They interlocked like two jigsaw pieces, she believed. He started a sentence, she completed it. She began to form an idea, he developed it. Brick and mortar, wood and nail.
Phil was tall, dark-haired, good-looking, otter-sleek. And busy around the university campaigning, a missionary for environmental change. Strong feelings, high ideals. Hers too, and they went about together, she the shadow to his light.
Frieda knew she wasn’t attractive like him. Plumpish, plain face and brown hair, a reclusive fieldmouse, shy, to his out-there eager-beaverness. But they were solid, and she wanted him desperately.
One night they slept together. Fully locked. This was it. She would never feel incomplete again, no longer believe she was a solitary piece of a puzzle. But in the morning he just said, ‘That was nice. We’re still friends?’ And then he was off with his right-on, committed chums, busy-busy, no time for her for days. She asked him eventually had it just been a one-off?
‘Well, you know,’ he said, a silly smile like a child caught filching a cake.
Yes, she did know. He’d slept with a nestful of women. She’d pretended he hadn’t on her night with him, pretended she would make a difference to him, open his eyes. She hadn’t.
‘Get over it,’ a friend, Tracy, advised. ‘This is the twenty-first century, not the Jane Austen era.’
She got over it with hate. Hating him when she woke up, when she saw him from afar, when she went to bed, wishing his legs were smashed, his mind rearranged. Then one day her wishes came to pass.
‘He’s been sectioned,’ Tracy told her. ‘Some kind of a breakdown; all that operating at a hundred m.p.h. perhaps?’
Frieda pictured the unit where he was. An entrance door, press a button, bend your head like a supplicant to speak into the mouthpiece on the grill. A buzz as sharp as his brain was dull and drugged, and the door clicks open. On your left the window of a locked office. A woman gets up, asks who you are, who you’ve come to see – friend? family? have you an appointment? She speaks into a phone, unlocks the door, comes out of her protected office, ushers you to a bench in the corridor. You wait. Eventually after not too long – this place runs well; they’re expecting you; the patient has been made ready in anticipation of you – a worker comes out with the patient, and you go to a small room. The patient is quiet, absent, sedated, dressed in his own clothing. Phil recognises you. His eyes are not completely dead. They are telling you he wishes to leave; can you help get him out of this hateful confinement? Then his momentary crackle of hope is extinguished. He stares into space. He’s back in darkness, unreachable. You’re no longer there.
Yes, that’s where he is, Frieda thought. In a hall of mirrors. Imagining me imagining him. Tough. She was over him; out of the maze.
