Along the sea wall the bright shops in the inclement weather feel like a forced smile at a funeral. Most of the seafront shops are closing for the season and those that are still open are empty. Windbreakers crammed against dusty windows. A little rack of postcards washed out in the wintry sunshine. In the shop window are yellowing posters, long faded. A pantomime. A church fair. A town carnival. I look at the date on it. 14th July 2004. I think for a moment. Where was I in July 2004? What was I doing? And then, of course, with a jolt I remember. Thailand. Carmel and I had booked flights one evening after a session on cheap wine. We had been thrilled by our impulsiveness. It had been a freewheeling adventure: blistering heat and soft white sands, the drink, the weed, the mushrooms, the sex. In Bangkok, I had got my hummingbird tattoo. There is a photo of me somewhere – it used to be pinned to the corkboard in the flat – a cigarette clamped between my teeth, beer in one hand, gripping Carmel’s fingers tightly with the other as the muscular, gleaming back of the tattooist bends over me. In the photo I am tanned and grinning and look younger and happier than I can ever remember being. Thinking of it now makes my stomach curdle. That laughing, reckless figure seems so distant. A lump of alien rock, drifting in space. Had it been me? It must have been, once.
That night the mist comes in from the sea, thick and heavy as a cloak. It gives the rising moon an eerie blue light that picks the bones of the landscape silver. I wake, becoming immediately cold, skin prickling. I sit up, covers pooled about my waist, straining to listen for the sound which has woken me. At first I think it is a hard rain but slowly I realise it is coming from inside the house. The sound is soft and sibilant, like heavy material being dragged across the floor. I creep to the doorway, peering into the darkened hall. Water. I can hear it more clearly now. My hand gropes for the light switch in the dark hallway.
The bathroom door is ajar. Inside, the taps and the shower are running, filling the room with steam and a thunderous roar. For a moment I simply stand there, skinny arms folded across my chest, cupping my elbows in my palms. I blink rapidly. I do not need to look in the mirror to see that a crease has appeared between my eyebrows; a vertical frown line like a stitch in my skin. It is the look of my father as he hunched over betting slips, lottery tickets, scratch cards. The look he got moments before the loss set in. He passed it on to me the same way he did his thin hair and dimples.
I turn the taps off and open the window to let the steam out. The tiled floor is glossy, the walls damp. The water has been running for some time. I try to remember if I’d left the taps on and I can’t. It’s like a switch has been thrown, a circuit which can’t be completed. A mirrored cabinet hangs over the sink, and I swing it open and take out the bottle of pills. I hold the brown glass bottle up to the light and shake it. Inside, the little grey pills rattle like shaman bones, runes. I take two more from the bottle, grinding them between my teeth. The taste is chemical and astringent. I wipe the condensation away from the mirror and study myself. As I do so I catch a sudden movement behind me. Something moving towards the open door. I gasp and just for a moment fancy that I see the ivory oval of a face hanging in the mist, framed by curtains of dark hair. But when I turn there is nothing there. Just shapes in the fogged-up bathroom, grey and indistinct. Nothing except the lip of the bath and the laundry basket in the corner. Nothing except the black-and-white tiles and the towel rail with a solitary pink towel folded over it.
I’m losing my mind, I think. I’m losing my fucking mind here.
I make my way downstairs, hand clutching the banister so hard that my knuckles whiten. The kitchen is very dark, the wind a thin, fluting howl in the old soot-blackened chimney breast. A cold clutch of fear threatens to topple me. The sink. The taps are running down here too.
This time I turn them off so sharply that my wrist bristles with pain. My heart is a drum, my fear a rapid percussion, slowly building. I walk about the house distractedly, not really sure what I am looking for, what I expect to find. In each room I turn on the lights and run my hands over the window locks. After that I check the front and back doors. I peer beneath the bed and in the airing cupboard. I look in the old stone pantry full of cobwebs. I find nothing, of course, except the fossilised corpses of woodlice and balls of lint.
I make tea and sit in bed and the pills lift me, turning the night into something uncomplicated and dreamy. I fall asleep with the lights on, just as the sky is brightening, clouds turning the pearly colour of oyster shells. I fall asleep and there are no dreams. But even in my sleep I am listening, and I feel my fear growing like mushrooms in the dark. I need to heal. I need to feel as though I am scar tissue, being repaired from the inside.
There are just three names in the address book of my phone – Marco, Doctor Wilson and Alice. I wonder if Aunt Jackie is worried about me. Marco has contacted her, he tells me, to reassure her that I am getting better.
‘I think she saw it coming, love,’ he’d said to me solemnly. ‘You’ve been unwell a long time.’
‘I need her number,’ I’d told him, and he’d said sure and he’d written it down on a piece of paper, folding it smaller and smaller and pressing it into my palm. ‘Here you are.’
And of course I’d lost it. I must try to remember to ask him for it again. I must try to remember.
Marco calls me while I am washing dishes in the cold morning.
‘Hello?’ he says. ‘Stella? How are you?’
‘I’m all right. Tired. When will you get here?’
‘Honey, you know what? I’m going to have to give it another couple of days. Chances are I may have to go to Zürich for a while. I need to work on the Tybourne account.’
‘What?’
‘It’s my business, honey. It’s not as easy as checking people into a hotel. I can’t just abandon it.’
‘There was more to my job than that.’ I’m automatically defensive. ‘And you can’t just abandon me!’
‘Is that what you think I’ve done?’
I don’t know how to answer that so I ask instead, ‘Have you heard from Carmel?’
‘I think you need to face facts, Stella, she’s not going to want to speak to you again. Not after what happened.’
My stomach sinks. I know this, of course, but I am hopeful. Optimistic. My mother had called me ‘starry-eyed’. She would say it in a sour way, her lips twisted. The seagulls are shrieking and it’s making my head hurt.
‘Can you call Jackie for me? Give her my number?’
‘Sure, I’ll do it this afternoon. Can you email her?’
‘No, I – I can’t get into my emails. I’m not sure of my password. It’s been changed. I must have done it; I just don’t remember.’
I haven’t been able to access anything since I arrived at Chy an Mor. I can remember a rainy afternoon as a teenager watching old films with my dad. The 39 Steps, The Great Escape, Some Like It Hot. He’d been slumped in his armchair, the one which always smelled of tobacco and hair wax, and his eyes were unfocused and far away. In one of them, something black-and-white and slow-moving, a war general in the trenches turns to his officer and says, ‘All lines of communication are down. We are out here on our own now’, and over their heads the thunder of artillery.