Blink(30)

I let out a breath when I saw she’d actually stopped crying.

‘It can be our little secret.’ Harriet tipped her head at me meaningfully and I turned quietly to walk away. ‘Now then, we’re doing some very exciting work in class today. Do you like art?’

‘Nanny says I’m a very good drawer,’ I heard Evie say as the two of them disappeared through the gate. ‘And I can do lots of different sorts of art, even painting faces.’

I watched them go, Evie nodding and answering Miss Watson’s questions. She never even looked back to see if I was still there. An invisible weight lifted from my shoulders and I stretched my neck left and right to try to ease the trapped tension.

Mum might not be impressed, but as far as I was concerned, Harriet Watson was my hero.





26





Present Day





Queen’s Medical Centre





I am trying, so desperately, not to sleep.

If I sleep, they could come in and turn me off. It could easily happen, just like that. The flick of a switch, the press of a button and bang – I’m gone.

No one to stop them, no one to miss me.

Dr Shaw will sign the papers that will go to the coroner. They’ll quickly reduce me to a pile of ashes, and once the death certificate is filed, no one will be any the wiser that I was ever here. Alive in my invisible prison.

And then what will happen to Evie?

I know that somewhere, my beautiful girl is behind her own glass wall, unable to find her way back home. Without me, they’ll write her off, forget her. She will just become a statistic, another unsolved case.

That’s why, no matter how hopeless it seems, I have to fight. I have to find a way to make them see I am still here. That I am worth taking a chance on.

I have such vital things I need to tell them. Things that might just find Evie. I’m starting to remember everything, even the seemingly uneventful, everyday things. The truth is in there somewhere.

Beep, hiss, hiss, hiss, beep.

My chest rises and falls as the respirator pumps life into my lungs.

Tick tock, tick tock.

The clock on the wall taunts me. Every second that passes, I move nearer to certain death at the hands of the doctors.

Unless I can crack the glass, that is. Shatter this unseen prison inside myself.

I search for the archived lessons of my school human biology class.

The diaphragm is the muscle that promotes effective breathing. It moves up and down and it is located just under the ribs.

I try to feel its presence; my diaphragm. I conjure up in my mind a horizontal band of thick, powerful muscle. Muscles can move, they can twitch of their own accord. Muscles have a memory.

For a few seconds I concentrate, willing my diaphragm to move.

Up, down, up, down. Relax.

And again. Up, down, up, down.

Nothing happens.

But it’s a start.





27





Three Years Earlier





Toni





When I got back home after taking Evie to school, I made a coffee and sat drinking it in the kitchen, waiting for my mood to stabilise. I had that horrible feeling again. It was hard to explain it, but suffice to say it was a powerful feeling that something awful was about to happen, although I knew that was hardly rational. Enough awful things had happened already to last me a whole lifetime.

I ought to be feeling hopeful. Surely things were looking up. With any luck, Evie would settle into school, and I’d landed a job way before I could’ve reasonably expected to. Yet even though I knew I’d be able to cope easily with the duties at Gregory’s, bearing in mind my previous experience, my hands began to tremble when I imagined myself walking in there this afternoon. The new girl all over again at thirty-five years of age.

Evie was just five years old. Why was I even remotely surprised she was having teething problems at St Saviour’s? My daughter had a good excuse; I had none. I was all grown up and had to take whatever life threw at me.

Tara had included a telephone number and email address in her recent letter. I could call her. I used to enjoy our chats; she was always so pragmatic and sensible, I remember she had this knack of calming me down.

And then I remembered the recent bad news about her health. There’s no way I could ring, burdening her with my silly little problems in comparison. I would call her soon, but I wouldn’t be bleating about how hard my life was.

Slowly these thoughts began to drift and one image filled my mind. That of a little brown bottle.

I placed my mug down on the table and stood up. As I climbed the stairs I thought about one little tablet and the tremendous power held within it. It would relax me but there was a risk it would make me overly sleepy, too. Half a tablet would be just perfect. Half a tablet still had the power to calm me down, making me appear confident and relaxed on the first day in my new job, when I most needed it.

Bryony James, my new line manager, hadn’t seemed overly impressed with me at the interview. I wanted to put that right, but the way I was feeling at the moment, I doubted she was going to get the impression I would turn out to be any kind of asset to the team.

I opened the bathroom cabinet and scrabbled my fingers towards the back of the shelf, pushing through the half-filled packs and boxes of various toiletries. I plucked out the bottle and cradled it in my hand, like it was something precious I was afraid of crushing.