1

On the day I met Raine, the first thing I did was jerk awake in bed and vomit nightmares into my lap.

That’s not quite accurate. If I could purge the nightmares like a bad meal then life would be a lot easier. No, I brought up bile and what little I’d managed to keep down over the last couple of days, then dry heaved through the aftershocks, shaking and coated in cold sweat; the nightmares had lashed at me for two weeks, and last night broke the record.

For a long moment I screwed my eyes shut and struggled to forget the nightmare. The endless dark plain, the Watchers, the Great Eye which had crammed my head full to bursting with things I didn’t want to know, night after night, until I’d clawed my way out through the bedsheets and back into the sick prison of my nausea-wracked body.

I mumbled some poetry to drown out the Eye, a few lines of Coleridge through the taste of sick in my mouth.

“And now there came both m-mist and snow, and it grew wondrous cold … a-and ice …”

Poor old Coleridge and the rapture of the Arctic wasn’t strong enough, not when scratched out through my throat, raw from the bile and acid. Pressure spiked inside my head. I felt a nosebleed start and watched fat bloody droplets join the reeking puddle on my bedsheets. The Eye’s lessons filled my mind, a jumble of painful geometry and impossible equations quivering and bleeding on the rim of reality.

I dry heaved again.

Predawn grey crept around the edges of the sheet I used as a curtain, and the green numbers on my bedside clock told me I’d been asleep for less than three hours. Not even two full REM cycles. My room stank of vomit and fear-sweat, cut through by the iron tang of blood. I pinched my nose to stop the bleeding.

I said some unflattering things to myself and finally accepted I was suffering the worst schizophrenic relapse of my life. Wonderland was calling me back. Once or twice a month I could handle, I had coping strategies; two weeks without respite and I felt fragile, brittle, spent.

It was time to call my mother and go back on the crazy pills.

‘Crazy’ is a safety blanket word for me. It defines a neat boundary in which I can exist without screaming at the walls or talking to people who aren’t there. A safe zone to keep me from being locked in a padded cell. I don’t like ‘insane’ because the word itself requires a ‘sane’ with which to define against. Crazy has no opposite.

Raine was about to take away my safety blanket; if I’d known, would I still have gone out that morning? For Raine, probably yes.

I’d constructed a routine the last couple of weeks. Strip my bed and my sweat-stained clothes, shove it all into the ancient washing machine in the corner of my one-room bedsit flat, clean myself up best I could, down three cups of coffee, and drag myself to morning classes.

And try to ignore the hallucinations.

A spindly figure by the back wall watched me with holes instead of eyes, with too many fingers pressed to its face, too many joints, skin made of mushroom flesh and marble.

A vast shadow outside drifted across the window, trailing ropey tentacles, a gasbag jellyfish humming whalesong.

I finally got the washing machine going, on my feet by willpower alone, when a ball of spines and black chitin sniffed at my foot. I scooted it away. Of course, I felt nothing. It wasn’t really there.

I put the kettle on while I shuffled into the tiny bathroom to wash out the taste of stomach acid and blood. I spat tainted saliva into the sink over and over again until I felt a little less defiled, then scrubbed the dried blood off my face and lips and blew my nose. The water ran pink. Even when clean I didn’t relish the sight of myself in the mirror, my eyes ringed with dark exhaustion. Sallow and slack and sick. I dragged my hair into a semblance of order.

My stomach clenched with exhaustion-hunger at the smell of instant coffee. I rummaged for food but instead found another hallucination, huge and covered in wire-coarse hair, shifting in the back of the cupboard. I waited for that one to pass, afraid it would look at me if I reached inside.

I needed real food if I was going to have that fatal conversation with my mother, so I made a deal with myself. A last meal.

“Have to go outside, outside we go. You can do it, Heather, you escaped once before, you can do it again. It’s easy, it’s just a bedsit room and all you’re going to do is walk down the street and get bacon and eggs. That sounds good, yes. Bacon with the fat still on, just how you like it. Come on, out we go. You can do it.”

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