She was in a dream she couldn’t wake up from. Huge forms moving softly around her, lunging soundlessly towards her. Cold white hands touching her. The earth was full of slimy things that writhed and clung to her.
Waves of pain in her skull, cresting and crashing.
Sudden light burning into her eyelids, but she couldn’t open her gritty eyes to see, nor her parched lips to speak.
Taste in her mouth, like metal, like blood.
Smell in her nostrils, rich and sweet, like the odour of her own body rotting.
It was silent, and then she heard a scream that came from far away, like an animal in a trap. The scream abruptly stopped, and it was silent once more, and that was almost worse.
She had been here before, in this dream. The same dull tang in her mouth and the same fetid smell in her nostrils and a mouth so dry she couldn’t open it. She needed water, but she couldn’t move her lips to ask for water.
Her skin itched and tingled. Her stomach hurt as if an animal was coiled inside her guts.
Very slowly, she moved a hand and placed it on her belly, over the top of a cotton gown, moved it up to her breasts, to her throat, to her face. Her skin was puffy on one cheekbone and when she touched it, throbbed slightly.
Very slowly, she opened her gummed eyes and at first it was dark. After a time, she saw a square of light around the edges of the door and she could make out the shape of the room, square and empty: just four walls, a high window, a door, a bed.
She was in the bed, in the room, in a building somewhere, but what had happened before? She tried to find things that had a name and a shape, something to hold on to while panic rose and sank inside her and pain washed round her skull.
She was Nancy North, Nancy for her grandmother and North like the North Star and the North Pole. She was thirty-three years old. Her hair was pale brown, and her eyes were blue in some lights and grey in others. She had a small birthmark on her left buttock. She was five foot and four inches, and she was a chef.
No. She used to be a chef. In another life.
Into her mind came the image of her little restaurant, clatter of pans and steam rising, beautiful Japanese knives laid out, her olive-wood pestle and mortar. She thought of asparagus spears and eggs cool in her palm before she cracked them open, the sour bubble of yeast and the settle of sifted flour. She felt her cheeks becoming wet.
She didn’t have a restaurant anymore. She had been ill. She had been ill, and she had lost everything and been locked away. Like before. Or perhaps she had never left. Perhaps it was the escaping that had been a dream.
But now the blankness had been breached and memories were starting to seep through. Nancy lay still and waited for them to gather in her and make sense.
Packing boxes. A body swaying in a doorway. Green boots with yellow laces. A frightened face. Nobody’s safe. Fingers digging into her flesh. Mean faces, whispering voices. A mother screaming at her kitchen table. Someone trying to kiss her. A crying baby. A used condom curled up in her fist. A man taking grunting swings at a punch bag in the garden, again and again. Someone looking at her with pity and reproach. Darling Nancy. Please. You’re a risk to yourself and others. Only trying to save you. Save me. Men in green scrubs at her door. Nancy North, please come with us.
Nancy sat up. Pain swung in her head like a wrecking ball. Her ribs ached.
Felix, she thought. It was Felix who had done this to her. Michelle had lied, and Felix had put her away. She was locked in the dark and he had sent her there.
Nancy struggled to make the jumble into a narrative. If it was a narrative, one thing leading to the next, other people would understand. They had to see that this wasn’t about her being psychotic. This was about a young woman who had been killed. Nancy had been pulled into someone else’s story. She knew Kira had been killed, because that was why she herself had been sectioned: someone was trying to make her look mad so that she wouldn’t be listened to or believed. Her incarceration was the proof that Kira had been murdered and the murder was proof that she wasn’t mad.
If she could only persuade people that she was being called psychotic precisely because she wasn’t, then they would have to let her go.
That sounded wrong. It sounded a bit deranged.
She needed to get the narrative right because she couldn’t be in this place a moment longer or she really would go mad and what they said she was, she would become. And she had to keep the rage and terror tamped down and concentrate on her calm, rational explanation. My name is Nancy North and I am not mad. People are trying to make me look mad because I know the truth. Except that was what mad people said.
In time, the single star faded, and the window lightened. There were sounds. The distant rumble of traffic. A bird outside the window. Brisk footsteps in the corridor. Nancy imagined all the corridors and all the rooms with the pane of glass in the door so that people outside could stare in. There was nowhere to hide. They wanted to get into her mind as well, peer at the secrets in there, all the foolish hopes and desires. She turned her face to the pillow and closed her eyes.
‘Nancy. Nancy. Are you awake.’
Female voice. Northern. Kind – or at least not unkind.
Nancy turned and opened her eyes. She half sat, blinking and slightly dizzy. The worst of the headache had gone, just a heavy dull throb remaining. She felt raw and frail and puny.
She tried to say something. It came out as a parched grunt, but the woman understood and poured water from a jug into a beaker and handed it to her.
Nancy drank eagerly, water dribbling down her chin. She looked at her right wrist but her watch was gone. She remembered now how they had taken it from her when she came here. They had taken her necklace, her earrings, everything stripped away from her.
‘Time,’ she said.
‘It’s nearly nine o’clock. You’ve slept for hours.’
Nancy had no sense of having slept at all. She had been wiped out, drugged into a dreamless sleep that could have been minutes or years.
‘Time for your medicine.’
She held out a small plastic container in which there were four pink pills.
‘No,’ said Nancy.
‘They are just—’
‘No way.’
‘Doctor’s orders,’ said the woman. Her voice didn’t seem quite so kind anymore.
‘You’re just trying to knock me out again.’
‘The doctor will be here soon and will explain everything.’ She moved the pills closer, almost under Nancy’s nose. ‘These will help you keep calm.’
‘I don’t want to be calm. I need to tell my story. It’s urgent.’
‘You can tell your story soon enough,’ said the woman. ‘We encourage patients to tell their stories. It’s all part of the process of recovery.’
‘I shouldn’t be here. It’s a mistake. They want to keep me quiet.’
‘Nancy, we’re here to make you better.’ Now she was talking as if Nancy was a small child on the edge of a tantrum. ‘You were very agitated when you came yesterday. Don’t worry. We’re all on your side.’
She rattled the pills encouragingly.
‘What can I say to make you believe me?’ Nancy stared into the woman’s unyielding face. ‘Nothing? Are you telling me there’s nothing I can say or do to change this?’
‘I’m just here to give you your medication.’
‘I don’t need medicine. There’s nothing wrong with me.’
‘A lot of people say that when they first arrive.’ Her voice grew sterner. ‘You know that we can make you take it, if you refuse to do so voluntarily? You don’t want that, do you?’
‘Give them to me,’ said Nancy.
She took the container and hurled the pills across the room.
‘That wasn’t very sensible.’