by Mauro, Laura
“You’re tough, Alessa. I know you’re not going to let something like this beat you. Christ, I remember when you were twelve and you broke your ankle…It was at the adventure playground on Harper Road, do you remember it? The bone was practically sticking out of your foot and you refused to go to the hospital because it would ruin your birthday?”
Alessa let out a snort of laughter. “How would you even remember that? You were what, eight? Dad promised I could have another birthday party if I went with him to A&E.” She lifted her glass to her lips. Somehow, it was full again. She drank deep, savouring the crisp taste. “I never did get another party.”
“He made all kinds of promises,” Shannon said, a little wistful. “He used to say stuff without ever really thinking about how realistic it was. That’s why mum used to shoot him down. We thought she was such a killjoy, but somebody had to do it. Remember when he promised us we could have chickens in the garden? We lived in a council flat, for god’s sake, the garden was the size of a wheelie bin.”
Alessa placed her empty glass back on the coffee table. Her body felt a little slower than normal, as if she were half asleep, and a pleasant warmth had seeped deep into her muscles. “I miss him,” she said. “I haven’t stopped missing him. Is that strange? I keep thinking I should be used to it by now, but there’s a part of me that expects to hear his voice when I pick up the phone. And I’m always disappointed when I hear mum’s instead. God, what a horrible thing to say.” She stared down at her hands; broad fingers like her father’s, the same blunt, chewed nails. “I keep thinking. If he were here I’d be coping so much better with all of this. He always knew what to tell me. He always made me feel safe. Why am I even saying this?”
“In vino, veritas,” Shannon said, with a thin smile. “I miss him too, Ali. I know you two were closer, but…” She trailed off, looking momentarily thoughtful. Then, without a word, she got up and headed into the kitchen. When she came back she was holding another bottle of white wine in one hand, and a family pack of Monster Munch in the other.
“It’s Asda’s own,” she said, by way of apology. “But wine is wine, isn’t it? Here, give me your glass.” She filled them both back up. Alessa could smell this wine from a distance, sharp and acid. Shannon handed Alessa her glass back and lifted her own. “To dad,” she declared. “Wherever you are. I hope every night is steak night, and there’s red wine on tap, and more books than you can ever hope to read.”
“To dad,” Alessa said. Her throat suddenly felt very full. The world blurred, as if seen through a rain-wet window, and she looked down into her wine, blinking furiously.
“Oh Ali.” She heard Shannon rise from her seat, the creak of leather as she shifted her slight weight. And then her sister’s arms were around her, and she couldn’t hold the tears back any more. She had cried so hard and for so long when her dad died that, at his funeral, hers had been the only dry eyes in the church. She’d simply run out. The sadness had grown inside of her, festering like an abscess, and it seemed she might never be rid of it; a deep, dull pain radiating out as though from the very marrow of her bones. It was not healthy, she knew, to bottle up grief but it hadn’t been a choice. She had done all the crying at his bedside, and her body had deemed it enough.
She hadn’t cried again until after the bomb.
“Poor Ali,” Shannon said. “You’ve been through so much these last few months.” She smelled warm, reassuring; Dove soap and white wine and the faint salt tang of unwashed hair.
“I’ve got no right to feel this way,” Alessa said. Her voice sounded quiet in the protective cocoon of Shannon’s arms. “I wasn’t badly hurt. I didn’t lose anyone. I was just there.”
“Don’t be an idiot.” Shannon held her at arm’s length, mouth stern. “Other people suffered worse that day, yes. But that doesn’t diminish your own grief. You’re allowed to hurt, Alessa. Your feelings are just as important as theirs.”
“You sound like Moira.” Alessa scrubbed at her eyes with the heel of her palm. Her nose felt plugged with mucus.
Shannon smiled. “I’ve got your back. You know that. And you can always talk to me about things, all right?”
She thought of ink-black limbs, long and bone-thin, of pale staring eyes.
“I know,” Alessa said.
*
S hannon was highly skilled in the art of distraction. It was practically a requirement in her field of work, she said; keeping young patients occupied while they had a cannula fitted, playing repetitive games with them to take their minds off their illness. Alessa let herself be distracted. They finished the wine in front of the TV; the presence of it was strangely soothing, filling Alessa’s brain with meaningless noise and colour until her anxiety seemed to recede, a tide slowly going out until it was a mere line on the horizon.
Before long, Shannon was sound asleep on the sofa and Alessa remained stubbornly awake, wrapped in a blanket and listening to her sister snore in the grey gloom. She kept thinking about what she’d seen in the bus window, and the more she considered it, the more certain she was that she must have imagined it in her panic.
Alessa was not quite drunk – not like Shannon – but the wine had made her bold. She got up quietly from the sofa, blanket draped over her shoulders. The laminate was cold beneath her bare feet. She padded across the room, over to the window where the curtains hung, dark and heavy. She wouldn’t see anything, she told herself. There was nothing to see. Malevolent shadow-presences were not real.
Slowly, and with great caution, she parted the curtains.
The lights lining the Thames glowed gold, the night sky the murky purple of a fresh bruise. High up, the bright light of a passing plane cut through the scudding clouds like a torch in the dark. The river was stained pink and blue as the neon colours of the city bled out into the high tide.
Something quick and dark moved in the corner of her eye. Her heart gave a momentary leap, but the shape quickly resolved itself into the narrow silhouette of a fox scurrying along the embankment, slinking from shadow to shadow.
Alessa looked up. There was her reflection, a pale ghost in the glass. The only ghastly thing staring out from the window was herself: puffy and hollow-eyed, surrounded by a wild halo of dark hair. Tipsy laughter bubbled up in her chest and she clamped her teeth hard to keep it there. What she’d seen on the bus had been a trick of the light, her anxiety taking control and warping the mundane into the horrific. There was a great sense of relief, a draining of pent-up adrenaline like a lanced abscess.
Behind her, Shannon muttered something in her sleep. Alessa let the curtains slip closed, padding back to the sofa in the dark. Quietly, she gathered up her coat and bag. The display on her phone read 10.43pm. She could stay here if she wanted, but sleep was a distant promise and her newly restless limbs wanted to walk, to run, to move. She would go home, and tomorrow she would get up early, start clearing up the accumulated clutter and mess that had piled up like a landslide in the days when getting out of bed had seemed an insurmountable challenge.
Alessa scrawled a note for Shannon on the back of an envelope – thanks for the wine & chat, hope your head isn’t too sore in the morning! Love ya A x – and used her spare key to lock the door behind her.
*
I n the absence of spring sunshine the air was sharp and chilly, and strangely sobering. Alessa buried her nose in the fur collar of her parka, breathing warmth into the confined space beneath. The streets around Shannon’s flat were quiet. The occasional car passed by, headlights bright, wheels hissing on tarmac. She passed a housing estate, looking steadily past the cluster of hoodies stood at the entrance like sentinels, their faces sallow in the glare of the streetlights. They followed her progress with their eyes.
Her mouth was as fuzzy as her head. As she walked, some of the heaviness in her limbs began to subside. Shannon might have been younger, but Alessa had inherited their father’s tolerance for alcohol. Still, when she turned into a series of side streets and realised she was no long
er certain where she was, she instinctively blamed it on the wine. She’d walked this route so many times it was ingrained into her memory, a map scrawled on the inside of her skull, but here she was, standing in the mouth of a narrow street she was certain she’d never walked down before. She frowned, turning a circle in search of a sign. Loman Street. Offices on the right, a long, windowless building on the left. Somewhere along the way she’d taken a wrong turn.
The mosquito whine of a building alarm sounded from somewhere nearby. She heard the low thrum of traffic ahead; a main road, still busy even at this hour. It would be easy enough to get her bearings there. She set off, suddenly aware of how dark it was down here, how few of the street lights seemed to be functional. The sour smell of overripe binbags drifted in on the wind. The shrill sound of the alarm seemed to carry a long way in the quiet. Her shadow waxed and waned as she passed between the lights, limbs stretched, form distorted. Just like…
No. She shoved her hands in her pockets. It wasn’t real. I proved that.
Behind her, close by, something skittered out into the road.
A fox, she told herself, though she felt her pace quicken, her muscles tightening. Lots of foxes around here. The sound came again, closer still, and it seemed that there were eyes on her, tracking her frantic motion; her fingers closed around the keys in her pocket, slipping them between her knuckles.
Occipital, parietal…
She was tipsy and alone, and a woman walking solo on a dark, isolated street was an easy target. Her screams would be lost beneath the wail of the alarm. Nobody would come for her. Nobody would know she was here.
Frontal, temporal, sphenoid…
She sucked in a deep breath and peered over her shoulder.
Something long and thin retreated into the shadows.
Alessa ran. Her heart was alive in her chest, struggling against her ribcage. She would not look back. She sprinted the last fifty metres, her ragged breath loud in her own ears. She turned out onto the main road and collided heavily with a man coming the other way.
“Careful, love,” the man said, taking a step back. “Watch where you’re going.”
There was life out here, and lights and motion but her nerves were sparking at random and the breath didn’t quite seem to be reaching her lungs. Wide-eyed, she nodded a frantic apology, but the man was already on his way. Maybe he’d smelled the wine on her, taken her for a lush. Alessa stared out at the passing traffic. She knew this road, and she knew how to get back home from here. The lights were bright, the road still busy. She would be safe now.
It took all of her courage to look back into the mouth of Loman Street.
There was nothing. Bathed in an orange-gold glow, the street seemed no more sinister than any other street. There were a hundred things which might have made the noise she’d heard, and only a fraction of them were dangerous. Alessa’s spine slackened a little, a sigh escaping her lungs. Why was her imagination suddenly so intent on burning holes in her sanity? And why did she keep falling for it?
She kept to the main roads the rest of the way.
*
N ot until she was safely inside her own flat, door locked and latched behind her, did she truly allow herself to relax. The flat smelled warm and stale, of old food crusted on the hob and piles of unwashed clothes. It smelled safe.
She moved through the small space, flicking all the lights on so as to banish every shadow, every dark corner. She had never felt unsafe in her own home, not even after the bomb; she was not about to entertain the possibility now.
She picked up the least grubby glass from the sideboard, rinsed it under the tap and poured a glass of water. She hadn’t realised quite how parched her throat was. She gulped it down in one go, the coldness of it tracing a path down her gullet. Her heart still fluttered unpleasantly in her chest, the dregs of her fear persistent as a bad headache.
Alessa went into the bedroom, leaving the kitchen light on behind her. Her sheets were in the same crumpled disarray she’d left them in this morning, the floor covered in a layer of discarded clothing. A leaning tower of half-read books rose haphazard from the nightstand. She peeled off her jacket and kicked off her shoes. She paused. Across the room, above the bed, the curtains were wide open. She was on the third floor, but her flat overlooked another block; she could see them, and she was reasonably sure they could see her. Alessa waded through clothing across to the other side of the room, one hand tugging at the button of her jeans, the other reaching for the curtain.
Outside, down in the car park, something moved.
She peered out. The car park was poorly lit, shadows merging with shadows in the light of a single, solitary lamppost. And something was moving there, a shape on the very edge of the darkness, undulating like the tail of a large animal.
A bolus of panic rose in her throat.
It lurked there a moment, barely visible but there, and when it finally came into the light – tentative, as if it might burn – she knew what it was. An oil-smear of a creature; the awful distortion of something almost human, crawling slowly on four long matchstick limbs. A narrow, elongated head bobbed limp on a thin neck. Pale eyes flickered open like newly-lit flames.
It looked up.
It saw her, and she looked back; she wanted to look away but she met its gaze, stared hard and unblinking. She had to know it was real, not a shadow or a trick of the light but something physical.
The skin of it peeled back, the space below the eyes opening like a shutter to reveal a gleaming lamprey mouth: a perfect circle of bright, needle-sharp teeth.
The books clattered to the floor as she swung her arms up, yanking both curtains shut.
Her hands gripped the curtains, holding them together; if she couldn’t see it, it couldn’t harm her. It was ridiculous logic, a child’s logic, but she clung to it with the desperation of a drowning man. The front door was locked, all the windows shut. If she tried not to think, she could almost pretend that there was no car-park outside, no grinning shadow-thing standing just beyond the glow of the streetlight. She crossed back over and closed the bedroom door, pushing the plastic wedge as firmly beneath as it would go.
Alessa shucked off the rest of her clothes and crawled into her bed. She flipped both table lamps on, bathing the room in light. For weeks after the bomb she hadn’t been able to sleep in the dark, afraid that she might wake up back in the tunnels. And here she was again, swaddled in blankets as though they might keep all the evils of the world away, afraid of the dark and what might lurk inside.
THREE
I n the pale light of morning, after only a few hours of fitful, fearful sleep, two things were clear to Alessa. The first was that what she had seen last night had felt very real. Every instinct she possessed told her this was a sign of impending insanity, but she had felt its gaze worming beneath her skin, settling there like something malignant.
The second was that the trauma support group no longer sounded like a terrible idea.
Maybe this wasn’t an unusual phenomenon. Maybe stress-induced hallucinations were common after a traumatic event. And maybe it would help, talking all of it through with people who’d been there, who’d emerged from the other side intact, if a little scarred. If it meant finding some small peace of mind then it had to be worth trying.
But talking about what she’d seen wasn’t an option. Revealing something so clearly divorced from reality was surely a recipe for enforced convalescence. Perhaps they’d put her on antipsychotics, monitor her carefully to ensure she was taking them. Perhaps they’d lock her away. They’d never let her near a school again, not when the agencies found out about her ‘issues’. They’re not real, she told herself, as though strange, frightening visions were infinitely more comforting than real monsters. None of this is real. You’re stressed and upset. You need help.
She dug her laptop out from beneath a mound of old magazines. A quick Google search revealed the ‘Healing Hearts Group’, organised by a woman named Teresa Osterman who, the w
ebsite explained, had lost an eye in the London Bridge bombings five years previous. She, along with a couple of other survivors, had organised the group as a sort of informal catharsis, a meeting of people who’d experienced the same horrors and were struggling to readjust to the world in the wake of it all.
The mere thought of dealing with other human beings filled her with a bone-deep exhaustion. Not even in the bright, shadowless light of morning did she want to open the curtains and acknowledge the world beyond. She dozed fitfully on the sofa, pulled constantly from the precipice of deep sleep by the fear of what she might dream of. Distantly, she was aware that she was regressing to the same behaviours she’d adopted after the bomb.
In the early afternoon she forced herself to leave the house, taking a slow walk up through Southwark to St Thomas’. It was a large and sprawling hospital, spread out over several buildings, their architecture discordant. Sunlight bounced off the windows, reflecting back a piecemeal image of County Hall against a cloud-spattered blue sky.
There had been frost on the ground in November, when she was last here. She remembered carving patterns in the ice with the toe of her boot, occasionally pausing to stare up at the window her father lay behind. His bed had boasted a spectacular view of Westminster Bridge and the London Eye revolving slowly against the grey sky. He had never been awake for long enough to enjoy it. The faint sound of Gipsy Kings filtered out from the headphones pressed against his ears – the ones Shannon had insisted they put there, because even in his unconsciousness she was sure he would be able to hear it.
He’d smelled of fever-sweat and antiseptic; the bones of his chest were visible in the gap of his hospital gown, skin strung paper-thin from rib to rib, a sallow canopy. She would spend hours at his bedside staring out of the windows, listening to the slow, persistent rhythm of the heart monitor, aware that at any moment, it could all come to an end. Praying that it would. And her father had lain there, tubes and wires protruding like pale tentacles, oblivious to the view, to the world, to everything but still, silent darkness.