House of Small Shadows

THIRTEEN

While Mike spoke, Catherine was sure the room had fallen silent. But now cutlery chimed and the PA system played something she once recognized but couldn’t identify now. In the distance someone said, ‘a new till roll’, but their voice seemed too loud around her head.

Catherine sucked in her breath and tried not to be sick into her lap.

‘You’ll be lucky,’ someone else said, but their face was fuzzy and indistinct.

The room lurched like a ship in a gale, then righted, was solid and stable again. But it looked different. It was really bright now, clinically lit. She couldn’t lift her hands, she was paralysed. And momentarily she thought she was sitting really close to the opposite wall and staring into its white painted surface. Then her vision seemed to retract across the room to her chair. She could not swallow. Her jaw was so heavy. Her mouth was open.

There was nothing but panic recognizable in the maelstrom inside her, faint but coming fast from the distance towards her conscious mind. Thin white hands were slapping around the walls of her skull. She heard herself make the sound of a sob and thought she was sliding off her chair.

She held onto the table and into her mind came a memory of her inability to breathe when Mike called her after so many years of silence. And she recalled the ever-expanding light and joy from her heart that smothered and concealed everything else because the rest of the world no longer mattered when he came down to London to meet her. She saw snapshots of their weekend in Barcelona, being drunk on the beach in Minehead, dressing up as a pony girl and jockey for a New Year’s Eve party, sex in a borrowed tent in the Lake District, a Latitude festival, the pregnancy test, them sitting side by side on top of the Worcester Beacon and deciding to go for it. All of this flashed through her, life with him as it ended. And she knew that she was more in love with him at the very instant he left her than she had ever been before. The critical point. He’d walked out at the very peak of her intensity. The damage he had just done could not have been more severe if they had been together for another ten years before this scene occurred.

Permanent damage.

The waitress was whispering to the youth behind the bar. They were looking at her. Everybody was. She fumbled with fingers made from wood. Tears came off her chin and splashed against the back of her hands. Never coming here again. Idiot thoughts came and went. She still couldn’t swallow. She was stoppered and stuck inside, nothing was moving. There was a cold pain inside her stomach too now, like a cramp. Incongruously, self-pity filled her with what felt like helium and a brief euphoria.

She ruffled two twenties on to the table. Thank fuck you’ve got cash. The thought of a card transaction nearly made her scream with horrible laughter. You’d have me operate a machine with these hands?

She knew she wouldn’t get across the room and to the door on her heels. Her humiliation at the table wasn’t sufficient, the universe wanted her down on her hands and knees, sobbing as strangers grinned.

Why?

Because he’s found someone else.

You are too intense, you are exhausting, you are pessimistic, you are depressing, you are strange, no one actually wants you around once they get to know you.

He’s met someone else. He’s been withdrawn for weeks. Should have trusted your instincts. You suppressed them as an unhealthy paranoia, just like you’ve been shown how to.

He’s met someone else to have children with.

Because you miscarried.

She walked home, pressed into the cold brick walls of the town that seemed to be a thousand miles long, and she looked at a blurred and watery world but didn’t see much of it at all.