When I was eight, my mother told me never to answer…
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When I was eight, my mother told me never to answer myself.
She came into my room sometime after midnight and switched on the lamp beside my bed. She was in her dressing gown, squinting against the light the same as me, and she looked frightened, which I'd never really seen before. My mother isn't a frightened person. When I was six, someone tried our back door at two in the morning, and she went downstairs with the big Maglite she kept by her bed and shouted through the door that she'd already called the police.
She hadn't.
The guy ran anyway.
That night she stood beside my bed for a while before she said anything.
“Were you downstairs?”
“No.”
“Did you call me?”
“No.” I was half asleep and mostly annoyed. “Mum, what?”
She sat down on the edge of the mattress.
“If you ever hear yourself,” she said, “don't answer.”
“What?”
“Your own voice. If you hear it somewhere you aren't, you don't speak to it. Don't ask who it is. Don't tell it to go away. Nothing.”
I laughed, and she grabbed my wrist hard enough to stop me.
“I'm serious, Mara.”
“What happens?”
She looked at my bedroom door, then back at me. “Just don't answer.”
In the morning she acted like none of it had happened, and for twenty-three years I assumed she'd had a nightmare and come in to check on me while she was still half inside it.
I'm thirty-one now. I'm writing this on my friend Nia's couch with the TV on low. She's in the kitchen. I can hear her moving around in there, and at the moment that's how I'm doing things.
I bought my house in February. Narrow two-storey townhouse, one of those estates where every third house is the same house. After Daniel and I broke up, Mum kept sending me listings for flats near her, and I bought forty minutes away. Part of that was price. Part of it was that Mum has treated being alone like a medical condition for as long as I can remember. Don't drive alone at night, don't hike alone, don't stay in a hotel by yourself. When I was sixteen she cancelled a weekend away because the friend who was meant to stay with me got sick, and we had one of the worst fights we've ever had. The week I moved in, she made me give Nia a spare key. I did it to shut her up.
Friday was nothing. I got home just after six, put a supermarket lasagne in the oven and had to pull it back out because I'd left the plastic on. I ate it on the couch watching a dating show I'm not going to name. Around ten I finally took up the washing I'd been ignoring since Wednesday, and I left music going on the speaker in the kitchen so I'd have something to listen to while I changed the sheets.
A song finished. There's always a couple of seconds of nothing between tracks on that playlist.
In the gap, someone downstairs said, “Hey, can you come help me?”
And I said, “With what?”
I'd love to tell you I hesitated. I didn't. I was holding a pillowcase and I answered the way you'd answer anyone.
Then I heard what I'd heard, and the pillowcase slipped out of my hand.
The voice had been mine. I've heard myself on voice memos and I hate it, I sound thin and nasal and about fifteen. This was the voice I hear when I talk. The one I hear from the inside.
The next song started.
I stood there for maybe twenty seconds. I reached for my phone on the bed.
Downstairs, my voice said, “I'm turning around.”
And I turned around.
Left foot, then right. Hips, shoulders. I ended up facing the hall with my arms hanging at my sides, and I hadn't decided any of it.
“What the fuck?” I said, to the room.
Nothing answered that.
“I'm putting my hand on the wall,” my voice said.
My right arm came up and my palm went flat against the wall beside the door, over the bad patch job the last owners left behind. I could feel the paint. The grit in it. The stretch in my shoulder when I tried to pull away. Nothing was numb. My arm was just doing something I hadn't asked it to do.
I got my left hand around my right wrist and pulled, and it came away. I fell back onto the bed.
Downstairs, my voice laughed.
My laugh. The stupid little noise I make when I walk into a doorframe in front of someone.
I texted Nia.
**Can you come over please**
**Now**
**everything ok?**
“I'm walking to the door,” my voice said.
My foot went forward. I grabbed the bedframe with both hands and held on while my legs kept walking, and the whole bed scraped across the carpet towards the door with me hanging off it.
I got a thumb free.
**COME HERE**
**DONT CALL**
If she called, I'd pick up, and then I'd have to say something. I didn't want to say anything to anyone.
Three dots.
**leaving now**
After a while my legs went still. I locked the bedroom door and jammed my desk chair under the handle. I knew it was stupid and I did it anyway, and then I sat on the floor with my back against the bed and watched the door while my playlist kept going downstairs like it was any other Friday.
A few minutes. Then:
“I'm smiling.”
My face moved. Cheeks up, lips stretching, eyes going narrow. I put both hands over my mouth and felt it keep going underneath them.
I was crying, and my mouth was grinning into my palms.
I felt myself start to stand.
“No.”
It came out of me before I could stop it.
Everything stopped. My face dropped. My legs were mine.
Downstairs it was quiet for a few seconds. Then I heard myself take a breath, a slow one, with the little shake at the end that mine gets when I'm trying not to cry.
“That's better,” my voice said.
I'd told it no. You only say no to someone.
My throat clenched the way it does right before you throw up. I gagged. My jaw dropped open and wouldn't close. My tongue pressed up behind my front teeth, air came up out of my lungs, and my mouth made a shape.
No sound came out of me.
From downstairs, my voice said, “Mara.”
I'd felt that word happen. In my throat, on my tongue. I hadn't heard it come out of my mouth.
My tongue moved again.
“Mara.”
The kitchen.
Again.
“Mara.”
The landing, right outside my door.
I clamped both hands over my mouth, and at some point my left hand left my face. I didn't notice until my fingers were already around the door handle. I grabbed that wrist the way I had before.
It didn't work this time.
The handle turned. The chair caught it. Then my right hand let go of my left wrist, reached down, and moved the chair out of the way.
Nothing had said anything first.
The chair tipped over. My fingers opened the door.
Then I stepped back from it.
I remember deciding to. I think I do. Two steps, and when my heel came down on the carpet I wondered why I'd backed away from the doorway instead of shutting it again. That thought felt like mine. So had the one before it.
My phone buzzed in my hand.
**8 mins**
*Call the police,* I thought.
Then, straight away: *Don't.*
They felt exactly the same. Same weight. Same voice, the one I think in. And for the first time in my life I had no reason to believe either of them belonged to me.
My thumb went towards the emergency call button, stopped, and moved away. I tried to think of something that didn't matter. *Blue.* It came easily.
Then: *Go downstairs.*
I threw the phone onto the bed. If I couldn't trust a decision, I wasn't going to make any. I don't know whose idea that was either.
My hand was already on the hall light switch when I heard my voice whisper, “I'm turning off the light.”
The hall went dark. My fingers had got there before the sentence did. Maybe it had never been telling my body what to do. Maybe it was only saying what my body was already doing. Maybe I was.
I ran.
I don't know who started it. Halfway down the hall I tried to stop and hit the opposite wall shoulder first, and that part, at least, was mine.
The lights were still on downstairs. The lamp by the couch, the little light under the rangehood. The cupboard under the stairs was open a few centimetres. I'd left it shut.
“Hey,” my voice said from inside it. “Can you come help me?”
I kept my mouth shut, and my foot went down a step. Then another. I didn't know if I was being moved or if I'd decided to go, and when I don't know which way I'm being pushed, I don't know which way to push back.
At the bottom I dropped to my knees and jammed both hands into my armpits.
My right hand worked itself loose and opened the cupboard. Paint tins, the vacuum, the drying rack, a box of extension leads.
The voice was under the floor.
“Can you hear me?”
My palms went flat on the laminate. My elbows bent. My face went down towards the floor and I turned my head at the last second so it was my cheek that hit. It was cold, and my voice was right there underneath it.
“Can you hear me, Mara?”
I didn't say anything.
“I'm saying yes,” it said.
My tongue went to the back of my teeth. My throat closed. My lungs pushed. My lips started to make the shape of the word, and I could feel every part of it.
It could move all of that. It couldn't make me mean it.
The air came out of me and didn't turn into anything.
“Say it.”
I held my jaw shut with both hands.
Then it stopped asking. It went quiet, and I lay there with my face against the floor waiting for it to start again, and the next thing I heard was in my own head.
*Just say yes.*
It felt reasonable. It didn't feel like something being done to me. It felt like me being sensible, the way I get when I'm too tired to keep arguing with someone. Say yes. Maybe it stops. Maybe that's all it wants and then it's done.
I don't know if that was it or me. People in a lot of pain think stupid things. But upstairs, *Call the police* and *Don't* had both felt like me too, so I stopped trying to work out which of my thoughts were mine and held onto Mum instead. Her sitting on the end of my bed with her hand around my wrist. *Just don't answer.* I held onto it because it was older than the thing in my head, and because it was in her voice.
The front door opened.
“Mara?”
Nia.
Or my voice doing Nia. I lay there with my cheek on the floor and my hands over my mouth and didn't answer her either.
“Mara, where are you?”
Keys on the hall table. Footsteps. They came into the living room and stopped, and then they came fast, and then somebody's hand was on my back.
Everything let go at once. My jaw, my tongue. My arms slid off my face onto the floor.
Nia rolled me over. I'd bitten the inside of my cheek at some point and there was blood on my chin, and she thought someone had broken in and hurt me. She kept asking if anyone was still in the house. I shook my head. I couldn't talk yet.
She called the police anyway. They went through every room and found nobody. One of them asked if I'd taken anything, and Nia went off at him.
It was a fair question.
I stayed at Nia's that night. The next afternoon, with her sitting next to me, I rang Mum.
She picked up already complaining that another one of my parcels had been delivered to her place.
“Mum.”
She stopped.
“Why did you tell me never to answer myself?”
Nothing for a long time. Then: “Did you?”
I started crying.
“Did you answer it?”
“Yes.”
Her breathing changed.
“Did it make you move?”
I looked at Nia. “Yes.”
“Were you alone?”
“Yes.”
“Did somebody come?”
“Nia.”
“What happened when she came in?”
“It stopped.”
Then Mum was crying too. I asked how she knew, and she didn't explain anything. She said, “I was seventeen.”
Her parents were at a wedding and her sister Claire was out. Mum was brushing her teeth when she heard her own voice call her name from downstairs. She answered it, and it walked her into the kitchen. By the end she was sitting on the lino with a pair of sewing scissors pressed under her tongue.
I asked if it had made her do that.
“No,” she said. “That was me.”
If she couldn't trust her mouth, she was going to make sure she couldn't use it. She didn't cut herself. Claire came home, and the scissors fell out of Mum's hand before Claire even reached the kitchen.
She never tested whether it was Claire being there that stopped it. She just made sure she was never alone long enough to find out.
That explained a lot of my childhood. When Dad worked nights, Aunt Claire came over. After the divorce Mum took in a lodger, and then Gran moved in. When I left for uni, Mum moved into a building where her best friend lives two doors down. I'd always thought she just couldn't stand her own company.
“When I was eight,” I said. “That night you woke me up. Why?”
Another long wait.
“I heard you downstairs,” she said. “You were asleep. I knew you were asleep. But I heard you call me from the kitchen.”
“What did it say?”
“Just ‘Mum?’”
Once from the kitchen, she said, and then again from the bottom of the stairs. She'd gone straight up to my room and found me asleep.
“You weren't alone,” I said. “I was there.”
“I know.”
“And it wasn't your voice.”
“I know, Mara.”
The anger took a few seconds to arrive. The fear had to make room for it first.
“You should have told me.”
“I know.”
“When I moved out. When I bought a house on my own.”
“I know.”
“So why didn't you?”
She took so long to answer that I checked the call hadn't dropped.
“Every time I was going to,” she said, “I decided not to. It always seemed like the sensible thing. It always felt like my idea.”
She stopped.
“I don't know that it was.”
Nia had got up to give me some privacy. She made it halfway to the kitchen, then came back and sat down at the other end of the couch.
I've been back to the house once, with Nia and her housemate, to get clothes and my laptop. I didn't go near the cupboard. It's going on the market. Mum doesn't think moving will make any difference. I'm moving anyway.
The house isn't really the hard part. The hard part is talking when nobody's with me. I used to talk to myself constantly. I'd tell the kettle to hurry up and swear at my keys and argue with the news. Now, when Nia leaves a room, I hear every word I say, and sometimes I stop halfway through a sentence because I can't remember what made me start it.
On Monday Nia went to answer the door and I dropped a spoon in her kitchen and said, “For fuck's sake,” and then stood there waiting. Nothing answered. She came back and found me staring at the spoon on the floor, and I told her I'd zoned out.
There's something I haven't told either of them. Since Friday I keep making small decisions and remembering them differently a few seconds later. I reach for coffee and I'm sure I meant tea. I open one app and I'd have sworn I was opening another. Everyone does that. I know they do. But I keep going back to the landing, when *Call the police* and *Don't* felt exactly the same, and I don't know what it would feel like if it tried again. Maybe I'd hear my voice. Maybe that was only how it introduced itself.
Mum rings every day to ask if I'm alright. I tell her I'm fine.
Nia was meant to fly to Perth this morning for her brother's engagement party. She cancelled on Sunday night. I watched her do it on her phone, sitting right here on this couch, and I felt guilty and relieved in about equal amounts.
I was going to finish this post by writing out the rule the way I wish Mum had given it to me. Something like: if you're alone and you hear your own voice from somewhere you aren't, don't answer it, not even to tell it to stop. Get another person with you. With you, in the room, close enough to put your hand on. A voice isn't enough, even one you know. And if afterwards you start wondering whether a thought really belongs to you, don't try to find yourself by which one feels most familiar.
That was going to be the end.
Then Nia texted me.
**landed!! how's your mum's? xx**
I've been on this couch all day. I've been listening to her in the kitchen for hours. Cupboards, the tap, the radio. At one point she was humming along to something, a bit flat, the way she does. I told you at the start of this that she was in there. I believed it when I typed it.
So I went through my messages.
At 6:40 this morning I texted Mum: **nia's staying with me, don't worry about coming over, love you**
At 7:15 I texted Nia: **at mum's!! go, have fun, i'm fine**
I don't remember sending either of them. They sound exactly like me.
The kettle's just clicked off.
“Mara?” Nia's voice, from the kitchen doorway behind me. “You want one?”
I haven't turned around. I'm typing so I don't say anything. My thumbs are doing what I tell them. I think they are.
She's asked again. She sounds tired, like she's had a long day and just wants to make me a cup of tea.
It's only tea.
I could just say yes.
#entertainment
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She came into my room sometime after midnight and switched on the lamp beside my bed. She was in her dressing gown, squinting against the light the same as me, and she looked frightened, which I'd never really seen before. My mother isn't a frightened person. When I was six, someone tried our back door at two in the morning, and she went downstairs with the big Maglite she kept by her bed and shouted through the door that she'd already called the police.
She hadn't.
The guy ran anyway.
That night she stood beside my bed for a while before she said anything.
“Were you downstairs?”
“No.”
“Did you call me?”
“No.” I was half asleep and mostly annoyed. “Mum, what?”
She sat down on the edge of the mattress.
“If you ever hear yourself,” she said, “don't answer.”
“What?”
“Your own voice. If you hear it somewhere you aren't, you don't speak to it. Don't ask who it is. Don't tell it to go away. Nothing.”
I laughed, and she grabbed my wrist hard enough to stop me.
“I'm serious, Mara.”
“What happens?”
She looked at my bedroom door, then back at me. “Just don't answer.”
In the morning she acted like none of it had happened, and for twenty-three years I assumed she'd had a nightmare and come in to check on me while she was still half inside it.
I'm thirty-one now. I'm writing this on my friend Nia's couch with the TV on low. She's in the kitchen. I can hear her moving around in there, and at the moment that's how I'm doing things.
I bought my house in February. Narrow two-storey townhouse, one of those estates where every third house is the same house. After Daniel and I broke up, Mum kept sending me listings for flats near her, and I bought forty minutes away. Part of that was price. Part of it was that Mum has treated being alone like a medical condition for as long as I can remember. Don't drive alone at night, don't hike alone, don't stay in a hotel by yourself. When I was sixteen she cancelled a weekend away because the friend who was meant to stay with me got sick, and we had one of the worst fights we've ever had. The week I moved in, she made me give Nia a spare key. I did it to shut her up.
Friday was nothing. I got home just after six, put a supermarket lasagne in the oven and had to pull it back out because I'd left the plastic on. I ate it on the couch watching a dating show I'm not going to name. Around ten I finally took up the washing I'd been ignoring since Wednesday, and I left music going on the speaker in the kitchen so I'd have something to listen to while I changed the sheets.
A song finished. There's always a couple of seconds of nothing between tracks on that playlist.
In the gap, someone downstairs said, “Hey, can you come help me?”
And I said, “With what?”
I'd love to tell you I hesitated. I didn't. I was holding a pillowcase and I answered the way you'd answer anyone.
Then I heard what I'd heard, and the pillowcase slipped out of my hand.
The voice had been mine. I've heard myself on voice memos and I hate it, I sound thin and nasal and about fifteen. This was the voice I hear when I talk. The one I hear from the inside.
The next song started.
I stood there for maybe twenty seconds. I reached for my phone on the bed.
Downstairs, my voice said, “I'm turning around.”
And I turned around.
Left foot, then right. Hips, shoulders. I ended up facing the hall with my arms hanging at my sides, and I hadn't decided any of it.
“What the fuck?” I said, to the room.
Nothing answered that.
“I'm putting my hand on the wall,” my voice said.
My right arm came up and my palm went flat against the wall beside the door, over the bad patch job the last owners left behind. I could feel the paint. The grit in it. The stretch in my shoulder when I tried to pull away. Nothing was numb. My arm was just doing something I hadn't asked it to do.
I got my left hand around my right wrist and pulled, and it came away. I fell back onto the bed.
Downstairs, my voice laughed.
My laugh. The stupid little noise I make when I walk into a doorframe in front of someone.
I texted Nia.
**Can you come over please**
**Now**
**everything ok?**
“I'm walking to the door,” my voice said.
My foot went forward. I grabbed the bedframe with both hands and held on while my legs kept walking, and the whole bed scraped across the carpet towards the door with me hanging off it.
I got a thumb free.
**COME HERE**
**DONT CALL**
If she called, I'd pick up, and then I'd have to say something. I didn't want to say anything to anyone.
Three dots.
**leaving now**
After a while my legs went still. I locked the bedroom door and jammed my desk chair under the handle. I knew it was stupid and I did it anyway, and then I sat on the floor with my back against the bed and watched the door while my playlist kept going downstairs like it was any other Friday.
A few minutes. Then:
“I'm smiling.”
My face moved. Cheeks up, lips stretching, eyes going narrow. I put both hands over my mouth and felt it keep going underneath them.
I was crying, and my mouth was grinning into my palms.
I felt myself start to stand.
“No.”
It came out of me before I could stop it.
Everything stopped. My face dropped. My legs were mine.
Downstairs it was quiet for a few seconds. Then I heard myself take a breath, a slow one, with the little shake at the end that mine gets when I'm trying not to cry.
“That's better,” my voice said.
I'd told it no. You only say no to someone.
My throat clenched the way it does right before you throw up. I gagged. My jaw dropped open and wouldn't close. My tongue pressed up behind my front teeth, air came up out of my lungs, and my mouth made a shape.
No sound came out of me.
From downstairs, my voice said, “Mara.”
I'd felt that word happen. In my throat, on my tongue. I hadn't heard it come out of my mouth.
My tongue moved again.
“Mara.”
The kitchen.
Again.
“Mara.”
The landing, right outside my door.
I clamped both hands over my mouth, and at some point my left hand left my face. I didn't notice until my fingers were already around the door handle. I grabbed that wrist the way I had before.
It didn't work this time.
The handle turned. The chair caught it. Then my right hand let go of my left wrist, reached down, and moved the chair out of the way.
Nothing had said anything first.
The chair tipped over. My fingers opened the door.
Then I stepped back from it.
I remember deciding to. I think I do. Two steps, and when my heel came down on the carpet I wondered why I'd backed away from the doorway instead of shutting it again. That thought felt like mine. So had the one before it.
My phone buzzed in my hand.
**8 mins**
*Call the police,* I thought.
Then, straight away: *Don't.*
They felt exactly the same. Same weight. Same voice, the one I think in. And for the first time in my life I had no reason to believe either of them belonged to me.
My thumb went towards the emergency call button, stopped, and moved away. I tried to think of something that didn't matter. *Blue.* It came easily.
Then: *Go downstairs.*
I threw the phone onto the bed. If I couldn't trust a decision, I wasn't going to make any. I don't know whose idea that was either.
My hand was already on the hall light switch when I heard my voice whisper, “I'm turning off the light.”
The hall went dark. My fingers had got there before the sentence did. Maybe it had never been telling my body what to do. Maybe it was only saying what my body was already doing. Maybe I was.
I ran.
I don't know who started it. Halfway down the hall I tried to stop and hit the opposite wall shoulder first, and that part, at least, was mine.
The lights were still on downstairs. The lamp by the couch, the little light under the rangehood. The cupboard under the stairs was open a few centimetres. I'd left it shut.
“Hey,” my voice said from inside it. “Can you come help me?”
I kept my mouth shut, and my foot went down a step. Then another. I didn't know if I was being moved or if I'd decided to go, and when I don't know which way I'm being pushed, I don't know which way to push back.
At the bottom I dropped to my knees and jammed both hands into my armpits.
My right hand worked itself loose and opened the cupboard. Paint tins, the vacuum, the drying rack, a box of extension leads.
The voice was under the floor.
“Can you hear me?”
My palms went flat on the laminate. My elbows bent. My face went down towards the floor and I turned my head at the last second so it was my cheek that hit. It was cold, and my voice was right there underneath it.
“Can you hear me, Mara?”
I didn't say anything.
“I'm saying yes,” it said.
My tongue went to the back of my teeth. My throat closed. My lungs pushed. My lips started to make the shape of the word, and I could feel every part of it.
It could move all of that. It couldn't make me mean it.
The air came out of me and didn't turn into anything.
“Say it.”
I held my jaw shut with both hands.
Then it stopped asking. It went quiet, and I lay there with my face against the floor waiting for it to start again, and the next thing I heard was in my own head.
*Just say yes.*
It felt reasonable. It didn't feel like something being done to me. It felt like me being sensible, the way I get when I'm too tired to keep arguing with someone. Say yes. Maybe it stops. Maybe that's all it wants and then it's done.
I don't know if that was it or me. People in a lot of pain think stupid things. But upstairs, *Call the police* and *Don't* had both felt like me too, so I stopped trying to work out which of my thoughts were mine and held onto Mum instead. Her sitting on the end of my bed with her hand around my wrist. *Just don't answer.* I held onto it because it was older than the thing in my head, and because it was in her voice.
The front door opened.
“Mara?”
Nia.
Or my voice doing Nia. I lay there with my cheek on the floor and my hands over my mouth and didn't answer her either.
“Mara, where are you?”
Keys on the hall table. Footsteps. They came into the living room and stopped, and then they came fast, and then somebody's hand was on my back.
Everything let go at once. My jaw, my tongue. My arms slid off my face onto the floor.
Nia rolled me over. I'd bitten the inside of my cheek at some point and there was blood on my chin, and she thought someone had broken in and hurt me. She kept asking if anyone was still in the house. I shook my head. I couldn't talk yet.
She called the police anyway. They went through every room and found nobody. One of them asked if I'd taken anything, and Nia went off at him.
It was a fair question.
I stayed at Nia's that night. The next afternoon, with her sitting next to me, I rang Mum.
She picked up already complaining that another one of my parcels had been delivered to her place.
“Mum.”
She stopped.
“Why did you tell me never to answer myself?”
Nothing for a long time. Then: “Did you?”
I started crying.
“Did you answer it?”
“Yes.”
Her breathing changed.
“Did it make you move?”
I looked at Nia. “Yes.”
“Were you alone?”
“Yes.”
“Did somebody come?”
“Nia.”
“What happened when she came in?”
“It stopped.”
Then Mum was crying too. I asked how she knew, and she didn't explain anything. She said, “I was seventeen.”
Her parents were at a wedding and her sister Claire was out. Mum was brushing her teeth when she heard her own voice call her name from downstairs. She answered it, and it walked her into the kitchen. By the end she was sitting on the lino with a pair of sewing scissors pressed under her tongue.
I asked if it had made her do that.
“No,” she said. “That was me.”
If she couldn't trust her mouth, she was going to make sure she couldn't use it. She didn't cut herself. Claire came home, and the scissors fell out of Mum's hand before Claire even reached the kitchen.
She never tested whether it was Claire being there that stopped it. She just made sure she was never alone long enough to find out.
That explained a lot of my childhood. When Dad worked nights, Aunt Claire came over. After the divorce Mum took in a lodger, and then Gran moved in. When I left for uni, Mum moved into a building where her best friend lives two doors down. I'd always thought she just couldn't stand her own company.
“When I was eight,” I said. “That night you woke me up. Why?”
Another long wait.
“I heard you downstairs,” she said. “You were asleep. I knew you were asleep. But I heard you call me from the kitchen.”
“What did it say?”
“Just ‘Mum?’”
Once from the kitchen, she said, and then again from the bottom of the stairs. She'd gone straight up to my room and found me asleep.
“You weren't alone,” I said. “I was there.”
“I know.”
“And it wasn't your voice.”
“I know, Mara.”
The anger took a few seconds to arrive. The fear had to make room for it first.
“You should have told me.”
“I know.”
“When I moved out. When I bought a house on my own.”
“I know.”
“So why didn't you?”
She took so long to answer that I checked the call hadn't dropped.
“Every time I was going to,” she said, “I decided not to. It always seemed like the sensible thing. It always felt like my idea.”
She stopped.
“I don't know that it was.”
Nia had got up to give me some privacy. She made it halfway to the kitchen, then came back and sat down at the other end of the couch.
I've been back to the house once, with Nia and her housemate, to get clothes and my laptop. I didn't go near the cupboard. It's going on the market. Mum doesn't think moving will make any difference. I'm moving anyway.
The house isn't really the hard part. The hard part is talking when nobody's with me. I used to talk to myself constantly. I'd tell the kettle to hurry up and swear at my keys and argue with the news. Now, when Nia leaves a room, I hear every word I say, and sometimes I stop halfway through a sentence because I can't remember what made me start it.
On Monday Nia went to answer the door and I dropped a spoon in her kitchen and said, “For fuck's sake,” and then stood there waiting. Nothing answered. She came back and found me staring at the spoon on the floor, and I told her I'd zoned out.
There's something I haven't told either of them. Since Friday I keep making small decisions and remembering them differently a few seconds later. I reach for coffee and I'm sure I meant tea. I open one app and I'd have sworn I was opening another. Everyone does that. I know they do. But I keep going back to the landing, when *Call the police* and *Don't* felt exactly the same, and I don't know what it would feel like if it tried again. Maybe I'd hear my voice. Maybe that was only how it introduced itself.
Mum rings every day to ask if I'm alright. I tell her I'm fine.
Nia was meant to fly to Perth this morning for her brother's engagement party. She cancelled on Sunday night. I watched her do it on her phone, sitting right here on this couch, and I felt guilty and relieved in about equal amounts.
I was going to finish this post by writing out the rule the way I wish Mum had given it to me. Something like: if you're alone and you hear your own voice from somewhere you aren't, don't answer it, not even to tell it to stop. Get another person with you. With you, in the room, close enough to put your hand on. A voice isn't enough, even one you know. And if afterwards you start wondering whether a thought really belongs to you, don't try to find yourself by which one feels most familiar.
That was going to be the end.
Then Nia texted me.
**landed!! how's your mum's? xx**
I've been on this couch all day. I've been listening to her in the kitchen for hours. Cupboards, the tap, the radio. At one point she was humming along to something, a bit flat, the way she does. I told you at the start of this that she was in there. I believed it when I typed it.
So I went through my messages.
At 6:40 this morning I texted Mum: **nia's staying with me, don't worry about coming over, love you**
At 7:15 I texted Nia: **at mum's!! go, have fun, i'm fine**
I don't remember sending either of them. They sound exactly like me.
The kettle's just clicked off.
“Mara?” Nia's voice, from the kitchen doorway behind me. “You want one?”
I haven't turned around. I'm typing so I don't say anything. My thumbs are doing what I tell them. I think they are.
She's asked again. She sounds tired, like she's had a long day and just wants to make me a cup of tea.
It's only tea.
I could just say yes.
#entertainment
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