I nodded, afraid to speak.
‘Want to talk about it?’
I shook my head.
‘Well, you know I’m here if you change your mind.’ She started the ignition.
‘No, it’s fine. We were just talking about driving lessons. Nothing serious.’
Nothing serious. So why did I feel as though my guts had been ripped out with a blunt camping knife?
20
Initially, I put the headache down to another night twisting myself up in my tangled thoughts and tangled duvet, along with the alcohol, something I rarely touched. I got up around dawn, tried to shower off any last traces of stink, and forced down a cup of coffee.
Ten minutes later, I threw the coffee back up again. Then the chills kicked in. My throat felt as though someone held a lighter to it. I made it halfway down the street, determined to get to church, where I could show Dylan I’d brushed off last night’s conversation. Rasping, quaking, my head spinning, I stumbled back home and hauled myself back up to bed.
Fever, virus, bacterial infection. My greatest fear after long-lost killers, having a bin for a bed again, and something happening to Sam. Or rather, something even worse happening to him.
If I couldn’t get out of bed, couldn’t stay on my feet for a five-hour stretch, couldn’t carry four loaded plates without my hands trembling, I couldn’t work. If I didn’t work, I ran out of money. Running out of money spelled big trouble.
I could survive on pennies, live off beans, wrap up in an extra duvet when the gas got cut off. But what I wouldn’t be able to do was pay the massive debt I still owed from when, in desperation, I had booked Sam into a private treatment centre for the first time.
Three years ago, the overstretched community nurses told me Sam must prove to be a danger to himself or others before being admitted to the kind of NHS facility that would help prevent him becoming either of those things. Distraught at watching him slowly tumble into his own personal hell, certain a rope or a bottle of pills lay at the bottom of that abyss, I took matters into my own hands, and a monstrous bill along with them. The private facility saved his life. I had been paying for it ever since.
Two years after that, I had fallen ill with tonsillitis, but kept working. Having missed too many days already due to ‘compassionate leave’, I faced a final warning if I took any more time off. Sam was on the downward slope of his constant cycle, and the signs all told me he was slipping fast. Garbled phone calls in the middle of the night. Empty bottles no longer hidden but strewn in plain sight. The pinprick eyes and sweating hands betraying a man who had handed control back to the chemicals.
The mornings and evenings were unusually bitter that spring, even for April. I ploughed on through my illness, tramping the two miles to HCC and back, and the combination of the cold, the walk and the ten-hour shifts tipped tonsillitis into the worst sort of flu.
I knew I couldn’t keep working, but my brain was addled, full of virus and fever and fear. Sam, sensing my exhaustion, my weakened attention, slipped even further into the darkness.
For six days, I battled on. Hitching a lift with a colleague where I could, half-crawling home when I couldn’t, crashing asleep at my desk, ignoring emails and avoiding customers.Vomiting repeatedly, chills shaking my body so hard my teeth rattled one minute, my clothes getting drenched with sweat the next. My boss, having run out of patience at my continual insistence I had a bog-standard cold, issued me with a final warning – pull it together or find another job.
On the sixth day, I used eighteen pounds’ worth of my precious tips on a taxi home following a particularly horrendous late shift. It had been nearly twenty-four hours since I had spoken to Sam, which at that point gave me a mild sense of disquiet, but I felt too weak to feel anything more. I ran myself a scalding hot bath, falling asleep in it until the tepid water startled me awake. I toppled into bed, weeping with relief that tomorrow, I had a day off.
I slept for fifteen straight hours, waking to find myself the teeniest, tiniest bit cooler, the pounding in my head a fraction less insistent. So, taking my time, I heated half a tin of soup and carefully spooned in every mouthful, pleasantly surprised to find it settled in my stomach. I had another bath, dressed and took the five-minute walk round to Sam’s, feeling a faint ray of optimism that maybe I had weathered the worst of it. Another crisis averted. I would still have a job on Monday.
The flat was quiet when I let myself in. Nothing unusual about that – I expected to find Sam in bed.
I called out to him a couple of times, again unsurprised by his lack of answer. Kicking my way through the mess that had piled up since I had last found the energy to clear up, I opened his bedroom door.
Weakened legs collapsed underneath me. I sank to the floor, pulled out my phone and dialled for an ambulance.
Later that evening, I made another call. To Perry. Whereby I formally accepted his offer of a proposal of marriage.
Did he make the link between my acceptance and my hour of need?
Perhaps. On the other hand, he lived in a world so carefree regarding money, so removed from the need to make choices based on the financial implications, that perhaps he didn’t. Either way, he never mentioned it and once Sam was home again, six weeks later, offering his hearty thanks with all the charm and charisma that befitted a future Upperton brother-in-law, from Perry’s point of view it seemed as though the issue was done and dusted. His point of view, however, couldn’t see addictions, or the murky past that went with them. Let alone the murky present.
The week after my hen do, I cancelled my three shifts, my babysitting for the twins, and my meeting with Larissa and the florist, and spent three days straight on the sofa, under a duvet, eating the chicken soup Marilyn had brought round, and watching drivel on television in between naps.
Tuesday evening, the doorbell rang. I shuffled down the corridor, expecting to see Marilyn with another tub of food, but unable to ignore the surge of hope that it might be Dylan, despite my unwashed hair, pallid complexion and saggy pyjamas.
Perry stood on the doorstep, carrying a fruit basket, a bunch of flowers and a stack of romantic comedies.
‘I’m so sorry I couldn’t get here earlier. The traffic back from Heathrow was a nightmare.’ He dumped the goodies on the kitchen table and turned to enfold me in a hug. ‘Darling, look at you. You must be feeling awful.’
I tried to pull away. ‘I must be smelling awful, too.’
