Flora “doesn’t do people”, not since the Incident that led to her leaving school midway through her GCSEs. The Incident that led to her being diagnosed with bipolar II. The Incident that left her in pieces.
Until Hal arrives. He’s researching a story about a missing World War I soldier, and he wants Flora’s help. Flora used to love history before the Incident, but spending so much time with Hal is her worst nightmare.
Yet as they begin to piece together the life of the missing solider, a life of lost love, secrets and lies, Flora finds a piece of herself falling for Hal.
For my mother, who would have said “I told you so”.
(And yes. She did.)
“What’s past is prologue.”
William Shakespeare, The Tempest
Contents
About this book
Title Page
Dedication
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Author’s note
Acknowledgements
About the author
The Last Summer of Us
Unconventional
Theatrical
Copyright Page
I have picked the worst possible moment to be standing on the pavement outside the village shop: the exact moment the bus to the sixth-form college goes past on its last morning run of the term.
If only I hadn’t agreed to pick up my brother’s parcel from the post office counter before work.
If only Mr Parkins and his stupid package to Australia hadn’t been ahead of me in the queue.
If only I hadn’t told my friend Mira that I’d meet her and we could walk back up to the hotel to start our housekeeping shifts together.
If.
Only.
But here I am, and here’s the bus, and as it stops to let Mr Parkins cross the road with agonizing slowness, every single face behind the bus windows turns to look at me – and I am fixed to the spot as firmly and definitively as if someone had driven iron spikes through my shoes.
Everything stops: time, my heart, the movement of the Earth through space. Everything. I am trapped in this moment, pinned like a butterfly on a board. Me on one side of the windows; the people I used to go to school with, the people I used to know – the people I used to be friends with – staring at me from the other.
And then Mr Parkins has made it to the other side of the street and, just like that, the world is moving again and the bus is gone. I step off the pavement to watch it disappear from view between the hedges and the green overhanging branches of trees.
There goes the life I could have had.
Almost did have.
A strange, horrible screeching sound fills my head, drowning everything else out – and at first I wonder if it’s just in my head or whether it’s me and I’m doing it out loud…and then I realize that Mrs Rolfe from the Old Vicarage has stopped in the middle of the pavement and is staring at me, and the screech stops and there’s a new noise. One that sounds a bit like…like a car horn.
A car horn coming from behind me.
I’m in the middle of the road, aren’t I? That screech was brakes.
Slowly, I turn around.
It’s an old green car – one of those vintage things that looks like a squashed frog.
More blasts on the horn, sharp and angry, then long. One-two-three-fooooooouuuurrrr.
Sweat prickles along the back of my neck, along the lines of my palms.
Is everybody looking? Has anyone else seen? Are people peering from behind their curtains to see what all the noise is in this tiny little nothing village at this time of the morning?
No big deal – just Flora Sutherland, standing in the middle of the road.
I make myself take a step sideways, back to the safety of the pavement, and hope that’s enough. I wish the car would go, that the ground could swallow me, that nobody has noticed or shaken their heads and thought, Well, what do you expect from someone like her? But the driver’s door swings open with a creak.
“What the hell are you doing? I almost hit you!”
Red hair, sunglasses above a dark T-shirt, and a face bleached pale with shock.
“Are you crazy? Hello? HELLO?!”
The word “crazy” hits me harder than the car could ever have done. I flinch – then panic in case he saw, but he whisks straight past me and drops into a crouch in front of the car.
He’s checking it for damage. Buffing at the paint with the palm of his hand.
He doesn’t care whether he nearly hit me. He cares whether I somehow dinged his paint job.
I take a deep breath, hugging Charlie’s parcel tighter to my chest like a shield.
Is this a balanced reaction?
Satisfied I haven’t magically dented his paintwork, he turns back to me and sees me watching him.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing, just standing there in the road? Have you got some kind of death wish?” He pulls the sunglasses off his face and waves them around him like he’s conducting the orchestra at an outrage concert. “If I hadn’t looked up right then…” he starts – then stops himself.
“Maybe,” I say quietly, “you should look where you’re going.” I almost add, “Instead of calling other people crazy…” but decide it’s better if I don’t.
“Maybe,” he snaps back, “you shouldn’t stand in traffic.” He’s younger than someone with that kind of car should be. My age, maybe a couple of years older. Eighteen? Nineteen? His eyes are a washed-out shade somewhere between blue and green, and he squints against the bright sunshine.
“Yes. Traffic. There’s so much of it round here,” I mutter, turning my face away again and letting his gaze slide off me.
I hear him open his mouth to speak, but there’s no other sound.
Just go. Get in your car and go. Leave me alone.
He still hasn’t moved. Why won’t he go?
“Look, seriously, are you okay?” He says it gently now – there’s real concern in his voice. “Do you need me to call some—”
“I’m fine,” I snap. “You can go now. Really.” The edges of the parcel dig into my ribs, and there’s a pounding in my ears – I can’t tell if it’s my heart or my brain that’s thumping, but something is. Maybe it’s both of them.
“Can you just leave? Please?”
“Wow. Okay.” He leans away, his eyes as wide as if I’d slapped him. “Fine. Whatever. I mean…Jesus. I was just trying to find this hotel…”
His lips keep moving, but it doesn’t matter; I can’t hear a word.
He’s a guest.
He’s talking about Hopwood Home Hotel. There are no other hotels for miles around. There’s nothing else at all for miles around, not out here.
Oh god, he’s a guest he’s a guest he’s a guest.
Get it together, Flora.
He reaches into the car, pulling a sheet of paper from the dashboard. The sheet of paper he must have been looking at when he nearly hit me. He holds it out. “I don’t suppose you know where it is, do you? It’s not on my satnav and there’s no phone reception out here.”
“I work there.” It falls out of my mouth before I can stop it. I end up half-swallowing the last part of “there” and feel stupid. He, however, brightens.
“Oh, amazing. I’m so lost. Totally, totally lost.” Running a hand back through his hair, he looks around – as though to say that the only reason he’d be anywhere near a village like Hopwood-in-the-Hollows is to pass through it on the way to somewhere else. With that kind of car, and dressed the way he is – carefully, neatly, probably expensively – it seems about right.
And if he’s staying at the Hopwood, and I’ve been stupid enough to let slip that I work there, the last thing I need is him complaining about the super-unhelpful staff member standing in the road on his way to check in.
Get it together, Flora. The sooner he gets directions, the sooner he’ll be gone.
“You’re going the wrong way.”
“I am?” He squints along the road, the same way the bus went, then turns around to look behind him. “But…”
“You need to turn around then go back through the village, past the pub and take a right. Go past the farm with the ice-cream sign shaped like a cow, then keep going until the road gets narrow and forks off to the left. Take the left fork, and there’ll be a metal gate with a gatehouse and an intercom. That’s the hotel.”
There’s a long silence, then: “So that was a left at the farm?”
“Do you have a pen?”
He hands me the paper, and reaches back into the car to pull out a biro with a chewed end. I slide the parcel under one arm, and sketch out a quick map. It’s not good, and I realize it was a mistake to try and make the cow-shaped sign actually cow-shaped so I label it “cow”, but at least it should get him to the Hopwood. And away from me.
I pass the paper back and he takes it, nodding. “Thanks,” he says – and hesitates. “You sure you’re okay?”
Am I sure I’m okay?
Ask me that a year ago.
“Fine. Thanks.” I slide the parcel back around to my chest and look down at the floor. “Please just go?”
The almost-smile on his face disappears behind a frown. “No problem. Thanks for…whatever.”
I wince as he slams his door, starting the engine with a loud roar…and just like that, he’s driving away.
And there – coming up the street with perfect timing – is Mira, rounding the corner from her house with her bag over her shoulder, sunglasses pulled down over her eyes and her housekeeping uniform looking like she slept in it. She raises her head and smiles when she sees me, stuffing the envelope she’s carrying into her pocket.
“What’s that?” She nods at the package in my arms.
“Charlie’s anniversary present for Felix. He asked me to pick it up for him.” And on every level possible, I wish I’d said I couldn’t.
Mira makes a thoughtful noise as – tyres screeching – the green car goes past the other way, vanishing around the corner behind the village primary school with its row of sunflowers along the front wall.
“What happened to your uniform?” I ask, but Mira just shakes her head.
“No asking questions, thank you,” she mutters – and when I open my mouth to do exactly that, she growls something in Polish at me. My Polish is non-existent, but this being Mira, I’m willing to bet that what she said is very, very rude.
See? Everything’s normal. Everything’s fine.
Except she’s eyeing me suspiciously. “You’re not right.”
“I’m perfectly right, thanks.”
“Also a terrible liar. What’s wrong?”
“Nothing’s wrong. Honestly.”
“No. Really.” She peers at me over her sunglasses. “You had one of your mad head things?”
“Can we not call them that?” I drop my bag from my shoulder and squeeze the parcel into it, forcing the zip of my backpack shut over the top.
“But that’s what you called them!”
Which is true, because how else was I meant to explain the stuff that goes on in my head to my best friend? Charlie knows all the proper words for it, and what they all mean, because he’s my big brother. I know all the proper words for it and what they all feel like because…well, it’s my head. But how do you explain the inside of your mind to somebody else – particularly when it doesn’t work quite the way it’s meant to? Besides, nothing seemed to do the job of describing the anxiety or the swings between crazy energy and slow heavy despair better than “a mad head thing”. Trying to describe what my brain is doing at any given point to someone who isn’t inside it is kind of like…trying to explain the point of an octopus to an apple.
“You’re okay, yes?”
You’re okay, Flora. You’re okay. Be okay.
“I’m okay.”
“Good, because…you know. Tick tock.” She waves her wrist in front of my face, trying to make a point about the time.
“Your watch is on upside down.”
More Polish swearing, but at least she’s laughing as she switches it round. “Upside down or not, we’re going to be late. Tell me whatever it is bothering you on the way. And you’ve got your parcel, so?”
I sling my bag back up onto my shoulder, wondering if becoming friends with Mira was some kind of cosmic trade-off for losing everything else. I nod. “So. Let’s go.”
We take the usual shortcut round the back of the village and head for the grounds of the hotel, clambering over a stile and cutting through a field. The tall grass is splashed with patches of red poppies, and swifts screech and wheel overhead as I tell Mira about the bus and about the guy with the green car. She nods, and even though I know she can’t completely understand why it’s set me so much on edge, she understands that it has – and that’s all I need. When I get to the bit about the guy turning out to be a guest, she winces. When I admit that I told him I work at the Hopwood, she laughs as we climb over the low wooden fence marking the Hopwood estate boundary into the woods.
“But you know he will already have forgotten you, right? Staff don’t have faces to them. We’re just…part of the furniture.”
“Them” being the kind of people who come to stay at Hopwood Home. And she’s right. Nobody notices us.
Which is one of the reasons I came here.
The hotel grounds unspool over miles of gardens, woods, fields, river, deer park – even estate cottages for some of the staff, like the one I live in. Hopwood Home used to be one of those big wealthy family mansions before the First World War, but now it’s a hotel: one of, according to the brochure, the top thirty-five boutique country house hotels in the country. Which has always sounded like a bit of a weird number to me, but I don’t write the marketing material. All I have to do is clean the rooms.
Also, not be late.
After working here for nine months full-time, and a whole year of weekend and summer hours before that, I’m still struggling with that second one.
I try a change of subject. “What was that post you had?”
Even from behind her sunglasses, I can feel her blinking at me. “Post?”
“When you were coming up the road earlier.”
“No?”
“That envelope you put in your pocket – I mean, god, I’m just trying to make conversation.”
“Oh. Junk mail.” She straightens her sunglasses and sniffs. To anyone who doesn’t know Mira like I do, it might seem like she’s kind of grumpy – but I do know Mira, and that’s not it at all. If she was really grumpy or prickly, she wouldn’t be so patient. She wouldn’t be the one who crosses her arms and tells me I’ve got into “one of those bad thinking circles” when my thoughts start spiralling down into the darkness, or that I’m being an idiot when my mania kicks in – because that’s what it looks like from outside. The thing about Mira is that mostly she’s just not good at mornings – which I guess is a bit problematic when your job is all about mornings.
The woods give way to the gardens: mown and rolled lawns spread out like green velvet around the gravelled drive, still sparkling with dew, and the sun makes the front of the hotel looks like it’s glowing. We walk round to the staff entrance at the side, down the narrow stone steps and along the corridor to the locker room. Already in her uniform, all Mira has to do is throw her bag and sunglasses in her locker, leaving me to cram my backpack into my own with one hand while yanking out my uniform on its hanger with the other. Miraculously, I manage to change into my dress and apron, kick off my trainers and shove my feet into my work plimsolls and make it into the staff room a full five seconds before Mrs Tilney walks in with the worksheets for the day.
If only I wasn’t so out of breath, she might have thought I’d actually been there ages.
She hands out the day’s room lists, checking off our names on her clipboard as she goes, and giving Mira a very long hard look as she passes, one eyebrow raised. Mira tries to smooth some of the creases out of her dress with her hand. It doesn’t work. Between us, we’ve got six rooms to do – all changeovers, needing a full clean and fresh sheets and towels ahead of new arrivals – and something on the list that I’ve not seen before. A room marked with a green star.
When Mrs Tilney asks if there are questions, I raise my hand. “Mrs T? What’s the mark next to room fifteen?”
“Hmm?”
“The star. Is it important?”
“Oh, number fifteen. Yes. I wanted to talk to you and Mira about that one.” She looks over her shoulder at the rest of the staff – three of them today, all pretty new. “The rest of you can go make a start,” she says, before turning back to us. “Room fifteen. It’s a long-stay booking – ten nights – so it needs a few extras.”
“Ten nights?” Mira says it, but I’m thinking it too. Ten nights here is a long time – nobody ever stays for ten nights. Two or three, sure. Four at the very most. But ten? Out here? Being in the middle of nowhere is one of the things Hopwood Home sells itself on – other than a handful of villages and a couple of National Trust houses, there’s nothing but fields and trees for miles around. No big towns, no cities, nothing.
The perfect place to escape from absolutely everything. The kind of place to run away to.
And whatever the reason they’re coming, a ten-night stay means they’re obviously loaded.
Room fifteen is up on the second floor of the hotel, overlooking the gardens at the front. For guests, it’s lovely because it’s reached by the grand staircase in the lobby, then by another secret, narrow, wooden one hidden behind a bookcase at the end of the first-floor landing. Checking in and being led up the stairs for the first time must be pretty magical. For housekeeping staff, however, who have to get a laundry trolley up there, the journey is slightly less magical because it involves the ancient freight lift, which can only take one person and a trolley and always sticks between the basement and the ground floor. I draw the short straw and get lumbered with the trolley, so by the time I get to the room Mira is already waiting, the key in her hand. She tosses it to me, then knocks on the door. We both wait.
“Who do you think it is coming? Somebody famous?”
“Why would somebody famous – who could go literally anywhere – come here?” With no answer from the room, I fumble with the keys until the lock clicks and the door swings open.
We’ve just finished stripping the bed and straightening the mess left by the last guest when a scraping noise drifts up through the open window, along with faint whistling. Someone’s working on the flower bed below.
Charlie.
His parcel! The parcel I promised I’d drop off with him before I started my shift!
Mira hears him at the same time I do. “You didn’t give it to him, did you?”
“I completely forgot. With the bus, and the car, and then being late…”
“It can’t wait until we’ve got a break?”
“No. It’s…” I lower my voice, just in case. “It’s their anniversary today.”
“He forgot?” Mira’s eyes widen.
“Again. Felix will kill him.”
“Go.”
“Two minutes,” I promise, backing out of the room. “I’ll be quick.”
I make it down to the locker room, grab the parcel and run out to Charlie in record time. He leans on his rake as he watches me sprint round the corner from the staff entrance, his wavy hair pushed back from his face by a green bandana that matches his gardener’s uniform.
“Did you get it?”
“Here,” I pant, holding it out to him.
“I owe you one. I don’t think Felix would forgive me if I forgot again this year.” My older brother winces, taking the box and tucking it into his wheelbarrow.
“What is it, anyway? It better be worth it.” I decide not to tell him any more about my morning – despite the quizzical look he shoots me – and point at the parcel in the wheelbarrow. “It’s not another T-shirt, is it? Tell me it’s not another T-shirt.” Felix’s collection of Metallica shirts is already out of control.
Charlie beams. “Original nineties Burn your fingers design. He’s wanted one for years.”
“Oh.” As presents for Felix go, that one’s pretty much perfect.
Charlie studies me carefully. “What’s wrong?”
Obviously my attempt at misdirection has not worked.
Above us, Mira sticks her head out of the window of room fifteen. “Tell him.”
“Mira!” I hiss back up at her – but it’s too late. The damage is done, and Charlie’s expression has already changed from interest to concern.
“Tell me what?”
“It’s nothing.”
“Tell me.”
“I said it’s nothing. It was just the school bus, that’s all. It went past. No big deal.” I shrug and try to wave the question away, wave the whole memory away…but it hovers above me like a stubborn wasp.
“Flora.”
“And then there was this guy with a car, and…” I pause to choose the right words; ones that won’t make Charlie freak out and tell me to go through the checklist. “And it was…fine?” This comes out less confidently than I had hoped – mostly because as soon as I even start thinking about the bus and that guest with the car, my stomach turns cold and fills with acid and twists itself into a tangle.
It all replays inside my head, scene by scene in bright colours and extreme close-up. The faces inside the bus. The car hooting. The guest getting out of his car. Oh, god. Was I all right? I told him to leave, didn’t I? Is he going to arrive at the hotel and tell them how awful I was?
The questions form a staircase, each step lower than the one before and leading me down, down, down inside my mind.
Is this a balanced reaction?
Charlie leans his rake against the barrow. “You know you’re meant to tell me if something—”
“I said I’m FINE!” I snap.
Charlie just blinks slowly at me, his expression carefully neutral. Waiting.
“I was coming out of the post office, okay? And the bus was there, and it stopped, and I saw a bunch of people from school, and they saw me. And they were staring, and basically it sucked. Okay? And I didn’t want to have to come running to you and talk about it, because it sucked.”
“I understand that. Have you gone through your checklist?”
“I don’t need the checklist.”
“It’s part of the deal. Anything that upsets you, you’re supposed to go through the checklist and decide whether you’re reacting to it…” He hesitates – then stops altogether.
I finish his sentence for him. “Like a not-crazy person?”
“I was going to say, like someone who has a more balanced view of the world. But sure…” He smiles at me. “Not-crazy works too.”
“I said I don’t need the checklist.” This is so humiliating.
“Part of the deal.”
“Well, the deal sucks too.”
“Flora…”
“And it’s not like you’re Dad or anything…”
“So stop making me have to behave like I am!” he groans.
I look at my shoes, feeling a stab of guilt. Charlie’s nothing like our dad. He’s still here, for a start, and he’s probably the closest thing to a proper father I’ve ever known. Our actual father decided that he didn’t really want to do the parent thing again when I came along ten years after my brother – an accident apparently – so he left. I wouldn’t have taken it personally, except he set up a whole new family pretty quickly after that, one we’ve never met. So I guess it wasn’t that he didn’t want to do the parent thing again – he just didn’t want to do it for us. For me.
“Sorry,” I mumble.
Charlie pulls his bandana off his head and his hair flops across his face.
“I don’t want to have to nag you. Christ, I’m not the life police. You’re entitled to do your own thing, have your own space – but you know the rules. You don’t want to get ill again.”
No. I don’t. That’s why I’m here, isn’t it? Because everything out there is…too much.
“And a bus full of the kids you used to go to school with – who were all there – I think that counts as something you should mention, don’t you?”
“Yes, Charlie.” I make a circle in the dusty gravel of the path with my shoe. “Sorry, Charlie.”
“And you can drop that attitude while you’re at it.” He shakes his head in frustration, suddenly sounding a lot more than ten years older than me. “I just want you to be all right. You’ve been doing so well lately – you’ve been so stable. I promised Mum when she moved…I promised her that Felix and I would make sure you were okay…”
“You promised you wouldn’t let me spiral up or down, I know. Look, I’m not going to totally lose my mind in the next fifteen minutes. That’s not how it works.”
“That’s not what I meant.”
I can see the tension in his face – in the set of his jaw and the little vertical lines above the bridge of his nose. He gets them every time we have to talk about my condition – even more so if the “Incident” comes up. It’s not like I ever want to talk about it either, or even think about it – all it does is remind me of another life. My other life. A life with messages and phone calls, with cinema trips in a group all sharing popcorn and going to get food and to dissect every minute of it afterwards; with shopping, with music and gigs and shouting across the seats of the bus and…
“I’m fine. It was just a lot. Especially with suddenly having a total stranger in my face and being a nightmare.”
“You’re sure?”
“Which one of us is living in my head?” I snap back. “Me or you?”
“Flora…”
“Me. Exactly. So which one of us is likely to know whether I’m fine or not?”
He doesn’t respond. All I can hear is the cry of the swifts overhead and a sudden clatter of crockery from the breakfast room nearby.
Finally, he scrubs a hand back and forth across his face. “You know the answer to that,” he says softly.
And however much I hate it, and hate him for saying it – maybe even hate him more for knowing it – he’s right. It’s not me.
There was an Incident – The Incident. Halfway through my GCSEs. Halfway through an actual paper, in fact. I don’t really remember it. I don’t really remember much for weeks before it either, other than the constant trickle of pre-exam stress – an ever-present prickle of panic under the top layer of my mind…And then suddenly it all went away. I wasn’t stressed any more, wasn’t panicked about my exams or revising or any of it – I just knew I could do it. Better than that, I wasn’t just going to pass, I was going to pass amazingly. Of course I was. It all suddenly made sense, like someone had switched on a light in a dark room, or opened a magical door that had everything behind it. The world was brighter, louder and sharper. Everything was clearer – so clear that I wanted to run down the street shaking people and telling them to look…
And then it all went wrong.
I went wrong.
Actually, that’s not true. It wasn’t me that went wrong, it was my wiring, the switches, the tiny little invisible lights that come on and go off inside my brain which broke. And when they stopped working properly, they took me, Flora Sutherland, down with them.
I’ve tried to piece it all back together from what Charlie’s told me, from what the doctor and Sanjay, my therapist, have said. It’s not easy because even the things I remember feel wrong, like I’m looking at the memories underwater – the edges of them are too sharp and too shiny, and they don’t feel like they happened to me at all.
I know I was revising beforehand. I didn’t sleep much – a couple of hours a night at most – but I wasn’t tired. At all. I sat my first few exams and I was fine. More than fine. I had so much energy, and everything seemed so easy all of a sudden. I was even the first one to finish, by a long way. Like, an hour early. In a two-hour paper.
The morning it happened, I got up and went to school – like I had done every other day. I sat down and waited for the exam to start – like I had done every other day. I started writing – like I had done every other day.
And just like that, “every other day” became something that only used to happen.
After that, there were waiting rooms – I remember that much. Blue plastic chairs and wall-mounted bottles of antibacterial handwash.
And then there were pills: a prescription from the GP, who handed the slip over with a smile and a “Let’s see how you do with these.”
He referred me to Sanjay, in his little office in the corner of the surgery building, where the blinds were always drawn. “Mania,” he called it, this thing that had stripped me away from myself. It was mania that took “every other day” away. It was mania that meant I wouldn’t – couldn’t – be on that bus with everyone else who had sat those exams. I thought too quickly, spoke too quickly, jumped from idea to idea way too quickly. My brain had got stuck in high gear and nobody could keep up with it – not even me.
And everyone, everyone I knew…they all saw it.
I didn’t care at the time. I was moving too fast and burning too brightly. In my head, I was a superhero. I was a genius. I was a comet, a sun, a shooting star…
But even suns burn out, and shooting stars fall to earth, and comets are nothing but exploding ice; enormous dirty snowballs crashing through space. And so after the high came the low, and the weeks when even breathing hurt; where every thought felt like it was wrapped in mud and all I wanted to do was sleep and sleep and sleep. To lie face down on the floor and never get up again. Ever.
So. Back to the doctor.
“Mmm. Everything you’re telling me – the heaviness, the slowness, the exhaustion – sounds like a classic depressive episode,” he said, nodding at me. “Mania and depression in a cycle like this?” He typed something into his computer. “I think we’re looking at bipolar disorder here. Bipolar II.”
There was another prescription. There were more pills. There was more Sanjay.
Suddenly Flora’s Craziness was real. It wasn’t just in my head – even if it sort of was. It had a label and a name. Even if I didn’t recognize it, couldn’t figure out what it meant or whether I was supposed to just live with it now…or why it had landed on me.
One thing never changed. I might have had a head full of crazy, but I also had Charlie.
It was Charlie who sorted out the mess with school, who tried to get me to go back and resit. Charlie who drove me from appointment to appointment in his old Land Rover that makes you feel like your bones are being shaken loose. Charlie (and Felix) who moved me into the spare room in the cottage in the Hopwood grounds when Mum said her job was being relocated up north, and wouldn’t it be better for me to stay here, somewhere familiar? I remember hearing the fight between Mum and Charlie from my old bedroom and I’ve never heard him as angry as he was then, accusing her of running away. I don’t blame her. I’d have run away from me too if I could. I ran away from everything else.
It was Charlie and Felix who put me back together. Charlie sat on the floor of my room and read to me when all I could do was stare at the ceiling; he held my hair back when the medication I’d been given to help flatten out the roller coaster in my head made me sick for twenty-four hours straight. Felix dragged me out of the house and along with him on his regular tours of the estate – pointing out trees and badger setts and rabbit tracks, calling out bird songs as he heard them, making me hear them too.
Together, they made me remember who I am – who I really am, rather than the ball of misfiring mental wires that looked a little like me. They gave the world shape again. They gave me shape again. Because roller-coaster Flora wasn’t quite me – she was just a fraction of me, a faction of me.
So now I am me again. But I’m just…not always good at holding on to the actual me. And that’s what this is about – Charlie and his deal, the checklists, the constant self-analysis and self-editing. It’s about holding my shape, keeping me together. Stopping another Incident, even though that’s what being bipolar is: a cycle, a roller coaster, a constant orbit around my very own axis. I just wish I could do that without all the questions I have to ask myself every time I feel anything – good or bad: is this a balanced reaction? Does my mood match the moment?
Finally, Charlie reties his bandana round his head, and looks me up and down. “Okay,” he says.
“Okay?” I blink at him. “No checklist?”
“You say you’re all right. I don’t have much choice except to believe you, do I?”
I shrug. “I just got a bit…flustered. That’s all. Look, I have to get back to work.” I turn back to the hotel and mutter: “And also kill Mira for making me tell you.”
“You leave Mira be,” Charlie calls after me. “She’s looking out for you. We all are.”
At a jog, I shove through the glass front door into the lobby – it’ll be far quicker than taking the staff entrance, and I need to get back up to the second floor before Mrs Tilney does her first round of the day – but halfway across the polished wooden floor, I freeze.
A new arrival is standing beside the soft velvet sofas by the window; an expensive looking leather bag and a smart backpack stacked on top of each other by his feet, a bundle of papers on the low coffee table in front of him.
Red hair, sunglasses pushed up onto the top of his head.
Oh no.
With a sinking feeling, I step back from the door and lean out into the sunlight to check the drive. There it is: the squashed-frog car.
When I creep back into the lobby, he has pulled off his sunglasses and is watching me. His gaze is direct, unflinching.
He recognizes me.
Oh god.
“Mr Waverley? I’m Barney, the general manager. Welcome to Hopwood Home…”
The voice comes from behind me as Barney strides across the lobby from his office. He passes me, shoes clicking against the polished floor and walks up to the guy, holding out his hand to shake. I dart for the staff door behind the check-in desk, but even when the door has closed behind me, I can still feel those pale eyes on me.
Upstairs, Mira has already finished room fifteen and is packing all our cleaning stuff back into the trolley. “Quick, you said,” she snorts, throwing a towel at me as I walk in through the open door.
“And I would have been, if you hadn’t dropped me in it with Charlie.”
She pouts, looking about as unapologetic as it’s possible to be when something is technically your fault. “He needed to know.”
“Did he, though? I mean, did he?” I wave the plug of the vacuum cleaner at her.
“Yes.” She pouts some more, and I sigh.
“How can I disagree with an argument like that?”
She throws another towel – and it’s right when I bend over to pick them both up that Mrs Tilney appears from nowhere in the doorway.
“Flora? Barney would like to see you in his office, please. Now.”