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,