Chapter 10 #2
‘Are you okay, Blythe? Did they attack you, are you… oh, God, you can’t breathe?
’ and he dug around the inside pocket of his jacket.
Somewhere outside, in the sitting room, she heard her phone ring out.
It was one of those sounds, so very disconnected from her at this moment, she only barely registered it after it had finished ringing.
‘Here,’ he said, whipping out a blue inhaler as if it was the answer to all her problems. ‘Open your mouth and breathe in deeply when I press it.’ Within two short puffs, she began to feel as if her breathing was going to be okay.
She’d have taken a third, but he put the inhaler back in his pocket again.
He lifted her from the floor, guided her to the side of the bed.
They sat there for a long time, she sobbed and clung to him.
He murmured things like, ‘There, there, it’s alright now.
They’re gone now. You’re safe.’ Except Blythe didn’t feel safe.
Instead, she felt as if the shadow of that guy who’d almost strangled her would always be at her side.
‘You’re okay, Blythe, nothing happened. Do you want to report it to the guards?’ Marcus asked her and she had a feeling that he wanted to get going. The careers fair was a big deal for him after all.
‘No.’ She tried to steady her voice. ‘There’s no point, is there?
I mean, the guards have enough to be doing, they won’t want to deal with something that isn’t even a thing.
’ And she stood up then, trying not to tremble or to fall over because it honestly felt as if her knees might buckle beneath her.
The last thing she wanted was to make a complete fool of herself.
God, she thought, as they sat next to each other on the bus that day, Marcus is amazing. She’d never known what it was to need a hero, but today, it felt like Marcus had been a hero to her, if he hadn’t been there, well, she didn’t want to think about what might have happened.
It was later, much later, that she remembered the missed call on her phone.
At the jobs fair, she searched her bag, but of course, in the panic of getting out of the flat, she’d left it behind.
She didn’t want to make a big thing of it at the fair, but as they travelled back into the city again, she asked Marcus if he’d come back to the flat, just to check things out – of course, she was hoping for much more.
‘Sure,’ he said, but he looked at his watch, and she had a feeling that he would rather be somewhere else.
‘I’m sure it’ll be fine, but…’
‘In that case,’ he said, and he left her at the door, standing there with her key in the lock and was at the end of the road before she had a chance to tell him about the wine in the fridge.
She didn’t have time to think about what it meant that he could just saunter off like that, leave her standing there, what if those two guys had come back?
They could be waiting in the flat for her to return.
What if she was walking into a flat filled with crazed knife carrying psychopaths who’d made their way back in just to finish her off?
Despite all these thoughts, she turned the key in the door, fear in her chest, but also, intent on finding her phone to return whatever call she’d missed earlier.
The missed call was from the hotel. Her grandfather never rang her mobile, he always stuck to landline numbers, fearing the cost of speaking for too long on those ‘yokes’ as he still called them.
She knew it must be important so she called as she moved through the flat, switching on one light after another, checking beneath beds and in wardrobes, although maybe the rational part of her brain knew that those thugs would not be back again.
‘Oh, der Schatz,’ he sounded as if he was crying.
‘Pappy, what is it? Is everything alright?’ Instantly, she assumed he’d fallen in the hotel, made it to the telephone and needed help. ‘Are you okay?’
‘Me? No, not me, I’m…’ He was fine, she could hear that much in his voice. ‘I’m sorry, liebstes M?dchen. It’s your parents. They’ve been in an accident.’ He was sobbing now.
‘I don’t understand, Pappy, what’s happened?’ Then she heard a commotion at the other end of the line, her grandfather’s heartbroken sobs moving into the distance.
‘Blythe?’ This voice was not readily familiar, it was thick, gruff, business-like. ‘It’s sergeant Byrne here, I haven’t met you, but I’ve been stationed on the island for a few months now…’ A cold shiver moved along her spine.
‘Okay?’ she wanted to tell the stranger on the phone she didn’t care who he was, she just wanted to know that everything was alright.
For a moment, it felt as if she stood, tippy-toed on the edge of a wave, one wrong move and she was going under, if she could just stay here – not allow the water to suck her into the depths. ‘My parents?’
‘Yes. I’m so sorry to have to tell you. There’s been an accident.
They were driving back from Muffeen Beag – it seems that they lost control of the car – you know those old cliffs at Widow’s Cove?
There’s been some subsidence… and well…’ He stopped, perhaps allowing her to fill in the blanks.
She knew that road well, there was a sheer drop into the ocean.
It was over six hundred metres in places.
‘Are they alright? Have they been brought to the mainland – where are they?’ She heard her voice rising, as if it was far beyond her control, a tiny knot of panic had slipped into it, but it was growing with every passing nanosecond.
Now, it was erupting inside her – so she could hardly breathe.
It felt as if everything was coming in on top of her, the day, the break-in, Marcus and now this – this was horrifying.
‘They went over the cliff…’
‘They’re not…’ Dead – she couldn’t say it, but it was the word that dangled there, unspeakable. Unthinkable.
‘I’m so sorry. Your father died instantly.
By some miracle the passenger door of your parents’ car seems to have opened, your mother was flung against the cliffs.
Sea and air rescue managed to lift her and take her to the mainland.
It’s not looking good for her, I really can’t tell you how sorry we all are here, Blythe. ’
‘And my father is…’ Oh God, words had deserted her. Later she couldn’t remember hanging up the phone.
And then, nothing.
*
She must have gone back to her room, packed a bag, filled it with God alone knew what, but then, by seven in the morning, she was on a bus, back to the west, no thought of her final exams – which were due to start the following week, no thought to the rent on her flat or the milk, just about to turn in the fridge.
For most of the journey she cried. Cried for her father, for her mother and for Rae.
But she cried for herself also. Fear bubbled up in her.
She kept seeing that face, heavy dark eyebrows, a thin scar running across the lip and hearing his heavy accent.
Sergei. That was his name. And even saying it in her head made her feel nauseous.
She tried to force it all from her brain; from her thoughts.
At about the halfway home point, she realised he wasn’t in her thoughts, somehow, he had travelled with her.
He was sitting next to her. Standing over her.
She had been so scared, his presence had never really left her at all.
Now, here she was, on her way back to Pin Hill Island, her safest place in the world and she wasn’t escaping the fear.
And now, instead of crying, she closed her eyes.
She had to be strong. She had to pull herself together.
Pappy had enough to deal with, she couldn’t go to pieces, so she vowed she would stamp down on the terror of what had happened and push it to the back of her mind.
That was the only thing she could do now.
Everything of the next week somehow blended into itself. There was a funeral for her father. Later she would remember it only in isolated snapshots – as if some paparazzi had documented the whole thing with a long lens in twenty-second breaches.
They stayed, she and Rae and Pappy in the hotel.
She couldn’t possibly think of going back to Dublin.
Everything about it made her stomach churn.
She couldn’t even face Still Water House, which was meant to be home.
Even in the hotel, an unexpected shadow could make her jump, a voice from the next room or the scent of aftershave, sickly, sweet and cheap turned her stomach and filled her with terror.
The idea of going back to Still Water House terrified her.
It was huge. She’d spend her whole time checking and double-checking doors and windows, seeing shadows and threats where there were none.
She wasn’t sure Rae could face going back there yet, either.
Instead, she took over one of the large family rooms in the hotel.
The sisters slept, or more accurately, spent each night not sleeping, but lying curled up together in a double bed, while four other beds lay empty around them.
Pappy organised the funeral.
Later, when she had Siggy, a daughter of her own, she would think, how unthinkably heartbreaking it must have been for him, organising his own son’s funeral.
Her mother couldn’t do it. She might have avoided being plunged to her death in the sea – but nobody could say she survived to the point of living again.
Instead, she spent weeks that felt like forever, in a high-end nursing unit.
There were broken bones – fifteen of them in total, there was a punctured lung, a suspected spinal injury and most worryingly of all – her mother didn’t speak for almost two months after the accident. Shock, they said.
Blythe thought it was more than shock, it was grief too and maybe guilt, however misplaced, remaining a stumbling block to her ever really being the same person again.