By Jonny Mahon-Heap

It is Harry’s idea to see their town from the hill. They drive up after dinner, their second date. The meal had been so fraught expectation that they failed to establish anything new about each other. Where did he work again? Did he say he was left-handed? Harry found it hard to tell whether he was simply getting carried away, whether it always felt like this. 

By the time they walk up to the highest ridge, the lights of their quiet city are all out. Harry lies down on the grass, flings his head back, takes in the view upside down.

 ‘Come on’, Harry calls. Micah lies down next to him.

 ‘That’s Orion’s belt,’ says Harry.

‘Bullshit.’

‘Yeah, bullshit. I don’t know what that is.’

‘You’re a bullshit artist.’

‘And I’m the best at my craft.

Looking at the city like this, everything turns alien. Skyscrapers scratch the sky, the stars become the floor. 

Micah grabs Harry’s wrist, thumbs and fingers rubbing his palm, then touching everywhere, thumbs grazing his knuckles, his forearm. 

Harry is stunned, taking in the view, his eyes quickly scanning the little cars tracking home to dinner. He wants for nothing, and his pity for these people is enormous, he is sighing giant exhalations of pity. 

For a second, nothing on the earth has his envy, and all he feels is Micah’s thumb in his palm, and the world tilted on its axis.

Micah was 27. He thought he should be done with fashion. He spent his days making PowerPoint presentations that he prided on being day immaculate, each a variation on some new trend. It was easy for him, knowing where to find references for each client, padding out his presentations with the right patina of industry-speak, and reframing their perspective on whatever it was that the “zeitgeist” meant. He enjoyed spending his time surrounded by people and images of good style, as though recognising the value of this art implied something about him too. He found the work involving, and aside from the faces of his executives (hungry, blank, sometimes lecherous) the ones who willed him to achieve the impossible on no budget, he also found the work meaningful to him, that it was a show of group progress towards a higher purpose.  

He worked late into most evenings and would cycle home to the same playlist, wending his way slowly through the quiet streets, sometimes glancing into the shop windows he had in part helped to design. At their best, they were an ode to the kind of beauty that inspired him in the first place. At their worst, they looked like pop-up ads made real. 

Turning into his street, he would glance through the ground-floor apartments whose living rooms were on display, flickering past him quickly like different television channels. Sometimes their artfully arranged interiors made it into his references.

Micah and Harry shared a first-floor apartment at the end of the street. They joked about it being the worst house on the best street, but they made merry with it, and Micah, especially, chose to believe it was character-building, being surrounded by all this beauty. There was one house on their street, its door a shock of neon green. It gave them both an uneasy feeling. But it made Harry curious, about the choices the owner had made. Micah simply hated it.

Lately, it wasn’t until he forced the key into the lock and cast his mind up to their flat that he felt he would rather be back at work, looking at the screen, giving the deck another cursory trawl, numbly scrolling his mouse. Once he was upstairs, there was a feeling that anything could happen, that his life was not under his control. There was something ugly to this sense of disorder.

When he described it to their friends, he might say that Harry was “going through something”. What had begun as low-grade depression had morphed into something else, something Micah could no longer categorise, as it had become a more dominant feature in Harry’s life.

That’s how Micah put it to him, “this is a dominant feature in your life”. When Micah said anything like this, in terms troublingly similar to a teacher delivering a bad report, he caught the flutter of helplessness in Harry’s eyes.

Lately, he averted them. Looking away, you could say anything, it was as if words weren’t delivered, they just arrived. 

3. 

They spent Saturday lunchtimes with Harry’s family. His aunt lived in a townhouse further west. When they punched in her door code each week, it caused them both to smile at one another, at this intimacy. That these people accepted them – wanted them – filled them both with a stupid gratitude. Harry’s aunt would ask a cast of distant family, old friends, and figures from the neighbourhood. They were part of the scenery. There was the neighbour who slid one of his aunt’s cantaloupes into her purse after one afternoon tea. His uncle’s roasted potato recipe, which Harry begged him to reveal every week. Their sniggering over the endless suffering of the neighbourhood WhatsApp group. Life could just happen there; you didn’t have to force it. 

They spent a lot of time at galleries with no fee entry. They came to know their favourites, attend their openings, assuming roles as older, wealthier, involved. They found trinkets from the exhibitions to arrange in the flat. Harry knew he overdid them, but couldn’t help it. He adored watching the way Micah cut through the gallery floor, the way he could tune into the frequency of the art around them. Sometimes, the excitement was too much. Harry would come home from these days in the city, his eyes on stalks, his head in a sling of pain.

He would make good on his bad moods by massaging Micah, who tensed up when he felt Harry’s mood start to shift. Harry would oil up his back and shoulders with cheap lavender oil they found from a gift shop. Litres of the stuff stained their sheets and greased their hair and Harry worked his joints until they spasmed and relaxed. Sometimes they had sex. Sometimes they fell asleep. Mostly this was when they talked, when Micah was open, pliant, wanting.   

The White Cube gallery was showing an exhibition of Emma Hauck. As he scanned the robotic prose of the programme notes, Harry saw it was referred to as something called outsider art. This seemed like an oxymoron.

The notes said she was a German artist in the early 20th century. That she was committed to a psychiatric institution.

Her works were really just tightly packed letters of a single refrain repeated over and over, she was simply writing the same phrases, over and over, until her words blurred together with the force of a storm. The frenzy of her repetition, the ache of her refrain (“sweetheart, come”, “come darling”, or just “come”) eventually banished embarrassment until they soon gained the status of something like a prayer.

Harry read each refrain like it was new, his eyes following her looping scrawl until it blurred into a single pulsing shape, giving way to a storm of feeling. He surrendered to it as her words started to beat on the page. There was a pleasure in it, he thought, it was as though he could hear her saying these words into her ears, hear her cry, the one that could now be heard by everyone, apart from its addressee. Love, like any illness, is an altered state.

They had sex on their second date, drove home trancelike after holding hands on the hill, back to Harry’s house. He snuck Micah down the side like he had with one or two boys, boys with waxy tongues and thin lips, boys with round cheeks and bicep veins. He knew that Micah was beautiful, and his friends would tell him (‘It’s not that he’s good looking or handsome, you know, he’s beautiful’). Harry never thought about his own body. Not then. He was still adolescently self-conscious. The beads of sweat that formed too easily when they started to kiss (‘don’t laugh’). That spill of freckles coating every stretch of skin, parsing apart more sparingly only around his belly button. Micah stretched his palms across them, liked to feel his fingers across Harry’s taught belly, snatching a fistful of m skin, of his freckles, which he thought were beautiful, like the scattering of stars outside the borders of a galaxy. 

Harry’s room was lit only by the dull white of his neighbour’s courtyard lights casting everything in their pale glow. Harry flopped onto the bed, satisfied by the weak crumple of his cheap duvet. Standing still before it, Micah lingered, wanting at once to touch him, but also to clean slightly, to make nice; Harry cleaned only in bursts, an urgent weekly mission that would eclipse any other concern. But here, on a Thursday night, cups cluttered his desk, fragrances and skincare scattered across his bedside, Micah had to forgive him the mess, though he surprised himself by not minding so much, it felt lived in, it felt, in the smallest way, like home.

‘Come to bed’, said Harry, not lifting his face up from the mattress.

Wind bristled the curtains slightly through his open window, the one they had snuck through. Micah felt the first pinpricks of chill.

With a slight sigh he lifted off his jumper and decided to join Harry. 

Something like love crept over Micah, as he pulled the sheets up to his chest, a grin emerging from his toes, scanning up his body, lighting him from within. Harry was bristling beside him, alert to his longing, responding in his own way. Micah felt like a thief slowly unpicking the metallic click of a lock, and once open, breaking in. Micah kissed him on the cheek and there was no wine or fruit or sweeter thing than that kiss, the underside of his lip carrying away from his cheek some taste redolent with sea salt and body and man and sweetness.

Micah kissed his cheek again, hungry for the same taste, though his mouth was canny and would replicate it anyway, scenting the juices of his tongue all with him, baiting himself, like some creature from the deep, until Harry kissed him deeply on the mouth and the creature was released. He tasted like a new chemical. Micah wanted to catalogue it. He wanted to name whatever it was that was within Harry and pin it through its heart like a butterfly on a board, tour it, present it as a wonder. Look, he’d say, us humans aren’t all bad, look at this! 

When Harry started to experience the pain, he couldn’t name it. One day, Micah arrived home early from work, seeing Harry asleep in the dark on the sofa.

‘When did you get home?’ Micah asked as he closed the front door, which shifted a beacon of light onto the outline of Harry under their duvet. 

Harry couldn’t explain it. That he had been on his lunch break. That he stood up, mid-email, very slowly, as though his body was full of hot oil, as though it was swimming so quickly it was like his chest might start to glow. 

Before anyone could notice he had stepped outside. He saw his boss forking a cabbage slaw into her mouth from a polystyrene box, spilling the purple stuff on her lap. He saw a juddering crane stacking slats in the construction site around him. The world was big and scary, wasn’t it? Oh, and painful.

 Then he felt the sides of himself dissolve into the noise. And the world shrank to the size of a pinprick. 

Harry started to sweat at nights, soaking through his pyjamas and the sheets. He had joked that his cheap pair made him look like Peter Pan, with its childlike three-quarter shorts.

He soaked them through two or three times a night, waking ragged, running on fumes. 

A year or two of this. One night in bed, Harry turns over to see Micah’s outline. As his eyes adjust, he can see the outline of Micah’s hips in the moonlight jutting out of the blanket. He has always slept deeply. But he’s not asleep yet. 

Harry goes to say something. There’s the moment before he says anything where the air has already shifted, is already freighted with the weight of what his mouth is measuring. 

 ‘I’m just in pain.’

Micah makes a sound. It’s just a sound. Harry can’t make out whether it was meant to acknowledge him or to suggest his frustration.

Outside there is sound of the trees rustling, the distant sirens on the main street, and a low yet piercing ringing from somewhere.

‘You know that.’

The trees are constant, soothing.

‘I’m still yours.’ He taps the inside of his palm with the index finger, three times. I love you. Their thing. Cheesy. You never let anyone else close to things like this.

He is about to say something else but leaves it. 

Then he says it anyway.

‘I wasn’t always in pain.’

Micah’s mouth clicks. He feels closer to Harry now than he has in a long time. But he stays silent. 

Then, nothing. 

The trees, his tapping, silence. 

There were good days, beautifully normal days. There were moments they wanted to savour, that didn’t resemble the threadbare nights or the meagre feeling of the morning. The way Harry would say ‘so smart!’, rap his knuckles on Micah’s brain comically when he did something clever, like cooked his fish recipe, remembered a crossword answer, or the name of an obscure artist. ‘So smart!’

And Harry wouldn’t mind being thrust ahead at the lunches and cocktail parties, Micah’s finger invisibly prodding him forward to swallow the flotsam of people’s conversations. ‘You’re my human shield’, he’d say.

When they did the things they liked together, when they sang or talked or even when they gripped each other’s ghost-white hands during the turbulence they were both afraid of, they felt like custodians of the same soul, two bodies, one way of being in the world. 

One morning when Harry was leaving the house, there was a prickling, electrical sensation gripping his forehead, as though his head had been tightly wound in a vice overnight, as though the man in his dreams had pressed his boot into his mouth, holding his jaw open all night.   

Like usual, Micah reached out to swipe the shaving foam left coating the sides of his ears, but Harry flinched, in pain, and to Micah it looked like fear.

‘Gosh. So sensitive.’ For the first time there was a look of something other than fear or concern in his eyes. 

They left the house in a rush and when they got on the tube together the endless shuttering forward through stops felt like falling. 

They met not far from their old square. The restaurant was busy. Micah was glad, satisfied to be another person amongst these people. Harry was aching, happy to be out, even as the noise seemed to strip him like paint thinner. 

At their table, Harry found himself sizing Micah up like a stranger. His eyes took the measure of his hands, Micah’s habit of casting his eyes to the table while talking, as though speaking itself was trivial, as though the world revealed itself enough already. Harry loved his hands. 

As he admired them, it was like the years started to peel off them, and for a second, all their old stories hummed, taut, between them, electric lines. 

Micah took Harry in in fits and starts, wanting to understand how he was, but not wanting to absorb the full image. It was hard to swallow. Black bags weighed his eyes, meeting in the middle over the bridge of his nose, where a fallout of blackheads now clumped together. 

His speech was quick, which was nothing new, but for once the speed seemed to take something from him – he ached in giving it. His eyes still laughed and flitted about Micah’s face, scanning it quickly and lovingly, so much so that Micah made sure to steel himself against it. That milk-drunk feeling was so familiar and so good – it meant to take you with it. 

While Micah was talking, Harry felt himself modulating his features, arranging them in a way that was alive to each passing word. This was exhausting, of course, and meant that his expression was only ever a word behind what Micah was saying, his response always effortful but incorrect.

It was a Saturday night. They still didn’t have anywhere to be but with each other. Micah saw how small Harry made himself against the bench.

When they parted, they hugged briefly. Micah swung onto his bike parked just outside the restaurant, (‘You ride everywhere now?’ ‘Yup.’). Normally he could unlatch it fluidly – the gesture was suddenly difficult, as though people were scoring him. 

 ‘See you.’

 ‘Bye.’

They uttered a few more goodbyes. Micah looked back from his bike. He was already moving fast. Did Harry then give a wave? Was that a smile? He looked small. 

Micah followed his usual route, not bothering to turn to the ground floor apartments, their noise and their parties, the hum of life. 

A wild thought engulfed him. If he took his eyes off the road for a moment he would keel over, with a squeal of tires, the bloody spokes, even the gift of his white bones sluiced through a kneecap. He shuddered. He didn’t know why he thought of such things. 

He wanted to look around him and take in the surrounds. He would move soon, a month left at most in their lease, which he had taken over. He knew he ought to absorb it all. He glanced through the giant windows of the beautiful ground floor apartments, scanned the fat black cars sitting outside. Though he was not looking at them, he thought he was still heading in their direction. He was one of them. These people, these unknowns, they all played their roles so well—all he had to do was play his too. 

The sycamores left their trees, casting him in a fine brown dust, as the sunset erupted overhead, rolling over the treetops, and as he pedalled on, he found it beautiful and ugly all at once, the heat of the springtime like a gas, the atolls of orange above, and it was as though there were no democracy in the world, no balance in its elements, and as he felt the first shudders of this recognition he pushed forward, ferrying his body into the dusk.

The street was silent, and the silence was clean. He made sure to ride fast so the tears would slick cleanly off his skin. 

contemporary mental health quiet fiction relationships