An hour later and we’ve hugged our goodbyes and made promises to call every couple of hours. As we hug I feel the solidity crumble. Watching the small, flash car heading away down the drive, it’s crystal clear that we’ve fallen apart. We’ve fallen apart and we didn’t even have the good manners to wait until you’d gone before we did it. I can still smell Penny’s perfume in the hall when I shut the door and it forms a ghost of her. Everything is ghostly. Or maybe I’m the ghost and they’re all real.
I wish my head wouldn’t hurt so much. Or my heart.
*
The day goes by in a drift. I feel as if I’m standing still and the world is passing by, not touching me but avoiding me, as if I’m outside of its natural ebb and flow. Or maybe it wants me outside. I stand in the kitchen
for a long time, staring out of the window at the ivy on the garden wall. I wonder how long the vine took to smother the bricks while I wasn’t paying attention. When my feet get pins and needles I come round a little and notice I’ve made myself a cup of tea. It’s covered with a film and stone cold. I think about making another, but don’t. I open the fridge and think about food, but my stomach churns. I look at the cheese and bacon in there and think for a minute that if I stare hard enough I can see it slowly rotting despite the chill. I turn the thermostat inside the fridge up to four, but then I leave the door open. Let’s see what the cheese makes of that.
*
Barbara comes round and I smile and let her voice caress me. It coats me and hardens on my skin. Then Penny calls to say that they have got back safely and to check on us. I hear my words,
Yes, we’re fine, no change, love you too
, and they seem normal enough, but I’m glad when she’s gone and I can have the peace back again. I’m waiting for night to fall. The daylight, grey as it is, makes me feel unsettled. I smoke a cigarette and stare out at it. I don’t open the window, but let the acrid smoke fill the kitchen. Grey outside, grey inside. I go upstairs. The walls stare at me, accusing. I ignore them. They’re not real.
The chair creaks when I lean forward and talk to you.
I talk for a long time. I tell you all this and more, but I don’t think you hear me, even though I think I see you hiding in there, a little way down. It’s hard to tell because your eyes aren’t closing properly anymore and they’re becoming coated in a milky film. Kind of like dogs get when they have cataracts. I look at your eyes with their marble sheen. Even your surfaces are shutting you off from us.
I talk anyway. I let it all come out. Everything. I want you to know everything about me because I can’t know everything about you. I pour myself into what’s left of you, hoping you can wrap it all up and take it with you. I talk until my throat is raw and dry.
When I’m done I sit in silence and watch you descend into your cells and beyond. I listen to the endless ticking of the clock. I listen to your Cheyne–Stoking. I think about the language. I think about the Macmillan nurse coming later and I think about Penny and Davey and Simon and Paul. My heart pounds a little.
As darkness falls my head thickens and I feel how alone we are here, you and me and the nightfall. The nurse will be here soon and that privacy will crack. I wonder about the monitor downstairs projecting your image into an empty room. I look at the Listerine and tears and anger spark in my eyes. I twist in the chair. My face is burning. I feel swallowed up by the emptiness and I want to be free of it. I’ve always wanted to be free of it.
It’s black outside, in the nothing on the other side of the glass, but I squint and search out the black fields below. Scanning. Seeking. Hunting. I haven’t looked out of this window for a long time. Not in this way. Not
really
looking. I wonder whether he will come tonight. It’s been so long I sometimes wonder if I’ve ever seen him –
it
– at all. I wonder whether it was just brief bouts of madness. God knows the wildness of lunacy runs in our blood and no one would be surprised if we all turned out to be fey in one way or another. So maybe the occasional brief bout of madness is all my special gift ever was.
But still I look. Forty next birthday and looking out of the window for something that I haven’t seen in fifteen years, if ever I saw it at all.
But it’s one of those nights, isn’t it, Dad? A special, terrible night. A full night. And that’s always when it comes.
If it comes at all.
I push my face into the glass.
I stare so long my eyes hurt and nothing exists outside the frame of the window. I can feel veins throbbing in my brain, or so it seems. My head is too full of memories and I can’t get them in any sort of order and they randomly attack me. You, me, him, all of us, even Mum. You all fill me too full. You’ve taken my empty thinking space. I pinch myself and wish for a drift, but it won’t come. I rock forward, keening, trying to cry it
all out. Trying to cry you out. Trying to cry away this waiting for you to rot into death. My throat tightens. The world glitters in the corners and my own breath threatens to choke me.
Sound throbs loudly and painfully and I squeeze my eyes shut for a second. The pulse spreads through my body from my skull to my toes and when I open my eyes I see the Listerine in the spit jar shaking slightly in the rhythm. I stare at it, unsure. Reality wants to twist away from me, but I grip it. The glass is shaking. I am shaking. The world is shaking. I feel the magic in the empty air.
I am alive with tension. I think my face might burn me up from the inside. The house watches you with me. You lie still and grab at a mouthful of slow air.
I turn back to the window and, panting like a small girl, I glance out into the dark and all I can see are red eyes and a whirl of energy. I smile. I knew what I would see before I looked. Something that was snapped inside heals as I watch. The creature dances in the road and in my soul. I see you and me and my lost babies in the clattering of those heavy hooves, in the dark hide that shines with sweat. I stare, and feel my heart sing.
The beast must feel it too, because it stops and whinnies, the base of the sound making me flinch, and it paws at the ground, sending shards of tarmac up to the sky like black stars.
It shakes that terrible mane and I know.
My nose is streaming with snot and I lick it and the tears away as I push myself out of the chair. My legs shake under me and my whole body trembles. I feel vaguely sick – sick and hot – burning-up hot. I lean over you and look into your milky eyes. I need to know. I need to be sure. The beast roars for me outside and as I sob I think – I’m sure – I see the tiniest red pinprick shimmer beneath the smell and the wasting and the nothingness that breathes reluctantly from where you used to live.
I smile. You understand. You know.
Very gently, despite the heat and energy raging at me from outside, I kiss your head. I leave my love there forever and my lips there for a moment, savouring your heat. One hand slips under and holds your skull gently as the other pulls out the pillow before laying you back down again. I watch you. Your breathing doesn’t change. One exhale. Four seconds of silence.
I think of him. I think of the ivy. I think of the poor Macmillan nurse and what she will say, and then, my vision blurred, I say goodbye to your face and push the pillow down over it. I hope it doesn’t hurt.
Your hands tremble slightly and then your back arches, and then nothing. It didn’t take so very much for you to die, after all.
I step away.
I leave the pillow where it lies.
*
After a second I turn and run. I can’t be late. I can’t be late this time, not this last time, this last chance. I pound down the stairs, my legs heavy and solid. My feet slip on the kitchen floor, but I stay upright. I can hear sobs in my chest but they don’t slow me down as I tear out of the back door and down the path to the gate. I don’t look at the swings.
*
The night air is cold and my lungs burn as I suck it in, deep down inside, no Cheyne–Stoking for me, my legs desperate to reach it before it disappears. It always disappears. But not this time, please not this time. I turn into the road, my limbs aching and clothes sticking to me. My hair is slick to my face.
*
I have nothing to fear. The creature is waiting for me. It’s always been waiting for me. I stand before it and wail as it roars and rears up, shaking the ground beneath us as it lands and then I grab for it, my hands entwined in that rough mane and I pull myself up, burying my face in its hot, sweaty neck. It smells exactly as I imagined it would. As it turns to the field, I am ten and twenty-five and forty next birthday, I am everything I will ever be and ever was. And I am alive.
The blackness of the field and the night stretch out before us as the beast and I leap the fence. I laugh and my hair blows out behind me as we gallop. I feel my
hooves pounding through the night as I rage onwards. Behind me, the lights from the house fade.
*
I don’t look back.
A big thank you to all at Jo Fletcher Books for giving this little book, which means so much to me, an outing in the big wide world. Also thanks to Neil Gaiman for much laughter and insight and, of course, my agent Veronique. You’re all wonderful.