It was just some knocks on the door, Robin had told herself last night as she tried to sleep, duvet tangled in her legs. Just a few knocks. And what harm could someone knocking on the door do? Robin lived in a busy suburb of Manchester, on a bus route and with the front of her house facing a popular green. There were witnesses everywhere—there were hundreds of people whose very presence should stop anyone even trying something dangerous. So why hadn’t she just opened the door?
Tomorrow, she told herself, she would open the door if he knocked. More than that, she would fling it back and say, “Yes?” phone in her hand, ready to call the police if there was any need. And surely there’d be no need.
The decisiveness calmed her at first, but the thought of the door opening, the rush of daylight, the face of someone angry and desperate emerging, possibly someone with a score to settle…She had climbed under her bed before she knew what she was doing, tugging her duvet down after her.
She swung through these loops often— The logical part of her taking charge, then the broken part of her swinging a wrecking ball through all that sense. There were so many things that a reasonable person would have done differently over the years. A reasonable person would open her own post, would open her own door, would sleep on top of her own bed, would leave her own house, wouldn’t count her daily steps, would watch normal adult television and not seek out the nursery comforts of CBeebies. A normal person wouldn’t believe that she holds other people’s mortality in her scrawny hands. Wouldn’t take responsibility for strangers as if that could bring anyone back. But then, a normal person wouldn’t be responsible for someone else’s death. A normal person wouldn’t be so swollen with guilt that she could barely fit in the real world.
Robin pushed open the door of the “gym”—one of the first-floor spare rooms—lay down on the weights bench and tried to focus on the bar of metal over her chest. At least working out was a fairly normal thing to do, even if she did do it for hours on end, getting stuck in loops of round numbers and having to keep things equal and burning her muscles to oblivion.
—
The hole she was in had opened up in L.A., California. The band had been in the city to work on their fifth album, a trip that was an indulgence designed to inspire.
Robin had gone outside to get some fresh air—air warmer and grittier than in the air-conditioned room she’d just left, an unexpected arrival the day before still pressing on her mind. Then she saw it. A triple drain. Three drains in a row. She walked around it, slid into the road to avoid it, just like she had as a teenager when it was a pavement in Berkshire rather than a sidewalk in L.A.
Why did that old phobia kick in then? She didn’t know for sure. The letter, perhaps. Its ugly words pasted onto cheap lined paper, sitting in her hotel room.
The drain thing was just a stupid habit from the nineties, a kind of socially contagious fear. An urban myth of a superstition that no one could actually explain or find a history for when pressed. But why are all these teenagers in the suburbs lunging into the road to avoid triple drains? And why are double drains lucky? None of this makes any sense. No, it didn’t. It didn’t make sense in the south of England and it certainly didn’t make sense in the San Fernando Valley nearly twenty years later, where there were far more frightening things near that studio than three manholes in a row.
But that was it. The final trigger. The Pavlovian bell that had her up on her tiptoes, walking carefully to the top of a landslide of panic attacks and weird rituals, hurling herself down it with furious determination. The more she tried to grasp control any way she could get it, the more slippery her life felt.
From avoiding triple drains, it was a hop, skip and jump into washing her hands three times every toilet visit, carrying antiseptic wipes, sprays and alcohol hand rub (L.A. is amazing for germaphobes—she couldn’t have been better placed). Soon she was obsessed with security in the hotel, checking the small balcony on her room repeatedly, pulling back the curtain to catch someone standing there, fully expecting to see eyes every time.
Where once the band’s drummer, Steve, had only to give or receive one loaded look—the shared shorthand of the hungry and the wanting; where he was used to being pulled inside her suite—always larger than his—and used willingly and secretly (he was only the drummer after all): now he was left outside in the hall.
By the time the band arrived back in England, three-and-a-half-star album in the can, tour dates looming, Robin was a nightmare to be around. She was a nightmare to be. She barely scraped through a shortened rehearsal at the Manchester Apollo— Too busy trying to stop herself curling into a ball to notice the anger on the others’ faces.
Steve avoided her eye, lest she mistake it for that hungry look. Alistair, the bassist and singer, talked to her mostly via text message or pushed notes on hotel paper under her door, with dissolving courtesy and an increase in passive-aggressive question marks.
Her days revolved around strict milestones of hand washing, swallowing, lock checking, nail cutting and knee scratching. Red raw all over, her fingertips throbbed constantly and she could barely hold a conversation because she’d be frantically scheduling the next hour, day, week and month in her head. Of course, Robin told none of this to her bandmates, manager, tour manager, driver, A&R contact, press officer or anyone else. What she did instead was nothing. She just stayed in her hotel room, doing all of this stuff, thinking all of these things. Or, worse, sat with everyone else but contributed absolutely zero.
The band started the UK tour in Manchester.
In Manchester, it finally snapped.
Robin never managed to leave.
—
The morning of the first gig, Robin had gone to ground. She’d tried to get out of the show that night with minimal fuss, texting various people to say she’d lost her voice and had a high fever. A session musician would have to do.
A few minutes later, there was a knock on the room door. Before Robin had a chance to get up, Bev, the tour manager, was yelling. “Bollocks, Robin, I’m not having any of this shit today.”
Robin had laid down on the floor, not replying.
“Enough of it, Robin. If you’re well enough to text, you’re well enough to play.”
Robin texted: “Told you, lost my voice, so can’t answer, please don’t be so hostile.”
“Fuck off, Robin, no one expects you to open your mouth, but you’re part of a machine. We can’t just lose a big chunk of the machine a few hours before you’re all due on.”
Bev had paused. Probably weighing whether to try to bash her way through the faux mahogany door.