Mad About You

by Mhairi McFarlane

“It was like the way people talk about loved ones in an addiction spiral. The addicts pass a point where you can’t help them, they won’t let you.

All you can do is watch and wait and hope to God they decide to save themselves. It made me truly understand what it means to feel helpless.”

All we really have is warning each other. Who am I, if I don’t warn this woman? Ultimately, it’s as much for me as for her. If

If I don’t do it, Lorna, then I’m still scared of him. That’s just a fact.”

She hated Scott with a force she’d never known.

Harriet never had her day in court, metaphorically or otherwise. He got the last word.

wasn’t myself yet, if you know what I mean: I was a bundle of ideas and intentions, untried and untested.

Charisma to spare. He was the leader of his pack, wreathed in a special aura, the kind of character who blazes through life like a comet.

His embrace like a cage, staking a claim. Me thinking that his possession is my paradise. We

I craved his approval like a drug, and I never knew when he’d throw me into sudden withdrawal.

started to change. Adapt to survive. I became withdrawn, tense, on edge.

Making you mistrust everyone else but them, is power.

I had learned to treat the earth as if it were full of land mines, and pick my way gingerly through it.

It had been perfect, and somehow, I had ruined it.

Our lives were ruled by his moods.

He said losing both my parents young had left me with deep problems, and because I’d not been to therapy, my unresolved issues were being taken out mercilessly on him. “You

he turned the death of my parents into another weapon. Now we call it “gaslighting,”

If someone who loved me this much, and seen me at my most vulnerable, thought my soul was disfigured and ugly, then it must be.

They don’t understand you’ve become accomplice as well as victim.

“What’s going on at home, are you all right? Is he mistreating you?”

That I seemed to spend all my time with his friends and “doing what he wants.”

“He’s always with you, not like he’s accompanying you, but shadowing you, watching over you.”

I’d texted to tell him and got no response, which was a clear warning I’d pay for it. To this day, if someone forgets to reply to a message, I get that icy feeling in my gut, thinking they’re furious with me.

If you genuinely cared, you’d stop doing stuff like this.”

“I do care.” “You always say you do, and your actions prove different.”

Soon turning thirty, in a relationship with someone who spoke to me in a way that alarmed and repulsed a younger woman.

“This is over. I don’t want to carry on. If you can move out today, I’ll pay this month’s rent.”

He was an emotional terrorist but not violent, there weren’t going to be threats to my safety.

He wasn’t the love of my life; he was an abuser. To confuse the two things seemed impossible.

I didn’t care. I really didn’t care. I was free.

The thing with abusers is they’re a percentage of a nice person.

If the nice percentage is the only part their friends ever see, they don’t know he’s other things as well.

Scott is a showman, and a con artist. His friends don’t realise that they’re part of the show, and the con.

Then I saw you, and it was like seeing a past version of myself, seeing myself the way others must’ve once seen me.

when I saw you, outside the reception, it was like you were sticking your head out of water to gasp a breath. I know that feeling.

“If I can get over what happened, then you certainly can,” Kit said. “That’s not how human beings work.”

Kristina just wants to know she could have me back, if she wanted. It’s all a power struggle for dominance, all the time.”

I finally came to my senses at the point of no return.

I never wanted to be near her again, let alone marry her.”

“The universe had already offered me a respectable and eminently intelligent moment to walk away.

‘Look, mate, you don’t have to do this, you know.’

think it boils down to this. Kit is a narcissist. She wanted to bait Seb, to see if he’d turn up on her big day, witness her marry his rival. She thrives on inhabiting a diva spotlight.”

She didn’t think I’d have the nerve to walk out.”

“She’d designed a trap. Like Jon did with my proposal,”

Truth be told, I’ve stopped trying to work out how she thinks.

“Remember being bright, shiny, and hopeful about love and relationships, thinking we’d not make the same messes our parents’ generation did?”

know you won’t believe me, but my encouragement is nonexistent. I’ve got no appetite for any of it,” he said.

Whenever they chatted, he made her laugh. He managed to be always upbeat without ever being unserious.

She lay there feeling hurt, and foolish, and, when those emotions abated, also angry.

He had tricked her into thinking they had a connection, even a spark. Why exploit someone like that? What was the point?