3pm. Thursday, 9th November
The group therapy session in the overheated lounge wasn’t going any better than her one on one with the psychotherapist earlier. Honor ran her fingers over her chopped-about head. It felt matted and uneven, her scalp raw in places. According to the incident report, she hacked off her own hair in the hotel bathroom with a steak knife, and blonde silky hanks of hair falling into a blinding white sink came back into focus, bleeding from what used to be her memory. A slim dark-bearded addict opposite, his upper body shaking, spared her a spasm of a smile as she sank lower in the uncomfortable chair.
“This is a safe space, Honor.” When the counsellor grew excited or agitated, she wriggled her fingers and there was a clacketty-clash of metal scraping against metal from the silver and turquoise rings on each of them. “You’re protected within our supportive community.” She flung out her arms as if she was a mother and the motley group of eight blank-eyed, twitching patients her most beloved children, and her rings smashed one against each other. “This is a sacred place of absolute trust.”
Honor folded her arms across her body and stretched out her legs. She crossed them at the ankles. No Surrender. The silver-haired counsellor sighed with apparent disappointment, excluding Honor by skewing her droopy body towards an easier mark – the bearded man and his coke addiction.
What was the point of speaking? Even Honor thought Honor sounded like a lunatic. Like a paranoid narcissist with suicidal tendencies. Like her father, in fact. Someone who trusted no one. She rubbed her upper arm where blue bruises bloomed under the skin. Certainly not the nurse with the apple cheeks who pinched her under the pretext of helping her dress. Not the avuncular psychotherapist this morning who with his fingers steepled, the tips pressing against each other, “brought her up to speed” with the “psychotic incident” at the Savoy. “Screaming, nudity, faecal matter and food spread over the bedroom walls, violence to staff,” he read from the admission forms in a kindly voice, and Honor was paralysed with shame. It came as no surprise when he refused her requests for access to a telephone. “Let’s concentrate on you for the time being.”
Trust? She had no intention of trusting this be-ringed dabbler in broken souls prodding her through the bars with a specially sharpened truth stick.
Dougie, the sex addict with a cocaine problem, who drank himself to sleep every night before breakfasting on a bowl of uppers, drew breath. He had “shared” enough to have the counsellor bug-eyed with good will as she wound up the session and congratulated “everyone” – a sorrowful glance at Honor – on their excellent work. Same time tomorrow, people.
The talker’s goatee suited him; he patted her hand as he left the session. “Stick with it, darlin’,” he said. “I should know – it’s my fourth time in here.”
The lounge door closed behind the last of the group – an over-eating compulsive hoarder – and Honor was left in silence, but for the ticking of the ancient radiator. The kindness of the stranger’s touch sank through her flesh and bones to lie upon her soul. In the magnolia emptiness, she took out the thought that “they” were right. That she was breaking apart into pieces. That despite her best efforts to control herself and her surroundings, she had inherited her father’s murderous insanity. That it was better for everyone if she was in here. The tiny pin-pricks on the back of her hand were gone – had they ever been there? She drew her fingers over the crimson line along her wrist, plucked at her tufted hair again. She looked like a convict. A lunatic. Was she self-harming?
Obsessing? Neurotic? Delusional? Honor shivered. Had she sailed over the edge of the world? A place she vowed never to go and was she still falling? According to the psychiatrist, she checked herself out of Tommy’s hospital and straight into the Savoy on Tuesday and went to ground, brocade curtains drawn, refusing housekeeping and food – hotel staff growing increasingly worried for her welfare.
She hadn’t been on her own though, she’d explained to the consultant. There was a witness to everything. Michael North.
The consultant listened. His hand covering his mouth when he wasn’t scribbling notes.
Had she considered that North represented a delusion of her manic imagination? The dangerous, damaging protector with the power of life and death. Who looked at her like he wanted to save her, like he wanted her to save him. “It’s telling,” the psychiatrist said, “that you invented this guardian angel, as it were, with a bullet in his head. Your own mind acknowledging the fiction, that a figure like this is a powerful, persuasive construct of your damaged psyche, a representation of your mental crisis – a crisis repressed since the trauma of childhood.”
Her head was thick and muzzy from whatever they pumped into her at the Savoy to subdue her; pins and needles crawling across her skull and down her neck. She rubbed her fingers over her forehead, rubbing away the confusion. Peggy left and it triggered madness. Maybe she left because of her? Because she was a lunatic? Because she thought Honor was a danger to both of them. Worse yet, perhaps Peggy didn’t even exist? Holding on to the idea of Peggy’s arms around her. The excitement in her face whenever she talked about space, about galaxies and supernova and everything there was still to know. Peggy at least was real. She had to be.
On the seventies glass coffee table at the heart of the circle of empty chairs, the vanilla-scented candle flame spluttered as it fought to stay alight in the puddle of wax. A week ago Honor believed she survived her childhood. Triumphed. She had a career and status. She was making a name for herself as a serious political player. She had a wealthy, skilful lover ready to marry her whenever she said the word; it was true she had no great talent for friendship, but she had a best friend to love and a future. She didn’t have that any more – she didn’t have anyone or anything. With a sigh the twisted wick with its bud of flame bent over into the molten wax, lay down and died.