me out. They stitched me up, masked the cuts with padded dressings.
Meg came back the next day and brought me lunch in a brown paper bag and looked tearful when I said I couldn’t touch it. David came and I immediately felt guilty again for being a burden on him. He said, “I had to use annual leave to come see you. What happened? Why are you here, Lex?”
I had no answer. I wondered if he’d had to clean up the blood. David was always squeamish.
A doctor came along, stood beside my bed with his hands in his pockets.
“Lexi, before we send you home we need to be sure you won’t do this again. We need you to sign a form saying that you have no more plans to harm yourself.”
He produced a form. I signed it. I took the bus home.
On the phone my mother said that I was always an attention seeker. I read somewhere that those who get under our skin are our best teachers, and while it sticks in me to call my mother a teacher of any kind, I’ll say that her comment inadvertently sparked an epiphany, because even as she moved on to give me a blow-by-blow account of that morning’s Jerry Springer, I realized that she was part of the reason I’d tried to top myself. And secondly, I realized that if I was to stay alive, I should probably stop speaking to her altogether.
I lost my job. I was working as an administrator at a care home and took a month off to recover. I didn’t get a medical note, so they sacked me. It was probably illegal, but the thing with illness, mental or otherwise, is that it tends to annihilate your capacity for argument. At the time I was spending twenty-three hours a day in bed. For the first few weeks I mostly slept, though I had such psychedelic nightmares that it wasn’t exactly restful. Dreams about my childhood, about my mother telling me she wished I’d never been born. Dreams of being shipped out to strangers while she “sorted herself out.”
David didn’t say much to me during this time. He went out to work every morning, sent me a text at lunchtime, and then came home at dinnertime with a ready meal or takeout. I didn’t eat much. He’d sit in bed beside me marking homework assignments while I tried to follow Game of Thrones. When the cuts healed I started sleeping less, and the fear set in again. I asked David if I could go to work with him and he looked at me like I’d suggested he get a full body wax.
“Come to work with me? What for?”
I didn’t want to say I was lonely at home. “Because I’m lonely at home.”
“Go back to work, then.”
“They sacked me, remember?”
“Can’t you just look for a new job?”
“I could sit in the staff room and read.”
“You can’t do that . . .”
“Why not?”
“It would be weird, Lexi. You know it would.”
“Maybe the janitor’s cupboard.”
“The what?”
“Don’t schools still have those? Mine did.”
“Look, I’ll FaceTime you.”
He didn’t FaceTime me.
I went to the public library, but it was too loud. People were staring and it felt like being branded with hot irons. The books were full of stories that shouted at me and I worried they might fly off the shelves and hit me. Difficult to explain these kinds of things when a librarian is leaning over you asking why you’re hyperventilating on the floor.
So I went home, opened my laptop, and started to write. I wrote and wrote and wrote. It was like the story was being dictated to me. It was about a twenty-eight-year-old woman who had a nightmarish childhood due to her mother passing her around to strangers who did terrible things to her, and the girl grew up to be an inventor and made millions and learned self-respect. Note the feminist angle. It was set in Norway. After my doomed trip to the public library, I realized I’d somehow managed to check out some novels, all of them whodunits set in bleak Nordic landscapes. Scandi noir. After I finished reading them I thought, That’s what my book is. I tweaked a few details and lo, a Scandi noir it became.
I knew David was going to break up with me. We’d been together eight years and the last six had been fairly rough going. He was like the Arctic. Impenetrable, cold, rugged. I used to find those qualities attractive.