Chapter Eleven
There was water all around me. I wasn’t swimming in it – it wasn’t one of those dreams – but I felt dwarfed by the sheer volume of it and dazzled by its glare. I looked down as though preparing to dive, which even dream-me knew was a bad idea, as I’m only a passable swimmer.
I struggled to pull myself out of the dream, but something was tethering me to it, entangling my limbs as though they were imprisoned in long twists of rope.
I woke with a start, my legs still thrashing across the width of the double bed.
It took a moment or two for reality to kick in and for me to realise they were tied up in nothing more treacherous than the sheet I’d replaced the duvet with, following the Met Office prediction that tonight would be the hottest in decades.
With an impatient grunt, I freed myself from the sheet and then flopped back on the mattress, waiting for my racing heart to find its usual rhythm.
I was covered in a film of sweat; I could feel it greasily sticking the hair to the nape of my neck and trickling unpleasantly down my back.
Even the skimpy strappy top and briefs I’d worn to bed were damp with perspiration.
It was as if I’d run a marathon in the night, but I hadn’t been asleep long enough for one of those.
The illuminated screen of the bedside digital clock confirmed it was only a little after two-thirty in the morning.
I’d been asleep for three hours, which was the longest stretch I’d managed to achieve in the seven days since I’d learnt of my mother’s death.
Those words rolled across my brain like tumbleweed over a prairie, still alien, still incomprehensible.
Grief and guilt were as tangled up in my head as the sheets I’d kicked myself free from.
It was impossible to separate the strands of loss from the shocking truth that my brain had simply erased her death from my memory.
Was that because losing her hadn’t hurt? Or because it had hurt too much?
How many times had I charged her phone, just so I could call it and hear her voice one more time? Those were just some of the questions that waited for me in the shadows at the end of the day and in the lonely middle-of-the-night hours when sleep eluded me.
Tonight, in the stifling sultry heat of the bedroom, it had been even harder to slip into the oblivion I craved. Every bedroom window was open, attempting to trap a whisper of a breeze, but the night air was thick and soupy and totally still.
The dream had already lost its potency as it evaporated away, and although I tried to grasp its disintegrating fragments, they were already just wisps of thoughts disappearing from my memory. Like so many other things have done recently, I thought as I flipped over my unpleasantly damp pillow.
As odd as the dream had been, I didn’t think it was responsible for jerking me awake.
There had been a noise, or a crashing sound.
My senses were instantly alert to the possibility of an intruder, but seconds later the room filled with brilliant light as though an invisible hand had momentarily flicked on every lamp in my flat.
I bolted upright, already placing the source of the sound before it came a second time. It roared, louder than a jet engine, from somewhere directly above the rooftops, making the windows rattle in their frames and the entire building shudder.
In pure reflex I drew up my knees, bringing them tightly against my body as though I was trying to make myself so small the lightning couldn’t find me. But it did, didn’t it, said a voice in my head that refused to be silenced. It found you again.
Those were the words that triggered the third most terrifying thing to happen to me in the last few weeks.
Knowing I was spiralling into a panic attack, even though I’d never experienced one before, did nothing to stop my descent into terror so intense it felt as though my heart was surely about to stop.
It was pounding against my ribs as though trying to hammer its way out of my chest. My throat was tightening, and every breath became a hoarse gasp that failed to deliver enough oxygen to my lungs.
I felt dizzy and light-headed, and there was a weird tingling sensation in my fingers and toes, like pins and needles on overdrive.
A terrified whimper escaped me as the thunder was followed by more forked lightning, so bright I could still see it imprinted on the inside of my eyelids.
You have to get off the bed and close the shutters, I instructed my frozen limbs, and even the voice in my head sounded half hysterical with fear.
But I couldn’t move. Every joint felt fused together as though I’d been turned into a statue right there in my own bedroom.
My eyes went fearfully to the open windows, the nearest one just a metre from where I lay.
My obsession with lightning stories on the internet had uncovered numerous accounts of people being struck while inside their homes through open doorways or windows.
There’d also been tales of people who’d been struck by lightning more than once.
There were theories that these victims had somehow become lightning magnets, which had been crazy enough to make me laugh when I read it.
But now, in the middle of the night, with the storm raging right outside my window, it didn’t seem nearly as funny.
Had the lightning come back to finish what it had started?
With the next flash, I clawed at the sheet, drawing it up to my neck as though the thousand-thread-count fabric could protect me from a second strike. The storm wasn’t moving on, and neither was the panic attack.
I’m not sure what would have happened if the lull between the next rumble of thunder hadn’t been punctured by a different sound and a light that lit up the area around my bed in a far less threatening way.
It was surprisingly hard to persuade myself to let go of the sheet and reach for my phone.
My hand felt dead, as though the fingers that were fumbling for the mobile belonged to someone else.
But they managed to pluck the device from the bedside cabinet and, after several clumsy stabs at the screen, they answered the call.
As luck would have it, I accidentally turned on the speaker, which was just as well as holding the device steady enough to talk into it would have been beyond me.
‘Hello? Ellie?’
It had been over a week since I’d heard his voice, but the relief I felt as it filled the bedroom was so great I immediately began to cry.
‘Rhys.’ His name was accompanied by a ferocious chattering of my teeth, so violent you’d be forgiven for thinking I was freezing to death instead of sweating more than any sauna could achieve.
‘Are you okay?’ From the concern in his voice, I think he’d already worked out that I wasn’t.
‘No. The storm. It woke me. And I can’t move. Or breathe properly.’
I don’t know if he’d taken a first-aid course in his past, or if he was just so incredibly good in a crisis that his instincts were reliable enough to work out what was happening to me.
‘Have you fallen? Are you injured?’
I shook my head fiercely in reply, before realising I needed to somehow summon my vocal cords into action.
‘No, but my heart is going so fast I think it’s going to stop.’
‘It won’t,’ he said, so reassuringly I almost believed him.
‘It feels like I’m going to die,’ I said, and even though I knew it was overly dramatic, it felt true in that moment.
‘I won’t let you,’ Rhys reassured me, and for the first time I felt the jackhammering within my chest begin to slow down.
‘It’s just a panic attack. It’ll pass in a minute or so. Just breathe slowly and deeply. In . . . and out.’ I did my best to follow the pace of his instructions. ‘Keep thinking about every breath and then find something in the room to focus on.’
Still breathing like a beginner, as though inhaling and exhaling was an alien concept, I glanced across the bedroom and saw the white jeans I’d worn that day.
‘Okay. Now focus all your senses on whatever it is you’re looking at. Think about how it feels when you touch it. Does it make a sound when it’s moved? Does it smell?’
‘I hope not. It’s the clothes I was wearing today.’
His laugh was the best medicine I could have hoped for.
‘There you go. You made a joke. You’re going to be fine.’
And I realised he was right. My heart rate was slowing down and the weird numbness in my hands and feet had almost gone. I’d been on a precipice, about to tumble into a bottomless abyss, and amazingly he’d talked me back from the edge.
‘How do you feel now?’
‘Foolish.’ It was the most honest answer I could give him.
‘Don’t be. Not even for a second. Foolish would have been not having a reaction to something that tried its best to kill us a little while ago.’
I really liked that ‘us’.
‘How did you know to phone me? How did you know I’d be panicking?’
I heard a long exhalation, as though he wasn’t altogether satisfied with the answer he was about to give.
‘To be honest, I don’t know. The storm woke me too, and I lay here for a few minutes, telling myself I was being irrational, but something kept compelling me to call you, to check you were okay. I just hoped I wasn’t going to get an earful of abuse for waking you up in the middle of the night.’
‘I’m so glad you called,’ I said, flinching as yet another strobe of lightning flickered beyond the open window.
‘Is it still bad outside?’
I looked at the rain teeming down like bullets from artillery fire.
‘Yes, it’s wild here. And the lightning still hasn’t passed.’
‘On a scale of “slightly bothered” to “really terrified”, where are you right now?’
‘Is there a “paralysed with fear” option?’
The terror must have still been there in my voice, because I heard the rustle of bedcovers, as though they’d been hastily tossed aside.
‘Just hang tight. I can be there in about twenty minutes.’
‘What?’ I said, and I knew I must have been feeling better when my first thought was of my sweaty body and perspiration-drenched hair. ‘No. You don’t need to do that. The roads will be treacherous in this rain.’
‘That’s not important,’ he said, and I heard the sound of a zip being hastily pulled up. A totally different kind of heat flooded into my cheeks, because I knew it belonged to his trousers.
‘Honestly, Rhys, please stay where you are. I couldn’t bear the thought of anything happening to you on the road because you were on your way to me.’
There was a jingle that I guessed was probably his car keys, and I found myself holding my breath for what felt like an eternity before they clattered back down.
‘Are you absolutely sure, Ellie? I hate the thought of you being there all alone and terrified.’
For just a second or two I wondered if some of the reason he’d offered to come over was because he too was scared. But that idea couldn’t find a foothold. I truly couldn’t imagine Rhys being frightened of anything.
‘I can’t have you racing over to comfort me every time there’s thunder and lightning or it rains. We live in the UK. You’d be dashing over every five minutes.’
I could hear the smile in his voice. ‘Well, I didn’t say I’d do it every time.’
My lips curved in response and then I heard the sound of the zip again, this time being tugged back down. That took the grin from my face and made swallowing suddenly difficult.
‘Will you stay on the line though, for just a minute or two longer?’ I asked, wincing at another roll of thunder.
‘Of course I will,’ he said, and although I couldn’t hear it, I imagined the sound of bed springs taking his weight as he lay back down.
‘So, what do you want to chat about?’ he asked, before adding on a lighter note, ‘Now that the good old English standby of the weather is off the menu.’
I laughed nervously. Rhys’s ability to defuse what had been an explosion of fear within me was nothing short of miraculous.
On one level I knew I could probably tell him that I’d unbelievably forgotten the death of my only living relative, and he wouldn’t judge me.
But it still felt too soon, too raw to share that confession with anyone. Even him.
‘I don’t know. Anything. What did you do today? What did you have for dinner? What kind of music do you like?’
‘I designed a book jacket. Spaghetti carbonara. And country.’
‘I’m going to need more background on answers one and three. The spaghetti one we can ignore.’
‘Ah, but that’s the one worth talking about. It’s my signature dish. I’ll have to make it for you sometime.’
‘I’d like that.’
Friends could cook for each other, couldn’t they? That wasn’t stepping over any line, was it? My conscience must have been feeling kindly towards me following the panic attack, because it offered no argument.
We talked for hours, long after the storm had passed and the rain had died down to a very non-terrifying drizzle.
Rhys’s voice had soothed and relaxed me like a fine wine flowing through my veins.
At some point I’d lain back down on the bed, curling onto my side, with the phone now off speaker and nestled against my ear, because it felt more intimate to hear his voice that way.
My eyes were growing heavy, and it was getting harder to disguise the yawns that were punctuating my side of the conversation.
But Rhys never said he was tired or that he wanted to hang up.
I think he was regaling me with a story about a trip to Alaska that he’d taken in his twenties when my eyes eventually fluttered to a close.
I don’t remember drifting off to sleep and have no idea how long he kept talking to me after I’d fallen silent.
But when I woke up in the morning, my mobile was still in my hand and sunlight was streaming in through the open windows.
I Iooked down at the phone screen. There was a new message that I clicked on even before I lifted my head off the pillow.
Goodnight. Sweet dreams. R
Oh God, I was in so much trouble.