1
Now
My heart is beating so fast it’s going to trip over itself and stop. Everything is hot and dark. I’ve been buried alive. I’m already dead.
I have just enough grip on reality to discard these notions, but it doesn’t quell my horror. My mouth is dry, strange and sour, my tongue as thick as carpet. Alcohol-heavy breath drags itself out of my throat, the scent of it churning my stomach. I’m pickled in sweat. And there’s an arm across my chest, a leg across my legs. I am manacled in flesh.
god, god, fuck, god, fuck
My body is far too loud. Blood roaring, heart thundering, breath screaming, stomach raging, head pounding.
I’m going to have a full-blown panic attack.
The first in a long time. Except that’s not much consolation.
Where am I? What have I…
out, fuck, have to get out
I twist away from the arm and the leg, rolling off a bare mattress onto bare floorboards. Maybe my first instinct was right. I am dead and this is hell. The darkness scrapes against my eyes. Where are the rest of my clothes?
And breathe, I need to breathe more. Or breathe less. Stop the light show in my head. My vision sheets red and black, like a roulette wheel spinning too fast, never stopping.
god, fuck, clothes
Scattered somewhere in the void. Trousers, shirt, waistcoat, jacket, a single sock. My fingers close over my phone. A cool, calming talisman.
Half-dressed, everything else bundled in my arms, I ease open the door, dark spilling into dark and, like Orpheus, I’m looking back. The shadows move across his face, but he doesn’t stir. He sleeps the perfect, heedless sleep of children, drunkards, and fools.
My footsteps creak along a narrow hallway of peeling paintwork and I let myself out onto a wholly unfamiliar street.
***
Next
Breathe, just keep breathing. Keep breathing, and get away.
I stumbled down the pavement, the awfulness of this—this and everything—hanging off my shoulders like a rucksack full of rocks.
Still no idea where I was. Suburbia spiralling away in all directions. And, at the horizon, a haze of pale light where the distant sea met the distant sky. I fumbled for my phone. 3:41.
god, fuck, god
There was a single blip of battery left. I called Niall. He didn’t answer. So I called again. And this time he did. I didn’t wait for him to speak.
“I don’t know where I am.” My voice rang too high even in my own ears.
“Ash?” Niall sounded strange. “What do you mean? Where are you?”
“I just said. I don’t know. I… I’ve been stupid. I need to get home.”
I couldn’t control my breathing. The most basic of human functions and even that was beyond me.
“Can’t you call a cab?”
“Yes…no… I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know the number. What if it doesn’t come? I don’t know.” Anxieties were swimming around inside me like jellyfish, but I was usually better at not confessing them aloud.
It hadn’t occurred to me to get a taxi, but even the idea of it seemed overwhelming in its magnitude. A quagmire of potential disaster that was utterly terrifying.
“Can you come and get me?” I asked.
Later I would see how pathetic it was, my desperate pleading, the weasel thread of manipulative weakness running through my words. Later, I would remember that calling for a taxi was an everyday event, not an ordeal beyond reckoning. Later, yes, later I would drown in shame and hate myself.
Niall’s hollow sigh gusted over the line. “Oh God, Ash, can’t you—”
“No, no, I can’t. Please, I need to go home.”
A pause. Then the inevitable, “Okay, okay, I’m coming. Can you at least find a street sign? Give me some idea where you are?”
Phone clutched in my sweat-slick hand, I ran haphazard along the houses. The curtains were shut as tight as eyes.
“Marlborough Street,” I said. “Marlborough Street.”
“All right. I’ll be there. Just… I’ll be there.”
I sat down on a wall to wait, irrational panic eventually giving way to a dull pounding weariness. There was a packet of cigarettes in my jacket pocket. I wasn’t supposed to have cigarettes, but I was already so fucked that I lit one, grey smoke curling lazily into the grey night.
Don’t drink, don’t smoke, don’t forget to take your medication, don’t break your routine. Nobody had ever explicitly said, “Don’t have casual sex with strange men in unfamiliar cities,” but it was probably covered in the “Don’t have any fun ever” clause. The truth was, casual sex was about the only sex I could stand these days. On my own terms, when I could control everything. And myself.
But tonight I’d broken all the rules and I was going to pay the price. I could feel it, the slow beat of water against the crumbling cliffs of my sanity. I was going to crash. I was going to crash so hard and deep it would feel as though there was nothing inside me but despair. The cigarette, at least, might hold it off until I got home.
I lost track of time, my nerves deadened with nicotine and my skin shivering with cold. But, eventually, Niall pulled up, and leaned across the seats to thrust open the passenger door.
“Come on,” he said.
He was shirtless and tousled, a pattern of dark red bruise-kisses running from elbow to shoulder.
“I’m sorry.” I stamped out my cigarette (how many had I smoked?) and climbed in.
He didn’t reply, just shifted gears abruptly and drove off. I rested my head against the window, watching the streets of Brighton blurring at the corners of my eyes. The motorway, when we came to it, was nothing but a streak of moving darkness.
Niall’s fingers were tapping a tense rhythm against the steering wheel. He’d known me since university, back when I was different. We’d been friends, lovers, partners, and now this. Pilgrim and burden.
“I’m sorry,” I tried again.
Silence filled up the car, mingling with the darkness.
“You can’t keep doing this to me,” Niall said, finally. “You’re…it’s…ruining my life.”
“You seem to be doing a pretty good job of ruining your own.” I turned away from the window. Touched a piece of shadow on his upper arm that might have been a mark. “I suppose you were with Max.”
I’d never meant to hurt to Niall. It had just been inevitable that I would. In some ways, that only made it worse, as though I’d been careless with something precious. The truth was, sometimes I found it hard to even like him anymore. He’d seen me at my worst, but that only made me feel resentful and ashamed, as if the memories of a thousand mortifications were lurking behind his eyes like a swarm of silver fish.