Sometimes I Lie(22)

I can see the crashed car and the damaged tree, its thick roots come to life and snake over towards me and the child. They wrap themselves around our arms and legs and bodies and squeeze us together, pinning us to the tarmac where I fell until we are almost completely covered and hidden from the rest of the world. I sense that the child is frightened, so I tell her to be brave and suggest that maybe we should sing a song. She doesn’t want to. Not yet. The rain starts to fall harder, and the painting I’m trapped inside starts to smudge and blur. It feels like the rain is trying to wash us away, as though we never were. The water falls so hard that it bounces off the tarmac into my mouth and up my nose. I feel myself start to drown in the dirty watercolour, then, just as quickly as it started, it stops.

Stars cannot shine without darkness, whispers the little girl.

My body is still being held in place by the roots of the tree, but I turn my head up to see the night sky. As I stare up at the stars, they become brighter and larger and more real than I have ever seen them. Then the little girl starts to sing.

Twinkle, twinkle, little star, if you’re down here who’s in the car?

The roots release me, an army of goosebumps line my arms and I look over to where the child is now pointing. Sure enough, there is a shadow of someone inside the car. The driver door opens and a black figure gets out and walks away. Everything is silent. Everything is still.

The sound of a lock turning brings me back to my sleeping body in my hospital cell. Everything I could see and feel disappears. The nightmare is over, but I’m still afraid. There was someone else in the car that night, I’m sure of it. And now there is someone in my room and everything feels very wrong.

‘Can you hear me?’ It’s a man. I don’t recognise his voice. Fear floods through me as he walks towards the bed.

‘I said, can you hear me?’ he repeats. He’s right next to me when he asks the same question a third time. He sighs and takes a step back. He opens something next to my bed and then I hear the sound of a phone being turned on. My phone. I hear the security code that I never change; whoever this person is, he’s listening to my voicemail. There are three messages, faint but audible. The first voice I hear is Claire’s. She says she is just calling to see if everything is OK, but her tone suggests that she already knew that it wasn’t. It’s followed by an angry message from Paul: he wants to know where I am. Then the stranger in my room plays the third message and it’s his own voice on my phone.

I’m sorry about what happened, it’s only because I love you.

It feels like my whole body ices over. I hear a beep.

Message deleted. You have no new messages.

I don’t know this man. But he knows me. I’m so frightened that even if I was able to scream, I don’t think that I could.

‘I do hope you’re not lying there feeling sorry for yourself, Amber,’ he says. He touches my face and I want to shrink back down into the pillow. He taps me on the head repeatedly with his finger. ‘In case you’re confused in there by anything you’ve heard, this wasn’t an accident.’ His finger slides down the side of my face and rests on my lips. ‘You did this to yourself.’





Then

Wednesday, 21st December 2016 – Morning


I turn off the alarm, I won’t need it. I’ve hardly slept at all and it’s pointless trying now. The insomnia should be a symptom of my concern for my missing husband, but that isn’t what I’ve been lying awake thinking about. I keep remembering the dead robin, its tiny lifeless body. All night long, I kept imagining that I could hear its wings flapping inside the bin as though it wasn’t dead. I worry that perhaps it was just unconscious, that maybe I threw it away when it was only sleeping.

I stare at the vacant side of the bed. Still no news from Paul. There’s an empty bottle of red wine on the floor; I tried to drink myself to sleep but it didn’t work. Wine has become an over-prescribed antibiotic that my body has become immune to. I consider calling the police to report Paul missing, but I feel foolish. I wouldn’t know how to say what I’m afraid of without sounding crazy. Husbands don’t always come home at night, I know that, I’m a big girl now.

My mind switches from Paul to Claire. When she finally returned my calls, she sounded annoyed that I had accused her of knowing where he was. She said she’d been out with a friend and I had ruined her evening, then she hung up. She knows exactly what I’m scared of. I love them both but I can feel everything I’ve kept safe until now starting to unravel. One pull on the thread and they’ll fall through an unfixable hole. It might be too late already.

It’s still dark, so I switch on the light, scanning the room for anything that might resemble a clue. I remember the gift bag hiding women’s underwear in the bottom of Paul’s wardrobe. I retrieve it once more and take out the bra and knickers, flimsy panels of black satin, framed by lace. Definitely too small. I pull down my pyjama bottoms and use my feet to step out of them, whilst pulling my top off over my head. I leave the pastel-coloured pile of cotton on the floor and slip into the underwear, tags still attached, the sharp angled cardboard edges digging in my skin. I squeeze my breasts into the too small cups, then come to stand in front of the full-length mirror. It’s been a while since I’ve seen myself like this. The body in the reflection isn’t as bad as I had imagined. I’m not as ugly on the outside as I feel on the inside, but I still don’t like what I see. My tummy is a little rounder than it used to be, but then I mostly eat what I want now. I hate this body almost as much as I hate myself. It didn’t do what it was supposed to. It didn’t give him what he wanted. I don’t want to look any more so I turn off the light, but I can still see the ghost of my reflection. I grab my dressing gown and hide myself again, the new underwear pinching and biting my flesh beneath. The thought that it might not have been bought for me is too loud inside my head to be ignored, so I take it off, put it back where I found it and start the day again.