Alex could sense the sudden discomfort at the other end of the line, as if Rob was uneasy that it had been brought up, or maybe that Alex was discussing it over the phone. When he spoke again his voice was reined in, the words carefully chosen.
‘The same could be said of anyone involved in a situation like that. Some people deal with it better than others I suppose.’ He stopped, hesitated, and then more relaxed, said, ‘Listen, Alex, why don’t you come down for lunch tomorrow? Or I’ll come to you if you’re busy. I really do have a shitload to do but wouldn’t it be great, I mean, to see each other, catch up properly?’
Alex thought about it. His instinct was to say no, that he couldn’t, that it was too far, but he wanted to talk openly to Rob now, to get another opinion on Will’s death from within the dormant circle of their friendship. It was already clear that Rob was uncomfortable talking about it on the phone so Alex agreed, checking on the address, giving an estimate of the time he’d arrive.
It was only after he’d put the phone down that he wondered why Rob had been so cagey. He supposed a certain amount of caution was understandable from someone who’d been a journalist in the kind of countries where phones were tapped, where there was always some kind of war footing.
He still couldn’t understand why Rob would apply that same caution to the accident in their own past though. They’d agreed to keep it secret and Alex had played along with that, would continue to play along, but it wasn’t something bad enough to fear talking about it with each other on the phone.
Possibly Rob was just mixing up the things they’d all mixed up so badly when it had happened, the way it felt to them and the way it was in the real world. They’d been devastated by the turn of events that night, not in an obvious way, but with a subsidence that had gradually undermined who they were, forcing them apart, isolating them from each other.
If they’d gone to the police on the night it had happened Matt would have been hung out to dry for the couple of drinks he’d had, but beyond that, in the real world they’d been victims too. She’d run in front of their car, her death as random and unavoidable an act as if a rabbit had sprinted beneath their wheels.
Yet something about the argument in his own head rung false. His own subconscious was telling him every night that he was no victim of circumstance. It wasn’t Emily Barratt who inhabited the dark edges of his sleep, it was his own knowledge of her death. He wasn’t being haunted by her but by himself, by the person he’d been that night ten years before.
It played on his mind for the rest of the afternoon. He tried to work but, as so often happened lately, he shuffled his notes and spent most of the time staring out at the fading light beyond the window. He’d have no peace tonight; he could sense it already.
The uneasiness started when he was making dinner, the sensation of someone crossing the hallway just outside his vision, like a stirring of air, as if somebody had crossed swiftly from the lounge to the stairs. He dismissed it but kept picking up the stray sounds of the floorboards above him, the house coming alive.
He sat at the kitchen table to eat and had stopped hearing the noises above when he noticed he was shivering. He told himself it was a cold room anyway, that with the stoves off the temperature would have dropped naturally. He couldn’t shake it off though, the nagging sense that there was a presence of some kind in the house with him.
That was how it went on throughout the evening, sitting in his study, trying to ignore the constant feeling that someone else was in the house, moving about just beyond the scope of his hearing and vision, teasing him, laying siege to his psyche.
Before bed, he performed another of his routines, systematically checking the rooms, the doors, the windows, reinforcing what he always knew, that he was alone. And then he set up the equipment, a reminder of his other constant defence, that the explanation for his unease lay within the world of science.
Once in bed, he knew it was too late to try and govern what would come in the next few hours. He could only lie there and try to relax. He even reminded himself of another remote possibility, that an attack might not come tonight after all. But he wasn’t hopeful, trying instead to prepare himself for what might come.
It was a mild night but full with a volatile breeze that toyed with the curtains and tested the house here and there. There was no noise inside in the darkness of his bedroom, just the sensed noise of the electrical equipment that surrounded him and the intrusive mumbling of his own thoughts.
He touched the actimeter and thought himself through the process that lay ahead, reassuring himself that it was a physiological process that he knew and understood. Maybe he wouldn’t have an attack tonight anyway, not after the severity of the one the night before.