Page 39 of No Safe Place

Thursday | Evening

Lily

Scott drove them back to his flat in silence. His hands gripped the wheel, his shoulders rigid.

Tears dripped steadily down her face during the drive. She knew Scott thought she was about to break up with him, but she didn’t trust herself to speak. Too anxious to offer him reassurance.

They climbed the stairs to the flat. Scott always took the stairs, never the lift. She trailed behind him, still crying.

He let her in and went straight to the sofa. Sat down heavily. Lily wished they were back at hers, in the safety of her own room.

Scott’s face was earnest, full of concern, and Lily felt guilty.

Scott didn’t speak as she sat next to him. He reached over and picked up her hand. The gesture made her cry again.

‘I’m sorry.’ She sniffed. ‘Do you mind if I tell you all of it really quickly and get this over with?’

Scott nodded.

‘It’s not just Callum,’ she said, eyes squeezed shut. ‘I have OCD too.’

Silence.

‘And I didn’t meet him in my twenties,’ she went on. ‘I met him when I was fourteen. I met him at the Maudsley.’

She had spent the last decade trying not to think about the Maudsley.

Lily might be Cal’s carer now, but he had looked after her first, on the ward. He was a year older, fifteen going on twenty-eight. Cal wore band T-shirts and smoked with the night porters. She’d finally got an OCD diagnosis after years of utter misery and confusion, and she was terrified.

Callum got Lily through it. Callum understood her.

Lily only met Callum again because of Paige’s death – and it unravelled him. It was slow, but Cal recovered, and they were happy. Their little life, in their safe little house. They were good for each other.

Until they weren’t.

Callum got ill again, but this time there was no life-shattering event to point to, no root cause. And this time, Lily couldn’t make him better.

Scott was sitting very still, waiting for her to keep talking.

She felt sick.

‘I developed OCD as a child. About food. How it was prepared and what was safe to eat and what was bad. Mashed potato? Good. Boiled potatoes? Something terrible would happen.’ She sucked in a breath, aware it sounded flippant, aware it sounded ridiculous.

‘My parents thought I was fussy, at first, then thought I was anorexic when I got to secondary school. And I was slowly going mad, because I had all these crippling rules to follow around food.’

Scott had a deep furrow between his concerned eyebrows. He went to reach for Lily’s hand, but pulled it back when she flinched.

‘I was in and out of hospital from eleven to fourteen, in eating disorder clinics.’

‘All this – is this why you don’t speak to your parents?’ Scott asked in a whisper.

‘Yeah. They were scared I’d pass my behaviours on to my little sisters. I haven’t spoken to my mum since I was sixteen and she said I was using OCD as an excuse. She accused me of making it all up. For attention.’

‘Fuck.’

‘Yeah.’ She shrugged. ‘But, by then our doctor – he was called David Moore – David told me I had OCD. I joined the support group, and did this intensive course of CBT. It was a fucking lot.’

‘That’s why you can’t let go of Callum.’ Scott said it as a statement, in a kind of hard voice.

Lily gave Scott a hard stare. She would not stand for him being jealous of a sectioned teenager.

‘Cal started writing his novel while we were still in the Maudsley. The first half is during treatment. The second half is after. David wasn’t the only one to get published off the back of it.’

Scott looked confused, and she realised he didn’t know about David’s paper. She was too tired to explain that as well.

Lily thought back to the books on her bedroom windowsill.

Her copy of Darlings, Obsessed was mixed in with other books on madness.

One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest , The Bell Jar .

Perks of Being a Wallflower . Woolf, Vonnegut, Kane.

Paige loved Sarah Kane. Always aspired to act in a production of 4. 48 Psychosis.

Lily kept cuttings about David’s career tucked inside the madness books, like pressed flowers.

Psychiatry Monthly ’s first write-up of their study, articles in the local paper, David getting his medal from the king – safe between the pages.

She wondered if the police would search her room, move the books around.

Scott cleared his throat.

‘It’s all fiction,’ she said looking down at her hands. ‘Callum’s book, I mean. The story and the characters were made up, but the charm of it was that the actual OCD and stuff – that was really us.

‘We did lots of creative stuff. David encouraged us to write fictional versions of ourselves.’ She sniffed. ‘Write out the best-case scenarios. The worst-case.’

She twisted to look at Scott. He hadn’t moved. Through the wide window behind him, the sky was beginning to darken, turning blusher-pink at the edges.

‘I can’t believe she’s dead,’ she whispered. ‘Sam – she was there when I arrived. We were together on that ward, every day, for almost two years—’

The sobs came and Scott wrapped her in his arms, squeezing her tight until they subsided, patting her firmly on her shoulder like she was a burping baby.

The nausea was building again, and she twisted her body to try and ease the feeling, pulling away from his hug.

Scott swallowed. ‘Can I say something?’

Lily nodded.

‘I think on some level, I already knew.’ His voice was deeper than usual. ‘I knew there was something about you that you were holding back. Holding back from me, I mean.’

She wiped her nose on her sleeve.

‘You know I would never have judged you, Lily.’

‘Of course.’ She frowned. ‘Why would you judge me?’

‘That’s my point,’ he said, a note of frustration in his voice. ‘I never would.’