Glitterland

In the past, we are drinking tea in my oak-panelled rooms, where the wisteria creeps beneath the arched windows, filling the air with scent.
In the past, Max and Niall are dancing at the centre of a sea of flesh beneath multicoloured lights.
In the past, I walk between green lawns, surrounded by golden stone.
In the past, I am brilliant and I am happy and my every tomorrow is madness.
In the past, words shimmer around me on silver threads and I pluck them like summer peaches.
In the past, the universe is a glitterball I hold in the palm of my hand. I am the axis of the world.
In the past, I am soaring, and falling, and breaking, and lost.
Then there are grey walls all around, a sullen haze of medication where minutes and months lose all their meaning.
Afterwards, I performed the halting ceremony of betterness in a crawl of grey days. Somehow, I started writing again, laying words out like cutlery. Niall moved in. And then out again.
And now there was this. And yesterday.

"You`re ill, Ash. You`re not capable of living a normal life. You know it. I know it. But do you think it`s something Darian is going to understand or accept? You haven`t even told him you`re bipolar, for God`s sake."
"It hasn`t been a problem with him," I said faintly.
"Oh, come on, you`re giving him false expectations. Have you seen the way he looks at you? He`s going to want things from you that you just can`t give him. Like today. Like now. You`re lying to him and lying to yourself. You`re building a house of cards and it`s going to come crashing down. I can`t keep saving you."
"I seem to be quite busy with all this lying and building you have me doing," I snapped. "And, for the record, I`ve never wanted you to save me."
"Without me you`d be dead or in an institution."
I stood up, and then blurted out: "Well, maybe false expectations are better than no expectations."
Niall shrugged. "Let`s not have this argument. Let`s go home."
"Fuck you," I said.
And ran after Darian.

"Um, you know," I said, "you know bedazzled is a real word, right?"
She blinked, her lashes beating like the wings of a hummingbird. "Is it?"
"'Pardon my mistaking eyes, that have been so bedazzled with the sun, that everything I look on seemeth green.'"
There was a long silence.
"Shakespeare," I said.
"Oh, honey," breathed Chloe. "That`s so clever of you to know that. Darian, babes, he`s so clever."
"Well," I said, "you invented it independently of Shakespeare, so that technically puts you on par with him."
She shook her head, tossing a chaotic spill of wine-dark curls over her shoulders. "You`re so sweet, honey, but I wouldn`t get bedazzled like you said cos I always wear sunglasses."
Beside me, Niall burst into hysterical laughter.

Go to Essex? To a fashion show? Throw myself among strangers and hope for the best? This wasn`t a book signing or an interview or a carefully orchestrated social occasion. It was the utter unknown. How could I prepare for that? How could I make it safe when my ability to perform for the world came and went as randomly and unreliably as an ashamed lover?
And, someday, it would all come crashing down. And the world would see me for what I was. And then I wouldn`t even have these pieces of pride to live for.
But what if it would be fine. Maybe I would deride myself for ever having let terror paralyse me over something so trivial.
But maybe it wouldn`t. Maybe the damn event would loom over me like the shadow of a waiting hydra until I could barely get out of bed for dreading it. Maybe it would be nothing but a grim struggle, a quiet dying like an animal caught in a trap of spiked smiles and metal words.
"I c-can`t."
"Why not?" asked Darian, as if the answer could be simple.
"I mean, I don`t want to." God, what was wrong with me? Why couldn`t I just tell him I was... mentally ill. But the words were stuck, sharp edged, in my throat. The truth was, I`d rather be a dick than a lunatic. I`d rather be hated than pitied. "It`s not my... err... thing."

"So. Nabble. Basically you can only play words that aren`t in the dictionary."
"You what? God,they teach weird stuff at university."
I took the opportunity to haul myself out of the ridiculous sprawl in which he`d trapped me. "It`s really simple. Any made-up word counts, assuming you have the letters, and somewhere to place them, and you can make a case for what the word means. But if it`s not convincing, then it gets disqualified. So you couldn`t have, um, f-s-k-s-w-z for example, as it blatantly doesn`t mean. But you could have, I don`t know, dwelkin."
"What`s a dwelkin then?"
"I think it`s probably a loosely knitted garment, a bit like a poncho, but made of yak hair."
He considered it. "Yeah," he said finally. "I can see that. I reckon there was probably like a trend a coupla summers back, but it nevva caught on proper cos they was naff."
So I dug out my dusty — very dusty — Scrabble set and we sat on my living room floor, playing Nabble. Eventually I stretched out on my side, propping myself up with an elbow, nudging the letters around lazily with the fingertips of one hand. Darian, however, sat solemnly cross-legged, frowning over the board, a single lock of hair shaking loose from its gel, hanging in front of his eyes. A banal setting for a glitter pirate but it did not dull him. The sight of him stirred a wanting that was starting to feel familiar, though it was less frantic tonight. It was a warm, steady thing, like a heartbeat.
He was uncertain at first but soon he was nabbling like an old hand. First came glink ("that like look what happens when two people are fancying each other from across the dance floor"), then gloffle ("like when you put too much toffee in your mouth at once"), then mooshes ("ankle boots made out of crocodile leather wif pompoms hanging on 'em, big in New Zealand"), rapazzled ("off your head, obvs"), and quimpet ("like when hair extensions get all weird up at the top like what 'appened to Britney"). And then, somehow, I got silly and offered up svlenky to describe the motion of his hips while dancing, to which he responded with flinkling, which was apparently what my brow did when I was coming up with something sarcastic to say. From there we moved through a few variations to ridiculous to be recorded, I foolishly formulated glimstruck as a representation of how it felt to be around him, and then we graduated to kissing, still fully clothed like a pair of teenagers, on the wreckage of the Scrabble board.

"So what else you like?" he asked incorrigibly.
The answer you, which served as both evasion and flirtation, rose to the tip of my tongue, but I didn`t say it. What did I like? My pursuits were solitary to the point of solipsism and essentially performed the function of marking time. They were the things I did in the spaces between depression. Like Vladimir and Estragon passing bowler hats around. And about as meaningful. My entire life sublimed into the act of waiting: waiting to be ill, then waiting to be better, the one consuming the other.

Later, he served up his Nanny Dot`s cottage pie, and I presented my salad.
"Babes." He peered into the bowl. "What`s all this?"
"It`s pear and Roquefort," I said, with an airy wave.
"I was maybe thinking some lettuce and tomatoes. This is proper MasterChef."
Truthfully, it didn`t go. Not even a little bit. The cottage pie was about as wholesome and straightforward as you could get. It was food for winter evenings and happy days. And the salad was rich, complicated, a little bit sweet, a little bit sharp, and seemed to be trying too hard to be impressive. We`d both served each other a metaphor.
Fan-bloody-tastic.

He laughed and turned back to cooking, body still moving a little in time to the music.
"So what did you do today?" he asked, chopping away.
Well, Darian, I spent the morning fretting about going shopping, the early afternoon psyching myself up to go shopping, and the rest of the afternoon nearly having a humiliating panic attack in the middle of Sainsburry`s. That left me just enough time to put myself back together and de-lunatic my flat for your arrival.
"Oh, this and that," I said aloud, which was sufficiently discouraging that even Darian didn`t press it.

Don`t panic, don`t panic, breathe, it`s fine, it`s fine. God, have these places always been so bright? Is it hot in here? I was suffocating on light. Lost in a maze of wire and geometry. The aisles were radiating away from me, endless, white and bright and silver, like a three-dimensional crossword puzzle, white spae and a black abyss, and nothing, and nothing, and nothing. People roaring past me like cars down a motorway, their eyes like headlights, glaring through me. Thundering away in a rush of feet and a swoosh of breath. Strangers, and the loudness of their living, battering me on all sides, the whole world, crashing too loud, too bright against me. Wire-crowned waves, scraping my skin, fingernails in my eyes. Why can`t I find anything? A fucking carrot, where are the fucking carrots? Why was this simple thing impossible? Breathe. It`s fine. Breathe, fuck it, breathe. Fucking basic. Okay, just rest, it`s fine, just stare at this row of olives, nobody is looking, nobody knows. Heart racing like a rabbit. Half-dried sweat seared my palms. But nobody knew. That`s all that mattered. My sweaty, fearful little world: population, me. The pit of my stomach, where terror gathered, a cold iron snake coiled around my heart. I think I hated everything. All my words were whirling away into animal panic, thick as mud. This wild awareness of too much that was its own dislocation. Its own separation. Reality was peeling like a grape. I think I could hear my synapses. Where are the fucking carrots?

Ring Max, she said. As if it were simple. As if I could just pick up the phone and talk to him. I couldn`t remember the last time I`d seen him other than as part of a larger group, or the last time we`d had anything like a conversation. Perphas we`d been closer at university, but I`d lost so much of that time due to an extravagant combination of recreational drugs, mania, and electroconvulsive therapy. A title for my autobiography, possibly. Or an epitaph. The ECT had sort of worked, but it had fucked my memory inside-out and upside-down. Nearly everything had come back, in time, but it had left my life a jigsaw. I had the pieces but I didn`t know what the picture was supposed to be.
University and its immediate aftermath were little more than a sensory haze. A blur of gold and green, the scent of old books, the slide of a stranger`s body against mine. Rushes of chemical rapture. The heat of a nightclub, a sweep of lights, like a peacock`s tail, bodies and heartbeats and music. I was king of a glittering world, a splintering, falling, shattering world. But what of Max? What could I remember of Max?