After work Melissa came over, hauling a huge fragrant bag of Thai takeaway. She was so irrepressibly and touchingly delighted about me being home—spinning around the living room laying out cutlery like she could barely keep her feet on the ground, flicking on the sound system to some radio station full of peppy sixties girl groups, flinging a kiss my way every time she passed me—that I couldn’t help feeling a little more cheerful. I hadn’t been hungry since that night, but my fiery beef stir-fry actually tasted good, and Melissa gave me the whole saga of how she had spent the last week persuading my mother not to get me a dog (my parents loved Melissa; fortunately they weren’t the type to drop heavy hints about weddings and grandchildren, but I could see them thinking it): “She was totally set on it, Toby, she said you could never have a dog when you were little because of your dad’s allergies but this was perfect, it would be extra security and it would cheer you up—your dad kept going, ‘Lily, it’s not going to work, the management company—’ but she just went, ‘Oh, Edmund, who cares about them, I’ll talk them round!’ And Toby”—giggles starting to break through—“the one problem she could see, the only one, she thought you wouldn’t hoover and the whole place would be covered in dog hair. So she”—Melissa was giggling harder and I found myself laughing too, even though it hurt my ribs—“she decided to get you one of those great big poodles. Because they don’t shed. She was going to have it here waiting for you, she said it would be the perfect welcome-home surprise—” The image of me and the detectives walking into the apartment and coming face-to-face with a poodle in full pompom resplendence had us laughing so hard that I was startled to find myself trembling. It had been a long day.
As the evening wore on, though, I got edgy. Melissa—shoes kicked off, snuggled drowsily against me on the sofa—obviously assumed she was staying the night. As far as I was concerned, this was unthinkable, absolutely out of the question. I couldn’t even let my mind touch on what would have happened if she had been there that night, when clearly I would have been utterly unable to protect her. I started stretching and yawning and dropping hints about how it was going to be weird being back in my own bed and I might be kind of restless, so maybe since she had to get up in the morning . . . Melissa picked up on this quickly, ungrudgingly—yes, getting sleepy too, better go now before I doze off right here. “Soon,” I said, tracing a finger down the back of her neck as she bent to pull on a shoe.
“Yes,” she said, and turned fast to kiss me fiercely, “soon.”
I got her a taxi on my phone, so I could watch the little car icon tick towards her place, holding my breath every time it paused or took an odd turning. And there I was: on my own at last, in this apartment that felt so much like mine and yet in some insidious way not like mine at all, with my holdall dumped by the door like a long-distance traveler and with absolutely no idea what I was supposed to do with that night, or the next day, or the next.
* * *
?The next couple of months were bad. It’s hard to say whether it was the worst time of my life, given everything that came after, but it was definitely the worst I’d had at that point, by a long shot. I was restless as a tweaker, but I didn’t want to go out during the day—I still had an underfed, off-kilter look, I still limped, and although my hair was growing back and I’d shaved the rest to match it, the Frankenstein scar still showed. I had some idea of going for long walks late at night, roaming the shadows of Ballsbridge in a Phantom of the Opera kind of way, but as it turned out I couldn’t do that either. I had been walking home at all hours of the night since I was a teenager, and it had never once occurred to me to be afraid; wary, sure, when I spotted a junkie on the scrounge or a pack of drunk guys looking for hassle, but never this thick miasma of nonspecific fear polluting the air, corrupting everything into a threat—every shadow could be hiding an attacker, every walker could be waiting for his moment to lunge, every driver could be an instant from flooring it straight over my body, how would I know and what would I do? I got about thirty meters from my gate before adrenaline was juddering me like an electric current, I was panting for breath, and I turned tail and gimped as fast as I could back to my apartment, which although it hardly counted as safety did at least have manageable boundaries that I could keep an eye on. I didn’t try again. Instead I walked up and down my living room, for hours on end, shoulders tight, hands dug deep into the pockets of my dressing gown. I can still feel the terrible rhythm of it, step and drag, step and drag, every pace driving it home all over again, but I couldn’t stop; somehow I believed that as long as I was up and moving, no one would break in, I wouldn’t have a seizure, at least nothing would get worse. Sometimes I kept walking until gray light filtered around the edges of the curtains and outside the birds started chirping.
When I did force myself to go to bed, I was, predictably, having a hard time sleeping. While I was in hospital my parents had thoughtfully had a monitored alarm installed, with a panic button and all (I could picture my mother looking around at the damage, knuckles pressed to her mouth, groping for some way to go back in time and stop it happening), and while I saw their point and knew it was probably a good idea, part of me wished they hadn’t. The panic button was a rectangular thing about the size of a matchbox, in a brisk medical shade of red, and it was set near my bed but low down, just out of reach. I spent hours frozen in bed, holding my breath and straining to catch the follow-up to some minute click or scrape, heard? imagined? about to explode into hoarse shouts and crashes? should I dive for the button now and risk crying wolf and not being taken seriously when the danger was real, or should I hold off for ten more excruciating seconds, ten more, ten more, and risk being too late, scrabbling frantically to cross those unbridgeable few inches as the blows crunched into me? The button developed a life of its own, swollen with symbolism, a single chance at salvation pulsing redly in the corner and if I blew it too soon or left it too late then I was lost. I developed a habit of sleeping balanced precariously on the edge of the bed, with my arm hanging over so my fingers would be as close as possible to the button. Once or twice I fell out and woke up on the floor, yelling and flailing.
Texts from friends, from my cousins, from work connections. Hey dude how you doing, barbecue at my place Saturday week are you on for it? . . . Hi, not to hassle you but you might want to pick up when my mum rings, otherwise she tells your parents that she thinks you’re unconscious on your floor—Susanna, with a little eye-roll emoji thrown in. Memes and gifs and bits of internet chaff from Leon, presumably meant to give me a laugh. Hi Toby, this is Irina, I heard what happened and just hoping you are feeling OK now and we will see you soon . . . I mostly didn’t answer, and gradually the texts got sparser, which left me unreasonably miffed and self-pitying. Richard rang; when I didn’t pick up, he left a message telling me—awkwardly, delicately, with real warmth—that everything at work was absolutely fine, the show was going beautifully, a major collector had bought Chantelle’s sofa assemblage, and that I shouldn’t worry about anything, just concentrate on getting better and come back to work whenever I felt ready. Texts from Sean, from Dec, will we call round? how about tomorrow? at the weekend? I didn’t want to see them. I didn’t feel like I had anything at all to contribute to a conversation, and I couldn’t stand the thought of them leaving in a cloud of inarticulate pity, waiting till they were well away from my door before they spoke: Jesus. He’s . . . Yeah, he is. The poor bastard.
Physically, I was getting better, at least to some extent. My face went back to normal—except for the chipped tooth, which I knew I should get fixed at some stage—and my ribs and my tailbone healed up OK, although I still got the odd twinge. I didn’t have any seizures, as far as I could tell, which was nice, although the neurologist had informed me smugly that they could start months or even a year or two after the injury. Sometimes I went four or five hours painkiller-free before the headache kicked in again; I liked life a lot better on the pills, which blurred the edges till things were just about bearable, but I was going easy on them in case—I didn’t even want to think too hard about this possibility—the doctors refused to renew the prescription once I ran out.