Because We Are Bad Read online

  “Are you coming or not? I have another job to get to.”

  “Sorry. Fenhurst station.”

  · 15 ·

  Driving

  The noise wakes me. I find myself by the window, staring out, fat-eyed, into the night. There are no stars.

  She has left me, I know, and is outside. I expect to see her crouched low in the bush beneath the windowsill, but She is not there.

  So I wait, and begin to think maybe the knocking was only rain, and her whispering was just the rustling of trees outside. I decide She must be somewhere inside the house, and that I will go and look for her.

  But just then, I see a wispy figure running into the distance. I know it’s her, although it’s strange, seeing her out of my head for the first time—I am so used to her sitting behind my eyes. Her feathery outline streaks in and out of the trees, and I jump out the window after her. For someone who’s never used legs before, She is surprisingly good at it.

  Eventually, there She is, sprawled under a big tree. I crawl in next to her, and ask her where She has been today. She doesn’t talk to me anymore. She just looks at me, and shakes her head like it’s time.

  Oh, say it isn’t time. I know that I betrayed you, that I told Dr. Finch about the thoughts when you told me never to say, but worse, the final insult—I’ve started to really like her.

  I can’t help myself. I want you both.

  We lie, looking up to the moonless blue. It is raining, and we are drenched to our bones, our breath momentarily catching in our throats, feeling like sinking ships on a black ocean with no land in sight, and no stars because they all exploded and then died for good a hundred thousand years ago.

  Why won’t you hold my hand?

  Come back.

  Please.

  I wake up without her. I go through the motions—breakfast, assembly, classes—but it’s like tiptoeing through a city at dawn. I’m by myself on vast empty streets too quiet to seem real.

  I don’t do my lists all morning, but then I start to feel guilty and scared. If I don’t do them just because She’s not there to keep track, how will I know what kind of person I am?

  I force myself to do my lists alone. It’s harder than I thought.

  She’ll be back soon. She has to be. Doesn’t she?

  I once overheard someone on the train tell the girl she was sitting with that she went to a funeral and got the giggles. She got them badly. So badly she had to take a minute outside. She couldn’t explain it—not then, not now.

  Grief, she said. It does the weirdest things to you.

  So maybe that’s why, despite everything, I find myself in the Austen communal kitchen with Ella and Scarlett, dancing to “Cotton Eye Joe” pumped up to full volume. We are spinning, twisting, and do-si-doing. We make manic clockwork figures of eight round the room.

  If it hadn’t been for Cotton Eye Joe

  I’d been married a long time ago

  Where did you come from, where did you go?

  Where did you come from, Cotton Eye Joe?

  The verse repeats again and again—are those the only words in the whole song? The three of us shriek with laughter. We hitch our school skirts up and tie our shirts in cowboy knots . . .

  And I forget briefly how lonely I am, until later, when I’m lying in my bed after midnight trying to order mountains of letters by myself, and I can’t.

  Why don’t you see? I howl. I didn’t want you to really go.

  All you had to do was be nice.

  Dr. Finch collects me from the waiting room. She tells me to come and have a seat, which annoys me. As if I’m going to stand up for the whole hour. Ridiculous woman.

  “How are things?” she asks. Calm, regular.

  “She’s gone.”

  “Who’s gone?”

  “My friend.”

  “Are you angry with me?”

  Silence.

  “It would be perfectly natural if you were. You might feel like I’ve taken something away from you.”

  Silence.

  “Are you?”

  “I thought you were going to make me better. She’s gone, and I’ve never felt more alone. You told me there was only room for one of us in my head, and that it had to be me, because I am the real one, and She is OCD. But you were wrong. She was more real than me. I hate you for it.”

  “That’s understandable.”

  I want to say Oh, for god’s sake, I’ve just told you I hate you. React, you overprofessional clinical monster. But I stay silent.

  “You’ve done it yourself. You got rid of ‘her.’ But you could bring her back if you wanted—she’s your creation. She’s your OCD. You can do whatever you want with her.”

  “NO.”

  Silence.

  “I didn’t create her, She created me. She told me what to do—how to react to things. I’m nothing without her. She’s gone to punish me for telling you too much.”

  Oh, oh, oh. I cradle my own head because now there is no one else to.

  “I am a blank space. I am not accounting for my actions. I am becoming inconsistent in my behavior. I don’t know who I am.”

  She is waiting outside Dr. Finch’s office, snickering.

  Be careful what you wish for.

  She throws her head back, roars with laughter, and skips off down the corridor.

  “Did you have a good session, darling?” Mum asks as we’re driving back.

  “Yeah,” I say. “It was okay.”

  She sighs, fingers drumming the steering wheel.

  “Are you okay?” I ask.

  “I’m fine.”

  She’s not.

  “I just wish I knew how to help you more. I’ll be honest, I feel like I don’t really know much about what you’re going through. I know you’re talking to Dr. Finch about it, but you don’t talk to me about it. Every time I ask you, you go all distant.”

  This is true. It’s also intentional. I don’t want Mum or Dad to know what it’s really like in my head—I am a soldier on the frontline somewhere awful, rightly or wrongly, deciding that my family should be spared the true horrors of what I see.

  I hold my secrets close. It’s not that hard, really. Being away at boarding school is conducive to deception.

  “You’ve got that book though, the one about dealing with OCD that Dr. Finch recommended.”

  “But that doesn’t tell me about you.”

  “I don’t like talking about me,” I say.

  She turns the radio on.

  We have two lungs. We have two kidneys. We have two sides of our brain. Two arms. Two legs. Two ears. Two nostrils. Two lips, eyes, boobs, segments of heart, hands, feet, labia. Everything in ourselves is geared toward there being two of us in our head. Now I have no one to share my spare parts with.

  So I hate Dr. Finch (almost). But in the midst of all this hate, I don’t stop going to my appointments, because without my friend there is no one, and at least Dr. Finch is someone.

  Every week she arrives in the waiting room, wearing a different shade of ankle-skimming skirt. “Hello,” I say.

  I am angry because in the beginning she said that if I wasn’t happy when She had gone, she would bring her back. Now I realize that was just something she said to make me take part in her strategies. I also understand that it’s not that she wouldn’t bring her back—perhaps if she knew how unhappy I am, she would try. It’s that she can’t. My friend has departed of her own accord. What remains is a strange hollow; I am a twin left behind in a womb too big for only me. I try to talk to her; try to get her to help me with my lists, but there’s no reply. My calls for her ring out into the void, where they stay, unanswered. So I carry out the routines by myself (See, friend, I am your student, your diligent protégé, and I will continue your life’s work), but without her to supervise, it all feels wrong.

  Today I tell Dr. Finch my theory of twos.

  “Yes”—she, usually so professional, wrings her hands in exasperation—“but we have ONE BODY.”

&nbs
p; I am stunned.

  She is in full flow.

  “You know who your ‘friend’ reminds me of? A wife beater. She beats you up in your head and calls you names when you don’t do what she says, and you follow her instructions because you’re scared of all the supposed things she could make happen if you don’t. And then, just when you’re at your lowest point, she comes and wraps her arms round you and whispers reassuring things in your ear and you’re persuaded into thinking she loved you all along. Her occasional niceness wins you over every time. You think none of the bad things will ever happen again, but they always do. I’m right, aren’t I?”

  I mope: “But when I had her in my head, I didn’t feel so lonely.”

  Dr. Finch has a suggestion. She blushes as she says it.

  “Couldn’t you put me in your head instead?”

  “What?”

  She seems genuinely embarrassed; her face goes a deep cherry red. “Well, couldn’t . . . When you have urges to give in to your rituals, or are feeling sad that your friend isn’t there anymore, couldn’t I be there instead?”

  “I could never put you in my head. It’s a terrible place for anyone to be—and I don’t want you to be there.”

  “But I wouldn’t really be there. It would just be a model of me, so I wouldn’t be feeling any pain.”

  “But that’s the other problem: if I can’t have you for real, I don’t want you at all.”

  I am sitting in the back row in philosophy. At the front of the classroom, Mr. Alan is presenting an introductory slide show on Sigmund Freud.

  I haven’t been paying much attention. I am coming to the end of a series of words I’ve been focusing on for about forty minutes, while staring at the tarmac path outside the window. It is so hot, it is turning into sticky black licorice. A fan whirs in the room. Suddenly Mr. Alan says something that demands my full attention:

  “Freud was the father of psychoanalysis. He believed that the origin of neuroses was sexual trauma.”

  I cry out “What?” as though I am personally outraged by what he has just said. I didn’t mean to, it just came out. Ten ponytails swivel and replace themselves with pouty faces. Mr. Alan raises his eyebrows at me. I don’t usually ask questions. On the slide show, the words repression, sexual abuse, and obsessional neurosis are swelling. I worry they might escape the screen. My ears are buzzing.

  “I’m just getting on to explaining it properly, Lily,” says Mr. Alan, “if you’ll let me continue. Freud’s seduction theory was a hypothesis he formed in the 1890s. After studying a group of patients suffering from a range of nervous disorders, he realized the one thing they all had in common was that they had been sexually abused as children. He came to believe that a repressed memory of molestation or sexual abuse in childhood caused hysterical or obsessional symptoms.”

  I cannot listen anymore. I ask to be excused and return to the house. I sit at the end of my bed in my dorm with my head in my hands and my phone next to me. I wait for it to buzz to let me know Mum is here. It’s Therapy Thursday, so she should be here soon.

  Her car pulls up in the forecourt. I push the door buzzer to let myself out and hop into the front seat. “Are you okay?” she says gently. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

  “I don’t wanna talk right now,” I say, knowing I am being unfair. She has driven all the way from London.

  “Okay, darling,” she says, handing me a hummus sandwich and some Jammie Dodgers. “Whatever you want.”

  By the time I reach Dr. Finch, I have worked myself into a state. It feels like I will never be calm again. As soon as I’m in her office, I tell her about Freud in a huge rush. I explain that when I was younger, I played a strange game—

  No! Of course it wasn’t with my mum or dad, or even anyone in my family. It was with a child, a little boy who I was close to. I used to play at his house, our parents were friends—

  I ask if it was my fault and if I am bad. I ask her if this is why I am ill; is it true that this sort of thing causes obsessional symptoms?

  Dr. Finch says not to take much notice of what Freud says, and that he later abandoned the seduction theory. Then—and this is the important part—she says it wasn’t my fault, which is shocking, because I always thought it must be.

  “It is not your fault,” she repeats. “It is not your fault.”

  “I never want to talk about this again,” I say.

  A week after this, Dr. Finch sticks her head into the waiting room, and I glance up from a book I haven’t been reading (looking at a book is a fantastic way to look like you are doing something productive, as long as you flick your eyes about a bit and turn the pages from time to time).

  She is five minutes late, which is nothing in the scale of a week. If I had to describe her in one word, I would say consistent.

  We walk along carpeted corridors, then the stairs and the corridor to her office. I sit in my seat and wait for her to ask me how I have been. In a few seconds I will start spreading my secrets across the table while the clock ticks by sixty minutes. We will probably overrun because she is nice like that, but still at some point all too soon it will be time to walk back down the corridor and leave.

  “How have you been?”

  This is what I want to say: All week I have been drawing our chairs, remembering the red flick of “engaged” that traps your smile in the door. Trying to reflect in the wall has been agonizing; shadows say nothing, except that things aren’t hollow; it’s all just silhouetted madness on indifferent plaster. But there you came again! Reliable like the cuckoo. You ushered me down passages, opened the door, and today I’ll see myself in you.

  This is what I say: “All-rightish. Also, I never realized.”

  “What did you never realize?”

  “How white the walls in this room are. It’s overpowering.”

  “It’s because it’s sunny today. I would put pictures up to distract from their whiteness, but you know what people are like. They’ll start thinking they have all sorts of symbolic meanings and that I’m trying to convey secret messages.”

  She shrugs theatrically.

  She smiles.

  I smile back.

  I wonder if she tells me this because she thinks I am different to the others. Perhaps she is trying to tell me I ought to be. A fly is buzzing in the room; sometimes it lands on her papers.

  I suddenly stop looking at the fly and start listening very hard because she is telling me something about herself, which hardly ever happens. “When I was little,” she says, “I couldn’t stop imagining I was in a tree, shooting everyone who passed by.”

  How should I take this confession? I decide the thing to do is to look her in the eye and say the magic words:

  “It’s just a thought.”

  She laughs, a real, genuine laugh. I feel warm and happy.

  There is a chip on the baseboard behind her chair where a circle of paint has flaked off. I decide to name the little brown dent Lily and pretend it is me. That way I can be in her office even when I’m not.

  I’m doing politics homework in my dorm during one of my free periods the next day when someone knocks on the door.

  “Coming!” I call. “One sec!”

  I’m in my towel. I put my uniform on, open the door, and think I might pass out.

  She’s standing right there—in the corridor outside my dorm. I try to speak, but my tongue won’t collaborate with my brain.

  “What are you doing here?”

  Dr. Finch smiles. “Come on,” she says, “we’re going on a day trip.”

  “But I’m—wearing my school uniform.”

  “It doesn’t matter.” Her smile is getting wider. “My car’s outside. Let’s go.”

  So I go with her.

  And then we are sweeping down lanes in her little red car and her windscreen wipers are swishing back and forth, back and forth, even though it’s not raining.

  I’m terrified but so, so happy. Has anyone named this emotion before? I would call it wh
izzing. That is what we are doing, though we are going so fast I can’t be specific about details, and the sheep we pass start to look like fallen clouds.

  “The sky is falling!” I say.

  Dr. Finch laughs. “What are you on about?”

  She glances at me quizzically for what feels like a long time, but is probably only two seconds.

  “Keep your eyes on the road!” I scream, giggling but feeling like we might be quite close to The End. “I mean we’re going so fast, the sheep in the fields look like clouds.”

  “Like clouds?” She’s laughing again. “Are we flying, then?”

  I can see her putting her foot down on the accelerator and realize we’re going even faster. Her foot looks determined, angry even, like it has a mind of its own. I’m momentarily captivated by her shoes; brown, flat, and stubby with a bit of gold chain across the tongue. I think they must be her only pair. I’ve never seen her wear any other. Maybe they are her work shoes, though; perhaps she has others at home. Does that mean she’s working now? Are we flying?

  “Lily?”

  “Yes?”

  “Would you try if your friend wasn’t looking?”

  No reply. Haven’t got one, don’t want to give one. Faster, faster, hedgerows are great wobbling green waves, branches are arms whipping past like a crowd holding their hands out to touch a superstar, faster, the white painted lines on the road are sprawling vertebrae, faster, somewhere a protective film is being lifted and I am seeing the blue of the sky unfiltered for the first time, faster—and then—out of nowhere—a rabbit—

  Dr. Finch’s reflexes kick in: brakes,

  command to tires: left, left,

  We swerve

  off the road

  into a ditch

  and everything is silent as death, apart from the rise and fall of our breath, which indicates we are both still by definition living. She drops her head slowly forward onto the steering wheel, her hair splaying out over it.