It was afternoon by the time she stumbled from her bedroom and into the kitchen. She observed with blinking eyes the chaos of half-eaten takeaways, and empty wine bottles that littered the kitchen. But she barely saw them. Instead her eyes scanned the room until they found what they were looking for – a blister pack of Dramadol. She picked it up, feeling the individual pockets to count how many tablets remained. She felt a stab of alarm when she realised they were all empty. She looked again, thinking she must have picked up the wrong packet, and quickly scrabbled for the other packets on the work surface. As she did so she knocked an empty bottle onto the tiled floor where it shattered, but such was her panic that she ignored it completely. All the other blister packs were empty, too.
Fear rising fast within her, she went to her bag, where she had the remainder of her stash. And it was with intense relief that her fingers closed on a full packet. She quickly pressed out six tablets with shaking hands, and found a bottle with a little wine left in it to wash them down.
Then she turned back to her bag and searched it more carefully, pulling out all her remaining tablets. At the rate she was taking them, they would run out before the end of the day.
She stopped what she was doing and walked to her desk. Her notes from the night before, where she thought she had made some progress, didn’t interest her now. The task was difficult enough if she had her medication. It was impossible without it. She pushed them away. Instead she opened her laptop, and clicked through until she reached Becky’s Facebook page.
The first image she saw was the one Becky had posted of the lantern room in the old lighthouse on Hunsey Island. She had taken it at dawn, looking through the glass of the window at the sun rising from a still ocean. You could just make out the edge of the island, where patches of sheep-worn grass gave way to black rocks and then lazy water. There were others, too. Close-ups of beautiful, late summer flowers nestled between channels of weather-worn rock. Waves pushing into the tiny coves and inlets that perforated the low cliffs. Clouds of seabirds hovering over the water. There was a selfie of Becky with her arms draped lovingly around Rob's neck. Julia worked her way through them all with a feeling of empty nothingness, until she came across the final image. It was Becky, sitting in the lantern room, with a manuscript in front of her. She'd labelled the photo 'Perfect place to write’. Some of her friends had picked up on the implication.
Are you actually writing something, Becks?
A girl called Sophie had posted underneath the picture.
Sssshhhhh
Becky had replied, and added a winking emoji.
Julia looked from her screen to her own writing desk. The notes for her new novel had been pushed to the back, and some had fallen onto the floor where they had been trodden on as she had walked from the kitchen to the desk and back again in the preceding days. She had spilled red wine on the desk – not a large spill – but she hadn’t bothered to clean it up and it had soaked into some papers. It smelt. So did the silver takeaway tray with the scraped remains of curry in it. Somehow her fountain pen had fallen into it and become stuck to the base. She sniffed back tears.
Perfect place to write, Becky’s smiling face taunted.
Julia tensed, waiting to see if the emotion kindling inside her was pity or anger. Then she sniffed again, more loudly this time as it became clear. It wasn’t fair. It was her island. Not Becky's, hers. She had found that tower, before Becky had even been born. She had written the most important literary novel of the decade, about that tower, on that island. Her island. So how had it come to pass that it was Rebecca Fucking Lawson who was sitting in the eyrie at the top of that tower, surrounded by such peace and tranquillity? That it was she who could write and Julia who could not? How had it happened that Julia was here, surrounded by filth and squalor, with barely enough pills left to get her through the day?
She snapped the laptop closed, but the image persisted, as if it were being beamed onto the window in front of her. With a snarl, Julia bunched her hand into a fist and punched it.
Bang!
The toughened glass wobbled under her blow, but the image persisted. Julia hit it again, and again, harder each time. Until the apparition faded into a bright red smear. And through tears of anger and frustration, all she saw now were London’s dirty rooftops and her own pain.
Thirty-Eight
Later, the episode of whatever it was – madness, paranoia, or a valid recognition of the horror she had descended to – cleared. Julia looked around the mess of her flat with almost-sane eyes. She even tidied, thinking again how she could solve her problems, how she could do away with Becky and Rob. But now the urgency of the problem seemed, not diminished, but certainly overtaken by the more pressing concern of how few Dramadol she had left. And a new idea formed. It wasn’t clear exactly how it offered a solution, but it felt like a possibility. She had to get out. Get out of her flat. Get out of the city, with its smoke and its dirt and its plague of people crawling around like ants beneath her. She had to get back to the countryside where it was quiet and peaceful. Once there, surrounded by fresh air and space, she would find a way forward. And while Becky might have stolen her island from her – at least for now – she still had the cottage, deep in the Dorset countryside. Away from everything. So that's where she would go.
Once the decision was made Julia felt compelled to act at once. She abandoned her tidying mid-way through, and instead hurriedly packed a bag with some clothes, her computer, and what little remained of her supply of Dramadol.
Then, already sensing the fresh air that awaited her, she left her flat and walked down to her numbered parking space. Five and a half white-knuckle hours later (both for Julia, and the poor motorists whose journeys intersected with hers) she pulled up in front of the hydrangea outside her country cottage.
* * *
The little house was reassuring in its familiarity, but cold from being left empty, the heating turned off. The fridge was bare too, save from some rancid milk and a nearly-empty tin of Edgar’s food with mould growing on it. The village had a shop, but she knew it would be closed already. Julia cursed that out here (in this bastard backward backwater – her mood hadn’t improved that much) it wasn’t possible to simply phone to have a takeout delivered. In the end she dined on a tin of tomatoes she found at the back of the cupboard, with stale biscuits left over from a distant Christmas. Then she took her now heavily-reduced ration of Dramadol and vowed to go to the supermarket in the morning to stock up.
A bright day woke her early, and she made coffee and drank it black. She took a single tablet but no wine, since there was none in the cottage. All of which meant that, as she pushed her trolley around the aisles of Tesco that morning, she was in a much more lucid state than had recently been the case. She was almost normal.
In fact, she was almost enjoying it. For once she wasn't plotting how to secure more drugs, her mind wasn't endlessly cycling through ways she could murder Becky and her horrible boyfriend. Julia was simply existing, in the moment. She was choosing what to have for dinner. It was like she had returned to the innocent state that she had lived in for years before she achieved her ambition of grand literary success.
This relative tranquillity meant that she didn't notice the man in front of her, with his long hair tied back in a pony-tail and his combat trousers and army boots. In fact, it was only his shopping trolley, left carelessly so that it blocked her from moving past, that made her look up at all. But when she did she saw the strangely drooping features of Kevin, the most unlikely member of the Rural Dorset Creative Circle.
There wasn't the time or space for Julia to look away.
"Alright?" Kevin said. He interrupted his frown to nearly smile, then fixed the look of confusion back again. "What you doing here?"
Julia's lips thinned as she began to force her own smile. Then she decided not to bother.
"Shopping," she said. She was about to use her trolley to barge past his own, when something stopped her. A memory she cou
ldn't quite place.
"Rats," Kevin said, as if she had asked him what he was doing too.
"What?" Julia said.
"Rats. A plague of ‘em." He held up the box he had been inspecting. From the lurid colours and artwork she identified the product as rat poison. "They're everywhere. Horrible little bastards."
Automatically Julia looked around, as if he might mean there were rats advancing upon her now, but the floor of the supermarket was free from any obvious infestation.
"Back at my trailer. Not here," Kevin went on. "Although there probably are. They just don't tell us."
"What?" Julia said again.
"Here. They probably are here, too. It's just they don't tell us about it. Tesco I mean."
"What?"
"Well, we don't know do we? At night they probably have all sorts of vermin crawling over the fruit and veg. Rats, mice. Cockroaches too, I shouldn't wonder. That's why I never eat anything unless it comes in a tin." Kevin snorted loudly and stared at Julia, who noticed now that his trolley contained only tins of soup, baked beans and alphabet-shaped spaghetti.
"What you doing back round here anyway?" Kevin continued. "You come to see old Geoffrey?"
Hearing Geoffrey's name surprised Julia, it almost made her smile. But at once she pulled her lips back straight.
"No, I'm just back for a few days to... Have a break from the city." Suddenly she remembered what that memory had been. Kevin's odd offer that he could sort her out if she ever needed… Whatever he’d said. Had he been serious? At the time she had dismissed it. But now, could it solve her problem?
She smiled at him.
"Oh. I thought you'd be here to see him," Kevin was saying now. "He never stops going on about you at the Circle," Kevin continued. "Like a lost puppy he is." Kevin seemed delighted by this observation, but it didn't interest Julia. Instead she was wondering how she might turn the conversation to her advantage. She noticed again what he was holding in his hands. Rat poison.
"So you've got a problem with rats?" she said.
"Have I?" He puffed out his cheeks. "I can't sleep for hearing them scrabbling around under the trailer. It's only a matter of time until they get inside and bite me on the nose!" He shuddered at the thought. Julia hesitated; she couldn’t think of an obvious way to link this to what she wanted to say. In the resulting pause, Kevin seemed to feel the conversation had reached its conclusion.
"Well," he said, tossing the rat poison into his trolley. "I guess I'll be getting on..."
"Kevin," Julia said smartly. He stopped.
"Yeah?"
"Do you remember, when we last talked?" She smiled again, the most charming smile she could muster. "You mentioned something, when we were talking about my accident?"
Now it was Kevin's turn to look confused.
"What?"
"Well, you said you might be able to… source something, should I ever..."
"Source what?"
"Some alternative..." Julia mouthed the word instead of saying it out loud. "Painkillers."
For a long moment he looked baffled. But then his face lit up in recollection. "Oh, aye. I remember. You were popping them like sweeties!"
The memory seemed to put a swagger in his stance.
"Quite. Well, is that still a possibility? Because if it is, I'd very much like to take you up on..."
"Shhhh." Kevin put his fat finger to his lips. Julia was surprised into silence.
"Look up," he said.
After a moment she did what he said.
"What do you see?"
Julia considered. There was the ceiling of the supermarket, squares of off-white ceiling tiles. "Nothing."
"See those little black things sticking out. What do you make of those?"
Julia squinted. She didn't have her glasses on. "I think they're for the sprinkler system aren't they? In case there's a fire."
"That," Kevin said meaningfully, "is what they want you to believe." He sniffed again – the man clearly had an unpleasant cold. “I think we’d better continue this conversation outside, don’t you?” He gave her a knowing look, and very deliberately he returned to his trolley and moved away.
“Kevin?” Julia called out to him.
He turned at once, looking slightly irritated with her now. Then he pointed to the supermarket door and mouthed the word ‘outside’.
Julia was baffled, but she had to let him go. She quickly paid for her shopping and hurried out into the car park, worried that she wouldn’t find him there. But in the event it was easy. He was standing next to a red and very muddy pick-up truck that was parked in a disabled space.
She walked towards him.
"No one ever looks up do they?" Kevin asked.
Julia frowned in confusion. "I'm sorry?"
"That's how they get away with it. No one ever looks up. In a supermarket. I mean, why would you?"
"I don't... I don't know."
"Exactly. So that’s how they can implant listening devices in the ceiling and monitor everything that people say and do. Mostly it’s to make us spend more money, but who else is bugging them, and sucking down all the data? Eh? You ever think about that?”
Julia was forced to concede she never had.
He sniffed again and leaned back on his car.
"So what exactly are you after?" he asked.
Julia considered quickly. It wasn't yet clear if he considered it safe to talk about this in the car park, or if he thought the lamp posts might possibly be listening too. She decided to risk it.
"Well, you see the problem is I've been prescribed these tablets, only the doctors have quite misunderstood the amount of pain I'm in, and so I'm getting through them a little faster than I can get hold of them."
"Uh huh." He nodded as if this were a common issue. "Muslim doc is it?”
“No… Well actually yes, but I don’t think that’s the issue here.”
Kevin’s eyebrows rose up, as if suggesting he would draw his own conclusions on that. But he let it pass. “What tablets?" he asked.
"They're called Dramadol." Julia dug in her bag for a box to show him. She handed it hopefully to Kevin but he quickly backed off.
“Whooa!” He quickly looked around. “Easy, lady.” He turned half-away, but put his hand out to the side and subtly took the box from her hands. “Never know who’s watching.”
Then he stared at the box for a while. Julia wondered for a second if he could actually read the words.
"Well?” she asked. “Do you have any?"
Kevin hesitated, then shook his head. Julia swore under her breath.
"These are strong little buggers. I don't keep anything like this in the vehicle." He reached into his mouth and began scraping one of his teeth with his little fingernail.
"But I’ll probably have something back at the trailer."
Julia's hopes dipped and rose as if on a roller coaster.
"What? Well, where's the trailer?" she asked at once.
Kevin looked at her, surprised. "It's just out in the woods. Old John from Rubblestone Farm, he lets me keep it there."
Julia had no idea who or where this was, but she didn't care either. "Well, can we go there? I can follow you?"
Kevin considered this for a moment. "You wanna come out to the trailer?"
"Yes."
"Now?"
"Yes."
“With me?”
“Yes, with you.”
Kevin seemed to calculate for a while. "Okay. This isn't going to be cheap, you know." He cocked his head to one side.
"Well, how much? I can write you a cheque right now." Julia began digging in her handbag again.
"Whooaaa," he said again. "You're a funny one, aren't you?" He pointed over at the supermarket's cash machine.
"Cash only."
Kevin waited while Julia withdrew the maximum she could take on her bank card, and then all three of her credit cards. It gave her over a thousand pounds in cash. Then she hurried to where she had parked and threw her shopp
ing in the back. She followed Kevin's truck, noting the black smoke that plumed from the exhaust pipe and the ‘Baby on Board’ sign attached to the rear window. They drove in the opposite direction to where Julia lived, but after a while turned off the road and onto a farm track. Kevin's truck rolled and bumped through a half-mile of pot-holed and muddy track, then he turned off again, this time leading Julia into a wood. After another half mile they came to a clearing. On one side a dishevelled static caravan appeared to have been dumped there. Next to it was a jury-rigged washing line with what looked to be dead animals, rabbits or squirrels perhaps. Kevin pulled up alongside the washing line and stopped his truck. Then he got out. Julia considered for a moment before doing the same. In the Tesco car park this had seemed a good idea, but now she was here it wasn't so clear. The woods were thick, and there was no one else in sight. In fact, as far as Julia knew, there were no other human beings within a mile of where she was. And suddenly Julia realised that Kevin was a large man. A large and obviously very unusual man. A part of her wanted to turn around and drive away as fast as she could. But a more primal part wanted the tablets. With a deep breath, she opened the door.
As she passed the line of dead rodents Julia kept her eyes fixed firmly forward, but still formed the distinct impression that the animals had been shot. She pressed the thought away and followed Kevin to the door of the caravan.
He unlocked it and held it open.
"I haven't cleaned up too much for a while," he said as she climbed the steps and went in.
There was a smell inside, the damp, rotten smell of slowly decaying furniture. The walls were stained yellow. In some places Kevin had cut out articles from newspapers. By the little bathroom, its door open, there was a pin-up of a girl in a swimsuit.
"Yeah, um…" Kevin looked around too, like he was suddenly noticing the mess of the place. "Have a seat, if you like. I'll see what I've got."
The Glass Tower Page 20