How strange it was to hear his voice today. His tone was so warm and calm that I knew he wasn’t angry at me for taking Chloe like I did. I knew he would be happy to hear from me. His letter had said as much, hadn’t it? He trusts me; he knows I’ll take good care of her.
It’s raining now, but I don’t mind a bit as I sit at the window watching the swirling tide beyond the Old Battery. Just out of view the waves will be charging up around the Needles, casting plumes of white foam in high arcs, back-flipping gracefully into the waters they came from. Some people live for the summer; not me. I love the winter months in England, from the crisp, frosted mornings of November to the drizzle-grey evenings of February. Winter challenges your senses in a way summer can’t. Summer makes you feel good so effortlessly: warm and light. But winter dares you to be happy despite the cold and damp, and I like the physicality of that hardship, the way it forces you to experience the body over the mind.
Chloe is sleeping in her little cot drawer behind me; tomorrow she will see her daddy for the first time in, oh, how long? When did I last see him? So long ago, but my timelines are always getting muddled, like long strands of seaweed woven together by the turning currents, so that by the time I try to untangle them they appear as one great knotted rope of green. I remember St Justin’s, and I know that was the first place I stayed in, as I remember James visiting me there. He never brought Chloe, but one time he came with his mother, and she tried to be nice to me – which I knew was a lie – and I screamed at her to get out and he agreed never to bring her again. I don’t know how long I stayed at St Justin’s, but I do know that by the time I was moved to Buddleia Hill my hair was no longer blonde, but instead the mousy brown colour nature gave me. When they showed me to my room I found it was much nicer than the one I had at St Justin’s, where they didn’t let me have many things in case I harmed myself (at least, that’s what Annie from Trinidad told me). But here I had coat-hangers, a plastic toothbrush mug, a manicure set and even a bathroom mirror screwed to the wall above the sink. I wondered how long it had been since I’d really looked at my own reflection. Of course, there were mirrors at St Justin’s, but not one in the privacy of my own room, one I could stand in front of for long minutes or hours while I tried to work out what had happened to me, where everyone had gone.
James never visited me at Buddleia Hill, and, for the first year or so, neither did anyone else. But then they matched me with a visiting volunteer called Lily, and she came once a week, without fail, even when I was just a day patient on the various occasions I tried independent living. The first occasion we met didn’t go too well, because she reminded me so powerfully of James’s mother that I quite lost my temper, in a way that the staff at Buddleia Hill had never seen before. I remember that clearly, unlike so many of my other memories. As Lily approached me in the common room and smiled, she extended her hand to shake mine, and her face was so much the double of James’s mother that I stood up in fright, knocking my chair backwards as my heart hammered against my ribcage. ‘No, no, no,’ she said gently, despite my loud cries for help, and along with Ginny, my care worker, they talked me down and made me understand that Lily was someone else altogether. I miss Lily now, with her bright, intelligent eyes and her gentle sense of humour. She was always telling me about these meetings she went to – my ‘old biddy’ meetings, she called them – where they’d learn new skills, or talk about a book they’d all read, or take it in turns to bake a cake. Sometimes she’d bring me a slice, and always she’d bring me a new story to laugh about, like the time they went wall-climbing at the local sports centre and Dennis, her eighty-two-year-old would-be suitor, got stuck on the top rung. ‘He was mortified,’ she giggled into her hand. ‘He kept apologising to me afterwards, as if he’d let me down. Poor old duffer.’
Of course, Buddleia Hill closed down five years after my first stay there, and they set me up in my own home, ten miles away, because I was well enough and they’d got my medication levels just right, apparently. On her last visit to Buddleia Hill, Lily handed me her telephone number jotted on a slip of paper, and asked me to keep in touch, to let her know how I was doing. I committed that number to memory there and then, but once I’d left Buddleia Hill I never spoke to Lily again. I think of her now, and I wish I could see her. I wish she were here with me now, watching the rain trickle down the window pane, telling me funny stories and sharing her cake.
A solitary gull soars across my horizon, a white flash against the turbulent grey seascape. Tomorrow I will see James again. We will take a walk around the Botanic Garden with Chloe, or head down the steps to Steephill Cove, and if the weather is fair we’ll have a cream tea in the café there. I hope with all my heart that it will be just like it should have been before all our troubles. If it isn’t, I don’t know what I might do.