Time passed. The shakes tapered off gradually, resolving into a tremble in her hands. She closed them into fists, gently, looking at the unmarked skin, wondering. Watching the trembles stutter and finally stop. She closed her eyes, and this time there was only blessed darkness. She took a deep breath, slowly pulling in air from her diaphragm, feeling her lungs swell. Held it. Exhaled.
Then she opened her eyes. Turned her fists over.
“Okay, here we go.”
Unaware that she’d spoken out loud, she opened her left fist.
In the centre of her palm was a dark, almost black stain, tapering to a smear of red. Blood, from the coins.
“Okay, well… okay,” she said.
Then she started to cry.
She walked home. All six miles. There was a bus that went straight to her door, but the thought repelled her. She briefly considered phoning a cab, but couldn’t face the idea of being in an enclosed space, especially if the driver…
So she walked, head down, eyes fixed on her feet, following the path through the park, back to the streets. There were other people, but she refused to look up, knowing what she would see. Even then, just looking at the ground, she knew. The dark splotches on the pavement were everywhere, some baked black in the warm light, others fresh red.
She passed several people. She didn’t look up once.
She let herself into her house, shut the door behind her, and slid down it, curling into a ball. She held her head and stared at the bristles on the door mat.
Sometime later the phone rang, and she gingerly rose to her feet, wincing anew as her leg muscles protested. She let the phone ring—work probably, wondering where the hell she’d got to—and went into the kitchen to make a cup of tea. She took it to the living room and sat on the sofa, sipping it and wondering what to do next.
When she got to the bottom of the cup, she still didn’t have any answers. So she went into the spare room, made the bed up, and climbed into it.
The knocking woke her.
“Love?”
Tim’s voice was muffled by the door, but even so she could hear the note of concern. By common consent the spare room was reserved for when one or the other was ill, or had got in too late and was courting a hangover. They had learned early on that unbroken sleep was a must have for both of them, and acted accordingly. They’d barely had a disagreement since introducing the policy.
“Don’t come in!” An image sprung to her mind—of Tim’s face, pierced by thin metal hooks, pulling his features into what she sometimes laughingly called his “concerned face”, the wounds bleeding… she thought if she saw that she might not come back to herself.
“Okay, love. What’s wrong?”
She felt a laugh threatening to bubble up in her throat, and she clenched her jaw hard until the feeling subsided.
“Not sure. Some kind of… bug. Came on very sudden. At the station.”
“So you didn’t make it in?”
“Nah, had to come home.”
“God, I’m sorry. You throwing up?”
“No, I’m… no.”
“Okay. Well, can I get you anything?”
“No, love, I just really need to rest up, okay?”
“Sure, no problem. I love you. Text me if you need anything.”
She smiled at that, briefly.
“I will. Love you.”
She heard him take a step, pause, then head back downstairs. Shortly after, the sound of the television came through the floorboards, loud, then muted to a mumble.
Sarah dug out her phone. At some point, either on the walk home or after she’d had her tea, she’d set it on silent. The conversation with Tim made her think of it. Six missed calls, over a dozen texts; all from work. Shit.
She replied to the last text from her boss, not bothering to read the message.
Sorry. Really unwell. Running a fever, totally out of it. Unlikely to be in for the rest of the week. She hit send. It was after 7 pm, but the reply came back within a minute. Get well soon. If you’re going to be off more than 4 days, you’ll need a doctor’s note.
Sarah lobbed the phone to the end of the bed with an almost silent snarl, then pulled the duvet around her. Snuggling into the warmth and comfort, she slipped into an uneasy, restless sleep.
That had been Monday. Now it was Friday, and nothing had changed.
Sarah had quickly fallen into a new routine. It consisted of feigning sleep until Tim left in the morning, then shuffling down to the living room to eat and drink tea. On the first morning, she’d tried watching the television, only to turn it off in horror after a few seconds, the mutilated faces and hands of the breakfast TV hosts and the blood-soaked sofas repelling her.
The cartoon channels seemed safer initially, but after the first advert featuring a young girl with blood-soaked hooks in her cheeks came on, the TV stayed off.
Instead, she read. Not the magazines she’d previously devoured—the bleeding faces of the smiling models on the covers turned her stomach—but books. They became an escape, a window back into a world she’d known, lived in, understood.
Whatever was going on was still going on. Even with her isolation and media avoidance, the clues were all over the house—literally. Every morning there were fresh drops of blood in the sink, on the bathroom floor, the kettle. She could track Tim’s movements by the red dots on the floor and smears on surfaces, like some grisly dance-step diagram. Each day, after getting up, she spent the best part of an hour cleaning the surfaces and floors, trying not to think about what she was doing and why.
Managing Tim through the door was increasingly hard. She’d claimed fever for forty-eight hours, until he started sounding scared, threatening to call an ambulance. Wednesday night, he’d begged to be let in to see her, wept when she’d denied him access. It had been a horrible scene, but she’d promised him that she loved him and that she needed the space and that she wasn’t seriously hurt, just ill, and eventually he’d left her alone. She texted him more after that, to let him know she still cared— and, most importantly, to keep him away from her.
On Thursday morning her door handle was caked with dried blood, his palm print stark on the white plastic, and she’d done some weeping of her own.
And now it was Friday. And she had to leave the house.
She’d arranged the doctor’s appointment the previous day, having promised Tim she’d do so. She had to, anyway. Work would need a sick note, or they’d stop her pay—she’d seen it happen before, it was the kind of thing the firm was really strict on. Of course, she wasn’t running the fever she’d been feigning for the last week. But: “There is something wrong with me,” she said ruefully to the empty house.
She spent most of the cab ride to the surgery with her eyes closed behind her dark glasses, trying to shut out her brief glimpse of the driver’s wounded face and hands, attempting instead to rehearse what she was going to say to the doctor. She’d been working on the problem since she’d made the appointment yesterday morning. It would have to be mental health, obviously; there simply weren’t any physical symptoms. That worried her. Officially the firm was as supportive around mental health issues as other illnesses, but in practice she suspected that kind of sick note—especially one with the dread word “stress” anywhere near it—would probably put a damper on any further career progression.