Adrenaline

by Robert Young

  It didn't of course. Lots of people in a place like that, even at 2 in the morning. Lots of people who navigate by the signs on the wall and the colour-coded lines on the floor.

  Not many people like me though.

  Getting home was simple enough once I worked out where I was, or must have been since I got in my front door an hour or so later, hand on the clock in the hallway at a right angle.

  One of the benefits of living alone: no-one to ask you awkward questions.

  A girlfriend or a flat mate might have been woken at 3am by the sound of the front door, might have asked why you had been discharged in the middle of the night, would have worried that you'd discharged yourself, that you had simply walked out of hospital after God only knew how long bandaged and bound in an isolated bed.

  Fair and valid questions all but not ones I would have either wanted or been able to answer.

  Silence instead then, and that creeping insistent fear clawing at me. I knew that having got here felt right, that staying in that clean, white room had been a terrifying prospect and one I could not countenance. Nonetheless I did not know why that fear had driven me out, nor why it stayed with me now.

  When I woke later, I woke sore and uncomfortable, folded awkwardly into the hallway cupboard. There was a ghost of a memory of having had to flee the rising heat of my bedroom, the inescapable burn that actually worsened when I kicked off the duvet. This cupboard offered a coolness and security that I'd not even questioned, so exhausted was I when I'd stumbled in.

  When I opened the door into the hallway and crawled out, everything was wrong and everything would stay wrong. You can't deny the evidence of your senses, but you can try. I tried. I would keep trying for a long while.

  With the night came calm and a sense of rebalancing and equilibrium. I had spent an hour pacing the flat, returning often to both the cupboard and the bedroom and trying to recall how I had got from one to the other without more than a shred of memory of it.

  The bedclothes were twisted and knotted across the mattress, the pillows dented as though they had been pounded and smashed. Like a tornado had ripped through the room.

  In the cupboard it seemed as though a nest had been hollowed out amongst the spare blankets and the half empty boxes. But there were corners and edges, cans of furniture polish, vacuum attachments and a bag of old Christmas decorations that would be no more use now than it had been as a mattress.

  And there was that same lingering chill up my back as I passed each window. I pulled the blinds, drew the curtains and then opened them all again. I peered out into the dark, saw the dull shapes of my neighbours moving behind their own windows as they settled in for the night. Whatever I tried I could not locate the cause of my unease.

  There was a full length mirror on the back of my bedroom door and I found myself undressed in front of it and appraising my entire body closely.

  I'd spent who knows how long in a hospital room virtually mummified. The escape, the trip home, sleeping nested in my cupboard. Amidst the hours tumbling past, the running from or after something lost or hidden, that most pressing thought had escaped me.

  My skin. Or more to the point, my burns.

  Where were they?

  Days of excruciating pain - searing, raging pain - had pushed me far enough from rational thinking that I had crept out of a hospital room in the middle of the night. I hadn't asked to leave, nor when they might discharge me. Simply run.

  I'd waited until night to do it then when I got home, had slept in the darkest, coolest place I could find when that terrible heat had begun to force its way in again.

  Most of my body was just as it had been days, weeks ago. But my hands, my neck, my face all carried the faintest marks. Not scars exactly, but almost like an ageing. No wrinkles or sagging of the skin, but the lightest toughening, the very gentlest thickening that the eye detected, but then lost, as though imagined.

  'The hell...?' I said aloud as I stared, flipping my hands and leaning into the mirror, eyeball to eyeball with my reflection. 'I was head to foot in bandages. And this...' I drew my fingers over my chest, clasped my arms in my hands, 'This is... clear. Just clear.'

  I stared so long and so hard that at one moment I thought that I could see the curtains moving behind me, through me. I shook my head and looked again.

  Had I seen that, really? The fabric swinging softly below the line of my shoulder?

  Indoors too long, no contact. No food either it occurred to me. I spent more long minutes then staring into the fridge, the cupboards, but could not match anything with an appetite. I fancied nothing, and yet there was that hollow empty-stomach feeling nagging at me.

  I felt a jarring shock when I saw the photos on the bookshelf. Not because I didn't know how long it had been since I had seen any of them, but that it had taken me this long even to think of it. My mother. My girlfriend.

  That might be pushing it as a description to be fair. We didn't live together, didn't have a special drawer of spare clothes at each other's flats for whenever we stayed over. Hadn't swapped spare keys.

  She had brought her own toothbrush the two times she had stayed here and I had borrowed hers the last time I stayed at her place - it had been an impromptu, post-pub decision and I had made do with stealing the least feminine shower gel I could lay my hands on and going commando until I could get home and change clothes.

  When had that been? A week ago? Two? There had been no mobile phone with me in the hospital, so I could not check that for messages or texts and there had been no wallet. Keys only.

  From under the bandages I could not tell them who I was and they in turn could not tell me how I had got there.

  So here I stood, gawping at photographs of loved ones who almost certainly didn’t know what had happened to me, but who might at least be able to tell me when I'd last been heard from. I might at last be able to begin to reclaim some of the missing pieces.

  The clock on the wall said that it was 5.30 in the morning which ruled out calling most people I knew; friends of professional acquaintances alike.

  My mother then? I hesitated at the phone in the hallway, partly over the time - although she was unlikely to be concerned by an early call given the circumstances. But when I thought about what I might say to her, and how little I knew, I figured that more harm may be done than good.

  But if I could not speak to anyone right now, I could check email, find a calendar. Come on, this can't be so hard. Get a grip.

  Walking into the living room I reached for the On switch of the computer and noted that outside, that deepest black-blue sky was fading to pale and I have never felt so scared.

  *

  Bin bags and parcel tape. There was a nagging sense that what I was doing was borderline insane, comfortably irrational, as I covered over each of my windows with increasing urgency. But I pressed on nonetheless. That would be something to reflect on later when I felt calmer and safer.

  When it was done, the sun was up. I could tell that because there was leakage and the sunlight seeped in no matter my attempts to seal myself in so tight. Tiny tendrils of light pushed through the smallest gaps in the tape, squirmed in under each kink and curve that had not been pressed flush and now I could not bring myself to go near to close them out.

  Those yellow fingers seemed to me a tangible, physical thing. Malevolent and focused, seeking me out. And for October, it really was heating up, even here in the blackout.

  In the centre of my home, furthest from all the windows, from the blazing yellow vines, I curled foetal and small into myself as if to wait out the siege.

  Back into the nest again, though this time more consciously than before. It felt like the worst kind of flu bug had come over me, raging heat on my skin and through my flesh and yet the hairs stood up and a chill ran down me. Every joint ached like I'd been stretched and twisted by some brutish fury.

  My delirious dreams strung out across the day and ripped and pulled at my consciousness,
jarring me awake and hurling back into sleep again, hauling me down like prey.

  Deep in the mist I entertained thoughts of making phone calls to people. It was the right time of day to do it and there was every reason in the world to let everyone know how I was now, but that was the thing. How was I?

  There was no way I could trust myself to say the things I should say to them, not the things I wanted to which might just infect them all with the same fear that was penning me in.

  But more than that I simply could not get past that closed door. Not that it was keeping me in, rather I felt that it was keeping something out.

  Again though the end came. Slowly and inexorably the day unwound and the boiling, tumbling tension began to calm and slow like a train approaching a station. It was again a striking thing to notice where I was, amidst the boxes and blankets and old newspapers, though I'd known it the whole time. Nevertheless, that fear gave way to embarrassment. The closed door did not hold back any threat but simply made me feel stupid.

  I would need to deal with this now. I was a grown man cowering in a cupboard, terrified of something formless, nameless. I had lost days, possibly weeks of my life and had nothing where the memory should be. The ground had shifted beneath my feet, had been whipped right out from under me and I could not simply remain unmoving. I must find my bearings. Recalibrate.

  It felt as if the answer was in the night somewhere. Or if not the answer, an answer. And if not a solution, a start.

  *

  The first steps were tentative, childlike almost. Like riding a bike for the first time, unsteady and fearful until you realise that no one is holding you up anymore and you are doing it yourself.

  It was full dark when I'd ventured out, taking time to shower and change, to gather the things I might need, though for what I could not be certain. It took me a while to acknowledge that I was just stalling for time.

  Initially I kept to quiet side streets and sought the solace of shadows where they could be found. Cars and buses passed, their headlights piercing and harsh, but the thing I began to notice the most was the sound. At first I figured that it was simply the effect of having been so long in silence - the hospital, the cupboard. Indoors and insulated from the noises of the city. But too often I noticed that the difference was not volume, but clarity.

  I could hear gear changes not just from the pause and change of engine tone, but on a mechanical level. The clicks and shifts of the engine disengaging, reengaging. Cogs and wheels realigning themselves. I could detect the smallest undulations and imperfections in the road surfaces as the tyres seemed to call out a description as they went.

  Then I noticed something very odd. Though it was dark and moonless, and even in streets with little lighting, or a small a shortcut I took through a cemetery, I could still see. Clearly.

  It wasn't like daylight, with its full spectrum of colours and details but nor was it just monochrome. Colours were dulled but identifiable. Instead I could make out shapes and textures, judge depth and distance. My peripheral vision picked up movement both close by and far away from me and the more I noticed it, the more I saw.

  For a while it became all-absorbing and I lost track of time and space, losing hours just walking as I looked and listened, covering miles. I could hear the rats in the sewers; see the bats flitting high up through trees. Three young men huddled in a stairwell of a block of flats, surly and mean, all oversized clothes sagging low at the waist or pulled high over brows. They watched me pass, chins thrust out, chests puffed, sucking teeth.

  As I passed flats and houses I could hear the sounds of televisions, the faint muddied thrum of music through headphones, there was shouting, talking and laughter. There was contented snoring, lovemaking. I felt like an intruder just walking past people’s homes; illicit, invasive and invisible.

  The hiss and rush of water through pipes, trains on rails a mile away, the snap and crackle of logs burning down in a grate. When a Police siren wound itself up I snapped my head around, expecting to see the car bearing down in me, all strobing blue lights and engine roar. But the street was empty, and after a moment when the soundscape failed to gel with the scene in front of me, I spotted its darting, flashing shape away down the hill as it flickered beyond the screen of trees in the nearby park.

  That was what snapped me out of it. Lost and wandering in the reverie with hours slipping past I had covered miles. There was a jarring moment of bitter fear when I looked at the street signs and noted the post code of where I was and scrambled at my sleeve to check the time.

  The hour was late but there were, to my intense relief, still hours of darkness left. When I turned to head for home again they were standing there.

  Chapter 6

  Roth kept irregular hours at the best of times, so the increasing sense that his stirrings were solely nocturnal had taken a little while to register.

  Initially it was the incident that threw him. He had spent days cocooned in blankets with blinds drawn and emerged fresher and brighter in the gloom only to feel a collapsing, crashing exhaustion draw over him after a few hours.

  He hadn't had anything like this since a three month spell shovelling coke up his nose but once he'd snapped out of that, he'd been nothing more than erratic. Necessity demanded it and he often prowled the night-time streets to make his living, lifting wallets and handbags of drunk office workers staggering off night buses or out of taxis that little bit too far from their front door.

  There were any number of shops or other commercial premises that might leave cash where he could get it before the sirens were drawn to the alarm, but whatever was paying for Roth's rent and beer at any time, he was not unused to sleeping through the daylight.

  But it never felt so soaked in menace before. It was easier to shut it out and ignore it than admit that he was scared but days were becoming weeks and it was only worsening.

  He'd spent those restless waking hours trying hard to put things back together from that night. There was the usual prowling past the train station, loitering at the bus stops, watching for opportunities. Same shit, different night.

  There was the guy that looked like low hanging fruit that he'd trailed lazily behind until the street lights thinned and the pavements emptied of people. Then the turn into the side street and Roth was on him in a few quick strides, pulling him into a shadow, taking his feet from under him. Raising his fist.

  The quick recognition of danger emerging from the clouds in the man’s eyes was an image that Roth could still see. He relished that moment.

  But then there was nothing but scattered pieces of memory. The weight on him, the falling. He saw ground up close, then faraway sky. He smelt something that was at once familiar and yet completely alien.

  There was pain, like a sharp blow to the neck.

  So little was clear but it can only have been someone jumping him, knocking him out. Yet there had been no sound of approach, no voices of warning that some Samaritan or vigilante would have bellowed. He knew that well enough - when someone played the hero, they always opened with shouts of warning in the hope that they would scare him off before they would have to confront him.

  But Roth could only wonder why someone would take him out so stealthily. And besides, his intended victim was still lying next to him when he woke, sparked out.

  Some rescue.

  And whoever it was had left Roth's wallet and phone. So they weren't hijacking Roth's mugging, something confirmed when he checked the prone mans pockets which were equally untouched. Roth didn't leave them that way of course, but he took himself home nonetheless, dazed and for the first time in a long time, afraid.

  Chapter 7

  They didn't look local, though exactly how I might qualify that I don't know. Somehow they were out of place, simply wrong. But at the same time inconspicuous, sort of blended-in, like vague figures painted onto the background scenery of a stage set.

  Both were tall, slender but wiry looking rather than skinny. They w
ere withdrawn into shadow and appeared to be talking to each other though looking not at each other but forward, in my direction. For a minute or so I could not move but held there rigid, as though awaiting instruction.

  Before the spell broke, and I turned fast and away from them, my eyes were fixed on them there beneath the broad canopy of a tree. I could see dark clothing, though no colours, dark hair and skin, and the sense came to me that they consisted of the shadow they inhabited, that they were made of it. There was a flicker of recognition then, a mote of memory, fragmentary and fleeting like dust on the air, quickly gone. And then one stepped swiftly forward into a shaft of streetlight and I saw he was blonde and pale.

  Just a trick of the light. A trick of the night.

  That movement snapped me out of it and I span on my heel and fixed on the next job; get home.

  I did so quickly, far faster than I remembered getting here in the first place, my feet knowing the route, the turns I had taken from my front door. My eyes were focused dead ahead of me, a conscious effort not to notice how much they could see, not to listen to all those same clear sounds I had noticed before as I covered the ground under my feet. This hyper-awareness, this super sensitivity that assailed me was a cloying claustrophobic thing, like moving fast through a noisy crowd.

  At my front door I first noticed the sweating, my clothes slick against me, hair plastered across my scalp. Was it the effort of moving so fast or of trying to block out the noise?

  The thinnest easing of the blackness in the eastern sky appeared and it felt like it was stalking me.

  Inside I decided that I would not sleep again, that I would not crawl into the nest of boxes and blankets in the cupboard to wait out the daylight, not again. I would try to be productive; try to resume some normality in the face of gathering evidence that nothing anymore was normal.

  I tidied the place - after sealing myself up again of course, taping down the edges of the bin bags that I had missed before - and then I opened the computer and read through a number of emails.