Pulse(9)

I went through to the kitchen and, even at this late hour, I put out the breakfast things. It was like a ritual. Cereal packets, bowls, spoons, mugs, plates, knives, butter dish and marmalade – all had to be put in exactly the right place on the table.

I stood back and checked.

I’d always had a bit of OCD – obsessive-compulsive disorder – but the depression had made it much worse. I knew that it was irrational to arrange everything just so, but I couldn’t help it. The house might burn down in the night if I didn’t, or my mother would die in her sleep, or any number of other awful outcomes would occur simply because I hadn’t put the spoons properly in line with the bowls.

I believed it. Totally.

I went upstairs and put my head round the door of each of the boys’ rooms.

As I’d expected, they were fast asleep, the sound of their breathing like music to my ears. They were my raison d’être. My all, my life.

I took my pills, potions and patches in the bathroom and then slipped between the sheets next to Grant. He grunted, which I took to mean, ‘Welcome home,’ and then he went straight back to sleep, snoring gently.

It had been my first ‘late’ shift of three in a row and I’d been up since six, almost twenty-one hours on the go and most of it on my feet. I was exhausted but, even so, I couldn’t nod off.

I lay in the darkness listening to the sounds of the house cooling, as I did almost every night. My psychiatrist had given me pills to help me sleep but they didn’t seem to work. Perhaps I should double the dose.

My mind was racing too much for sleep, worrying about the dead unnamed man, about the still living girl I’d sent to Bristol, about whether I had put the marmalade in the correct place downstairs and if I should go and check, about how I would pay the mortgage if Grant left me, about famine in Africa and about nuclear missiles raining down on us from North Korea. I worried about anything and everything, most of which I had no control over anyway. But that didn’t stop me worrying about it.

I turned over and tried unsuccessfully to switch off my brain.

I was tired of worrying.

I was also tired of being angry all the time, tired of feeling worthless and tired of the emptiness I felt inside.

I was tired of being depressed while pretending I was fine.

But, most of all, I was just tired of being tired.

I must have fallen asleep eventually because it was light when I woke. And I was alone in the bed. I rolled over and looked at the clock on my bedside table. Eight-thirty. Not bad for me, I thought. I was usually awake at five.

Grant will have gone on his regular Sunday morning run, I said to myself. He’d put on a few pounds after leaving the military but he still liked to keep himself in reasonable shape. He wouldn’t be back until nine-thirty at the earliest.

He was welcome to it. The last thing I felt like doing was exercise. I simply didn’t have the energy to do anything I didn’t absolutely have to.

I rolled over again and stuck my head deep into the pillow. A little longer wouldn’t do any harm, surely, and I would be back at work at six that evening for another eight hours of picking up the broken pieces of other people’s lives.

I just wished I could pick up those of my own.

‘Mum, are you awake?’ one of the twins shouted from the landing. Even after fourteen years I found it difficult to tell their voices apart, especially when they were shouting.

‘I am now,’ I shouted back.

‘I need my football kit. I have a practice at nine.’

Toby, I thought. The eldest by two minutes. Mad keen on football and now in the village boys’ team. ‘It’s in the airing cupboard,’ I called back. ‘And your boots are under the stairs.’

‘Thanks.’

‘Do you want any breakfast?’

‘No time,’ Toby shouted back. ‘I’ll have it after.’

Oliver, the younger twin, meanwhile, would still be sound asleep. He hated football and only said he wanted to watch Match of the Day so he could stay up late. The twins might look identical, but they had very differing opinions. Oliver maintained, often at great length, that footballers were all overpaid prima donnas who should get a real job rather than playing a stupid game all the time.

But I thought we were all playing a stupid game, the game of life, and, when the referee’s whistle blew, we would shuffle off this mortal coil and out of the floodlights only to be replaced by a new signing with an unpronounceable name from Real Madrid or Juventus. The never-ending match would go on, but without us on the pitch. And no one would notice.

The front door slammed shut as Toby left and I went back to trying to catch a few more winks.

The quiet before the storm.





4



It started raining heavily as I drove to the hospital on Sunday evening at a time when most sane people would be going home for the night.

The day had seemed to drag on interminably.

I’d failed miserably to get back to sleep and had finally dragged myself out of bed and into the shower just before Grant returned from his run, all hot and sweaty, demanding access.

There had been a time when we would have squeezed into the shower cubicle together, relishing our wet bodies being in such close contact. Things would have invariably progressed to another form of steamy action in the bedroom.

But not any more.