Chapter 54
Oh fuck.
I dropped the axe and ran to the door.
Oh fuck oh fuck.
I scrabbled for a handle, an edge, anything to pry it open again.
Oh no, please, oh fuck, oh no, please, no, please.
The door wouldn’t give. I went back and grabbed the axe.
I’d broken through before. Perhaps I could do it again.
Panicked, I swung at the wood. The metal cut through the boards then clanged against brick.
Fragments of door fell away, revealing nothing but old stone wall.
The door wasn’t just gone. It was as if it had never been there at all.
I wasn’t getting out. It was over.
I’d failed.
I sank to my knees and pressed my forehead to the wall.
My home, the house I’d fought so hard for, was just on the other side.
The flowers in spring. The coloured leaves in autumn.
I’d come so close. I thought I’d had to understand and forgive the director, but I’d gotten it wrong.
It wasn’t about my anger at other people at all. I hadn’t learned a thing.
And I’d fallen at the very last hurdle.
A chuckle echoed quietly from a corner behind me. I turned resignedly to the sound. My neighbour prowled out of the darkness.
“You really gave me the runaround there. First the axe. Now this.”
She wore my face, wide-eyed and grinning so hard it looked painful. The crescent moon scar shone along the curve of her forehead.
“It didn’t have to be this difficult,” she said. “You know that’s what makes the end so horrifying for some. Their inability to accept that it’s here.”
She circled me in the shrinking light. The beams overhead creaked under the strain of the earth outside.
“They always spend the precious little time they have remaining fighting the inevitable.” She paced leisurely around me.
“They wrap themselves in knots of denial and bargaining with a universe that really doesn’t care.
And then their very last moment is one of rage, despair and terror.
Can you imagine that?” She shook her head in mocking disbelief.
“A whole life reduced to that last moment. Well, you won’t have to imagine it for long. ”
Soil tumbled down the stairs into the basement.
“You could have spent time with loved ones.” She shrugged.
“Or if you don’t have any loved ones, gone somewhere you like to be.
The beach. A nice garden. I don’t know, something nice to think about in the last moments.
” She flashed me a look and flicked her tongue over her teeth.
“Though between you and me, we know it won’t work. ”
Rivulets of earth trickled in through the gaps between the stones in the wall.
I shuffled away from the encroaching soil, tucking closer to where the door used to be, as if I could shuffle away from the awful, soul-sucking, sinking feeling that weighed heavy in my heart-pounding, panicking chest. I was so far underground. No one would ever be able to find me.
My neighbour pouted.
“Oh, come on, Tammy. Don’t you understand yet?” She knelt down in front of me as soil rained down around her. “I’m not the one you came here to get rid of.”
I stared at her.
“It took me a bit to get it, but once I did,” she whistled, “you made this all so much easier for me.”
She gestured to herself.
“Look at me. Do I strike you as the thing you have no wish to be? I don’t annoy anyone.
I don’t go around with that perma-scowl on my face.
I’m not so fucking needy I send everyone running for the hills, like you do.
I know how to start a conversation. I know how to make friends.
I get invited to work drinks. I’m easy to know.
I’m easy to like. I’m easy to understand.
I’m not going to bristle at some stupid comment.
I’m not going to hold offense or a grudge.
I’m not going to force everyone to tiptoe around me.
I don’t pull a weird face at perfectly fine jokes.
I don’t look wounded whenever anyone else is hanging out and I’m not invited.
I don’t have to be invited to every fucking thing.
I don’t randomly blurt out uncomfortable details about my childhood.
No one knows what my childhood was like.
As far as they know it was completely normal because I have weekly calls with my loving, encouraging mum, and my dad, who just has to ask a million questions about anything I’m into because it’s the way he shows he cares.
They know what job I have. They know where I live.
They know what matters to me. I’m not such a fucking mystery to them.
I don’t hide myself away. I don’t have to blame them for every annoying thing I do.
I don’t force people into awful uncomfortable silences where they realise how fucked up I am.
I don’t want to push needles into people’s eyes.
And I don’t crush people’s hands in standing desks. ”
She tilted her head.
“I wonder how many people had odds on you bringing a gun into the office, you fucking psychopath. ‘Oh God, not Tamsin again. Oh God, not this shit again. Oh, thank God she’s gone. Thank God she left before she decided to take her inability to be a person out on anyone else.’”
I watched her silently. I had no arguments, no rebuttal.
She stared at me, eyes sympathetic.
“You know the truth, right? Deep down, you’ve got to know,” she said. “I’m not your shadow. You are.”