Chapter Thirty-Four
Thirty-four
I sit on the Central Line, trying but failing to read the book I bought earlier.
It’s an old story, but it’s putting new thoughts in my head that I don’t currently have room for.
Books can be mirrors, too, offering a reflection of our worst selves for appraisal; lessons tucked between pages, just waiting to be learned.
I put the book back in my bag and drink in the faces of my fellow travelers instead, wondering who the people wearing them really are.
Ben and I used to play a game on the tube.
We would pick a couple of people talking in the distance, and we’d take it in turns to speak when they spoke, making up silly voices and amusing dialogues that didn’t fit the faces we saw, finding ourselves hilarious.
We were fun back then. It was good. The memory makes me smile, but then I realize I am grinning at strangers and a past I can never get back.
It’s rude of me to stare like this, but nobody says anything, people don’t even see me doing it.
They’re all far too busy staring at their phones, partaking in the daily withdrawal from wonder and the world around them.
We’ve all got so busy staring down at our screens that we’ve forgotten to look up at the stars.
I think it can be dangerous to spend too long watching the lives of others; you might run out of time to live your own.
Technology is devolving the human race. Eating up our emotional intelligence, spitting out any remnants of privacy it can’t quite swallow.
The world will keep on spinning and the stars will always shine, regardless of whether anyone is looking.
Sometimes I think that every person might be his or her own star, shining at the center of his or her own solar system.
I observe the changing expressions of my fellow commuters and am certain I witness an occasional flare on their surfaces, as they contemplate their past or worry about their future.
Each walking, talking, thinking, feeling human star has its own planets revolving around it: parents, children, friends, lovers.
Sometimes stars get too big, too hot, too dangerous, and the planets closest to them burn to oblivion.
As I sit and stare at the galaxy of faces, trying to get from one place to another, I understand that it doesn’t matter who we are or what we do; we’re all the same.
We are all just stars trying to shine in the darkness.
I get off the tube at Notting Hill and walk towards home, my neck seeming to hold my head a little higher than it has recently.
I experience a trampoline of emotions with every step, bouncing from high to low then back again, before the mixed bag of feelings seems to collapse in an exhausted state inside my tired mind.
I have an audition with one of my all-time-favorite directors, my agent is not dumping me, and despite all the problems in my personal life, there is a lot to be grateful for.
This misunderstanding with Ben will get all cleared up.
He’s trying to hurt me, but he can’t vanish forever, and I can’t be accused of a crime that never happened.
I turn the corner onto my street, feeling as if everything might just be okay after all.
The feeling doesn’t last long.
The two police vans that were sitting outside the house this morning are still there, but now they are empty.
My front door is wide open. There is a steady stream of police officers going in and out of the building, and blue-and-white police tape forms a cordon between it and the rest of the street.
I guess Detective Croft got her warrant.
This has to be a bad dream. Surely by now she must have realized that I’m telling the truth.
I don’t know where my husband is, why he said the things he did, or why he is doing this to me.
I expect he just wanted to teach me a lesson, but enough is enough.
I certainly didn’t do away with him the way she keeps seeming to suggest. I might have been diagnosed with trauma-induced amnesia as a child, but the doctors were wrong, and either way, I think I’d remember if I’d done anything as dramatic as that.
I start walking towards the police tape.
They’ll have to let me in, it’s my house, and besides, I need to get ready for the wrap party tonight, I can’t go dressed like this.
The wind in my newly hoisted sails dies an instant death when I see two men dressed in white forensic overalls.
They are carrying what looks like a stretcher out of my front door.
Something, or someone, is on it, hidden beneath a white sheet.
At first I can’t believe what my eyes are seeing.
The image seems to burn itself onto my mind, leaving a permanent mark, and snuffing out my last remains of hope.
They can’t have found a body, because that would mean that someone was dead.
And if someone really was dead, then that would mean that someone else had killed them.
I spot the shape of Detective Croft coming out of the house; she’s pointing at something I can’t see.
If she really has found something, she’ll never believe me about the stalker now; she didn’t believe me in the first place.
I can’t make out the expression on her face from this far away, but I imagine that she is smiling. I turn and I run.