Chapter 11
ELEVEN
Aidan
Bernard has been spiking the whisky in the local shop. He knows it’s my favourite vice when I’m in a shit mood, and lacing it with LSD is his revenge for every scrap of disrespect I’ve shown him over the years.
Yeah. That’s it. It has to be . . . it’s the only rational explanation I can think of for the apparition that’s appeared in front of me in the shape of the world’s cutest dog and the man who haunts my thoughts every moment I’m not blind drunk.
I blink hard and push my overlong hair out of my face, willing the vision to disappear despite the fact that I’ve spent many long nights fantasising about a moment just like this.
Because that’s all it is—a fantasy. Ludo isn’t from around here.
There’s no logical reason for him to be strolling through my damn-fucking woods.
The dog starts towards me.
“Bella.”
And I blink again as the impact of the softly uttered word hits me.
Have you ever felt as though the world has stopped turning?
Cos that’s how I feel right now. I never knew Ludo’s face as well as I wanted to, but I learnt his voice—every rise and fall, the smooth bits and the sharp edges.
It’s how I knew him . . . how I know him. Oh god, it’s really him.
I step forward, but the dog responds before I can take a breath. It bounds over a fallen trunk and dashes away, it’s golden fur merging with fading sunlight until I can’t be sure where one ends and the other begins.
And then it’s gone, and Ludo is too, and I’m alone again, like I’ve always been, like I always was until I met him.
He’s not real. You’re drunk and tired. Go home.
For a long moment, I attempt to make peace with common sense, but as my heart beats a frantic tattoo, hammering my ribcage, I don’t care what’s real and what’s not. I care about Ludo, and as ridiculous as I fucking know it is, I miss him.
Follow him.
But it’s easier thought than done. My drunken hike has taken its toll on my broken body and I can’t walk without dragging my stiff leg behind me.
Returning my sorry arse to the uneven forest floor is so fucking tempting, but my body keeps going, limping towards the light with the grace of an escapee from the set of The Walking Dead.
It hurts. I stumble so many times I take the skin off my knuckles steadying myself on fortuitously placed trees, but I don’t stop.
I can’t, and my dumb-fuck na?ve self is so utterly convinced that Ludo will be waiting for me when I emerge from the woods that it takes me a full minute to reconcile myself with the fact that he isn’t.
Of course he isn’t. I stumble through the gate to the same quiet lane as when I arrived, and energy drains from me like water through a sieve.
You daft cunt.
I sag against the gatepost, grief and confusion crashing into me in a tidal wave of humiliating perspective.
The buzz of my whisky binge has faded to a dry mouth and a headache, and I’m not altogether sure how I got here.
The woods are a mile from my bedsit. Add in the trudge to the magical tree and back, and I’ve walked further today than I have since way before the accident.
I’m dead on my feet; I can’t imagine how I’ll ever get home. Or if I even want to . . . if I can face another night tossing and turning in bed until I inevitably give up and wind up outside, huddled on my bench as I wait for the sun to rise and give me a fucking break.
I don’t want to do it . . . any of it. But I have to. I’ve got previous for kipping on the street, and though I’m a long way from being happily too drunk to care, the old bill around here dislike me enough to stop and ask questions, and a night in the cells would probably finish me off.
Fuck that shit.
I push off the gatepost and start walking, forcing my battered leg to keep moving, dragging my toes along the pavement.
A car passes me. For a hot second I allow myself to imagine that it’s Ludo coming back for me, to drive me home, come inside and lock the doors so it’s just me and him forever.
Then I figure myself even more of a weirdo than before, and blacking out in the street is suddenly a viable option again.
Somehow I reach the end of the lane. Across the road is a row of three houses and a disused phone box.
It’s a vintage one, painted red, still stuffed full of old-school calling cards.
I can’t believe it’s still there, that it hasn’t been vandalised or nicked, but then, this town isn’t like that.
The only idiot hooligan I can remember running the streets around here is me. And I can’t fucking run now.
A hysterical laugh escapes me. I stumble against a dry-stone wall and cling to it as if I’m drowning.
It’s getting dark, and I welcome the shadows as they close in around me.
Teenage me was an idiot, and I’m an idiot still.
For months I’ve existed for the sake of someone I’ll never see again, waiting for some kind of fucking epiphany to save me.
And because it hasn’t happened, I’ve made one up.
Got so messed up I’m seeing things in the one place I’ve always felt at home.
I need the woods. I need the trees. I can’t let whatever car crash is happening in my brain take them away from me. I just can’t—
“Aidan?”
I close my eyes. “No.”
Ludo
Sometimes the worst has to happen to make things right.
I ran all the way home from the woods, threw Bella’s dinner at her, and then sat in my living room window, fixated on the lane leading to the woods, convinced that if no one emerged after an hour or so, it was probably time to call Rita to come and rescue me.
It’s rare that I’m able to pre-empt a crisis, that I have the foresight to warn the people paid to care about me that I’m not okay. For a little while I thought I cracked it, that this time and the next I’d be ready for whatever was coming.
But nothing could’ve prepared me for the sight of Aidan staggering out of the lane and collapsing against the wall. In a heartbeat, the blurred lines between real and illusion cease to matter. Real or not, Aidan needs me, and I sprint across the road, barefoot and frantic.
“Aidan?”
“No.” He shakes his head and buries his face in his hands. “You’re not real. Leave me alone.”
“I am real.”
“You’re not. You never were.”
He’s in my head. There’s no other explanation for how he can echo my own thoughts verbatim. For how the struggle in him resonates so deeply in my consciousness that my hand shoots out to touch him before I can check myself.
I close my fingers around his bicep—a part of his arm I never touched in the hospital—and squeeze, to ground myself as much as him. “Aidan, I’m real, I promise. Just look at me . . . please?”
For a second I fear he won’t. That I’ll have to let go and leave him like this, and it will be a hundred times harder than leaving him in the hospital, but then he groans, an animalistic cry for help that cuts me to the bone, and raises his head.
I barely recognise the face that stares back at me. I’ve never seen Aidan’s bright blue eyes unmarred by pain and morphine, but months down the line, perhaps I’ve forgotten how much his injuries hurt. How sad and lonely he was, despite how hard he tried to hide it with indifference and anger.
My hand slides from his arm and I touch his face, just for a moment, grazing the dark shadows beneath his red-rimmed eyes. “You didn’t get better.”
He shakes his head. “You did.”
How does he know?
Embarrassment ripples through me as I ponder what side of myself I showed him in the hospital.
By my standards, the manic episode and subsequent crash were mild—crisis lite .
. . diet crazy. But Aidan doesn’t know me any better than I know myself.
How can he know that right now, I’m as stable as I’m ever going to get?
This isn’t about you.
Of course it isn’t. And as the thought completes, Aidan sways on his feet.
I steady him, wishing this wasn’t the first time I’ve ever seen him upright. I wish he was happy and free and that it was easy to let him go. But he’s not happy, and I knew that even before today. “Aidan.” I try again. “Where are you trying to go? Do you live near here?”
He leans on me, though I can tell he doesn’t mean to. That he wouldn’t for one second if he realised. “I live round here,” he says slowly, slurring, like he’s drunk. “But you don’t.”
“What makes you say that?”
“Because I’d know.”
“Would you?”
“Yeah.”
I turn us round so we’re facing the road, my arm still looped under his broad shoulders. “Then you don’t know much. My house is right there, on the end.”
“It’s not.”
“It is.”
“It can’t be.”
“Why not?”
He’s run out of answers. And energy. His legs give way and it takes every ounce of my strength to hold us both up.
Lacking any better ideas, I manoeuvre him away from the wall and start walking.
“Where are we going?” he grunts.
“For a cup of tea,” I say, even though I don’t have any in my cupboards. “Then maybe I’ll call you a cab to wherever you’re supposed to be.”
He doesn’t answer, so I keep towing him until we reach my front door, wide open, as I left it when I charged across the road to get to him. I kick it shut and somehow manhandle Aidan into the kitchen, thankful I have the bad habit of leaving all the chairs untucked.
Aidan falls into one and instantly slumps over my cluttered kitchen table.
One arm is flung out in front of him, the other tucked under his unshaven chin.
His hair falls over his face. The urge to brush it back is so strong it takes my breath away, so I retreat to the kettle while I try and come to terms with the fact that the man I’ve been dreaming of is passed out in my kitchen.
It’s a tough reality to swallow, and I almost don’t, but then Bella comes in from the patio where she’s been chomping on the stick she brought home from the woods and stops dead in the doorway, her standard reaction for the rare occasions someone she doesn’t know comes into the house.
She tilts her head sideways and sniffs the air.
Likes what she smells and prances over to Aidan, treating him to an exuberant lick.
“What the—” He straightens so fast he must give himself whiplash. He stares at Bella. Then drags his gaze to me. “I—I don’t know what’s happening.”
I think of all the times I’ve stuttered those words at a well-meaning stranger and been even more terrified by their response. I think of the one and only time one of those strangers has ever managed to calm me.
“You are crazy right now, but never forever. Your world is fluid. Nothing sticks.”
The student nurse was kicked off his course for calling us crazy, and it’s a stupid word. Cruel and ignorant. But I don’t mind it. Never have. It’s mine, and I own it, and since that day I’ve never considered it a theme that can’t be swapped out for something else.
I was unwell then and I will be again, but I’m not right now.
Aidan was unhappy when I met him and he still is, but that doesn’t mean he has to be.
I cross the room and crouch in front of him, my hands on his knees, and I’m so sure I can feel the pins holding his bones together that I almost pull away.
But I don’t pull away. I hold his gaze and smile enough to help him feel safe. “I think you’re drunk and lost, in every sense of the word, so I’m going to make you tea and some food. Then we can talk, and maybe I can help you get home.”