Chapter 7
Olivia Greenwood comes round to find the bed next to her empty, the windows wide open, and absolute silence in the house.
Even more intriguingly, she is able to see.
Her vision, usually that of a geriatric mole, is now perfect, even if her eyes feel somewhat crusty and dry.
She blinks a few times and realizes she has fallen asleep with her contact lenses in.
The disappointment is swiftly dissolved by a rush of panic. Has she overslept? What day is it? She grabs for her phone on the bedside table but it isn’t there.
She sits up in bed, rubs her eyes, and feels the subtle sting of one of her contact lenses tearing.
She swears, the words rough against the sandpaper texture of her throat and the shallowness in her chest, and remembers all the cigarettes she smoked.
And beer she drank. And … drugs she took?
She groans, horror battling with nausea.
She fishes her contact lenses out, drops them in the vague direction of the bin and makes her way to the non-suite, bumping into various things as she goes: washing baskets, doors, flashbacks of the night before.
Sitting on the toilet, she realizes she is wearing only her pants, bra, and her shirt, now unbuttoned, creased and looking more Rab C. Nesbitt than Zara, the dark hues of a red wine stain down one side and a fag burn on the other.
Various words swim through her frontal lobe as she does the longest wee in history: Anniversary Architect, Rose, Erling Haaland.
The biscuity, dehydrated stench of her pee hits her as she goes to flush the toilet.
She’s glad she can’t see how dark it is, because then she might have to go straight to the nearest A she was causing a fuss over nothing, making mountains out of molehills, and so on and so forth, until she came up with a variety of ways to mask that sensitivity.
She smiled, she joked, she complimented, she flattered, she was amenable and she was, above all, likeable.
But this morning it’s as if all the masks have been pulled off by whatever it was that happened yesterday, a gushing wave of terrible feelings tumbling out in the process.
As she lies there, both eating the Twix and crying over it, she feels absolutely everything.
The truth of what has happened begins to surge over her pitifully.
She is reduced once more to the little girl she has spent so long trying to run away from, the one who felt too much, and spoke too much, and couldn’t live within the lines society had drawn for her.
The one who wallowed in self-pity and served no useful purpose to anyone, draining people rather than lighting them up like Lily always did.
She means nothing to anyone at work, she’s wasted decades trying to impress people who barely register her existence, and worst of all, she’s somehow managed to delude herself into believing that the complete opposite is true.
It’s as if she’s come round from a dream into a waking nightmare, only to realize that she was the person who willingly drugged herself into the fitful, foolish fantasy in the first place.
It’s taken a complete stranger to snap her out of it.
With drugs, ironically. Olivia cries and she cries and she cries, the tears mixing stickily with the Twix so that it becomes a strange, sugary-salty mess, and she only stops when she hears a hoarse cough from the kitchen.
‘Dad?’ she says, annoyed at the interruption. ‘Is that you?’
‘Yes, dear,’ he whimpers back.
She stands up and makes her way down the hall to find her father, who is hunched in front of the kettle wearing a sarong and a Roy Orbison T-shirt.
‘Sorry, dear,’ he says, a mug in hand. ‘Was just making myself a cup of tea. Are you OK? You seem a bit …’ Her father looks as uncomfortable as her head feels.
‘Upset?’ Olivia shrugs, heading towards the half-empty bottle of wine and the half-drunk glass next to it.
She downs the rancid glass of wine, winces, and then refills it.
‘Tell you what, Dad, why don’t we forget about tea today and just go straight for a drink.
’ She grabs another glass from a shelf, places it on the worktop next to him, and then fills it with the remainder of the bottle.
‘We may as well start as we mean to go on, eh?’