I dream of blood, spreading and pooling and soaking me. I am kneeling in the blood – trying to stop it – but I can’t. It soaks my pyjamas. It spreads across the bleached wood floor …
And that’s when I wake up.
For a second I just lie there with my heart pounding in my chest and my eyes adjusting to the dim night-lights of the room. I have a raging thirst and a pain in my bladder.
There’s a plastic cup on the locker, just by my head, and with a huge effort I reach out and hook one trembling finger around the rim, pulling it towards myself. It tastes flat and plasticky, but my God, drinking never felt so good. I drain it dry and then let my head flop back on the pillow with a jar that sets stars dancing in the dim light.
For the first time I realise there are leads coming out from under the sheets, connecting me to some kind of monitor, its flickering screen sending dim green shadows across the room. One of the leads is attached to a finger on my left hand and when I lift it up I see to my surprise that my hand is scratched and bloodied, and my already bitten nails are broken.
I remember … I remember a car … I remember stumbling across broken glass … one of my shoes had come off …
Beneath the sheets I rub my feet together, feeling the pain in one, and the swollen bulge of a dressing on the other. And across my shins … I can feel the stretch and pull of some kind of surgical tape across one leg.
It’s only when my hand strays to my shoulder, my right shoulder, that I wince and look down.
There’s a vast spreading bruise coming out from beneath the hospital gown, running down my arm. When I shrug my shoulder out of the neckline I can see a mass of purple spreading out from a dark swollen centre, just above my armpit. What could make such an odd, one-sided bruise? I feel like the memory is hovering just beyond my fingertips – but it remains stubbornly out of reach.
Have I had an accident? A car accident? Was I … was I attacked?
Painfully, I slide my hand beneath the sheets and run my palm across my belly, my breasts, my side. My arms are slashed with cuts but my body seems OK. I put my hand to my thighs, feel between my legs. There’s some kind of thick nappy-thing, but no pain. No cuts. No bruises on the inside of my thighs. Whatever happened, it wasn’t that.
I lie back and shut my eyes, tired – tired of trying to remember, tired of being afraid – and the syringe driver clicks and whirrs and suddenly nothing seems as important any more.
It is just as I’m drifting off to sleep that an image comes to me: a shotgun, hanging on a wall.
And suddenly I know.
The bruise is a recoil bruise. At some point in the recent past, I have fired a gun.
5
‘FLO,’ I STUCK my head around the kitchen door. Flo was loading the dishwasher with cups. ‘Oh, you shouldn’t be doing that all by yourself. Can I help?’
‘No! Don’t be silly. It’s done.’ She slammed the dishwasher shut. ‘What is it? Anything I can help with? I’m so sorry about the coffee.’
‘What? Oh – honestly, it’s fine. Listen, I was just wondering, what time did you say Clare was due to get here?’
‘About six I think.’ She looked up at the kitchen clock. ‘So we’ve got an hour and a half to kill.’
‘OK, well I was just wondering – have I got time to go for a quick run?’
‘A run?’ She looked startled. ‘Well, I guess – but it’s getting dark.’
‘I won’t go far. It’s just—’ I shifted awkwardly. I couldn’t explain it to her. I have trouble explaining it to myself, but I had to get out, get away.
I run almost every day at home. I have about four different routes, variations going through Victoria Park in fine weather or street runs when it’s wet or dark. I give myself a couple of days off a week – they say you should, to let your muscles repair – but sooner or later the need builds up and then I have to run. If I don’t, I get … I don’t know what you’d call it. Cabin fever, maybe. A kind of claustrophobia. I hadn’t run yesterday – I’d been too busy packing and tying up loose ends – and now I felt a powerful itch to get out of this box-like house. It’s not about the physical exercise – or at least, it’s not only that. I’ve tried running in a gym, on a treadmill, and it’s not the same. It’s about getting out, not having walls around myself, being able to get away.
‘I guess you’ve got time,’ Flo said, glancing out the window at the deepening twilight, ‘but you’d better be quick. When it gets dark here it gets really, really dark.’
‘I’ll be quick. Is there a route I should go for?’
‘Hmm … I think your best bet would be to take the forest path down— Hang on, come through to the living room.’ She led me through and pointed out of the huge window-wall to a shadowy gap in the forest. ‘See, that’s a footpath. It leads down through the wood to the main road. It’ll be firmer and less muddy than the drive – much easier to run. You just follow it down until you hit tarmac, but then I’d turn right along the main road and come back up the drive – it’ll be too dark by then to run back through the forest, the path isn’t fenced and you could end up going in totally the wrong direction. Hang on,’ she went back to the kitchen, rummaged in a drawer and pulled out something that looked like a set of badly folded suspenders. ‘Take this – it’s a head-torch.’
I thanked her, and hurried up to my room to pull on my running gear and trainers. Nina was lying on her bed, looking up at the ceiling and listening to something on her iPhone.
‘That Flo’s quite the fruitloop, isn’t she?’ she said conversationally as I came in, pulling out her earphones.
‘Is that a medical term, Dr da Souza?’
‘Yes. From the Latin Fruitus Lupus, fruit of the moon, associated with the pagan belief that insanity was connected to bathing in the light of the full moon.’
I began laughing as I pulled off my jeans and yanked on my thermal running leggings and top.
‘Lupus is Latin for wolf. You’re thinking of luna. Where are my trainers? I left them by the door.’
‘I chucked them under the bed. Anyway, werewolves turn crazy at the full moon. Same diff. Speaking of crazy, are you going out?’
‘Yes.’ I bent to look under the bed. There were my trainers, miles underneath. Thanks, Nina. I knelt and began fishing with my arm, my voice muffled by the bedclothes as I asked, ‘Why?’
‘Let me see.’ She began ticking off the reasons on her fingers. ‘It’s dark, you don’t know the neighbourhood, there’s free wine and food downstairs – oh, and did I mention it’s pitch fucking black outside?’
‘It’s not pitch-black.’ I looked out of the window as I tied my trainer laces. It was pretty dark, but it wasn’t pitch-black. The sun had set but the sky was clear and still illuminated by a diffuse pearly-grey light in the west, and a round white moon rising from the trees in the east. ‘And it’s going to be a full moon, so it won’t be that dark even after the sun sets properly.’
‘Oh really, Miss Leonora “I’ve lived in London for the past eight years and never strayed more than fifty yards from a streetlamp in all that time” Shaw?’
‘Really.’ I double-knotted the trainers and stood up straight. ‘Don’t give me grief, Nina, I’ve got to get out or I really will go crazy, moon or no moon.’
‘Huh. You’re finding it that bad?’
‘No.’
But I was. I couldn’t explain why. I couldn’t tell Nina how it had made me feel, having strangers picking over my past with Clare downstairs, like someone picking at the edges of a half-healed wound. I’d made a mistake in coming – I knew that now. But I was stuck here, car-less, until Nina chose to go.
‘No, I’m fine. I just want to get out. Now. See you in an hour.’
I set off down the stairs, with her mocking laugh following me as I slammed out the door.
‘You can run … but you can’t escape!’
Out in the forest I took a breath of the clean, crisp air and began to warm up. I stretched my limbs against the garage, looking out into the forest. The sense of menace, nearing claustrophobia, that I’d had inside had gone. Was it the glass? The feeling that anyone could be out there, looking in, and we’d never know it? Or was it the strange anonymity of the rooms that made me think of of social experiments, of hospital waiting rooms?