At last the plate was empty and I sat and waited for someone to come and collect it.
And waited.
And waited.
Time is very elastic—that’s the first thing you realize in a situation without light, without a clock, without any way of measuring the length of one second over the length of another. I tried counting—counting seconds, counting my pulse—but I got to two thousand and something and lost count.
My head ached, but it was the weak shiveriness in my limbs that worried me more. At first I thought it was low blood sugar, and then, after I’d eaten, I started to worry that perhaps there had been something in the food, but now I began to count back, to try to work out when the last time was that I’d taken my pills.
I remembered popping one out of the packet right after seeing Nilsson on Monday morning. But I hadn’t actually taken it. Something—some stupid need to prove that I wasn’t chemically dependent on these innocent little white dots—had stopped me. Instead, I’d left it on the countertop, not quite able to bring myself to down it, not quite wanting to throw it away.
I hadn’t been intending to stop. Just to show . . . I don’t know what. That I was in charge I guess. A little, pointless “fuck you” to Nilsson.
But then the argument with Ben had driven it from my mind. I’d gone off to the spa without taking it, and then the episode with the shower . . .
That made it . . . I couldn’t quite work it out. At least forty-eight hours since I’d had a dose. Maybe more like sixty hours. The thought was uncomfortable. Actually, more than uncomfortable. It was terrifying.
I had my first panic attack when I was . . . I don’t know. Thirteen maybe? Fourteen? I was a teenager. It came . . . and went, leaving me frightened and freaked-out, but I never told anyone. It seemed like something only a weirdo would get. Everyone else walked through life without shaking and finding themselves unable to breathe, right?
For a while it was okay. I did my GCSEs. Started my A levels. It was around then that things started to get really shaky. The panic attacks came back. First, one. Then a couple. After a while, it seemed like coping with anxiety had become a full-time business, and the walls began to close around me.
I saw a therapist, several in fact. There was the “talking cure” person my mum picked out of the phone book, a serious-faced woman with glasses and long hair who wanted me to reveal some dark secret that would be the key to unlocking all this, except I didn’t have one. For a while I thought about making one up—just to see if it would make me feel better. But my mum got annoyed with her (and with her bills) before I could come up with a really good story.
There was the hip young community support leader, with his group of young girls who ran the gamut of problems, from anorexia to self-harm. And finally there was Barry, the cognitive behavioral therapist that my GP provided, who taught me to breathe, and count, and left me with a lifelong allergy to balding men with soft, supportive tenor voices.
None of them worked for me, though. Or none of them worked completely. But I kept it together enough to get through my exams, and then I went away to university and I felt a bit better, and it seemed like maybe all that—that stuff—was something I’d grow out of, like *NSYNC, and cherry lip gloss. That I’d leave behind, in my old bedroom at my parents’ house, along with all my other childhood baggage. Uni was pretty great. When I left, with my shiny new degree, I felt ready to take on the world. I met Ben, and I got a job at Velocity and my own place in London, and everything seemed to be falling into place.
And that was when I fell apart.
I tried to come off the pills once. I was at a good place in my life, I was over Ben (oh my God, I was so over Ben). My GP lowered the dose to twenty milligrams a day, then ten, and then, since I was coping pretty well, to ten milligrams every other day, and finally I stopped.
I lasted two months before I cracked, and by that time I had lost thirty pounds and was in danger of losing my job at Velocity, although they didn’t know why I’d stopped coming into the office. At last, Lissie called my mum, and she marched me back to the GP, who shrugged and said that maybe it was withdrawal, and maybe it just wasn’t the right time for me to come off. He put me back on forty milligrams a day—my original dose—and I felt better almost within days. We agreed to try again another time—and somehow that time never came.
Now was not the right time. Not here. Not shut in a steel box six feet below sea level.
I tried to remember how long it had taken last time—how long it had been before I started to feel really, really shitty. It hadn’t been that long, from what I could recall. Four days? Maybe less.
In fact I could feel the panic begin to prickle over my skin in little cold electric shocks.
You’ll die here.
No one will know.
Oh God. Oh God oh God oh God oh God oh—
There was a sound at the door and I stopped. Stopped everything—stopped breathing, thinking, panicking—I sat, frozen, my back against the bunk. Should I pounce? Attack?
The door handle began to turn.
My heart was pounding in my throat. I stood up and backed away against the far wall. I knew I should fight—but I couldn’t, not without knowing who was coming through that door.
Pictures flashed through my head. Nilsson. The chef in his latex gloves. The girl in the Pink Floyd T-shirt, a knife in her hand.
I swallowed.
And then a hand snaked through the gap and grabbed the plate, quick as blinking, and the door slammed shut. The light went out, plunging the cabin into inky blackness so thick I could taste it.
Fuck.
There was nothing I could do. I lay there in the impenetrable darkness for what felt like hours but might have been days, or minutes, drifting in and out of consciousness, hoping each time I opened my eyes to see something, even just a thin line of light in the corridor, something that would prove I was really here, that I really existed and wasn’t just lost in some hell of my own imagining.
At last I must have fallen properly asleep, for I awoke with a jump, and my heart thumping and fluttering erratically in my chest. The cabin was still in complete darkness, and I lay there, shaking and sweating, holding on to the bunk like a life raft as I clawed my way back from the most horrible dream I could remember in a long time.
In the dream, the girl in the Pink Floyd T-shirt was in my cabin. It was dark, but somehow in the darkness I could . . . not exactly see her, but sense her. I just knew that she was there, standing in the middle of the cabin, and I couldn’t move, the darkness pressing me down, like a living thing, squatting on my chest. She came closer, and closer, until she was standing just inches away, the T-shirt skimming the tops of her long, slim thighs.
She smiled, and then with one sinuous movement she pulled off the shirt. Beneath it she was skinny as a whippet, all ribs and collarbone and jutting pelvis, her elbow joints wider than her forearms, her wrists knobbly as a child’s. She looked down at herself, and then she pulled off her bra, slow as a striptease, except there was nothing erotic about it, nothing sexy about her small, shallow breasts and the hollow of her stomach.
But as I lay on the bunk, panting, paralyzed with fear, she didn’t stop there. She kept stripping. Her knickers slipped from her narrow hips to form a puddle at her feet. And then her hair, yanking it out by the roots. Then she pulled off her eyebrows, first one, and then the other, and her lips. She let her nose drop to her feet. She drew out her fingernails, one by one, slowly, like a woman loosening her evening gloves, and let them fall with a slight clatter to the floor, followed by her teeth, click . . . click . . . click, one after another. And finally—and most horribly—she began to peel away her skin, as if she were stepping out of a tight-fitting evening dress, until she was just a bloody streak, muscle and bone and sinew, like a skinned rabbit.
She went down on all fours and began to crawl towards me, her lipless mouth spread wide in a horrible parody of a smile.
Closer and closer she crawled, until at last, though I backed away, I came up against the rear wall of the bunk and could retreat no farther.
I felt my breath whimper in my throat. I tried to speak, but I was dumb. I tried to move, but I was frozen with fear.
She opened her mouth, and I knew that she was about to speak—but then she reached inside, and pulled out her own tongue.