the night I resolved to find out who the culprit was and make them pay or face charges. People shouldn’t get away with stuff like that.
Then there was the question of why he thought I was in danger. I’d never given any hint that I wasn’t capable of looking after myself. And danger from what? My thoughts spiralled into a ceaseless whirl, concluding, after hours, that during the period when he was unwittingly withdrawing from his meds, Dan’s fractured psyche had twisted concern for my mum into a jumble of irrational anxieties. And then transferred them onto me.
People did that all the time: you got told off at work, came home and took it out on your nearest and dearest. If we could do that with anger, we could just as well do that with fear and anxiety.
There was no other logical explanation. But then a lot of things that were happening at the moment were not logical.
It was all crazy. And hectic too. Everything seemed to be hurtling through time, almost as if someone had flipped a fast-forward switch on my life. Things had happened in such quick succession that I had been unable to process them internally. Though, weirdly, at the same time, I was grateful. The frenetic activity was filling up the gap between me and Mum. I knew I was grieving but I was fighting giving in to it, holding the loss at bay while I concentrated on these other new phenomena.
I was still unwilling to use the ‘ghost’ word. In fact I felt more comfortable referring to the girl, or whatever she was – the memory, the apparition – as Rebecca. It kind of took the edge off. I had no doubt that if I used the G word or its associated language – haunting; bewitching; possession – it might unleash the fear that I was keeping abated, and if that came over me, I would be useless, gibbering, no more competent than Dan. Or Mum.
Mum.
Nor was it lost on me, this notion that I was possibly ‘seeing things’ as my mother had done. I had dismissed her experiences as insanity, psychoses that merely required chemical rebalancing for her to get a grip on reality. But what if the reality that I was beginning to see now, was the reality in which she had lived for the majority of her life? If I thought about it enough I could see that there had been a pattern to her bouts of ‘lunacy’. First she would become sad, then this would be compounded and transform into a darker thing – depression, anxiety, fear – then would come the ‘apparitions’, the voices.
My episodes had only begun since I lost Mum. When I, too, had been stressed and anxious, focusing hard on pain. Maybe that focus had meant that other parts of my brain weren’t holding up properly against these external forces. Maybe that preoccupation left part of me weak, creating a gap which gave Rebecca the chance to enter in?
Or perhaps it was psychological as Maggie had said: I had lost my mother and the guilt which flowed through my veins was manifesting itself in the visions of a young girl pleading for forgiveness: ‘I’m sorry.’ A transference of my internal culpability? An outward projection of loss, grief, blame? A seizure?
The answer was that ‘yes’, it could be any one of those things. What I really should do was make an appointment at the doctor’s. But that was a no-go after last night’s run-in with Doctor Franklin. I didn’t trust him and I no longer trusted Doctor Jarvis.
No, whatever was going on in my strange brain I was going to go with it, to ride it out to its conclusion. If it threatened at any point to overwhelm me, then I would seek assistance from some source. But for now I was resolved to move forwards. I would go to Manningtree tomorrow, for the book and to call up Rebecca, whatever she was – spirit or embodiment of guilt. Then I could let her know about what I was doing with Flick. Maybe that would assuage her guilt. Maybe it would assuage mine. At least it was doing something.
It was raining and somewhere in the attic water had got in. Perhaps Dan had dislodged a tile. I got up and tried lying on the sofa, listening to the steady drip, drip, drip until I gave up and got my laptop.