‘What are you doing?’ Ollie says loudly.

  Startled, I spin around to find him sitting in an armchair in the corner of the room, in the dark. I can only make out the shape of him, a single-layered purple-blue glow around him, the very same as hers, as though he’s been sitting in the dark, watching her, and charging himself with her energy. His presence feels eerie. Lily wakes at the sound of his voice, eyes widening with fright at the sight of my big, gloved hands over her head.

  ‘What are you doing?’ she asks, her sleepy voice filled with panic.

  ‘Nothing.’ I pull the gloves off, feeling stupid.

  She scurries off the couch, clumsily, stumbling in her quest to get away from me as quickly as she can.

  ‘What the hell were you going to do to me?’ she shouts, metallic red sparking over her head like lightning. Zap. Another fly dead. It disappears as soon as it appears.

  ‘Nothing,’ I repeat, unable to explain this one.

  She looks from me to Ollie nervously, then back to me again, thinking we’re both in on it, everyone against her. She backs away from me, then pulls her dull grey and muddy yellow blanket through the room like a child with a comfort blanket, and drags it up the stairs behind her. When she locks the door behind her and half the blanket remains on the other side of the door, I realise it isn’t a blanket at all but the colour of her fear of me.

  ‘This might be a good thing,’ Hugh says, the night before he leaves, the letter from the school in his hand, as he reads it over and over again. He’s taken it worse than I have. ‘I’ll be gone, you won’t be stuck here with her. I’ll still be worried about you, but at least you’ll be with responsible adults.’

  Neither of us mention how we’re leaving Ollie behind, all on his own, defenceless against her.

  ‘Here, I got you something,’ he says, handing me a gift bag. ‘For good luck.’

  I open the tissue-lined bag, and discover a new pair of sunglasses.

  He wraps me up in a hug and as I squeeze him tightly I think about this being the last time for a long time that I will allow anyone to touch me. We’ll all be home at Christmas; four months until my next hug. I breathe in his Lynx and Hugh smell, trying to magnetise his colours of hope and excitement for the escape and adventure that lie ahead of him.

  Lily visits me once at the academy. Once in six years, during my final few months of the academy, without an explanation as to why. I watch her outside, having a cigarette before she enters the school, and search her for signs she’s dying. If anything, she looks better.

  ‘So,’ she says, when we sit down in the family room reserved for Sunday visits. She’s nervous. Shifty. It’s weird seeing her outside of her territory, beyond enemy lines. You hear from Hugh?’

  ‘Yeah.’ He calls me almost every day. He’s started teaching English at a secondary school but I can’t think of anything to say to her about this. There’s a more than uncomfortable silence, as the families around us can’t stop talking.

  ‘And … Ollie, you hear from him?’

  ‘Once.’

  The foster family he’s with forced him to call me. I think they thought a chat with his sister would help settle him. Little did they know I’ve never been able to comfort him.

  ‘He’s all right,’ I say.

  He’d threatened to burn his foster home down if someone didn’t take him out of there. Fifteen years old and he thinks he’s twenty-four. Living alone with Mum, his behaviour had been getting increasingly worse and he was no good at hiding his new-found riches, flaunting stolen goods around the place for everyone to see and know exactly what he was up to. It was decided his home was a toxic environment for him and he had to be put in social care.

  ‘I came to tell you that I’m, eh, I’m getting myself better,’ she says.

  I sip sugary tea because I don’t know what to say. Getting better is the very opposite of a terminal illness. I had been prepared for the latter.

  ‘When Ollie was taken away from me, I went to a terrible place. Terrible.’ She shudders. ‘I tried to kill myself.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘Pills. Mrs Ganguly found me outside in the garden.’

  I picture the long grass, the overflowing bins, her on the ground beside them.

  ‘They’ve diagnosed me with bipolar disorder. Do you know what that is?’

  I have an idea from some people in here, but I shrug.

  ‘They say it’s when you have extreme moods. Extreme highs and extreme lows. They gave me this for you.’

  She reaches into her handbag that she’s been guarding and slides a Health Service leaflet across the pine table. Living with Bipolar: For people living with someone with bipolar.

  No one lives with her. She lives alone. Chased us all away. I flick it open. I’m not sure if she wants me to read it now or not, so I scan it, hoping that nobody around me can see it. A family at the table behind her, in front of me, are playing charades. The dad’s turn. Film. Two words. He puts his hands on his cheeks and looks shocked in a silent scream.

  Home Alone, I guess it straight away. They’re idiots, they don’t get it, while over here I’m looking at a Health Service pamphlet.

  Formerly known as manic depression, bipolar is a mental disorder that causes unusual shifts in mood, energy, activity levels, concentration and the ability to carry out day-to-day tasks.

  Yep. I’d say they got it right. I place it down on the table.

  Scream, they keep saying over and over. No, it’s two words, he said two words, didn’t he? Scream 2 then, Scream 3, they guess, while he shakes his head wildly.

  ‘They’ve given me pills to treat it.’

  I can already see she’s on pills, I recognise it from the other students here. So many on medication for ADHD, ODD, OCD, depression and anxiety. Her colours are still there but they’re muted by the calming colour of the pill. It surrounds the mood, suppresses it, clings to it like white blood cells attacking bacteria, only the problem is the pill doesn’t know what’s a good colour and what’s a bad colour, it hugs every colour she has, even the good ones, dulling everything down, making meh her primary emotion.

  ‘If I stay on course, then Ollie can come back home. They need to see that I’m trying.’

  Hugh left first, then me. Then Ollie. It took the third child being taken from her, and all of us gone, for her to take a look at herself. I wonder if it’s because she misses us or because she just can’t stand to be alone.

  ‘The doctor said that I probably got this,’ she says, looking at the pamphlet, ‘from having kids.’

  I don’t know how something so horrific could come from something so beautiful, something so stormy and dark come from something so pink, so tranquil and peaceful as Hugh.

  ‘I got postnatal depression from you. I didn’t know it until I spoke to the doctor recently, but that’s what it was. And then it got worse after I had Ollie.’

  She sips her tea, while I look at the pamphlet on the table, the letters blurring, not seeing them. My heart pounding at her revelation. What I hear is it’s your fault. I try to figure out if that’s what she means, if she’s playing games with me, her hands wrapped around her cup for warmth and hunched over like a crackhead. I’m tired of her and her games; being here is a relief, like being at a spa. I don’t miss this mind-scrambling. I realise how much she drains me, trying to constantly figure her out, work her out. How her very presence bothers me more than anything bad that anyone else could say. I remind myself that she’ll be gone soon, she’ll leave this building and I’ll be free of her, so I breathe. But I’m not letting her get away with it.

  ‘So it’s my fault.’

  She has the nerve to look annoyed. ‘That’s not what I said. Don’t twist my words.’

  ‘Maybe say it another way then. Maybe with all the time you had on your own over the past few weeks and even in the few hours it took you to get here in the car, you could have found another way to say it. A kinder way.’

  ‘Never mind,’ she says, grabbing her bag and standing up. ‘I knew this would be a waste of time. I told the counsellor you wouldn’t understand.’

  This place started out feeling like a prison and then became a kind of haven. I will have to leave soon, as I’ve watched everyone before me, some with hesitancy like a deer finding its legs, others with full-blown Andy Dufresne blueprints in their suitcases. I’m in Andy’s corner. I’m making plans, I’m moving in with Hugh and Poh until I get myself set up. I have no intention of going home to her. Not ever.

  It would have been easier if she’d said she was dying.

  Lily keeps her promise. She makes the necessary changes in her life to get Ollie home from the foster family. She takes her pills, her symptoms are successfully managed with medication, she ‘behaves’ and she’s rewarded by his coming home. She has a job. She works nights at a Chinese takeaway, answering the phone, taking orders, arranging deliveries, serving customers. I would have thought dealing with the public, particularly the drunken public late at night, would not be conducive to her leading as stress-free a life as possible, but she seems to have patience with the unhinged. She has something to talk about, a new world of her own outside of the house, even if it is bitching about customers, the chef, the filthy kitchen. She has a flirtation with the delivery guy.

  Despite her sacrifices for him, Ollie is constantly in trouble. She can’t manage him, she can’t handle him. They’re toxic for each other and yet always, always together. He won’t leave and she won’t throw him out. Blazing rows that go late into the night, into the early hours of the morning that Hugh has to referee.

  To give her credit, she worked hard making changes in her life for Ollie to come home, but Ollie never really came home.

  But I do.

  rust

  AT THE VERY BEGINNING I used to see just one prominent colour around a person.

  Blue for Lily.

  Pink for Hugh.

  But gradually, the number of colours around an individual grow and appear like layers. Everyone walks around like fluorescent onions, shedding layers and growing them again. Over the years the colours intensify, and with them, my instincts adapt. Not all at once, but a slow evolution, and I have to keep learning how to decipher what they mean. I emerge from my six-year stint at the academy thoroughly modified, though not in the way they think. With the limited abilities of my youth, I had only a basic understanding of people, but now as an adult I’m more in tune with their layers. Whether I like it or not.

  ‘I didn’t come here to talk about my periods,’ I finally snap at the GP. ‘I’m not here because I’m bloated, I’m here because I see colours around people. Colours. Dancing round their heads and their bodies. Do you understand? Happy colours, sad colours. And I feel them, when they get close to me, it rubs off on me and whatever they’re feeling, I feel. Do you get it? I explained it in quite full detail already.’

  I’m shouting. I don’t care. It took me a lot to come here. I’m finally free of the academy and this has been on my mind for some time. Find a doctor. Tell them the truth. Get better. Give me the magic pill that makes it go away, anything, I’ll take it. I didn’t sleep a wink last night; I lay in bed imagining all the things they could do to me as soon as I say the words aloud. I see people’s colours. Have me sectioned, for one, put me on a ‘do not employ’ list.

  ‘These intense migraines and what you’re describing as levels of high sensitivity can be symptoms of hormone imbalance or PMS—’

  Aura migraines, synaesthesia and now PMS. I don’t let him finish. It’s a waste of time. I stand up and storm out, slamming the door shut. ‘I’m not paying for that,’ I say to the receptionist as I pass. ‘He’s a shit doctor,’ I add to the startled people in the waiting room.

  Poh leaves the room when I return to the apartment from a day’s work at a coffee shop. Lowering her gaze and barely making eye contact, she closes the bedroom door behind her with a gentle click. I look to Hugh suspiciously.

  He pulls a chair out from the table, motions for me to sit. Before me are a selection of college courses, degrees, diplomas and certificates.

  ‘Humour me,’ he says.

  ‘Paddy Englishman, Paddy Irishman, Paddy Scotsman are at a swingers’ party—’

  ‘Alice,’ he says, firmly in the adult no-nonsense Hugh voice.

  ‘I already told you, I don’t want to go to college.’

  ‘There’s too many people,’ he says, repeating my much-repeated words. ‘New places, new things, horrible teachers and lecturers in positions of authority, telling you what to do. You hate being told what to do. You like the familiar, you want things to be simple, you like to be in control, you like the café you work in,’ he says, airing my very real fears.

  He lets that all hang in the air for a moment. He understands, I get it, now it’s my turn to listen.

  ‘But you’re eighteen and you can’t live like this forever. No one ever stays on a stepping stone, Alice. Colleges are nothing like schools. You’re an adult, you can come and go as you please, you can sit alone in lectures, you can disappear off campus for lunch, you can do whatever the hell you want, you can still work part-time in the café – in fact you’ll have to – but you go to class, you do the work and you get your qualification.’

  ‘And then what?’

  ‘And then you go.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Anywhere. Away. Out of here. The qualification is your ticket to wherever you want to go. The world is your oyster.’

  ‘Oysters are rank.’

  ‘You’ve never even tried one.’

  That’s the difference between me and him. He’d try one. He’d see if he liked anything. He’s open, I’m closed. He calls this a stepping stone, I call it a safe house. He’s worried about me, he’s always worried. I’m not ambitious like him, I don’t have drive. I don’t have hobbies, I don’t have passions, I don’t have friends and I don’t have a clue what I want to do or who I want to be. I’m better at hiding, at staying in, at staying away. Keeping to myself, keeping it all in. Slithering along the side in the shadows. He wants me to be the best I can possibly be when it’s hard enough just being. I look above his shoulder at a new colour that arises. It’s not one of his usual colours and moves differently. It’s like concrete mixing, slow and thick, a sludgy porridge-like consistency. It must be heavy; a growing weight on his shoulder.

  He looks to where I’m looking, at thin air above his shoulder, then back at me. ‘What?’

  ‘You need a massage.’

  ‘I know, my shoulder’s killing me,’ he says, starting to manipulate it roughly himself. ‘Can you see it?’

  ‘Yeah.’ I pick up a leaflet at random. I don’t want to be a burden. ‘Fine. I’ll look at these.’

  ‘Maybe you could be a masseuse,’ he says, rolling his shoulder around.

  ‘Yeah, one who doesn’t touch people.’

  ‘A masseuse’s assistant, or better yet, the boss. You make them do the physical work, you can pinpoint the pain.’

  He’s being playful but his insight into my ability to distinguish pain stings me. ‘How about a job where I can pinpoint joy.’

  Neither of us can think of one.

  Ollie arrives home at 3 a.m. to find me sitting in the dark on the couch watching the door, waiting for him. Lily had called the flat, upset, to put it mildly, Hugh was out with Poh. She’d wanted him to come over, comfort her, to talk to Ollie, be the referee again. I came instead, reluctantly. He’s wearing a Canada Goose jacket and trainers. The jacket costs over a thousand euro, and it’s identical to the one he got for Lily on Christmas morning, along with a wad of cash stuffed in a box of Quality Street.

  He gets a fright when he sees me, then covers it up with the usual bravado.

  ‘Hi freak,’ he says.

  ‘Hi drug dealer,’ I reply.

  He snorts and goes into the kitchen, bangs around. As he brushes by me, I shudder. The hairs on my arms stand up, goose pimples rise. My baby brother has induced a cold fear in me.

  ‘What did you do?’ I hear the tremble in my voice. So does he. He appears at the door, eyes dark, feasting on my fear as he does with the packet of lunch ham in his hand.

  ‘What are you talking about, freak?’

  ‘Ollie,’ I say, trying to appeal to his human side, not this monster energy that’s coming off him like steam. He’s on a high – not a drug high, something else, something visceral and cruel, a wicked adrenaline.

  ‘Anyone asks, I was home all night.’ He stuffs the ham into his mouth, eyes black, and goes upstairs to bed.

  I sit in the front row, beside Hugh, where I’ve sat every day of Ollie’s trial and watch the hypnotising woman before me who has colours like a lava lamp. Great big blobs of royal blue move slowly up and down in a haze of logical yellow. The blobs drift upwards, shapes changing ever so slowly like mutating globs and then travel back downward again. I’ve never seen anything like it before, so precise and controlled, it’s captivating. One each side of her head, they move at the same speed but in alternate directions, always meeting exactly in the middle at the same time, like a see-saw. The royal blue is a colour I have learned over time to trust in natural leaders who are keen on fairness and equality, and I recognise the shade of yellow that surrounds it from seeing students hard at work, applying themselves. The royal blue blobs’ movements may be fluid and change shape, but they are thoughtful and measured. I feel that this is an energy searching slowly and methodically for truth. The scales of justice. Which make sense as the host of the blobs is Judge Catherine Radcliffe, who is presiding over Ollie’s trial.

  Lily doesn’t come. It’s too much for her fragile state; she’s never been one to sacrifice a little of herself for the sake of someone else.

  ‘What do you think?’ Hugh asks me from time to time. He isn’t referring to the words being argued back and forth from lawyer to lawyer, which is its own language that he can understand. My job is to watch everybody’s colours as we cling to each other in hope for our brother’s life.