Three Hours(25)
‘You’re very talented too,’ she says to Tim. ‘You’ll storm it.’
‘Really?’
‘I have absolute and total faith in you. Go knock ’em out.’
‘Thanks, Daphne.’
Miranda, playing Lady Macbeth, sashays over to him, still doing her sex-kittenish act, even though it’s never tempted Tim away from his girlfriend, let alone that the school is under attack. She thinks Miranda spectacular right at this moment. Miranda slides herself down next to Tim.
Daphne’s mobile buzzes with a WhatsApp from Sally-Anne in the foyer, who’s just received an update about the people in New School and a message from a junior school teacher. She leaps to her feet and claps her hands, soles of her feet and palms stinging with adrenaline.
‘Listen up, everyone! I’ve had some good news. Everyone in New School has been evacuated and junior school are safely on Fulmar beach, waiting for boats to pick them up. Rafi got them out.’
A cheer goes up, the kids momentarily elated. Jamie Alton went to New School to get his cauldron, so he’s definitely evacuated too, blessed, blessed cauldron. Anna and Davy, her little Macduffs, were also in New School, so are also safe, and all the other junior school children are safe too, because of Rafi; a huge hoorah for Rafi, wonderful boy.
‘So Anna and Young Fry are all right?’ Josh asks.
‘Yes.’
‘What’ll we do without them when we get to Act Four, Scene Two?’ Joanna asks.
‘We’ll think of something.’
But even if the young children were here – thank you, Lord Jesus, that they’re not – she would have stopped the rehearsal before this scene. The other murders in this play aren’t so terrible, committed off stage and adult to adult, but the murder of Macduff’s son is on stage, right in front of you, the murderer stabbing the little boy as he holds him on his lap. Then, in their production, the little girl runs but is caught by a murderer in the wings, because Macduff had all his babes savagely slaughtered. She’d faff about this play’s themes and various interpretations and then she’d get here, to its terrible black heart, and know it was a play about raw evil.
My children too? … My wife kill’d too … all my pretty ones? Did you say all?
*
In the woods, Rafi Bukhari has stopped running to check his messages but his thumb has got too cold to be recognized on the touch ID so he has to key in his passcode and he’s wasting time, wasting time. He skips hurriedly through voicemails from friends and teachers, still nothing from Hannah. But she doesn’t ever leave voicemails, only talks on the phone when there’s a voice talking back to her. She’d told him that the night they’d first properly spoken to each other at a party. Before that, they’d hung out with different people, were doing different subjects, and he’d been shy of approaching her.
He’s running again, flat out, towards Old School.
At the party, she’d been sitting on a sofa, and he’d sat next to her and she’d jumped. And then he didn’t know what to say to her, didn’t have a clue. Idiot.
‘Do you think we wake up every day the same old self?’ she said. ‘Or do we have a choice but we don’t realize that? It might be just habit that makes us the same self as yesterday even if that’s not who we want to be at all?’
He just stared.
‘Oh shit, you think I’m totally weird.’
This girl.
‘I think that’s what mental illness is,’ he said. ‘I think it takes away the choice. You’re stuck being someone who isn’t even really you. And you should know that the not-really-me has PTSD and I’m genuinely weird in a psychotic way. You’re beautiful.’
She glanced away from him, deflecting what he’d told her as untrue, and it was a week before she explained she was turning away from him calling her beautiful, dismissing that, not his PTSD.
‘Jesus, Rafi, what kind of horrible person did you think I am?’
‘Yeah, but I still wanted to kiss you.’
‘So, it was always a totally superficial physical thing for you?’
‘Totally.’
At the end of the party, everyone else fuzzy with drunkenness and tiredness, they’d felt sharpened, wide awake, and they talked about calling each other later that night, not wanting their conversation to have an ending, and she told him that she never left a voicemail, because she could only talk to someone if someone was talking back to her. Weeks later, she said it was because she might say something stupid and he could hear over and over again what an idiot she was.
He stops to phone her again, wiping the snow off his screen, keying in the passcode, but again it goes straight through to message.
‘Hey, it’s Hannah …’
She must have run out of charge, that’s all, doesn’t mean anything bad. Can’t mean anything bad.
As he pockets his phone he feels someone behind him; a sensation that makes his back feel exposed, as if he’s missing clothing, and then the wind drops for a few moments and he hears footsteps and breathing.
The man behind him is just a delusion. He has PTSD and is hypervigilant and highly stressed and this man doesn’t exist. And even without PTSD as an excuse, he cannot trust himself to know what is real.
His love for Hannah is a delusion too.