Skin Diving. Chapter One.

My New Novel (Serialised fortnightly on Fridays).

Chapter One: Letter to Self.

Here I am, on my way in again. Mack’s chauffeur, Hagan, presses the buzzer - Buzz! Buzz! – and the tall gates glide open to receive us. We cross the entrance, drive up the avenue, our progress slowed by speed bumps all the way along.

‘Sleeping policemen’, Mack says they call these humps in Ireland, admiring what he figures that says about the Irish attitude to the law. ‘Lie down there, you lads, and we’ll go slow as we drive over ye’.

I open the window, stick out my head. Tall trees are leaning towards each other from either side of the avenue, intertwining branches to form a tunnel above, shutting out the sun that’s accompanied us all the way from the city. I lean my face up, trying to catch the sunlight flickering through.

Then the trees give out and, for a moment, I’m dazzled.

‘A fine few acres this place has,’ Mack says. And, as my eyes clear, the agree. Rich, open

parkland. Grasses rolling over small hillocks. To our right a flat lake holding a sepia mirror to the sky. And up ahead, emerging out of the trees, the house. A handsome 19th-century pile. White, Palladian style, sturdy steps leading up to an entrance framed by four Corinthian columns. More like a hotel than a hospital.

Sorry, not a hospital; an Advanced Psychotherapeutic Facility.

And here’s a flunky, more butler than porter, coming out as soon as Hagan stops the car, proferring his ‘Good Afternoon Mr McIntyre, Miss McIntyre, welcome to Ladbrook Hall’. Under his words, the air is syrupy with silence. I step out of the car and into it. Countryside quiet, clogging my city ears.

This way, this way. Would we like tea? The Facility’s admittance procedure picks us up and carries us along. To the secretary to sign the forms, to the assistant to be shown around and have the routine explained, to the nurse for physicals and finally to Doctor Keane, to listen while he and Mack talk over my head, to watch them clasp how-well-we-understand-each-other hands across my future.

How many times, now, have I sat like this with Mack?

Too many, you’d have thought, for him to be holding the faith he seems to be holding here. I can’t tell whether it’s a show, and he’s not as hopeful as he’s pretending, or whether he really thinks that this time, finally, he’s going to hand over a bundle of psychosis and get back a functioning daughter. Or at least one who is merely neurotic.  After twenty-two years with Zelda, he can cope with neurotic.

A second handshake and he’s standing, he’s leaving, hefting his poorly-hidden longing to be gone down the corridor, and out into the backseat of the car, where his work papers – his loyal and true children, the ones that don’t let him down – await him for the drive back.

I’m allowed to wave him off from the top of the steps and then, without time to think, I’m in a white room. White walls, white ceiling, a marble fireplace, an icy mirror reflecting white slatted blinds, sitting before a white page, being told by Doctor Keane, my white knight, my saviour-to-be, to write on it. A letter to my ten-year-old self, no less.

‘What’s with all the white,’ I ask.

‘There is safety in the oblivion of white.’

‘Pardon?’

Safety. He wonders whether perhaps I fear it, the emptiness that white represents?  I should have no such fear, it can actually be my friend. It’s there too in that notebook he’s just opened on the table before me: the power of vacant, the potential in blank.

Or to put it another way: writing therapy, on which the success of his Facility is based, is transformative. The research is incontrovertible, widely replicated and validated, each finding consistently confirming  its power. And his faith in it. And the reputation of Ladbrook Hall.

On that empty whiteness before me, I will write a new self, my new doctor says. A self without Jamie.

*

Dear Mel,
Look, can’t you? Look till you see what you see.

The cot was only – what? – ten feet from the door and yes, okay, light was seeping through the flimsy nursery curtains, but dawn light, Mel. So bright that you were entirely dazzled? Able to see nothing more than a tall silhouette, black against the glare, leaning in? Truly?

If you knew your future, you’d open those locked-down eyelids. You’d wait by that door till you knew what you know.

Tara’s foot in the cot, you saw that clear enough. Every detail of that you’ve passed up the years. One heel beating against the mattress, thud-thud-thud. The bubbly, baby shape of it and its flaw, the mark of the McIntyre: the second and third toe webbed, joined almost up to the nail.

Jamie had the same pedalian quirk. So do I. We all inherited it from Mack.

In his teens, Jamie had his tattooed along the join with a broken line and scissors. Cut Here. Typical Jamie. (I liked it so much, I copied him and had it done too. Typical me).

Oh give me something, small Mel. Something more than our sister’s, six-month-old foot flailing and a mysterious, unidentifiable shadow bending over the cot. A man? A woman? You can’t say, you didn’t see. Only that the shadow was tall. Tall enough to reach right in.

Tall could only mean Mack. Not Zelda or Tansy, each as short as the other, or  ten-year-old Jamie, my twin. We had nobody else in the house that night.

Unless… Unless…

Unless  - surely, the most annoying word in our language – the shadow was standing on a chair. The chair. The one kept by the cot for the purpose. The one you and Jamie stood on many a time, to hand our sister a soother or toy or turn on her mobile or do anything that might stop her tears and her screams.

You’re not saying the figure was standing on this chair. Nothing so useful, oh no. Just that you cannot be sure it was not.

I’ve had enough, Mel, of your bedazzling light, and your no time to see, and your maybe the chair. I need you to look ahead and see where your not-knowing has landed us. Me. Look what it did to our twin.

Look would you, look.

Thud thud thud. The muffled sound of that heel thumping mattress can only be heard because Tara’s stopped crying. The room is empty of noise for the first time in six months. Thud thud. All the days and nights she’s been crying, sending four nurses on their way with their hands over their ears, forcing Mack to bring in Tansy, his own mother, to mind her, because Zelda couldn’t cope… No crying now, Mel. Listen.

Thud. The last sound you hear as the silhouette starts to turn your way. Did it – he? she? – sense you there, by the door, not seeing what you don’t want to see. Who knows? You’re already gone, feet whispering back down the corridor in their slippers, around the open door of your own bedroom, to leap into your bed and lie, swallowing breath that’s too loud, waiting to see who’s going to come.

Whoever comes will be who it was.

You wait, eyes pretend shut, the sounds of thud and silence moving into the bed with you, never to get out again but nobody comes.

And next morning is full of more shadows and whispers. You’re back in the same spot at the bedroom door, with Jamie this time, watching the doctor fold black instruments into his bag. You’re hearing new words that get said in hushed tones: suffocation, asphyxiation, sudden-infant-death.  You’re learning new meanings for words you thought you knew: removal, service, remains.

You’re seeing Mack staring out the window, his back to the rest of the house, and Zelda being led, weeping, away.

You’re feeling soothing words from Tansy drop onto your forehead and slide right off again, falling into the silence you’ve clasped close and held onto, all the way up to here.

It’s what killed Jamie, we both know that. I don’t want to follow him and I will if you keep me cowering from what we know. I’ve got to the point where the silence is hurting more than anything else could, even the truth.  That’s why I’ve allowed Mack to bring me to this place.

So I write to you, ten-year-old Mel, to beg you, for Jamie’s sake, for Tara’s sake, for your sake and mine, to open up and let me back in.

Chapter Two: June 24th 2011: Gaining Entry