The mental stuff was a different story. I had a good all-round selection of the symptoms from the social worker’s helpful brochures: my Memory Filing Cabinet appeared to be well and truly fucked (standing blank-headed in the shower trying to remember whether I had already washed my hair or not, in mid-conversation with Melissa groping for the word instant), I was constantly exhausted just like James from Cork, and my organizational skills were shot to the point where making breakfast was a major and incredibly frustrating challenge. In practical terms all this was less of a problem than it might have been, I suppose, given that I wasn’t even trying to do anything complex like work or socialize, but that didn’t make me feel any better about it.
Overall, being home was worse than being in the hospital. At least in that cockeyed, dislocated limbo my symptoms hadn’t seemed out of place, while here in the real world they were glaringly, repellently wrong, they were obscenities that should never have been allowed to exist: grown man standing slack-jawed in his kitchen trying to figure out duhhh how me make fried egg, on the phone with the credit-card company fumbling for his date of birth, drooling moron, defective, freakshow, disgusting— And down again into that all-consuming vortex, only it had deepened, it was spreading: not just fear any more, now it was roiling fury and loathing and it was a depth and breadth of loss that I had never imagined. Only a few weeks ago I had been a normal guy, just a guy, tossing his jacket on in the morning, humming the Coronas through a slice of toast caught between his teeth, deciding where he was going to take his girlfriend for dinner; now every second was part of an inexorable tide drawing me farther and farther from that guy whom I had every right to be and who was gone for good, left behind on the other side of that unbreakable sheet of glass. And whereas in the hospital I had been able to tell myself that things would be better once I was home, now that that had turned out not to be true, I couldn’t find any reason to think that anything would get better ever.
It wasn’t only myself I raged at, of course. My mind churned out epic, elaborate fantasies in which I tracked down the two burglars (recognized a voice in the street, a pair of eyes across a pub, kept my cool with awe-inspiring self-control as I stalked them through their seedy haunts) and destroyed them in Tarantino-esque ways much too embarrassing to recount. I lived those scenarios over and over, amplifying and refining each time, till I knew each step and twist of them far better than I knew the details of the actual event. Even at the time, though, I knew exactly how feeble and pathetic they were (zit-ridden asthmatic loser locked in his bedroom furiously fantasizing, under his collection of scantily clad anime posters, about kung-fu-kicking the school bullies into next week) and in the end the rage always turned back on myself: mutilated, useless, physically and mentally incapable of a trip to Tesco never mind action-hero revenge, a fucking joke.
Calls from my mother, who—since Melissa had managed to convince her that I didn’t need a poodle—had switched back to suggesting, with infuriating persistence, that what I really needed was a few weeks at home. “You’d be amazed what it can do for you, a different setting— We promise to stay out of your way, you’ll barely know we’re there—” And, when I made it clear that nothing on earth would induce me to move back home: “Or I know! What about the Ivy House? Uncle Hugo would love to have you, and it’s so peaceful—just try it for a weekend, if you don’t like it you can go back to your apartment—” I put that idea down a lot more viciously than I needed to. I couldn’t even think about being at the Ivy House, not like this. The Ivy House, twilight hide-and-seek among the moths and the silver birches, wild-strawberry picnics and gingerbread Christmases, endless teenage parties with everyone lying on the grass gazing up at the stars— All that was unreachable now; that night was a flaming sword barring the way. The Ivy House was the one place that, more than any other, I couldn’t bear to see from this far shore.
Unidentifiable ready-meals congealing to lumpy glue on my coffee table. Dust thickening on the bookshelves, crumbs on the kitchen counters—I had texted my cleaner to tell her I wouldn’t be needing her any more, partly because I knew the clattering and hoovering would give me headaches, more because I very strongly didn’t want anyone (except Melissa) in my apartment. Bird-shadows skimming across my living-room floor, making me leap.
Melissa was a problem, actually, a big one. I loved her coming over, she was the only person I genuinely wanted to see, but the thought of her staying the night still sent me into a firework fizzle of panic that I could barely hide. I could have gone to her place, in fact I did try that once, but there was Megan the awful flatmate, hanging around with her thin lips all primmed up and just waiting for Melissa to leave the room so she could make bitchy jabs about how that one time when she got mugged she had been totally traumatized and she was actually much more sensitive than most people but she had actually managed to get over it in like a couple of weeks? because she had really set her mind to it? and someone as special as Melissa actually deserved someone who would make that actual effort? I made my excuses (headache) and left when I realized I was on the actual verge of actually punching Megan’s face in. I’d never had a temper before, I’d always been the easygoing type, but now tiny ludicrous things would send me, out of nowhere, into an uncontrollable fury that took my breath away. One time I couldn’t get a frying pan to fit back into the tangled mess that was my kitchen cupboard; I smashed it down on the counter over and over, with utter methodical concentration, until the pan bent and the handle cracked apart and the whole thing went flying in various directions. Another day, when my toothbrush fell out of my hand for the third time, I slammed my stupid fucking useless left fist into the wall, over and over, I was trying to smash the vile thing to pulp so they would have to cut it off me but—the irony—my muscles didn’t have the strength to do any real damage; all I ended up with was a big purple bruise that made my hand even more useless for the next few days and that I had to remember to hide from Melissa.
I knew awful Megan was right, of course. I knew that Melissa, the unfailing, unforced sweetness and patience of her—never a word of complaint, always a joyful hug and a full-on kiss—was far more than anyone could have expected in the circumstances, far more than I deserved. I knew, too, that even Melissa’s optimism couldn’t be bottomless, that sooner or later she would realize I wasn’t going to magically wake up one morning as my old sunny self. And then what? I understood that the only decent thing to do was to break it off now, save her all the squandered time and energy and hope, save both of us the terrible shatter and slice of the moment when it finally hit home; let her go on her way free of the heavy belief that she had abandoned me when of course that wouldn’t be true, not at all: I was the one who had abandoned her. But I couldn’t do it. She was the one person who seemed to believe, to take for granted, that I was the same Toby she had always known; a bit bruised and battered, sure, in need of extra nuzzles and funny stories and of having my coffee brought to me on the sofa, but not changed in any essential way. Even though I knew that was rubbish, I couldn’t make myself give it up.
I was aware that I was in big trouble here, but there didn’t seem to be any way out. At the dark heart of the horror was the knowledge that it was inescapable. The thing I couldn’t bear wasn’t burglars or blows to the head, wasn’t anything I could beat or evade or set up defenses against; it was myself, whatever that had become.
* * *