Chapter 5
FIVE
Ludo
Aidan looks how I feel—tired, fragile, and frightened of something he doesn’t understand. He’s also in a mess, half out of bed, one foot hovering over the floor, frowning as though he doesn’t remember how he got there.
I’m no use to anyone, never have been, but something drives me to take his arm and ease him back onto his bed. “You look like you’re trying to escape.”
“I am.” But Aidan lets me manoeuvre him until he doesn’t have the appearance of a desperate man on the edge of a cliff. “Whoa, you’re strong.”
“Why does that surprise you?”
“Because you’ve only got one working arm and you’re skinny as fuck.”
He has a point, but it’s not one I’m prepared to concede. Being freakishly strong, despite a lack of timber, runs in my family. Ask my cousin Angelo, and tell him I said hi. You might have to remind him who I am, but hey. No conversation is ever wasted.
Aidan is staring at me, and I realise I’ve done that thing—the one where I get lost in a bitterness that drowns me if I let it.
Most days I have bigger problems than the fact that my family have forgotten me, but others it sneaks up on me and I can’t help listening to the meanest of many voices in my head.
You aren’t even crazy enough for them to remember.
Aidan clicks his fingers in front of my face. “The fuck did you go?”
I blink. “What?”
“Never mind.”
He drops his hand, his gaze too, and I feel exposed.
The panic that drove me from my bed to seek him out returns and a strangled sound escapes me.
I thought he was dead, for no other reason than I came out of my infection-induced haze to find him gone.
A rational person would’ve figured he was moved to a lower dependency bed, but I’m not a rational person.
Aidan drops back on his pillow and winces as the jerky movement ricochets through him. “I can’t handle this place.”
“Cabin fever?”
“And then some. I’m gonna lose my mind if I don’t see daylight soon.”
“There’s a window right there.” I point to one two feet from his bed. “It’s dark now, though.”
Aidan’s gaze flickers to the window. “See? I hadn’t even fucking noticed.”
“Why would you when you have other things to worry about?”
“Because that is what I’ve been worried about.”
I can’t argue with his logic, and I worry that I’m keeping him up. It’s the middle of the night and he should be sleeping, or resting if he’s like me and finds the silent ward deafening.
Fretting, I step back.
Aidan’s hooded eyes flare and he sits up again. “Where are you going?”
“I don’t know.”
“That doesn’t make any sense.”
“What does?”
He has no answer to that. I claim a point back, and the implication that he wants me to stay makes me feel . . . alive, I guess. After a quick glance at the deserted nurse station, I sit on the chair at his bedside. “When did they move you here?”
“Yesterday, maybe? Or maybe it was today. I’ve lost track.”
“Me too.”
“I’ll bet. You’ve been asleep for days.”
“Have I?”
He nods. “I thought they were giving you my bed when they moved me. It freaked me out.”
“Why?”
Aidan starts to speak and then stops. His hands are apparently fascinating to him. He turns them over, examining them. He has scarred knuckles, as though he fights a lot or has a manual job. Yeah. He definitely has a manual job. There’s no way he sits in an office all day.
“Are you a thinker?” he asks suddenly.
The question catches me off guard. “What does that even mean?”
He shrugs. “You seem to forget we’re talking sometimes.”
“Not on purpose.”
“Didn’t say it was.”
His childish response suits me. It shouldn’t, but it does, and the draw to him intensifies enough for me to slide the chair closer to the bed. “I’m tired.”
“Me too,” he says. “So why aren’t we asleep?”
I consider what I’ve asked myself so many times and give him the only answer I’ve ever found. “Because we’re uncomfortable in our own skin, but that might be temporary for you.”
“But it isn’t for you.”
This time it’s not a question, but I nod anyway. “I’m a little messed up.”
He doesn’t answer for a moment, but he’s conquered his sudden fascination with his hands, oblivious to the fact that he’s sparked another obsession in me—that I can’t stop documenting his scars and committing them to my contrary memory.
“Are you feeling better?” he asks.
“Better from what?”
“Your infection. You were really sick.”
I start to cringe, and then I remember that he’s been sick too, and whatever he saw doesn’t seem to matter so much. “I feel better, but I’m not sure I like it. Being under the weather killed some time.”
I’ve never met anyone who understands statements like that, but Aidan nods. “Valid. Is the infection better, though?”
“A bit. They say it will take another five days to completely go.”
“How do you feel about that?”
I can think of no logical reason for him to ask me that question, but as I shoot him a quizzical glance, it clicks.
He’s asking about my problems to deflect and distract from his own, and damn, if I don’t get that.
“I meant what I said about being sick filling some time, but I don’t like having an infection.
It makes me feel like I’ve got invaders under my skin, and the longer I have it, the longer I’m stuck here. ”
“You want to go home,” he states.
“Yes, just like you.” Though I’m fairly sure that’s our only similarity.
Despite what he says, Aidan is far stronger than me—big and strong, with working hands, and the healthy skin of a man who spends most of his time outside.
Not like me. Living alone scares the shit out of me, but perversely I can spend weeks at a time indoors.
As if my brain wants me to feel as terrible as possible, and only then will it leave me alone.
Aidan hums. A deep, rumbling sound that comes from somewhere I want to be. “Who was the woman who came to see you?”
“What woman?”
His resting bitch face deepens to an actual frown. “You had a visitor, a woman . . . at least, I think you did. This morphine shit is sending me crackers.”
“Some of us are already there.”
“I want to be your friend.” Aidan clamps his mouth shut, as if his words have surprised him as much as they have me.
I let it slide. Perhaps it is the morphine, or Stockholm syndrome.
Whatever. It’s what we both need and I’ll call him mate all night long if it helps him feel better.
“If the woman exists, then I don’t know who she is, which tells me she was probably a volunteer from the mental health charity the NHS uses for crisis management. ”
“You didn’t notice her sitting by your bed?”
That he doesn’t so much as twitch at the mention of mental health warms me to him even more. “Maybe not. I don’t remember much of the last few days.”
“Because of the infection?”
“Yeah, and the sedative they gave me to compensate for the fact I’d puked all my lithium up.”
Experience told me there were other reasons to sedate me, but if I cling to every single waver in my mental health, it will become all I am, if it hasn’t already.
Aidan’s gaze is drilling a hole in the side of my head. I force myself to look at him, to accept his curious stare, and tell him the truth. “I have bipolar disorder,” I say, “among other things.”
“What other things?”
“Anxiety, paranoia, depression. Sometimes it’s symptomatic of the disease; sometimes, it’s just . . . me.”
“Bipolar.” Aidan says it as if he’s turning it over in his head and matching it to somewhere he’s heard it before.
I sigh. “Whatever you’re thinking, don’t. I have real bipolar, not the trendy one where you go to a clinic and come out with bigger boobs.”
“You want bigger boobs?”
I laugh, and lights come on, both in my soul and somewhere on the darkened ward. “Not especially, but a week in this nut house has done strange things to me already, so who the hell knows. I’d better go.”
“What?”
“I should go,” I repeat. “Before they catch me and put me in restraints.”
He can’t tell if I’m joking, and I don’t elaborate either way. I rise and he catches my hand in his, just for a moment. The contact is fleeting and wonderful, and I don’t understand how I feel as he lets go. Or why he did it.
“You’ll come back, won’t you?” he whispers.
I nod as footsteps approach. “I’ll come back tomorrow.”