Helena was visibly shocked.
‘I don’t quite know what to say. What a terrible thing. The poor woman.’
‘You probably think it’s one of my fantasies,’ said Nancy. ‘You can check it online, if you want.’
‘What about you? Are you all right?’
‘I don’t want to make this about me.’
Helena smiled at that.
‘In this room it really is all about you. Have you had any more episodes?’
Nancy considered this.
‘Sometimes I think there are things on the edge of my vision or my hearing. I don’t know how to describe it. Then I think it might happen again. But I also try to remind myself that if I do hear or see something, I can’t just run away from it.’
‘That’s right.’
‘This is me, who I am, and it’s not going to go away,’ Nancy continued. ‘I have to find a way to live with it and to pay attention to what the voices are saying to me. You said that to me once: talk back to them, try to make friends with them.’
‘Have you managed to do that?’
‘Not properly. I was so scared. I still am a bit. I’m a work in progress. That’s why I need to come here. It doesn’t help that everyone in the house knows.’
‘Knows what?’
‘Knows about me having a breakdown and that I had a recurrence. I don’t know if they know I was sectioned, but they probably do.’
‘How do you feel about that?’
‘Angry. Ashamed. The shame’s the worst. It makes me want to hide or run away. I can’t bear to be looked at in that way.’
‘What way is that?’
‘Pity, curiosity. Felix shouldn’t have told them.’
‘Why do you think he did?’
‘To protect me. Because he cares about me and is anxious. But it wasn’t his story to tell. It’s my story.’
She walked back to Fielding Road, though it was cold and damp and she had to keep checking her route on the phone as she walked along busy roads she didn’t know. As she stepped into the hall, she saw that the door to Kira’s flat was propped open by a plastic bucket and a woman was backing out, carrying a bucket and holding a mop under her arm. She was dressed in overalls and looked round at Nancy.
‘We are cleaners. But we are finished.’
Nancy looked over the woman’s shoulders and saw a companion carrying a grubby, industrial-looking vacuum cleaner in one hand and a bulging bin bag in the other. She thought she should ask some question, but she couldn’t think of anything.
‘Was it untidy?’ she asked feebly.
The woman shook her head and laughed and made a sound that seemed to suggest that it had been very untidy.
‘But better now,’ she said.
‘Here, let me,’ said Nancy, and she held the door open as the second woman squeezed past murmuring her thanks.
The front door slammed shut. Nancy stood silently for a moment and then looked around. Almost in surprise, she saw that she was still standing there, with the flat door open. She was about to close it, but she didn’t.
All her life, Nancy had heard voices. Friendly voices, unfriendly voices. Sometimes they threatened and scared her, sometimes they were kindly and encouraging. Sometimes too encouraging. They told her to jump off that high diving board. They told her to go to that party when she felt reluctant, to say yes to that boy. And now a voice – she didn’t know if it was from inside or outside her head – told her to go in.
She stepped inside and eased the door behind her so that it was almost completely shut. She was in Kira’s flat alone.