Victoria Sees It

Deb. Her absence in me. I was all that was left of her, of what we had. What I lost. It was more than a friendship, a million times more. It was a lifeline. A tear. A little rip in reality that could have broken this pattern, this cycle, this script that keeps repeating itself, where we cannot get what we need. Where we are not safe. Where we don’t have anyone. My mother didn’t have anyone. Not one single friend visited her in the home, all that time, all those nights and not one friend. I wonder if she ever had a Deb, when she was young. Was her Deb lost, too? Was her Deb like my Deb? Could I give her my Deb? If we can tear ourselves out of cycles, out of scripts, could a character from my life story tear herself out and jump into my mother’s? Maybe she needed my Deb even more than I did. Maybe that’s where my Deb went. Maybe she wasn’t my Deb to begin with. Maybe Deb is just a helper. Someone who goes where she’s needed. Maybe it isn’t my turn anymore.

I don’t care. I need her, and I’m going back out there. I’m going to find her.

Yes I know how that sounds. “Help.”

Epilogue

Nyx is a personification of the night. The night. The definite article. Nyx was there in the beginning and she’ll be there in the end. My mother died in the asylum—when did we switch to “home”? They didn’t mess around in that place: not with language, not with anything. Not by the end. God did it scare the crap out of me. Those last weeks. So I stopped visiting and eventually she killed herself and left a note saying it was all my fault. Like I said, it is in me. A baby kicking.

I used to be that baby. How time flies! Nyx these days is a brand of cosmetics. And when my mother was a kid, she used to go and visit her own mother. Yes, in a fucking asylum, it’s where we all end up, didn’t I mention? Why don’t we just check ourselves in when we hit thirty-nine? Save everyone else the trouble. Hi, no I don’t have a reservation but do you have a godawful soul-killer of a room available for the next 14,000 silent nights?

The other day the little shit brought me a book from home. A 1970s edition of Agatha Christie’s Endless Night. Says she heard I used to like this one. There’s this picture inside of a blonde woman in a pink sweater, like an actual picture, not on a phone—I suppose she used it as a bookmark. A beautiful pink lady smoking and smiling. Good hair for the ’90s. On the back someone had scribbled in biro, Semper eadem xoxox. Something about that was familiar but my memory is shot to pieces from the meds. They say it keeps me level but I feel like there are things I can’t see properly anymore, things that are, I don’t know, flat somehow. I threw the picture in the bucket with the food waste at breakfast.

Well, what else did you want to have happen here? And the unclean spirits went out, and entered into the swine: and the herd ran violently down a steep place into the sea, (they were about two thousand;) and were choked in the sea…? That’s not a better ending than this, is it? Doesn’t anyone care about the pigs? Two thousand fucking pigs? Keep it inside you, at least you save the pigs. Not that a pig’s life is a party, but I’d trade for mine if I could without cursing an innocent thing. What is salvation anyway?

Instead there is only static. This hammering, this buzzing, all of us racing around trying to find some kind of straight line, some kind of normal, some kind of security blanket. A friend, the one true friend, the one we can trust, the one who won’t leave us in the lurch. Or even just a good story, that’ll do, one where it all comes together. All the loose threads cosily tied up by Miss Marple’s clickety-clackety knitting needles.

—

Welcome to the lurch. Oh honey, is it too bright for you? Nyx, dim my lights to 50 per cent.

I’m supposed to eat something again and I don’t know what to have. They’re busy digitizing our whole lives in here, but at least for now you’re still supposed to put food in one end of you and shit out the other. As long as you keep it all moving along. I mean, you can stuff yourself up, but how is that any safer, not going anywhere? It’s only around and around anyway. Perhaps the motion is not really retrograde, perhaps it only looks that way from here. Not all regresses are vicious. This always used to happen, a kind of pathological indecision: even if I had enough money to buy something I’d just wander around in circles thinking, Chips. No, kebabs. No, noodles. No, chips, because everything was wrong. I was skinny because there was nothing to eat. Nineteen, twenty, my plate’s empty. And I lost so much weight when the little shit came out of me.

That man was on TV again yesterday—not TV, what’s the word for the screens in here, what do they call them—explaining that we’re doughnuts, topologically speaking. A tube with a hollow middle, you know, a corridor. A worm, a zero. An empty O. Or the iris of a human eye. All that stuff just passing through you on its way to anywhere.

Acknowledgements

My home base, Jonathan, Mezzo, Drusilla, Seven. My brilliant friends and magicians and muses, Carla, Mandy, Marina, Adriana, Ray, Richard, Tyler. My family, Nick, Pam, Calum, James, Mum, Ted, Lorna, Jo, Doug, Lauren, Emily.

My agent, Martha Webb. My editor, Haley Cullingham. My copy editor, Gemma Wain. My fiction teachers, Heather O’Neill,