Whispers Through a Megaphone

M
iriam Delaney sits at her kitchen table and watches the radio. She is mesmerized, transfixed.

Inside a studio somewhere—somewhere in the
outside world
—a woman is speaking in the fullest of voices about her extraordinary life: the adventures, the flings, the lessons she mined from her mistakes. Her stories are punctuated by music, carefully chosen to reveal
even more life
.

Miriam takes a deep breath in, because maybe what’s on the air is also in the air, maybe something of this woman’s superabundant presence will transmit through the broadcast.

Fancy being able to speak like that.

Fancy being able to speak properly.

It’s three years today since Miriam last stepped out of this house.

No, that’s not quite true. She has stepped into the back garden to feed the koi carp, stepped into the porch to collect the milk and leave a bin bag for her neighbour to place at the end of the drive. But step out into the street? No chance. Risk
collision and a potentially catastrophic exchange with a stranger? You must be joking. Not after what happened.
Not after what she did
. Inside the cutesy slipper-heads of two West Highland terriers, her feet have paced the rooms of 7 Beckford Gardens, a three-bed semi with a white cuckoo clock, brown and orange carpets, a life-size cut-out of Neil Armstrong.

Miriam’s hibernation is three years old today, but numbers can be deceptive, three years can feel like three decades. Hibernation ages like a dog, so three is about twenty-eight, depending on the breed, and this one is kind, protective, it keeps the world at bay.

The
world
—now there’s an interesting concept. Miriam rests her chin on her hands. Where is the world exactly? Is it inside or outside? Where is the dividing line? Am I in or am I out?

She tosses a coin.
Heads I could be part of the world, tails I’ll always be outside it
.

The ten-pence piece, flat on her palm, says heads.
Best out of three?

Three hopeful heads, one after the other.

Miriam smiles. It’s time. She knows it and the coin knows it. Show me the money. Money talks. It’s time to
get a life
.

The main problem? Other people. They have
always
been the problem. Other people seem to know things. They know what a life should contain, all the simple and complicated things like shopping and Zumba and being physically intimate with another body. They know the rules, the way it’s supposed to go. Miriam is thirty-five and when she looks out of the window all she sees is a world full of people who know things she will never know.

The
world
again. After years of not looking it’s all she can see. She would like to be part of it, to somehow join in.

She writes a plan on a Post-it and sticks it to the radio:

1. Do something I am afraid of. Apparently this builds confidence (have yet to see evidence of this—will be an interesting experiment)
   
2. Spend next few days clearing out house—get rid of mother’s things
   
3. Leave house next week
   

The trouble with number one is what to pick from the enormous list? The task of actually
making
the list of things she is afraid of could take another month, and four more weeks inside this house? Four weeks that will feel like ten months? That thought is unbearable, it makes Miriam shiver and run upstairs to fetch one of her many cardigans.

But lists are good, remember? You can add things and take them away. Adding makes you feel like a person with clear intentions, subtracting feels like a small victory. What else? Well, a list is a personal map. It’s a ladder that you can move up and down at your leisure. When you cross things off it feels like you’re moving, you’re getting somewhere, there is some purpose to all this—something is finally happening.

Back in the front room, she begins the list.

Write fast, Miriam. You can do this. Lists are good. Write until you land on something you could tackle tonight. No, not tomorrow. Tonight.

1. Idea that my mother is still alive somewhere and I am not alone
   
2. Idea that my mother is definitely dead and I am alone
   
3. Going back to where it happened
   
4. Love
   
5. No love
   
6. Clothes shopping
   
7. Thought that I might do it again if I go back outside
   
8. Being stuck in a lift with a group of talkative people
   
9. Never being able to write a list or letter due to major accident involving hands
   
10. Turning into my mother
    
11. Having no capacity to know that I’m already just like my mother
    
12. Fingerless gloves
    
13. Naked cleaning
    

There it is, number thirteen on the list (unlucky for some). Naked cleaning—all it actually requires is removing this cardigan, this T-shirt, these jeans, pulling Henry the hoover from the cupboard and plugging it in. How scary can it be?

Answer: that depends on your childhood.

It depends on whether, at the age of eight, you found your mother sweeping the floor of the school corridor wearing nothing but a pair of trainer socks. (Had she planned to go for a run and slipped into insanity seconds after putting on her socks? Can madness descend that quickly, like thunder, like a storm?) There she was, Mrs Frances Delaney, quietly sweeping her way through a turbulent sea of hysterical children, the waves of laughter rising up and up and—

Miriam was drenched. She had wet feet, wet hands, wet eyes.

Mother here at school. Mother naked. Other children cackling, jeering. Poor mother. I love mother and hate mother.

The headmaster appeared. He walked on water. He took off his suit jacket and smothered Mrs Delaney’s nakedness. He was gallant, unfazed. Perhaps he had seen it all before. (Miriam hoped not.) Frances carried on sweeping—she was
thorough, if nothing else. She had always valued cleanliness and order. Perhaps the headmaster understood this, hence his sensitivity. Perhaps he respected it.

What made the situation worse, even harder for Miriam to comprehend, was the fact that her mother didn’t even work as a cleaner. Turning up at your own workplace without any clothes on is a rupture of social etiquette, a glitch in mental health, forgetfulness at its most perverse, but at least it contains a thread of continuity:
I have done what I normally do, I have come to the right place, but something is amiss. I wonder what it could be?
Turning up at someone else’s workplace—your daughter’s school—in the nude, in the buff, apart from tiny socks, is unbearably nonsensical.

Miriam’s mother was mad as a spoon.

Was it catching?

(Miriam hoped not.)

Fast-forward twenty-seven years and what do we see? We see a woman, carefully folding her clothes and placing them on the sofa. She walks to the cupboard in the hallway and pulls Henry the hoover out into the light, plugs it in, switches it on. Now she is vacuuming the brown and orange carpet in her front room wearing nothing but knickers and Westie slippers. A cuckoo springs from its house, making her jump. It’s ten o’clock. Only two hours left until Wednesday becomes Thursday, until the first day of August is over, and then it will be three years and a day since she ran all the way home, whispering
oh my God, oh my God
. Anniversaries come and go. Important dates get sucked into the vortex and life rolls on, taking us with it, perpetual tourists who pretend to be at home.

Steady on, Miriam. There’s no need to start brooding over the nature of existence. You’ve got to stay focused, just for once, otherwise you’ll
never
leave this house. Self-soothe, remember?
Remember what the book said, the one Fenella lent you, the one about staying sane in a mad world.

Fenella Price. Chief supplier of objects from the outside world: food, pens, knickers, etc. Fenella is no ordinary friend. She is a Beacon of Sanity, forever glowing, her equanimity unshakeable. She is proof that people can be sensible, rational, consistent. But more importantly, she is proof that Miriam isn’t contagious. Her mother’s madness is in her blood and her bones—it has to be, doesn’t it? But Fenella has been there and seen it all, the highs and lows, the dramas and trips, ever since they were at primary school, and
still
she is sane. She wears smart clothes, works as a cashier in the local branch of Barclays, goes to evening classes three times a week: Pilates, Tango, How to Make Your Own Lampshades. As sane as they come, surely?

“Stay sane in this mad world,” Fenella said. “When your thoughts race off into historical territories, talk softly to yourself. That’s what I do. I don’t care where I am. I say
just you settle down, Fenella Price. Everything is fine
.”

Miriam sighs. Thank goodness for Fenella. If only she could tell her the truth about the thing that happened, the thing she did, three years ago today.

It happened like this.

Oblivious footsteps along the woodland path.

Oblivious footsteps across the field and all the way to the pub.

Lunch with Fenella (a cheddar and onion-marmalade sandwich, a few French fries, half a cider).

A hug and a goodbye, nice to see you, give me a ring soon.

Now we travel in reverse.

Oblivious footsteps across the field.

Oblivious footsteps along the woodland path. Disgustingly ignorant, outrageously unaware, until—

The world is a safe place until it isn’t.

People are good until they’re not.

Miriam wishes she had taken a final look at the buildings, the trees, the dogs playing in the field, but you never know what’s coming, you walk small and blind, the world simply an echo of your own concerns.