Chapter 17
SEVENTEEN
Ludo
“What if I become dependent on him? What if I already am?”
Rita watches me as I pace her office. There are no biscuits on her desk this time, no cake wrapped in paper for me. Because this isn’t my regular appointment. This is me invading her day and disrupting her hard-earned lunch break. “Being friends with someone doesn’t make you dependent on them.”
“Yes, it does.”
“No, Ludo, it really doesn’t. I have lots of friends I miss when they’re not around. It just means I love them.”
I stop pacing and wheel around. “I don’t love Aidan.”
“I never said you did. I’m talking about how I feel about my friends and how it’s probably not that different to how you feel about yours.”
“I don’t have any friends.”
“Aidan is your friend. You do nice things for each other, and you enjoy spending time together.”
Aidan is my friend. Aidan is my friend. Aidan is my friend.
But even as I repeat it over and over, it doesn’t feel right. Nothing has, ever since I woke up to a dark spare room, screaming into an empty house because Aidan left.
You had a shitty dream, like you always do in that room. It had nothing to do with the fact that Aidan did what any normal person would do when their host falls asleep—he went home.
My long-maligned rational side knows this. How can I not when Aidan texted me to tell me? But the anxiety I woke with has dug its claws in, and now real, deep-rooted, and yet totally unfounded fear is threatening the first new friendship I’ve made in this godforsaken town.
Stop it. You like Buckbourne.
But do I? I moved here because London scared me, and it was far enough away from anyone I knew that I didn’t have to live with the fact that I scared them. But that doesn’t make it home.
Nothing felt like home until Aidan.
“Ludo.” Rita sounds distant even as she stands and comes to where I’ve ground to a halt by the window. “I have ten minutes before my next patient. If we’re going to get anywhere, you need to talk to me, not yourself.”
I turn to her. “It’s myself talking to myself about myself.”
“I know, but maybe we should try speaking out loud for the time we have left. Then I’ll give you a new notebook to take home.”
Super.
I leave Rita’s clinic with two new notebooks and a prescription for a single Valium dose.
The pharmacy is on my way home. I consider walking on by, but three days of peak ridiculous is taking its toll.
I need to eat and sleep and sensibly think my way out of this mess before it turns into something I can’t fix.
Back home, common sense tells me to wait until tonight before I take the sedative. That sleeping all day will only lead to the kind of night I fear most—awake and afraid. But I’m so done with the noise in my head that I can’t fight temptation.
I swallow the magic pill and go to bed.
I wake to the darkness I don’t want to face. Mouth dry, I crawl out of bed and stumble downstairs. I gulp water and scour the fridge as my stomach grumbles to life. Finally I’m hungry. Famished, in fact, and I eat everything edible left in the fridge while leaning against the kitchen counter.
When I’m full, I take Bella for a quick spin around the block, then feed her too, guilt at neglecting her all day nibbling the edges of my sedative haze.
I walked her for miles before visiting Rita—I had to, to avoid Aidan’s precious tree—and I know she was perfectly content to share my bed with me, but she’s the happiest dog in the world. She doesn’t deserve my silence.
We play ball in the garden. Somehow she knows to be careful of the herb patch Aidan hasn’t yet finished.
I can’t look at it, but in the cool air of the late evening, my thoughts have finally slowed enough for me to catch up with them.
Rita’s notebooks are on the kitchen counter next to the empty blister pack the Valium came in.
I clear the rubbish away and take a notebook to the couch.
Challenging my negative thoughts is a way of life for me.
CBT, talking therapies, I’ve done them all, and they work when I have the wherewithal to let them.
Chewing my lip, I retrace my steps to Sunday, when I last saw Aidan.
He was standing at my kitchen sink, washing up, whistling through his teeth despite the fact that I preceded dinner with a mini meltdown over something he hadn’t even said.
Yeah, he was right about that. People don’t listen to me, so I spoke without giving him the chance to try.
Idiot.
No.
I’m not an idiot. I’m living with a mental illness. Sometimes I fuck up.
I write it down and then cross out the F-bomb. Aidan is right about that too.
It takes me an hour to piece together the anxiety trail. An unscheduled nap, a bad dream, and afailure to catch my negative thoughts before they spun me into a vicious cycle of fear and self-loathing. It’s a pattern I’ve drawn a thousand times, and I ponder if I’ll ever stop.
Still. The Valium and my full stomach have thrown up a roadblock. For the first time in days, I can think clearly. I find my phone and scroll through the messages Aidan has sent me over the last few days and my sporadic replies.
Aidan: snuck out while you were sleeping. speak tomorrow
Aidan: morning. going to work in a bit. call u later?
Aidan: hope ur ok
Ludo: I’m fine.
Aidan: um, good? u wanna walk after work?
Aidan: sure ur okay?
Aidan: hello?
Ludo: I’m fine
Aidan: okay. bell me whenever u want
Wow. If anyone has the right to be insecure, it’s not me.
But I can’t help how terrified I am that Aidan’s concern for me makes me feel good.
Makes me feel valid and wanted, but at the same time so unworthy I want to take his messages and set them on fire.
He doesn’t deserve to care about me. It will only hurt him and then hurt me when he can’t take it anymore.
“Ludovico, leave your cousin alone. He doesn’t have time for your silly games.”
My aunt pulls Angelo away from me and out of the room. I scream as he goes, and I scream and scream until my mum comes in and shuts me up. “He’s not yours. Now be quiet, your father’s embarrassed of you.”
I blink away my ten-year-old cousin’s lovely face, it’s perfection marred by confusion.
One day I’ll get over the fact that I never saw him again, but today isn’t that day, and I have other things and other perfect faces on my mind.
I read through Aidan’s messages one more time; then I delete them and shove my phone in a drawer.
I was an impossible child, and now I’m a difficult man.
Aidan doesn’t need that in his life—no one does.
The rest of my evening passes in a haze of catching up on work and tidying away the mess I’ve somehow created by doing nothing at all.
My phone calls to me every time I come in the kitchen, but I ignore it.
It’s been twenty-four hours since Aidan last messaged me, and I’m so sure he’s done that I’m almost relieved.
Without him I can get back to the monotony I need to stay sane.
The beige that keeps me safe. Maybe I’ll paint the rest of the house the same puke-esque cream as the spare room—
My phone rings. I freeze, my hand on the kettle. It could be anyone, but of course it’s Aidan, unless I worried Rita enough for her to check up on me.
Such a thing isn’t unheard of, but I know it’s Aidan, and the drawer is right next to me. My hand twitches. I ball it into a fist but reach for the drawer with the other before I can stop myself.
My battered iPhone greets me, lit up with Aidan’s name and the photo of the rosemary bush I’ve assigned to his contact.
I should’ve blocked his number.
But I didn’t because I don’t want to. I want—no, need—to hear his voice, even if it’s for the last time.
I take the call. “Hey.”
“Hey yourself.” His voice is scratchy and rough, as though he’s been smoking a lot. “Am I disturbing you? Fuck, I didn’t realise how late it is.”
I glance at the clock. “It’s only nine.”
Aidan yawns. “That’s late for me when I’m working. Getting up early basically turns me into my dad.”
Shut it down. Shut it down. Shut it down. “Your dad? What’s he like?”
“Dead. And probably just as well. He was a nasty bastard.”
It makes sense. Aidan is all sharp edges and deflective defence. He’s not a man who’s been loved. “When did he die?”
“A few years ago. I don’t count them anymore.”
“Because you hated him?”
“No, because I didn’t care enough even for that.”
That wounds me. It shouldn’t, but it does. I don’t want Aidan to be a man who doesn’t care about anything. Who walks through life cold and believing himself unlovable. He is kind and funny and gorgeous, and god, I wish he knew it.
So tell him.
My brain does a one-eighty. Suddenly pushing him away doesn’t seem so important. I pour water from the kettle into a mug already loaded with lavender tea. It tastes like soap, but Rita told me purple and blue are calming colours, and I need all the purple right now. “What about your mum?”
“She’s dead too.”
“When?”
“A long time ago.”
He doesn’t want to get into that—or any of it. But he wants to talk or he wouldn’t have called. And clearly I want to talk or I wouldn’t have answered the phone.
I take my mug upstairs to my bedroom. The spare room door is closed, like it has been since I stumbled out of there three nights ago. I open it now and peer inside at the drab walls. It’s not a space that makes me think of Aidan, and I feel bad that he had to come in here to find me.
“Ludo?”
“Yeah?”
“Nothing. Was checking you were there. You haven’t said anything for, like, an hour.”
I laugh, slopping tea over my hand. “An hour? Okay. For your information, I was just coming upstairs to settle down so I can talk to you properly.”
“Properly, eh? Does that involve ignoring my messages for days at a time? Cos, mate, it’d be easier if you told me to fuck off.”
And there it is: the brutality of him that I find so refreshing. He didn’t press me in his messages because that’s not who he is. He does things right or he doesn’t do them at all, even if it means things go wrong. “I’d never tell you to fuck off.”
“Well, you can if you ever need to, so don’t be worrying about hurting my feelings or some shit if you need some space.”
I feel like we had this conversation before, but I can’t remember when or how. Déjà vu often haunts me. Keeps me awake at night. Taints my days with doubt.
But I like it with Aidan.
It’s as if there’s whole parts of our friendship that might come back to me later.
Like shoring up my stash of him for a rainy day.
“I don’t need space—” But that’s not true.
A Valium and a top up dose of him hasn’t changed the fact that I’m frightened of how much I like him. “I’m sorry,” I say instead.
“It’s okay,” he says. “You don’t owe me your time. I was just worried in case you needed me and I didn’t know.”
I start to say that I don’t need him, that I can’t need anyone ever. But that’s a lie too. Because I do need him—I needed this, a quiet conversation that doesn’t have to make sense. “Sometimes . . . sometimes I get a bit lost in my own head. I’m scared of the things I like in case I lose them.”
“Hmm. I get that, and I’m not going to promise the worst shit in the world won’t ever happen, but . . . fuck, I don’t know. I’m scared too, Ludo. I’m scared I’ll say the wrong thing and upset you more. I’m scared I’ll squeeze you so hard I’ll break you.”
“Do you mean literally?”
“I don’t think so. I think for the first time in my life I might’ve understood how a sentence doesn’t have to be literal to mean something.”
I curl up on my bed, clutching my phone to my ear hard enough to leave a dent in my face. Warmth spreads through me, and I wish he were here so I could smooth the frown lines from his face. “I’m sorry I ignored you. I didn’t want to, I just—I lost my head a bit.”
“Did you find it yet?”
“I think so. My CPN gave me a Valium.”
Aidan hums, deep and low like a gathering storm. “I could do with one of those after three days in Bernard’s office. Those women are bananas.”
I’ve forgotten that he’s started a new job he was sure he’d hate. More guilt bites me, but knowing he’s right there tempers it. I can say sorry for that when I see him. When I sit him down and feed him the biggest dinner ever and prod him into sharing everything I’ve missed.
We talk some more, but eventually Aidan calls time. “I get to leave the office tomorrow,” he says, and I can tell how much it excites him. “Bernard is letting me assess a tree and write up a plan for dealing with it.”
“Is that worse than not working outside at all?”
“I’ll tell you tomorrow.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. Listen, I’m gonna go to the shop on my way home, then have a bash at making something that doesn’t look like road kill. If you’re hungry, come over. If you’re not, I’ll speak to you soon, okay?”
There are so many things I want to say, but I nod, even though he can’t see me. “Okay.”
And then he’s gone. A quiet click takes him away from me, but the lost sensation I’ve carried for days is no longer there.
I can see Aidan tomorrow.
For real.
I close my eyes. Excitement buzzes in my veins, eclipsing the disturbance of the last few days, and somehow, despite the fact that I’ve lost a whole day to a Valium coma, I fall asleep.