“Ludo—”
“Aidan.”
There’s a warning in the way he says my name, but the horse has bolted, leaving the stable door swinging in the wind. “There must’ve been something you wanted to do.”
“There really wasn’t. I spent my childhood watching my cousin dance like a fucking swan and my teenage years wishing life stayed that simple.”
I flinch. Can’t help it. I’ve got a mouth like a drunk sailor, but Ludo is cleverer than me and uses words that mean something. I can count on one hand the occasions I’ve heard him swear. “So whatdoyou do for work?”
“Software testing. It’s nothing like what you do, but it gives me structure when I’m struggling to focus, and I can duck out when I need to. It suits me.”
I disagree, but what the fuck do I know? Despite another round of late night googling I’ve done, Ludo’s illness remains a mystery to me, and it’s absolutely not my place to have an opinion on how he lives his life. “Working on the trees made me as happy as I let myself be. I wish you had that too.”
He grunts again, and I can’t fucking deal with it. I get to my feet like I’m eighty-five years old and limp inside to use the bog.
Ludo’s bathroom doesn’t make me feel any better. It’s spotlessly clean and by far the only tidy room in the house, but it’s still a riot of colour. Yellow walls, a pink suite from the seventies, topped off with zebra print towels. Chaotic or not, it’s stillhim. It doesn’t seem fair that he can’t be like this all the time. That the brightness in him that’s so addictive to me could do him any harm.
He’s waiting for me on the half landing of his curved staircase, anxiety rolling off him in jagged waves of tension. “You don’t understand.”
I sit on the top step. “Do I need to?”
“I don’t know.”
Measuring words has never come easily to me. Before Ludo I’ve rarely tried, but I make a valiant attempt now. “Look, I don’t care what you do for a living, and I never even said you should be doing something else. I think maybe... uh, you’ve had this conversation with other people and they didn’t let you speak?”
Ludo tilts his head sideways. Sitting on the carpet that’s the only beige thing about him, knees hugged to his chest, he seems so young that I have to revisit his lips on mine to remember he’s a fucking adult.
And then, of course, my ability to think clearly is pretty much obliterated. I swear, having girlfriends in school when all I wanted was to snog the captain of the football team was way easier than this.
“You’re right,” Ludo says eventually. “No one listens to me. I mean, Rita does, but she’s paid to, and even she doesn’t really take me seriously.”
“The soup woman?”
“Yeah.” Ludo laughs. “She’s my CPN.”
“Huh?”
“Community psychiatric nurse. My babysitter, basically, though it’s probably down to her that I don’t get sectioned much any more.”
Disquiet flares in my gut. “When did you last get sectioned?”
“A few years ago. I stopped taking my medication and I thought I could fly. I get delusional, see, if my manic episodes go on too long.”
“And then you come down? Like... uh, crash? Is that the right word?”
Ludo shrugs. “It works. And yeah, what goes up always has to come down, and sometimes it’s so fast no one can catch me, not even myself. But I’m getting better at recognising when I need help, so I’m hoping it won’t happen again, at least, not that badly.”
I think about what he said in hospital about falling a lot and the gruesome list of injuries he listed as though they meant nothing. Are they connected? If they are, I shudder to think how, but this is as open as Ludo has ever been about his bipolar, and I need to learn as much as I can for as long as he’s willing to talk. “What medication do you take?”
“Lithium to stabilise my moods, and an anti-depressant. I used to take an anti-psychotic too, but it didn’t work like it had on other people.”
The masochist in me is curious, and I can’t help raising a questioning eyebrow.
“It made my delusions normal,” Ludo says. “Like, I’d still have them, but I’d be less bothered by them, which actually made them more dangerous. If I’m frightened, I don’t come out of my house.”
I swallow hard. The fact that he has to be frightened to feel safe is so fucking unfair that I want to punch a hole in his funky coloured walls. My knuckles contract. Fingernails dig into my palm, and I grit my teeth.
“It’s not always like that, though,” Ludo continues when I don’t speak. “Sometimes I’m not scared of anything regardless of what meds I’m on, and that’s magic. It’s what makes me not resent being bipolar... the perfect balance of mania and reality. It doesn’t happen often, but it’s pretty fucking special.”
