I don’t know if it’s because I need them (no fingerprints) or if it’s because I like them and when I put them on, I feel like the exquisite (murderer) Villanelle from Killing Eve.
I haven’t figured it out yet, and I’m not entirely sure I need to.
I look at the cash in my hand.
To pay for this. Lunch with Leo.
Ronan doesn’t know about it. The cash. It comes from one particular therapy client of mine: Elaine.
Elaine is eighty-three and doesn’t like online banking.
Ronan thinks I charge her sixty pounds an hour, but I don’t.
I charge her eighty. The extra twenty gets put in my tampon box in the bathroom cabinet, and the other sixty goes to him, which he puts into our joint Monzo.
Cash is untraceable, like Villanelle.
Also, Ronan does the accounts, and has done since I was in hospital. ‘It’s fair, and right. In case you become manic again, and spend all our savings.’
I didn’t spend all our savings.
Fine, yes, I did put a deposit down on a boat.
But I didn’t mean to. Well, I did, but I didn’t want to ride it away into the sunset, or drown myself, as people seemed to think.
I just loved the look of it. Wooden, with a big white sail.
It was called the Blue Heather. Yes, its actual cost was a quarter of a million pounds, but it was more an idea that I was investing in. A fantasy.
It was moored in Wales, on the Gower Peninsula, near where we went for our honeymoon.
Ronan and I had spent days on the pebble beaches, hiding in the shade of the cliffs.
I remember it well, and think about it often.
We had only known each other for six months by that point, and many people had told me to take it slow, to enjoy it as it was.
But I knew he was different. Ronan set my world alight.
My mother adored him. She often asked me: ‘How have you bagged this one? Hold onto him, Mallory.’
I met Ronan when I was working as a runner for the BBC, my English degree being put to good use reading coffee orders off napkins while doing relentless trips to Starbucks.
It was cripplingly dull, but it allowed me the freedom to write the first draft of Shallow Embers.
I was drinking too much and lost, the usual early to mid-twenties pain, but I felt from within the chaos that at least I could control my book.
I had this ability to lose myself in it that propelled me.
I was certainly lonely, I struggled to make relationships that ever lasted longer than a few pints in the pub, and outside of the world I was creating, I felt dull.
But as soon as I opened my shitty little laptop and began to write, the world fell away.
On the night of a press party, he was suddenly there, at the bar, looking at me.
He was so charismatic, and interesting, and interested, in me, in what I had to say.
I remember his shirt, the way it was untucked slightly at his hip, and how it was a kind of linen the other men wouldn’t wear in that office.
It looked chosen and thought out, but also effortless.
He was stylish, but what really caught my attention was the way he held himself.
Totally assured, but not cocky. Just comfortable. At ease.
He told me about his love of books and of climbing, his hatred of the political system, the patriarchy and snobbery.
He had this way of adding things. Everything I said, he was able to add to it.
It felt like I was constantly learning. I told him sheepishly I had written a book – I called it a manuscript to sound less basic (everyone had written something who worked at the BBC), and I can still remember the way his eyes lit up.
He wanted to hear the whole synopsis, the inspiration for each character, the style, the setting, how long it took, how long it was.
He seemed genuinely blown away, and it made me feel incredible.
We didn’t move from the bar stools until the lights came up and the cleaners asked us to lift our feet so they could sweep the floor.
He didn’t ask me back to his, but he kissed me by the bus stop.
And after the kiss, we both knew I would be going with him.
His apartment was mature, the wooden floorboards covered in stacks of novels and memoirs and scripts that didn’t appear to be intentionally placed there for aesthetic reasons, but that were simply the product of someone who had piled them up, after having actually read them in a fit of creativity.
There were hanging plants and exposed brick walls. It was like a dream.
The sex was otherworldly. I know how lame, clichéd and gross that sounds, but it’s the truth.
My whole body left the planet, left the reality I had lived for so long: a horrific mix of unrelenting anxiety and utter boredom.
At that point in my life, I was only used to blurry drunken fumbles, or sober awkward robotic thrusting.
This was not that. With Ronan, it was almost spiritual.
I felt his presence, his care, his light.
I know, I know how that sounds. But everything lit up. He just kept adding.
And I lit up.
He plugged me in, entirely. And I understood that up until that point, I had been nothing but a dimming corner lamp. Now I was a glaring, undeniable LED strip light.
Naked and ablaze.
He whispered to me as he kissed me.
He said it was as if he had known me for years.
That he had never felt this way with anyone else.
So completely connected to someone.
As he spoke, the parts of me I hated seemed to dissipate. It was better than alcohol, or a line of coke off the back of a toilet seat. It was pure medicine. My fears went. Gone. And I felt whole. He did that.
And for me, that was insanity.
How could my fears just be lifted from me like that?
But it happened.
My synapses were on overdrive. Flooded by so many endorphins that I swear I saw things glimmering. My hairbrush in the morning. The fabric of bus seats on the way to work. Even fucking pigeons.
It all glowed.