She dressed quickly and rushed back to her cramped room, which was all that she could afford, and only barely afford at that. She grabbed her backpack, stuffed it with her possessions, told no one she was checking out-almost laughing, but not quite, at the double meaning of that phrase-and fled the hostel.
If she was going to die that day, she was going to do it in front of strangers.
Paula gulped down a mouthful of coffee the moment the waitress brought it over, burning her tongue, which reminded her yet again that life meant pain. At least for her it did. She blew on what liquid remained in the cup, cursing her impatience. She had no idea how others managed to maintain pleasant lives, but hers was one filled with impatience, and blossoming with pain.
She had hoped that the despair which had settled over her, initially back home and now deepening here, would do her a favor for once and demonstrate its own patience, so that she could stave off her suicide long enough to return to die in her home country. But her latest worries made that unlikely. The intricacies of getting her family’s remains released, negotiating with a local funeral home for proper caskets, dealing with the airlines to transport the bodies (or what remained of them)…it was all too much for her, and those details buzzed in her head, blotting out both sleep and reason. She found it hard to contemplate the enormity of suddenly being the responsible one in the family. No one could have ever mistaken her for the one in that role before, and now…
Identifying her father’s body had been difficult enough. She just didn’t have the energy to do all of the other things that remained.
And she didn’t have the energy to remain alive either.
She had walked all morning through the streets of a country she had never before thought to visit, stumbled on until her aching feet insisted that she drop into a chair at a corner cafe. She’d sat in the sunshine for hours, unable to summon up the energy to move, shamed by the determination of the passersby rushing on with their lives. Picking at the remains of her plate of squidgy lemon pudding, an odd dessert with an odd name, she wondered why her father had always wanted to visit this odd country.
He had always talked about it, studying maps, poring over guidebooks, and had finally done it, and look what good chasing his dreams had done him. She never understood his dreams anyway. That had always been part of their problem, she figured; she should have been able to understand him better. But then, he never seemed to spend much energy understanding her, either. Still, he had reached out to both Paula and her sister Jane, neither of whom had ever married, offering to pay their ways to London to experience it with him. Perhaps she should have taken her father up on it as her sister had. If she’d done so, she would have been on that bus with the three of them, and all of her worrying and despair would now be over.
Instead, she had to sit in an unfamiliar place and contemplate how and when she would…do it. If she’d been home, she would have known exactly what to do. She had been thinking about it long enough, planning for its inevitability. It would have been easy. There was that lake, and the sunset that came with it, and those pills that since Mark had left she had been spending far too many long nights studying, even before every living relative of hers had been erased. She cursed her decision to remain home instead of taking her dad up on his invitation. The matter could have been taken out of her hands. She could have died with them, without thought, instead of just sitting there thinking about dying.
Now, sitting at the cafe, eating her pastry, drinking her coffee, pondering both her loneliness and the short time she had left in which to be lonely…she had to find another way.
Maybe she could climb up Big Ben, which her father had always talked of visiting. She could climb it and instead of admiring the intricacy of the clockwork and the view, just…jump off, giving herself over to the breeze. She wouldn’t have minded that feeling of flight to be real for once, but somehow, it didn’t seem right to mingle her father’s goal with her own shortcomings. And besides… she knew nothing of Big Ben. She had no idea whether that tourist magnet even contained an accessible window or ledge from which she could jump.
Or perhaps she should fill her pockets with rocks, and swim out into the Thames until she could swim no more. A famous writer had done just that. She had even seen a movie about it. She liked the idea of floating off until consciousness faded, but the preparations-finding a river secluded enough so that no one would try to save her, finding a grouping of stones sufficient to her task-it seemed like too much work for her, regardless of how romantic it might sound. She needed a way that was almost effortless. If it could be instantaneous as well, so much the better.
As the traffic blared around her, she took another bite of her pastry and looked at the cars and trucks rushing by, and to the roadway, where she could see painted in large white letters a warning to walkers to look to their right. So many tourists visited London each year that there needed to be constant reminders that the world was not the same all over.
Reading the warning, she realized that she had finally found her answer. She could step blindly into traffic. No one would even have to know that she had done it deliberately. Americans were known for stepping off the curb while looking in the wrong direction. If anyone bothered to research her reasons for coming to London in the first place, they would simply assume that she had been distracted by grief. Unlike the case with the women back at the hostel, no one would have to feel personal responsibility, carrying the weight that it was something she could have been talked out of. There would be no guilt. They would just think it was the unfortunate, accidental passing of another sad American.
In fact, Paula could see one of those quaint double-decker busses approaching right then.
She pushed back from her table and walked away from the cafe. Her waitress stepped toward her from amid the outdoor cluster of tables, calling after her that she had forgotten to pay, which only caused her to walk more quickly. As the bright red bus neared, Paula looked the other way, feigning confusion just in case there was a witness, and began to put her right foot forward to step into the street.
Before she could set it down in the path of the bus, she heard a man scream. She hesitated, hanging there between life and death. When Paula turned, she saw that man pointing, not at her, but past her into the street. The bus went by, her opportunity gone. By then, additional people were pointing, and she followed their outstretched arms to what was revealed after the bus had moved on.
It was a dead man walking.
With his shredded clothes, bloodied body, and gray pallor, another might have thought him merely a man in make-up, costumed for a party or on his way to a movie set, but unfortunately, Paula knew what death looked like. As the creature grew nearer, she could see into its eyes. They were like those of her father; there was no there there.
Unlike her father, however, this corpse walked.
It shambled amidst the traffic in her direction, the cars honking for him to move and then swerving when he did not. A few drivers slowed to a crawl so they could look more closely at the impossibility. One man got out of his car and ran over to the thing, placing his hand on its shoulder. Paula could see from the driver’s face, no more than ten yards away, that this was only a gesture of concern; perhaps he’d thought the bloodied walker an escapee from a hospital. As a reward for the man’s good Samaritanship, the shambler slapped out with a bloodied fist and knocked him dead.
Pedestrians screamed and scattered around her, but Paula simply stood there. She wondered if she was frozen in shock, but no, she was only waiting, though she wasn’t sure for what. She watched as the walking corpse punched a second man to the pavement, then lunged to bring down a third, biting deeply into a woman’s neck with crooked teeth.