Alex Barclay: Harm's Reach

Ingrid Prince realized that the white walls in every Prince family home created a diorama effect. People watched from the outside, studying, deducing, then leaving, even after brief encounters, with lasting judgements. Ingrid Prince, the beautiful, radiant wife! Robert Prince, the handsome, wealthy husband, a man of fine stock!

Oh, what they see... and don’t see.

Ingrid closed her eyes.

I am safe. I am safe. I am safe.

‘Close those beautiful cat eyes, Ingrid, and say it three times. “It” is wherever you want to take us. I am Tahiti. I am Tahiti. I am Tahiti. Then — bam! — eyes open — bam! — I shoot!’

She could hear Sandro Cera’s voice in her head as he stalked around her all those years ago. Handsome, talented, orphan, immigrant Sandro Cera, the rags-to-riches-and-back fashion photographer; Ingrid Prince, at his feet, blonde, tanned, extended on the white floor of a freezing studio in Brooklyn, shivering by a faulty space heater.

Camera in hand, Sandro would rise up onto the balls of his feet, crouch down, close in, create distance, his body twisting and turning as if he was the one to be captured.

Ingrid did as he asked, closed her eyes, used his three-times trick.

‘No lips moving!’ Sandro said. No leeps. ‘These are thoughts I’m talking about. Three times, sweets, three times: I am silent, I am silent, I am silent!’

‘My teeth are chattering is why my lips are moving!’ said brave, bold, new-girl Ingrid, just turned seventeen. ‘I’m fucking hypothermic... times three.’

Click flash click flash click flash. And the photo that made them both famous was the one that was taken just afterwards, as Ingrid laughed, her head thrown back, then forward, the lens capturing a warm and beautiful smile with no Brooklyn ice, just St Tropez, St Tropez, St Tropez.

It was a different world. It was New York in the Nineties — when they partied below ground and cauterized their hearts’ wounds with the fire of quick fucks. Sandro Cera had been dead years — a gradual, then sudden junkie demise. In the live art installation of Ingrid’s life, Sandro Cera was the lightbulb in the corner, flickering ominously, bound to blow.

Yet his was the advice she was now hearing.

Three times.

I am safe. I am safe. I am safe.

Ingrid looked around the Colorado rental. Even the temporary homes she sought refuge in were white-walled, sparsely furnished, neutral. When their SoHo loft was shot for an interiors magazine, the stylist pared it back even more, took pieces away. Pieces: furniture, paintings, sculptures, reality. How suddenly the landscape can change when its elements are plucked away.

Ingrid heard a noise at the front door. Light on her feet, she walked out into the long polished hallway. Her suitcases were at the end by the door: a set of five, olive green, edged in brown leather with accents of gold.

Now, there was banging at the door, hammering. Ingrid froze. The door burst open. She felt a rush of adrenaline.

This is not how it ends. This is not how it ends. This is not how it ends.

She backed into the kitchen, then turned, set to run for the French doors, but she could make out two dark figures standing there. Ingrid was briefly blindsided by her reflection in the glass.

She knew what she looked like to others. She knew what her husband looked like.

A Swedish proverb came to mind: Alla känner apan, men apan känner ingen.

Everyone knows the monkey, but the monkey knows no one.

Five weeks earlier...

Denver, Colorado

Special Agent Ren Bryce was sitting in an aisle seat of a three-star hotel conference room, primed to run. She was dressed in blue jeans, a white tank and gold strappy heels. Her dark hair was in a shiny ponytail, her makeup was for going out. Since she’d sat down, she had been twisting the silver-and-gold cuff on her narrow wrist, opening it and closing it. It was shaped like a lightning bolt.

I wonder does it work? Will it make me fly? Or zap people.

She looked around.

Men, women, no children, gathered in a beige room on a sticky Sunday night. Everyone so, so miserable.

There was a lectern in front with an A4 printout stuck to it that read: ‘Bipolar Support’.

Annnd so explains the misery.

Up ahead, a large lady moved awkwardly to the stage. She was wild-haired and makeup-free, except for the crazy shade of cherry on her lips. She looked as if she had dressed under pressure; grabbed a blouse and skirt from a peg in the hallway on her way out the door and slipped her feet into a pair of sandals she’d left in the garden.

‘Partying...’ she began.

Oh, dear God, do not laugh at this poor woman whose only parties may have been Twilight -themed.

The speaker continued: ‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘Before I start, I should say that tonight I am going to talk about mania.’

This will be good...

Ren checked her watch. She was here only because her boss had told her to come.

There’s a first time for everything, Gary Dettling, and a last time. In this particular instance, they are one and the same.

Gary Dettling had been her boss in the Undercover Program and also her case agent on the deep cover investigation that nearly destroyed her. She had done a dazzling job, though. Her investigation was the exemplary one, the one still used in UC training. Ren’s own boyfriend, Ben Rader, had studied her case. But the official story didn’t include the part where, within months of finishing the investigation, the exemplary agent was diagnosed bipolar. Ren had yet to talk him through that bonus feature.

She looked around the room at the ordinariness of everyone.

What could any of you know about what it’s like to be me?

The woman at the lectern continued: ‘Imagine telling someone who has been at a spectacular week-long party that the next night, they have to be in bed by ten p.m. As they are dancing on a table, laughing, swigging from a vodka bottle, surrounded by friends, new and old, you tell them that, really, they should stop. This feeling, this amazing feeling is not good.

‘As you reach out to prise the bottle from their hand, they will see you as reaching inside their soul to switch off a light. And they will claw at your hand to stop you, and as they do, they will look into your eyes with one of two things: an anger so intense that it could take your breath away, or a hurt so deep that it could break your heart. Who are you to take away their high? You are supposed to love them, you are supposed to value their happiness above all else.

‘And the following will happen: they will attack, and it will hurt. It will hurt.’ She looked up at the crowd. ‘Face the manic, face the consequences. Poop the party, prepare to be pooped on.’

I need to get out of here. This is wildly accurate.

Ren bent down to grab her purse from the floor. She caught sight of the little orange bottle of mood stabilizers inside.

Five months. Yay... great to have you on the show...

‘And as your loved one attacks,’ the speaker was saying, ‘and as the pain rips through you, they will further your pain by turning to someone else instead. Who can they find to party with when you won’t? Who can they spend all their money with? Maybe all your money. Who can they have all that sex with? Not you. You are pathetic. You are a nag. You want them to be miserable. You just want to control them. That’s all you want. You don’t really love them. You are now the enemy.’