Significance by Jo Mazelis

markets were held and she would buy pictures, mirrors, old tin toys, vintage clothes.
    Back in her room she had unwrapped the bowl and put it on the chest of drawers and filled it with the fruit she’d bought, then she sat on the bed to admire it. She remembered, distantly and a little indistinctly, a postcard a friend had sent her long ago: a painting of a Japanese doll seated on a large round dining table, an ivory - coloured box with a duck - egg blue lining behind the doll and other objects scattered nearby. And the room beyond, with its small window, was painted in tones so muted it almost became a flat plane of mere smudges, as if the room had been invaded by a dense fog. For a long time Lucy had kept that card propped up on a mantelpiece in a room in a shared house in Glasgow. Then, between one thing and another, moving to another house, going home to her parents, her ‘breakdown’, the postcard had been lost. It was there in the background in a snapshot she’d taken of three friends posing in absurd fancy dress before they’d set out for the street party. They’d all taken magic mushrooms that night and their expressions were exaggerated, crazy, the little picture of the Japanese doll the only sober and steady thing in the room. Then it was lost and she could not remember who had painted it.
    She got off the bed and took a peach from the bowl, bit in. Sweet perfumed juice poured over her hand and dripped down her chin.
    Sight, smell, touch, taste; all these senses were filled. Only her ears were denied in this orgy of pleasure, the near silence of the room could be, at times, quite maddening.
    And so, out.

    She has drunk quite a bit; red wine, a glass of Pastis with water, more red wine, a brandy, an espresso and now here in front of her on the table another brandy, half of it already in her stomach.
    She gazes at the double seat opposite, dirty mustard - coloured leatherette, a mirror image of the one she is sitting on. When she has left the café the two will reflect one another more perfectly without the interruption of her form.
    She is thinking too much, too deeply, too drunkenly. She remembers other times when her mind seemed to hone in on a subject, to shine upon it brightly, to seek and find illumination. Then darkness. As when she was working on an essay on the Scottish designer and architect, Charles Rennie Mackintosh.
    Form and function were part of it, which she had vaguely been aware of as she began to write her essay. That’s the funny thing, her life as she looks at it is bisected by Charles Rennie and his furniture and architecture. He didn’t really cause her to have a breakdown, he just happened to be there at the exact centre of it. He was all around her too, anyone studying art in Glasgow was in his thrall as he’d designed the building.
    She can remember the sense of being both connected to the world and outside of it. Aware of dazzling beauty while being terrorised by it.
    A friend, Noel, had been giving her big white capsules which he filched from his parents’ house. He told her they helped you focus your mind, gave you all this energy and allowed you to stay up all night and oh, yes, an extra bonus for chicks (his words) you’d lose weight too. Lose weight and lose your mind.
    She did both.
    Her life before. Her life after.
    Once you have gone mad, had a breakdown, stared into the abyss, you are always afraid it will happen again. But will you know?
    And if you decide to go on holiday alone, to dye your hair blonde and buy a whole new wardrobe of clothes, does this mean you are going mad? No, of course not. It was a form of renewal. Of rebirth. It was healthy. Invigorating.
    If Thom walked in here now, Lucy thought, if somehow, by some weird chain of coincidence he happened to come to France, to this town, and this bar, he would not recognise me. He would stare at me. He wouldn’t be able to stop himself. And he would desire me. There would be