In bad dreams, I am in an empty place. I don’t know where I am. I can see there is space but I can’t see anything in the space. I can hear the wind chimes from my neighbour’s garden, but when I scan for their physical body, their little house of sound, they always seem to be coming from another direction. Then the women arrive. I don’t know who the women are. Maybe my ancestors, or the sisters I could have had. They arrive in single file, and each one wears a beige trench coat as if it were a military uniform. Some of them have heads hanging off their necks by a thread. Dead heads on live bodies, dead hair dripping down to their hips in silver trickles, a macabre parody of the red-gold waterfalls of shampoo adverts. Some of them have parts of a head but the parts won’t stay together—their hands grab wildly at pieces that keep floating away. The heads aren’t breaking up cleanly, the way you would expect, into pretty bits: item, one neck, one chin, and so forth. Sometimes it’s part of the scalp with an eye, sometimes three-quarters of an ear and a slice from the neck. Dangling tracheae.
Some of the women stop chasing, and just lie down.
It’s coming. Do you see it?
Chapter Nineteen
Why had I said I would write to The Cop? How could I? I couldn’t put down my whole life since we broke up and send it to her. Was I supposed to pick and choose bits of it, then? How could I possibly know what mattered and what didn’t? Even if I could have answered that question for myself, which was hopeless to begin with, how could I know what would matter to her?
The next morning, I started an email three times with the subject line Hi before I realized the project was a total waste of time. Instead, I decided I should send her a gift. An object, not words. A parcel would probably take a few weeks to arrive, and that would give both of us time to think. And if she had died in a plane crash on her way home, it would also buy me a bit more time before I had to start worrying that she wasn’t answering.
What I sent had to be something that mattered, something it would hurt to give away, or it wouldn’t mean anything. In the end, I dug out my old choker, with the four little items I’d collected during the time we’d spent together, investigating (or at least, so I thought) Deb’s disappearance. The skull, the sequin, the wing, and the crystal. The tired leather felt brittle now, and crusty. I wrote on a yellow sticky note:
Remember this?
Love, Victoria xx
Then I rolled the note up and stuck it to itself, slid the choker into the middle of the roll, and went to the post office. On the counter was a splotchy biro, tied to a chain with grimy old plasters. Plasters are called Band-Aids here. I copied The Cop’s new address from the piece of paper she’d given me onto the front of a Jiffy bag. Do they call them Jiffy bags here? Home is where your words are, isn’t it? Only as my pen hit the plastic did I remember to write Julie, not The Cop.
So I had sent her this part of me, feeling like I’d cut out an organ, to see what she wanted to do with it now. Knowing nothing could happen for at least a fortnight (they definitely don’t call them fortnights here). Hoping I’d have enough time to figure out how I felt about having sent her such a gift. Why I would do such a thing.
But before the first week had passed, it was all moot. By then everything had shifted beyond recovery.
—
My psychiatrist had been trying me on a few new medications. I couldn’t remember all the names anymore, or what they were supposed to do. Whatever the latest drug was, it was mostly just making me gain weight. Or perhaps it was that I had stopped moving. Anyway, something was different. And now Jeff the therapist was trying to get rid of me.
“I am a little concerned about our lack of progress,” he said in our penultimate session. “There is something distressing you that may not be responding well to cognitive therapy.”
“Mmm hmm,” I said, because I didn’t know what else to say.
“Victoria, I think I’m going to refer you to a specialist within the psych unit, who can review your situation in more depth. How would you feel about that?”
“You find my narrative unfit. It shall be rendered as fiction, crazy talk, nonsense. Why don’t you do what you dream, Bastian? But this is the next step in an established progression. A straight line for us to follow. You will follow it, and I will follow it.”
I’m not sure if I said all these things aloud.
“Is that a feeling?” Jeff asked.
But I can’t! I have to keep my feet on the ground!
“It’s what I have.”
Call my name! Bastian, please! Save us!
—
Jeff made one other last-ditch effort for me, bless him. He suggested I could go and see a hypnotherapist.
Hypnos is twin to Thanatos, remember? Sleep and death? They call the quetiapine a hypnotic and it gives me strange dreams, like the ones with the women, though they’re not as bad as the semi-dreams I used to have of Deb’s death in the nights after she disappeared. In some stories Hypnos lives in a cave at the source of the Lethe, the river of forgetting, which makes sense
