‘Are you kidding me? You took Joey! That’s what happened. You can’t just take a child from a school and not tell anybody!’
Cee-Cee looked affronted. ‘I always pick him up. How else would he have got home?’
‘LISA WAS GIVING HIM A LIFT, AS ARRANGED BY ME, HIS MOTHER.’
‘Well, you could have said.’
‘Didn’tJoeytell you?’ I asked.
‘He asked if I was supposed to be picking him up, I said of course.’
‘It’s a twenty-minute drive home. Where have you been?’ My voice was ice. I don’t know about Cee-Cee, but I was scaring myself.
‘We picked up goggles from the sports shop on the ring road. I wanted to treat him, celebrate his trial.’
‘You saw that letter about a weirdo hanging around the school gates! Didn’t you think I might be worried?’
She shrugged. ‘Not if he was with me.’
‘Cee-Cee, this has to stop.’ The adrenaline was fizzling into exhaustion now. ‘I don’t want you giving Joey lifts. Or buying him things. Or contacting him without speaking to me first. Please, we need a break.Youneed a break. Go and live your life. Let us live ours.’
‘You need my help. For his sake.’
‘No. No, we really don’t. I appreciate everything you’ve done, more than I can say. But this is not helpful any more. I am not that vulnerable, broken girl any more. This time, I need to fix myself. And if you can’t respect that, or my choices for my family, then I can’t trust you to be part of it.’
Cee-Cee blinked, several times. It was the most emotion I’d seen in her in over a decade. ‘Very well then. You’re on your own.’
The door closed behind her. I closed my eyes, breathing in a deep lungful of regret, relief and utter terror. Firing off a text to Lisa to explain, I went upstairs to speak to my son.
* * *
More than a little unnerved by the evening’s events, I ploughed through a load more work, most of which would probably read like drivel, and stood up to stretch the kinks in my neck. Digging through the pantry, I found a dusty bottle of red wine. I poured out a decent-sized glass and took a sniff.
‘Okay, Piper. This is happening. It’s time for stage two of the Programme.’ I paused to remember the feeling of helpless horror from earlier that day, weighed it up against the anxiety now stirring at what I was about to do. ‘No contest,’ I announced, whipped the back door open and took a step out into the night.
‘Okay, just keep breathing, nice and steady, in and out, you can do this, you’re a champion, remember? You can do anything you put your mind to.’
I followed the technique I’d read about so many times in the past few days: found a patch on the garden path to focus on, waited for the swaying and the clanging in my head to ease, considered it objectively, as an irrational reaction due to a problem in me not out there. I’d read that panic attacks last five to twenty minutes.
‘I’ll stay here and endure this for twenty-one if I have to,’ I gasped. ‘Do your worst, pathetic panic, you’re just chemicals and nerve signals and brain electricity. You aren’t controlling me any more.’
After a while (I guess somewhere between five and twenty minutes, but honestly it could have been five hours), I managed to take a sip of wine. I took a quick look around at the garden, then tipped my head up at the sky. Another clear night. Without a pane of glass between us, the stars were so bright, they held me spellbound. If I had climbed next door’s chestnut tree, I could have stretched up and caught one. Far enough from the city to be undimmed by light pollution, they spread so wide and high and deep, it seemed there was a star for every person on the planet. I spun slowly around, studying every one, their glorious, ancient beauty. A rustle from the bushes near the back gate startled me, but I kept my eyes up and remained standing until I’d finished my drink. It was maybe a little faster than if I’d been inside, but, hey, it wasn’t quite a guzzle.
I didn’t know why coming outside at night felt easier. Maybe the lack of people, maybe the lack of vision. But I had done it. I had breached the invisible barrier, once impassable as the widest ocean, as unreachable as those stars. Dizzy with emotion, I poured myself another glass and used the adrenaline to power me through the night to my deadline.
Tonight, one step into the garden. Next stop, the world.
Stop Being a Loser Programme
Day Thirteen
Sean emailed me again. I deleted the message without reading it. I knew I was being unfair, but when it came to his son, fair meant nothing. The only good thing about that man was him living five thousand miles away.
Joey stumbled into the living room and fell face first onto the sofa. ‘Dying,’ he mumbled into the cushion.
I put down the book I was reading – having successfully completed my latest project, I’d given myself the day off – and went to have a look. ‘What’s up?’
‘Feel,’ he croaked, feebly draping one of my hands across his forehead.
