The building, in many ways, reminds Adele of home. Of her home as it was before, at any rate. The way it sits like an island in the ocean of land around them. She wonders if any of them thought of that – the doctors, her dead parents’ lawyers, even David – before packing her off here for the month, to this remote house in the middle of the Highlands. Did any one of them even consider how much it would make her think of the home that was lost to her?
It’s old this place, she’s not sure how old, but built in solid grey Scottish brick that defies time’s attempts to weary it. Someone must have donated it to the Westland trust, or maybe it belongs to someone on the board or whatever. She hasn’t asked and she doesn’t really care. She can’t imagine a single family ever living in it. They’d probably end up only using a few rooms, like her family did in theirs. Big dreams, little lives. No one needs a huge house. What can you fill it with? A home needs to be filled with love, and some houses – her own, as it had been, included – don’t have enough heat in their love to warm them. A therapy centre at least gave these rooms a purpose. She pushes away the childhood memories of running free through corridors and stairways playing hide-and-seek, and laughing wildly, a half-forgotten child. It’s better to think that her home was just too big. Better to think of imagined truths than real memories.
It’s been three weeks and she’s still in a daze. They all tell her she needs to grieve. But that’s not why she’s here. She needs to sleep. She refuses to sleep. She was dragging herself through days and nights filled with coffee and Red Bull and whatever other stimulants she could find to avoid sleeping before they sent her here. They said she wasn’t ‘behaving normally’ for someone who’d recently lost their parents. Not sleeping was the least of it. She still wonders how they were so sure what ‘normal behaviour’ was in these situations. What made them experts? But still, yes, they want her to sleep. But how can she explain?
Sleep is the release that has turned on her, a biting snake in the night.
She’s here for her own good, apparently, but it still feels like a betrayal. She only came because David wanted her to. She hates seeing him worried, and she owes him at least this month after what he did. Her hero.
She hasn’t made any effort to fit in, even though she promises David and the lawyers that she’s trying. She does use the activities rooms, and she does talk – or mainly listen – to the counsellors, although she’s not sure just how professional they really are. It all seems a bit hippy to her. Touchy-feely as her dad would have said. He didn’t like that stuff in her first round of therapy all those years ago, and to go along with it now feels like she would be letting him down. She’d rather be in a proper hospital, but her solicitors thought that was a bad idea, as did David. Westlands can be considered a ‘retreat’, but for her to be sent to an institution could be harmful for her father’s businesses. So here she is, whether her father would have approved or not.
After breakfast, most of the residents, or patients or whatever, are going on a hike. It’s a beautiful day for it, not too hot, not too cold, and the sky is clear and the air is fresh, and for a moment she’s tempted to go along and hang out alone at the back, but then she sees the excited faces of the group gathered at the front steps, and she changes her mind. She doesn’t deserve to be happy. Where has all her happiness led? Also, the exercise will make her tired, and she doesn’t want to sleep any more than she has to. Sleep comes too easily to her as it is.
She waits to see the look of disappointment on the ponytailed group leader Mark, ‘We’re all first names here, Adele’, as she shakes her head, and then she leaves them to it and turns and walks to the back of the house where the lake is.
She’s done half a circuit of a slow stroll when she sees him, maybe twenty feet away. He’s sitting under a tree, making a daisy chain. She smiles instinctively at how odd the sight is, this gangly teenager in a geeky T-shirt and jeans, dark hair flopping over his face, concentrating so hard on something you only ever see little girls do, and then feels bad for smiling. She shouldn’t ever smile. For a moment she hesitates and thinks of turning to go back the other way, and then he looks up and sees her. After a pause, he waves. She’s got no choice but to go over, and she doesn’t mind. He’s the only one here who interests her. She’s heard him in the night. The screams and raving words that mainly make no sense. Clattering as he walks into things. The rush of the nurses to get him back to bed. These are familiar to her. She remembers it all herself. Night terrors.
‘You didn’t fancy group hugging on the moors then?’ she says.
His face is all angles, as if he hasn’t quite grown into it yet, but he’s about her age, maybe a year older, eighteen or so, though he still has train-track braces on his teeth.
‘Nope. Not your thing either I take it?’ His words come out with the hint of a wet lisp.
She shakes her head, awkward. She hasn’t started a conversation, simply for the sake of talking, with anyone since she got here.
‘I don’t blame you. I wouldn’t want to get too close to Mark. His ponytail must have lice growing in it. He wore the same shirt for three days last week. That is not a clean man.’
She smiles then and lets it stay on her face. She hasn’t planned to linger, but she finds herself sitting down.
‘You’re the girl who paints fires,’ he says. ‘I’ve seen you in the Art room.’ He looks at her, and she thinks his eyes are bluer than David’s, but maybe that’s because his skin is so pale and his hair nearly black. He loops another daisy into the chain. ‘I’ve been thinking about that. Maybe you should paint water instead. It might be more therapeutic. You could tell them that the fire paintings represent your grief and what happened and the water paintings are you putting it all out. Washing it away.’ He talks quickly. His brain must think fast. Hers feels like treacle.
‘Why would I want to do that?’ she asks. She can’t imagine washing it all away.
‘So they stop hassling you to open up.’ He grins and winks at her. ‘Give them something and they’ll leave you alone.’
‘You sound like an expert.’
‘I’ve been to places like this before. Here, hold out your arm.’
She does as she’s told and he slips the daisy chain bracelet over her hand. There’s no weight to it, unlike David’s heavy watch that hangs on her other wrist. It’s a sweet gesture, and for a brief second she forgets all her guilt and fear.
‘Thank you.’
They sit in silence for a moment.
‘I read about you in the paper,’ he says. ‘I’m sorry about your parents.’
‘Me too,’ she says, and then wants to change the subject. ‘You’re the boy with the night terrors who sleepwalks.’
He chuckles. ‘Yeah, sorry about that. I know I keep waking people up.’
‘Is it a new thing?’ she asks. She wonders if he’s like her. She would like to meet someone like her. Someone who’d understand.
‘No, I’ve always done it. As long as I can remember. That’s not why I’m here though.’ He pulls up his sleeve. Faded track marks. ‘Bad habits.’
He leans back on his elbows on the grass, his legs stretched out in front of him, and she does the same. The sun is warm on her skin, and for the first time it doesn’t make her think of flames.
‘They think the drugs and my weird sleeping are connected,’ he says. ‘They keep asking me about my dreams. It’s so dull. I’m going to start making stuff up.’
‘A filthy sex dream about Mark,’ she says. ‘Maybe with that fat woman in the canteen who never smiles.’ He laughs, and she joins in, and it feels good to be talking normally to someone. Someone who isn’t worried about her. Someone who isn’t trying to unpick her.
‘They say you don’t want to sleep,’ he says, squinting over at her. ‘Because you were asleep when it happened and didn’t wake up.’ His tone is light. They could be talking about anything at all. TV shows. Music. Not the fire that killed her parents. The fire that finally put some heat into their house.
‘I thought they weren’t supposed to talk about us.’ She looks out at the glittering water. It’s beautiful. Mesmeric. It’s making her feel sleepy. ‘They don’t understand,’ she says.
He chuckles again, a short snort. ‘That comes as no surprise. They strike me as thick as pigshit; one narrative for all. But what exactly in this instance don’t they understand?’
A bird skims across the water, its slim beak cutting a slice through the surface. She wonders what it’s so keen to catch.
‘Sleep is different for me,’ she says, eventually.
‘How do you mean?’
She sits up then, and looks at him. She thinks she likes him. Maybe there is a different way to deal with all this crap. A way that will help him too. She doesn’t say so, but this isn’t the first time she’s been in a place like this either. Sleep keeps bringing her back to therapy. First it was her sleepwalking and night terrors when she was eight, and now it’s her not wanting to sleep at all.
Sleep, always sleep. Faux sleep, real sleep. The appearance of sleep.
And at the centre of it all is the thing she can never tell them about. They would lock her up for ever if she did. She’s sure of it.
‘You make stuff up for them and keep them happy. And I’ll help you with your night terrors. I can help you way more than they can.’
‘Okay,’ he says. He’s intrigued. ‘But in return you have to paint some water pictures you don’t mean. It’ll be entertaining seeing them getting all gushy over themselves for saving you.’
‘Deal,’ she says.
‘Deal.’
They shake on it, and in the sunlight the daisy centres glow gold. She leans back on the grass, enjoying the tickle of the bracelet on her arms, and they lie side by side in silence for a while, just enjoying the day with no one judging them.
She’s made a friend. She can’t wait to tell David.
