“FUR IS DEATH!”
Drums bang, purple smoke explodes, a car horn blasts, a child starts screaming and a dog barks. A sheet of pure sound passes through me and I start to pull apart on a cellular level, the way a glass shakes just before it shatters.
“Head-to-toe electrocution!” An old lady gets right in my face: pores like orange coral, emotions neon yellow. “Foxes get an electrode up their butts. Does that sound fun to you?”
I follow the direction of her eyes to the large furry tail clipped to the front of my handbag. Will teases me for being “such a child sometimes,” but I like to hold on to it tightly when I’m on a busy train or someone gets too close to me in the post office queue. It’s also clearly artificial: it’s bright bloody green.
Which is what I open my mouth to politely explain when a spray of sticky liquid hits my face. It smells sour; tastes like ink and rotting Jelly Babies.
When I put my hand up, it comes away red.
Somebody starts wailing loudly.
And it’s only as I start desperately clawing and elbowing my way out of the crowd that I realize the horrible monotone noise is coming out of me.
It’s here.
It’s here and I’m covered in (blood? Paint? Corn syrup?) and fireworks are exploding behind my eyelids and I’m unlikable and relentlessly grating and unemployed again and a siren goes off and a shop alarm shoots through my head and Will doesn’t love me, couldn’t love me, maybe there’s nothing to love and there are no fucking banana muffins anywhere.
Openly sobbing now, I take the only option I have left. I find the nearest empty doorway, crouch in a small ball on the ground with my arms wrapped tightly around my head.
(“Cassandra must stop reacting to stress like a hedgehog.”)
And I wait for everything to go black.
3
It’s odd behavior, I know.
People have been telling me how weird I am since I was a small child, with varying degrees of anger and irritation. Over the years my “little episodes” have been put down to:
? Victorian-esque hysteria (“Get her some smelling salts”)
? A dramatic disposition
? A desperate need for attention
? A pathological inclination toward ruining parties
All I know for sure is that as long as I can get somewhere dark and silent as soon as I feel one coming on, my “hissy fits” often recede just before peaking, like a sneeze or an orgasm.
And if I don’t...
Let’s just say a large proportion of my life is spent in constant fear that the next one will happen in a client meeting, in the middle of Zara on a Saturday afternoon or at somebody else’s wedding. (“Cassandra must stop making everything about her.”) My theory is that my brain is like a lazy IT department, and every time there’s a problem with the electrics it just panics and pulls the plug out at the wall.
Switch her off, switch her back on again: see if that helps.
This must have been a particularly bad one; by the time I finally resurface, my limbs are covered in scratch marks, my body feels swollen—a balloon filled with water—and the street is dark and back to normal. The protest has gone.
Shivering, I look more closely at my wrist: so has my watch.
I look around: plus my box with my mug in it.
Nice one. Thanks, London.
Aching all over, I groggily attempt to rise like Aphrodite, except that instead of the Greek goddess of love and beauty, I’m obviously a snot-covered, unemployed woman in her early thirties, and instead of gracefully emerging from a seashell, I’m hanging sweatily on to the doorknob of a new establishment called Bar Humbug, attempting not to make eye contact with a judgmental binman.
On the upside, I feel infinitely calmer now.
You can say what you like about my brain—and a lot of people have done over the decades—but it certainly knows how to return to factory settings.
“HELLO? WHO IS IT?”
I wish my flatmates would stop yelling this every time I open the front door: I’m the only other person who lives here.
“Cassandra,” I say, locking it behind me.
After careful consideration, I splurged on an Uber back to my flat in Brixton instead of attempting to navigate public transport as I normally would. Now may not be the time to start splashing cash around, but it’s also not the time to be half a kilometer underground with a brain that feels like over-milked mashed potato.
“Oh.” Sal appears in the kitchen doorway wearing a pair of bright pink cropped shorts and casually props one foot on the other toned leg like a ridiculously beautiful flamingo. “It’s you.”
“WHO?” Derek shouts again from the living room.
“Cassandra,” Sal calls back with a deliberate note of disappointment, eyeing me suspiciously as if I’ve just broken in. “We’re waiting for the takeaway guy.”
“Do they have a key now too, then?” I put my bag down and take my trainers off.
“Ha. Always so unbearably witty.”
Salini Malhotra is a smidgen shorter than me—“tall for a girl” (generally only an observation made by short men)—and has glowing skin, full lips and the kind of cheekbones I can only assume were carved by Zeus himself. Derek Miller is her boyfriend and similarly attractive, if you like men who leave used teeth-whitening strips and blond beard shavings all over the bathroom, which I do not.
I’ve lived here for about six months now, and my flatmate is still scanning my features as if she’s going to be asked to draw them at some point in the future.
“Oh!” I say, suddenly remembering the fake blood from the protest and realizing I must look like I’ve been casually caught in a meat grinder and forgotten to mention it. “I’m not hurt—don’t worry.”
“I’m not going to,” Sal sighs tiredly, unhooking her leg and turning to forage in one of the cupboards for a glass. “You seem fully capable of looking after yourself, Cassandra.”
I watch her for a few seconds. The color coming out of her isn’t quite anger, but it’s definitely in the same family: a blue-red, like the shade of an expensive designer lipstick I’ve been told I can’t wear because it clashes with my hair. I can feel the intensity of her emotion tickling the edges of my skin, trying to get in. Not quite anger, more than resentment, too bright to be disgust...
“Derek,” she calls to the living room. “Your other girlfriend is here. Aren’t you going to come and say hello?”
Whatever it is, Sal clearly hasn’t forgiven me yet. There are also a few splashes of vomit yellow shooting out of her, but that makes no sense and I’m tired, so I must be reading it wrong.
“Be nice, babe,” Derek admonishes, ambling into the room with the blank smile of a toothpaste model and staring at her bottom. “She screwed up. We all do it sometimes. Try to let it go while we’re all living under the same roof, yeah?”
Then he slowly wraps a long arm around her and pulls her toward him for a kiss in a gesture that reminds me a lot of an elephant eating a peanut.
“Fine,” Sal sniffs, watching me warily over his shoulder as if I’m a gas canister placed next to an open flame and should be monitored at all times in case I take the whole house down. “Sorry. I just think it might be easier for all of us if we had the place to ourselves again. It’s not really big enough for three people. Plus, she’s in her thirties. Surely she wants a place of her own by now?”
As if I’m sitting on a deposit for a beautiful flat in Primrose Hill but have instead decided to take their tiny box room in Brixton for the sheer pleasure of watching them grope each other by the tea bags.
“You’re both twenty-nine,” I point out shortly.
“Everyone knows thirty is the cutoff point before flat-sharing with someone you’re not screwing is just a bit sad.” Sal peels herself away from Derek and narrows dark brown eyes in my direction as if trying to find somewhere to put me, like an awkwardly shaped piece of Tupperware. “Why don’t you just move in with the lawyer you’re dating? Get out of this little rut you’re clearly in.”
My stomach contracts as if whacked by a netball: a sensation I haven’t felt for quite some time but which is carved deeply into my muscle memory.
On the contrary, I am currently rut-less.
“Will isn’t a lawyer,” I say. “He’s a wildlife cameraman.”
I’m about to triumphantly add that he’s not dating me anymore, actually, before realizing this might not be the slam dunk I’m looking for.
“Just leave it now,” Derek says firmly, bopping Sal affectionately on the nose. “I mean it. We said we’d give Cassie as much time as she needs to find somewhere else to live, and we’re going to do that. We’re not dicks.”
“I’m looking,” I say. “Really.”