Free Girl in the Dark by Anna Lyndsey Page A

fridge for two days—should I eat it?”
    “Yes, hello,” she says. “This is the Chicken Advisory Service speaking.” The Advisory Service always gives clear and definitive advice.
    At his work, Pete was taught a mantra on a health and safety course: “Think ‘what if,’ not ‘if only,’ ” and I do. Caution infects all my movements now, and all my small decisions in the black and in the gloom.
    And I must not get pregnant.
    Now there is something that does not worry the SAS.

Telephone Friends
    I have got to know other people in the strange club of the chronically ill. I have friends I talk to on the phone but have never met; friends who are at home during the day, at home, in fact, nearly all of the time. Like me, they had a life before that has been lost; now they wander in the twilight zone where doctors diagnose but cannot cure, and the faint miasma of societal suspicion, never attached to those with cancer, or with heart disease, hangs about them, that somehow it must all be psychosomatic, or that at a deep level they actually want to be ill.
    How did we find each other? Bizarrely, the EuropeanUnion is mostly responsible: its plan for a compulsory switch to compact fluorescent light bulbs in homes and offices—in fact, everywhere—causes deep concern among people with a range of health conditions who find these bulbs give them painful and severe reactions. (Not everyone with a particular condition is affected this way—nothing so elegant, helpful or uncomplicated—just a subset, in each case.) Trying to find out what is happening, discussing how to influence UK MPs (mostly lovely and supportive) and the European Commission (the equivalent, it will sadly turn out, of smashing your face against granite), and sharing information about possible alternatives that may not be banned, I speak to people with ME and lupus and other conditions, and we put each other in touch with more.
    With some, I just talk about light bulbs, and that is the end of the matter. With others, I start off talking about light bulbs, and we end up talking about our shared experience of falling away from the normal, about books and families and politics and ideas; we keep on talking.
    My telephone friends speak of pain, debility and nausea, of fatigue and fog in the brain—but in absolute terms, their activities, unfouled by the darkness, are less restricted than my own.
    Down the telephone wires my friends give me massive transfusions of life. I come off the phone, every time, more cheerful than before.

Tales of Telephone Friends 1: Véronique
    Véronique is one telephone friend whom I did know in person in the life before. I met her when she came from France to study for a year in the UK. Always a brilliant girl, in the league tables so favoured by the French, she invariably finished high, receiving the best marks in the country for her baccalaureate and hoping for an elevated position in the national examination which must be taken by all, in France, who wish to work in museums.
    Fascinated by objects since her childhood, Véronique specialised in the art of the Pacific Islands. But her curatorial dreams were destroyed by long spells of depression, which then began to alternate with manic crises. She became familiar with the insides of psychiatric institutions, and was eventually diagnosed with bipolar disease.
    “This morning I have been to see my shrink,” Véronique says, on the telephone. “The appointment is only fifteen minutes, so one has to talk very fast. He is not ideal, my shrink, but he is the only behaviourist in my city.”
    I ask Véronique if there are charities in France that support people with mental health problems.
    “There is a charity to support the
relatives
of people with mental health problems,” Véronique says, “to help them cope with the stigma.” She often talks about her dilemma, as she tries to meet new people, over what sheshould tell them about her condition. Merely to admit that she is not