Lock Me In

‘Please, Dad.’

Mae shrugged, straightened up, committing those two lads to memory: bags, hair, sneery little faces. The last of the latecomers ran past them, ushered in by her classroom assistant (Mr Walls, 29, newly qualified last year, single, previously a gardener, caution for shoplifting aged 13). Mae bent to fix the mismatch of toggles on her coat, and she let him.

‘Thanks for hanging out with me, Bear.’ He squeezed her shoulders. ‘See you next week.’

She ducked him and was gone, off down the path, trying to press into a group of girls he half-recognized. Flicking a hand up briefly as a backwards goodbye. He flexed his fingers a few times in his pockets and headed back to the car.

It didn’t get to him. Saying goodbye and not even getting a hug: it was no big deal. He dealt with assaults and suicides and RTAs, no problem, all the time. Cat C murders, child abuse, DV, the lot. All the fucking time. So, his little girl forgot to give him a hug before a whole nine days away from him, even though five minutes ago she was three years old, falling asleep in his arms as he read The Gruffalo for the eighteenth time? Christ! Take more than that to make him cry.

From the driver’s seat he watched Bear disappear into the building.

Music. He reached round to dig a CD out from the pocket behind his seat, and his fingers closed on a disk in a square plastic wallet. She must have left it there by mistake. He brought it out: Lady Gaga for Bear! on the disk in sharpie, and then under the hole,

(not really, it’s Daddy’s very best CLEAN hip-hop mixtape).

And it was clean, too: he’d checked and double-checked each track, and there wasn’t a single swear. It had taken some doing.

He tucked it into the glovebox, then tried again and found Snoop Dogg’s Doggystyle under a fine layer of fried potato crumbs. It was scratched to shit but last time had played fine up to ‘Who Am I (What’s My Name)?’, which would be long enough to get him to the nick. His speakers were almost as creaky as his brakes, but they were loud, and loud meant a clear head.

Ignition, arm round the headrest to reverse. And off.

All business.

3. (#u079d501d-f43d-5e2f-9341-37d3e850f369)

CC: OK, I think that’s recording … Good. Right, before we begin can we just confirm this because we’ve got a slightly unusual situation here. You have asked for your friend Jodie – our mutual friend, should I say – to be here during this first session?

EP: Yes. Please. If that’s all right.

CC: Certainly, whatever makes you feel comfortable. OK. So, what I’d like to do to begin with is to have a chat about the dissociation, and the range of what you’re experiencing on a daily basis.

EP: OK.

CC: And from there we can move on to having a think about where you’d like me to get you to. Does that sound OK?

EP: Yeah. Yes. That’s fine.

CC: So. A normal day then. How does that start?

EP: OK well, it depends on whether I’ve had a fugue or not.

CC: Tell me about that.

EP: So, um, Siggy sometimes—

CC: Siggy is your alter.

EP: Yeah, sorry yeah my alter, she sometimes kind of takes over. I wake up at night sometimes but I’m not like, actually awake, it’s not me, it’s her. She talks to my mum sometimes, otherwise she’ll just try to go outside, that kind of thing. Sometimes we’ll only know Siggy was up because things will be moved, or lights will be on. Stuff like that. But I always know anyway because I feel her there.

CC: Physically?

EP: Not exactly. I mean, I always feel sick afterwards, sort of achy.

CC: OK, so let’s say you’ve woken up, got up. What happens next?

EP: Well, she’s always there. Just … like I can sort of sense her, whatever’s going on. It’s like she thinks things that I can hear—

CC: Does she speak? Does she have a voice?

EP: Well … no. Not really. But it’s like she’ll get scared or angry or whatever and I know it’s not me feeling those things. Does that make any sense?

CC: Yes, it does. It sounds like what you experience is what I call co-conscious dissociation, which is when a person can feel that they have more than one identity at the same time.

EP: Right. Yes, that’s what it’s like. But the times she gets me up and does stuff with me at night, and … I just have completely no memory of that at all.

CC: OK. I’m getting from the way you’re speaking now that it’s quite distressing.

EP: I just … I don’t know.

[pause: 32 sec]

CC: Would you feel comfortable going into a little more detail about the episodes you have at night?

[pause: 12 sec]

EP: Look, I-I don’t know.

CC: OK: Eleanor—

EP: Ellie.

CC: Ellie. A lot of the people I see, they find it very hard at the beginning. They can feel like … well, they don’t know if they can trust me. Or it might be that they don’t trust that talking is going to help.

[pause: 27 sec]

EP: No. It’s not that. I just know what’s going to happen. We’re going to go through all this, and then you’re going to give up.

CC: Ah, OK. Tell me a bit more about that.

EP: I’m just … like, I’ve tried. You know? I talk to Siggy, I talked to other people, tried medicine and everything. All kinds of stuff. I don’t want to do all of that again. Just tell you all of it and then have you just say that actually you can’t help. Or that you don’t believe me.

CC: Who does believe you, Ellie?

EP: My mum.

CC: She’s always believed you.

EP: Yeah. She’s-she’s seen what happens. The fugues, and – everything.