Afterwards I dream. There is a woman lying on a slab. She is very pale, her skin tinged blue. It is me, and I cannot move. My eyes are open but I can’t speak or turn my head. I can sense someone is approaching and even though I summon up all my energy I cannot even blink. Then they are standing over me, and I think, Oh, it’s me, only it’s not. Not quite. Her nose is slightly the wrong shape and her eyebrows are too arched. She looks as though someone has tried to draw me from memory, like there is a vital piece of me missing. The me-woman looks worried and is lacing her hands together, pumping at my chest. I’m not dead, I try to say. Can’t you see, I’m not dead? But no words come out of my mouth and now she is bending over me, pinching my nose closed. I can feel her fingers against me, her breath against my cheek. She smells bad, and when she exhales into my mouth, it tastes like the deep sea; a thick, dark breath. She moves back from me and I can see something hanging from her mouth and I still can’t speak, still can’t lift my hands. She is searching my face, hands tracing the lines of my nose, and then her hands move to her own face and find her mouth. I watch in immobile horror as her fingers grasp the thing hanging from her mouth and at first I thought it was a slick of brown drool, but now she is closer I can see it is seaweed, a long strand, and she is pulling it from between her lips like a ribbon and it keeps coming, it keeps coming. I can see the sheen of it in the mortuary lights overhead and I want to scream and still she pulls out more and more, clots of it, of seaweed, as though it has been stuffed by the fistful into her mouth and someone is saying my name, over and over, and shaking my shoulders.
When I finally wake, slowly, grudgingly, I see Carmel and Marco standing over me. I am home, in our flat, and Carmel is crying. Marco has his head in his hands. There is a strong, bitter smell, and I cannot move. When I open my mouth I make a thick gurgling sound – wuh, wuh – and Carmel tells me not to speak.
‘Oh, Stella, oh, Stella,’ she is saying. I close my eyes. I don’t know what has happened, but all I want to do is sleep. Why won’t they let me sleep?
I open my eyes again. There is a paramedic standing over me, handsome and young-looking, clean-shaven. The room is pulsing with a blue light. He is attaching something to the back of my hand, an intravenous line. I stare at it, at Carmel, Marco. My front is sticky and when I put my hand to it my fingers come away red. I feel a needle of fear. I try to sit up.
‘Am I dying?’ I ask, and the paramedic replies, ‘Not now, you’re not.’
Later, in the hospital, I lie on my side. I have a dextrose solution being fed into my vein through a cannula on my arm. I am not on the ward: I am in a small curtained-off cubicle in A&E. It is busy, chaotic. When the nurse comes to see me her rubber-soled shoes squeak on the floor. She looks me up and down, briskly. I notice Carmel is in the chair a little to my right. I don’t know how long she’s been there. She has been crying, I can see. There is a pile of shredded tissue in her lap. Her hands are limp, her complexion dull. It reminds me of the dream I had, that strange woman who had looked so much like me.
‘How are we feeling, Stella?’ the nurse asks.
I tell her my throat is killing me. She nods, explains that the intubation was necessary to stop me choking on my own vomit. I look over at Carmel but she won’t meet my eyes. And where is Marco? I feel like I am dying. I ask for water and the nurse hands me a tiny plastic cup. Tells me to sip.
‘There will be some pain for a while in your throat, and maybe in your stomach. You need rest and fluids. You have a good friend here looking after you.’ She indicates Carmel, who doesn’t smile. ‘Make sure you don’t drink that too fast. There’s a jug here if you need more.’
‘What time is it?’ I croak.
Carmel looks at her watch. ‘Four fifteen.’
‘In the morning?’
She nods. Her hands are folded into her lap. They are usually so animated, full of life, gesturing as she speaks. It worries me, this limpness.
As the nurse leaves through the blue curtain I say, ‘I don’t know what happened, Carmel.’
‘You overdosed,’ she says simply. ‘You overdosed on our sofa and nearly choked to death. When I found you, I couldn’t tell if you were breathing or not. You were covered in red, I thought at first it was blood. I thought you’d been stabbed. I’ve never been so scared.’
It was just tomato juice, I try to tell her. She doesn’t listen. She sounds flat, dismissive. I ask where Marco is. She shrugs.
‘He went to get coffee and pay for parking. That was, like, an hour ago. I thought you were going to die, Stella.’ She starts to cry. It is soundless, and she does not cover her face. I have never understood this. Like my mother, I am horrified by tears. Real tears, the rawness of them. I am not a pretty sight when upset. I sob and snort and wipe my nose with the back of my hand. My eyes burn, rimmed pink like myxomatosis. I pride myself on my stoicism. I hadn’t cried when Ben Madison dumped me at college, and I was the only person I knew who hadn’t cried at Watership Down.
‘I came home early from the cinema and there you were on the sofa, and I couldn’t wake you,’ Carmel tells me, ‘and you weren’t moving, even when I started shaking you. I said your name. I screamed it.’
The cinema, she’d said. I’d forgotten we were going to the cinema. We’d planned it last week. Some movie about teenagers getting hacked to death in the woods. We love that shit. Pizza and a film, we’d said, and I’d promised to be there. I don’t say anything but she looks at me anyway, already nodding because she knows.
‘It doesn’t matter. You forgot. It happens. It was a shitty film anyway. I walked out before the end.’ She wipes her eyes with her fingertips. ‘The blonde one got garrotted with a piano wire and the black one was sassy and angry. The usual shit.’
We fall silent for a moment. I think there is some sort of scuffle outside the curtains, I can hear a man, very drunk, shouting, ‘I don’t want to be here. I want to be home.’
‘I lost my job.’
‘Is that why you did it?’
‘Did what?’
‘Took the pills?’
I’m genuinely confused. I blink at her rapidly. My throat is so sore, as though it is being scraped by crushed glass. I take another sip of water; outside the man is still shouting, ‘I won’t go, I won’t go’, over and over.
‘I didn’t—’
‘Because that’s what Marco said. That you must have taken them while he wasn’t around. What are they anyway? God knows you don’t need downers.’
I don’t know what they are, but I don’t want to tell her that. She wouldn’t understand. They make me feel good, removed, detached. Carmel thrives on living, on being present. She wouldn’t get it.
‘Do you want to die, Stella?’
I laugh. It’s absurd. Carmel looks at me thoughtfully.
‘How come Marco has keys to our flat? That’s something you should have discussed with me, don’t you think?’
I stare at her. I feel like I’ve been hollowed out – all that puking, I guess – but also that I’ve woken up in the middle of a conversation. I have no idea what she is talking about and tell her so.