Chapter 34 #2
Ronan told the crisis-line lady that he thought I was exhibiting manic symptoms, and that this had happened before.
I heard her say, ‘Well, people do odd things – it doesn’t make them psychotic’ – which I was grateful for.
But Ronan told her it was more than odd.
That I was putting my life – and his – in danger.
The crisis-line lady said she needed to assess me and so he reluctantly held the phone out in front of my face and told me to speak.
The lady asked me a few questions: my name, my age, what day it was.
She asked how I was feeling and I said I was fine.
Ronan interjected, saying I wasn’t fine in the slightest, telling me I needed to be honest, for my own mental health.
That my mental health depended on it. The crisis-line lady asked me if I had a history of mental illness.
So we spoke about my prior admission, which is when the words mental and health began to make less and less sense.
We said them so many times that they lost all meaning.
They became mush. I might as well have been saying banana and rabbit.
My banana rabbit took a turn for the worse seven years ago.
My banana rabbit has been stable since then, but I have felt a bit numb.
My banana rabbit was definitely not OK back then – but this feels different.
She asked if I was scared. I said I wasn’t sure. And then she said jovially, ‘Don’t worry love – so many people have the odd menty-b, we’ll help you through it.’
I said, ‘Menty-b?’
She said, ‘Yeah: mental breakdown.’
This made Ronan rage. ‘How dare you?’ he snapped.
He said he would report her for making light of the situation.
But I appreciated what she’d said. It made me smile.
And she probably had a very valid point.
She apologised, saying she was trying to help me feel a little calmer, and that it came out wrong.
Ronan said he was going to make sure that she lost her job.
If this is the state of the banana rabbit system these days – no wonder so many people die.
She apologised again. He asked how he could complain, and said he would like to put it in an email to her manager.
She said OK, and gave him an address. She then continued with the assessment.
She was nice, I thought. Friendly. Chatty.
She did make me feel less stressed. People do odd things – it doesn’t make them unwell.
I told her what had happened, and agreed that it was a little bizarre, but that I was a creative. Sometimes I did things that might be out of the ordinary, but this was just my imagination. I was an author, and I was undertaking creative research for my next book. She asked for my name.
When I told her, she gasped.
‘Wait – oh my God – Mallory Maddox? The author Mallory Maddox?’
It was an incredibly strange moment.
‘Yes, that’s me.’
‘Oh my God – I’ve read your book!’
She told me that she loved it. Shallow Embers.
That she read it when she was in her teens and it helped her so much.
This was the point that Ronan snatched the phone away from my face and told her that she was inappropriate, and that to be discussing herself and using phrases like menty-b during an assessment should get her fired.
He would make sure of it. He asked her if she really truly believed she was good at her job, because he thought she was despicable.
She apologised again and told him to add it to the complaint email.
He said he would.
She said OK.
She asked me some more questions, about my mood, my perception, if I was hearing voices, if I was suicidal. I said no, no to all of it. She told me to call back if my mood dipped, and to speak to my GP about upping the dose of my SSRI, or perhaps changing to another medication.
She asked me if I felt like Ronan could take care of me.
I said yes.
She said OK.
And then Ronan hung up.
He took my phone, and I haven’t seen it since.
I am lucky.
I am lucky because my phone doesn’t have direct access to my emails on it, so Ronan won’t be able to find the conversations I have had with Stan. He would have to log into the browser, and he doesn’t know my Yahoo password. I’m not even sure he is fully aware the account exists.
After the banana rabbit phone call and the mention of a menty-b, he was so angry.
He told me it would be best for my mental health to delete any evidence of Slay from my laptop.
He said it would be best for everyone. That if anyone found it, they would think I was insane and deeply disturbed, and that wouldn’t be fair to me.
And that this boy – this random drug boy – was clearly very dangerous.
Any link to him could be seriously bad for us both – but particularly him, with his high-profile job.
He handed me back the laptop and told me to delete it in front of him.
He stood over me as I used the mouse to drag the document into the trash and click ERASE ALL.
It went.
In a second. It vanished. And as it did, I felt a sudden coldness. An emptiness. A real sadness. A longing to go back. Loss.
But I heard him sigh. Relief.
‘I’m not sure you should have this either, Mal,’ he said, pointing to the laptop. ‘It’s clearly not healthy for you at the moment. It’s making you write out some very dark parts of your brain that I don’t think you should be accessing.’
He wanted to take it.
I tried to protest. ‘But what about my clients?’
‘Are you serious? You can’t be seeing your clients while you’re like this.’
But I knew I needed to keep the laptop. It was imperative.
I remembered that I had a duplicate copy of Slay saved in a file titled CLIENT WORK.
Knowing I had that copy was the only thing allowing me to breathe normally.
I craved the story I was discovering. The idea of having no access to it made me feel vacant. Without it I felt blank. Nothing.
Meek Mal.
And the deal. Stanley. The money. I wasn’t sure what I needed more: the feeling the book gave me as I wrote it, or the future it could afford me.
Could I have both? They would come hand in hand.
So I scrambled, attempting anything to get him to let me have it.
‘I need to keep writing, Ronan. It’ll help me get better – I promise. I need the creative release. It will keep me steady. I can completely see how that particular story wasn’t good for me – it was awful – and it will never see the light of day. But I need to write something.’
He shook his head. No.
But then I had an idea. ‘What if I write a new book? A different one.’
He didn’t like it. ‘No – no more writing.’
‘Wait – wait – listen. Give me a minute.’
I told him I had been thinking of writing a romance novel for a long time. No darkness. No sadness. Just life-affirming love and joy. ‘Just what the world needs right now. Just what I need right now.’
He stopped. ‘Go on.’
I said that writing something positive and uplifting could really help me.
Help change my mindset and bring me back to a place of stability.
I spent ten minutes cobbling together a plot (not dissimilar from our own story) about a woman who was lost and afraid and underconfident in her abilities.
Then she meets a man. The man she falls in love with lights her up. He makes her feel alive again.
He scratched his chin. ‘I like this.’
‘Yes?’
‘Yes. So – the love interest helps her. Helps her find herself. Helps her find the side of her that succeeds.’
‘That’s a great idea, Ronan.’
He said, ‘This book seems much more appropriate.’
Then he said he liked the idea of us working together on it. He could give me notes.
And then he came up with a title.
The Air Between Us.
He thought it sounded punchy.
I smiled. ‘Wow, I love it.’
‘They didn’t promote me at Netflix for nothing.’
I agreed. ‘You’re brilliant.’
He paused, considering. ‘OK. If you turn off the passcode on your laptop – so there’s no secrecy.’
I agreed. Absolutely.
He watched me do it.
And so I have my laptop.
And so now, for the past two weeks, during the daytime, I have been writing my new contemporary and uplifting romance: The Air Between Us.
And every night, I read what I have written to Ronan.
(We are tentative, but are currently comparing it to commercial hits such as One Day and Normal People.) Ronan tells me it is wonderful.
That it is brilliant. That Netflix might even love it.
‘Who knows – maybe I’ll put in a good word. ’
But none of this is the truth.
None of it.
He is lying.
The Air Between Us is awful. The concept, the writing, the characters, the title.
I’ve never hated anything so much in my entire life.
Two-dimensional, thin, clichéd and worst of all: boring.
It is deeply boring. Embarrassing, in fact.
I know that Ronan knows it too. I know that he thinks it’s terrible.
That it will never sell. But he lies, intentionally, to keep me writing it.
To keep me sane.
To keep me correct.
But every night, after he has fallen asleep, whiskey-heavy, I go into the en suite with my laptop, sit on the closed toilet seat, get up the hidden Slay document and write the book that I know will sell.
The book that will give me what I need. My ticket out.
Of this. This domesticised, softly lit, William Morris cell.
This meek numbness.
So, I am now writing two books. Which is ironic, given the writer’s block I experienced for the best part of the last seven years.
With The Air Between Us, it feels like I am wading through mud.
Reaching the four thousand daily words’ goal seems insurmountable, and sometimes I have to google things and copy-and-paste them into the document to bulk it up.
Sweeping descriptions of countryside settings.
A whole page dedicated to the structure of trees.
(Ronan said he loved it. Because it was dreadful.)