The Things We Do to Our Friends(75)

I scrubbed the room for hours to try and get rid of it, then sought refuge outside, but when I went out, it was freezing. I’d end up hiding away down a piss-stinking wynd, desperate to be back inside in the warmth. I couldn’t win. As soon as I was back in my flat, the mold was in my lungs again, making me cough and my head ache. The skin around my nails in particular became so dry and cracked that it bled and bled.

My room that I had loved so much had betrayed me, it had stopped being a sanctuary. I had a solution, though. There was an attic—a tiny crawl space. It was only a few feet wide, but I could climb up via the radiator, open up the little hatch, and just about clamber in.

It was ideal, because I recognized that lack of sleep made me prone to snap and react in a way I wasn’t sure I’d be able to control. I had less of a hold on myself, which was frustrating when I’d been doing quite well with that side of things. So, I hid away.

The ceiling practically touched my nose and the walls just about grazed the sides of my body. It wasn’t some cozy nook, more of a halfway space between indoor and outdoor where gusts came in strong through holes in the roof. There was a smell that could have been mouse droppings and sometimes cold splashes of rain leaked onto my legs. I liked it, though. The space was dark, no light at all, and of course, importantly, no mold that I could see. Once I was there, nothing could find me, and sometimes, if I lay there long enough, I finally managed to get a few hours of sleep. It was safe.

Not much longer. I would be leaving soon to somewhere new, although I hadn’t decided where. I couldn’t let myself plan too much.

I researched my maladies at night before I climbed up, becoming preoccupied with them ever since I’d heard about someone spiking Tabitha’s drink, which almost certainly hadn’t been the point of that story. I thought of Tabitha a lot. Drugged and staggering around a club. Saved by Ava. And as much as I slid pieces around in my mind, I still didn’t know exactly what I was going to do.

I looked to times when the inexplicable had been solved with time and careful logic. Read about children who thought they were haunted by ghosts, who writhed in pain and hot madness, but it turned out to be carbon monoxide poisoning. Witches in the past whose splendid strangeness could be attributed not to magical trickery, but to the seemingly innocuous ingestion of a common parasitic fungus.

The lack of sleep, the aching limbs and fuzz in my head, the feeling of hands around my neck as vivid as if it had happened hours ago, my inability to properly plan my escape: it might be a diagnosable, physiological condition, perhaps related to the mold.

I ended up in the doctor’s surgery at the university even though I didn’t trust doctors.

The GP didn’t ask many questions. He didn’t question my appearance. He ran some tests; he took various vials of blood to check on a lot of things I’d never heard of, then he called me back into the surgery to talk over the results.

“So, the issue is sleep?” he asked again.

“I’m hardly sleeping at all,” I answered.

He turned back to his computer screen. He didn’t have my medical records from France, or the name associated with them. My slate was clean.

“Mood?”

“Mood is…variable,” I replied.

He nodded, tapping away.

I wanted to tell him that sometimes I got so angry that I wanted to smash everything in sight. I needed to lash out—it was the only thing that relieved it. And then the rage left, and I was fine.

That would have been the moment to do it. But I didn’t, because how could I possibly explain it? He was only marginally interested. I don’t think I represented a diagnostic quandary worth investigating. I looked like all the students he saw: young, rich, and unduly anxious.

“Working?” he asked.

I didn’t reply. Oh yes, I work as a honey trapper, and I’m scared that the girl I work with poisoned my boyfriend (maybe she meant to poison me!). Although the reason she did it is because I actually tried to poison someone myself. Oh, and she also pretended to be me and she may or may not have used a cattle prod and forced a man to climb into a carcass of a pig…

I smiled faintly at the idea of even trying to explain it.

“I’m a student,” I said.

“Drugs and alcohol?”

“Rarely.”

“Okay, well you do seem a little peaky.” He took his glasses off and rubbed his nose where they’d sat, before placing them on his desk. He gave me a long, hard look. “Why don’t we try to get your sleep sorted first, that often helps. Just a little kick-start. You can take these for a week, and we’ll see how it goes.”

He wrote out a prescription for me.

I didn’t turn back. I hadn’t even mentioned the mold.





64


Just like that, I was medicated again. It had been a long time since I’d been medicated. Two round white tablets every day. With water and not on an empty stomach. Make sure your prescription stays filled, because you don’t want to run out and go through withdrawal.

I was back studying, and Tabitha kept leaving me voicemails. “Come on, Clare; we need you for this. All the wives love you; you’re the prettiest,” she sang into the phone, like a lullaby. I hated the term “the wives,” like some flock of sheep. Or, “Clare, let’s not end it like this—we can make it work again. I know we can.”