Lucky cow.
Ginny met Alex in a bar. She wasn’t interested in him, she was chatting to his better-looking, taller friend. But, in the great romantic tradition, he made her laugh. Alex made her laugh so much she can’t quite remember agreeing to go out with him, but she did. A lot.
Soon, Ginny was no longer calling me up for Friday night drinks, she was calling me to see if James and I wanted to go to dinner at ‘ours’.
They were one of those sickening couples that you want to hate but just can’t. She was smart and beautiful and ambitious, he was kind and funny and adored her. I wanted to be annoyed by them, wanted to find their adoration of each other irritating, but it was impossible. Just being with them made you feel happier, bathing in their golden glow gave you a summery sheen that helped gloss over the cracks in your own life. James and I laughed, lovingly teased each other, and held hands more when we were with Ginny and Alex. Their joy made us joyful.
They moved in together and married in a timeframe that should have felt quick but just felt natural. ‘We’ve Only Just Begun’ could have been their theme tune, and Karen Carpenter would have been proud.
I was happy for them.
Until Ginny told me they were trying for a baby.
James and I were trying for a baby.
A baby was our next thing.
A baby would make everything better.
It had been over a year since James and I started trying for a baby.
James and I weren’t trying for a baby any more, we were struggling for a baby.
I said that I don’t have anyone who loves me and makes things better in this new world.
But that is a lie.
I do have someone.
I have Lucky.
I love Lucky.
Lucky is the thing that has made me happiest and brought me the only real joy I have known in this empty world.
Let’s be honest, without Lucky I would probably have killed myself weeks ago.
He is happy and healthy now, my constant companion with his big, doggy grin permanently plastered to his face. He sleeps on my bed at night and wakes with me in the morning. He sits on my lap when I cry and licks away tears from my cheeks with his stinking, rough tongue. He is often the only reason I get out of bed. My heart lifts when I see him, and his warmth, weight and smell calm me whenever he is near. He has shown me more love than I have received from some of my human relationships, and I would be lost without him.
If this were a movie or a novel, then Lucky would be enough to save me. I would realise that I didn’t need human interaction or love because I had Lucky and his love would be sufficient.
But this isn’t a movie. I ache for human contact. Every time I hear my own voice it shocks me. No one has said my name for over three months. Is it still my name any more? Do I still exist? I could be anyone. Am I even still me?
I am definitely not the same person I believed I was before. I am a murderer, a bully, a thief, a burglar, a former drug addict. I am weak and I am scared and I am tired all the time.
I feel like I’ve been lying about who I really am for years.
I can’t lie any more.
I don’t think I really like the person I have become, but then I wasn’t particularly keen on the person that I was before 6DM either.
And at least I am honest about who I am now.
I love Lucky, but he isn’t enough to save me.
Tomorrow is March 17th.
March 17th is my birthday.
It feels like a good day to die.
March 17th 2024
Happy birthday to me.
For the first time since Susan Palmers died I actually managed to wake up and get out of bed in the morning on March 17th because I had big plans for my last day alive.
I was going to shave my legs.
For the last three months my lifestyle has been an extreme mix of feast or famine and I have in no way taken care of myself. I am bloated and slovenly and sluggish. I wear what is comfy and warm and not what is attractive or fashionable. I burp and fart loudly and at will – often startling Lucky, to my strange delight. My face is pale and puffy and spotty, and my hair is shocking. I haven’t seen my real hair colour in over ten years, and now that I can, it turns out that it is mostly mousey and grey. My fringe was in my eyes and I had been pinning it back, but a couple of days ago I finally snapped and used some kitchen scissors to cut it. So now I am puffy, spotty, grey and have the haircut of a village idiot.
It feels like the least I can do before I die is have a bath, shave my legs, and apply a bit of deodorant.
It was only after I had bathed, exfoliated, shaved, waxed, plucked, washed and moisturised that I realised how ridiculously needless my efforts were. There was no one left to appreciate my smooth skin, my artfully plucked eyebrows. What was I doing? Adhering to social norms to the very end is what. Primping and preening and prettying like the good middle-class girl I was always destined to be. Even here, at the end of my life, I was doing what I had been taught. Why? No one would notice or care.
Except maybe Lucky before he inevitably eats me.
My plan had been to get riotously drunk but it is already late afternoon and I am still sober. Not for any noble or selfless reason. I have just been too nauseous in the past few days to want to drink any kind of alcohol.
However, I am bravely sipping a glass of gin because I am definitely going to need some Dutch courage. Turns out, it’s not as easy as you might think, killing yourself.
Because that is, of course, what is happening here. I am not sick. I might be mentally a bit unstable, but there is nothing physically wrong with me. I am perfectly fit and healthy if you discount the random vomiting, tiredness, bloating, and spots.
There is no physical reason for me to die. I am killing myself because there is also no physical reason for me to live. I am killing myself because it is the easy option for me. Easier than having to live in this new world.
Except, as I say, it is not as easy as I thought it would be.
The physical act of swallowing something that will end your life is a tough thing to make yourself do. Every time I think about it, I start to panic and feel sick. I am pretty sure it’s not a good idea to throw up immediately after you have taken T600.
I made the mistake of reading the information leaflet that came with the T600. The first line is ‘THIS MEDICINE WILL KILL YOU’. Which was not unexpected. What is unexpected is the number of unwanted side effects that can happen. Migraines, blood clots, paralysis, fainting, fits, sudden inability to breathe. Sudden inability to breathe? I thought I was going to drift into a nice sleep, not fight for my last breath. I suppose if I were suffering from 6DM, these side effects would seem like a walk in the park. I am sure most people didn’t even bother to read the leaflet. But I have. And it is frightening.
The worst part is the bit about children. Specifically, the line that says ‘Do not try to resuscitate or prolong your child’s life once you have administered T600. Your child will fall asleep as their organs shut down. Do not try to wake them.’ I hope very few parents read that section.
It was still only early evening when I had finished my bath and leaflet reading and it somehow felt too early to kill myself.
Death feels like the act of night, not late afternoon.
I had only managed a few sips of gin, so decided to take a wander around the hotel, drink more, and try to calm my thundering heart.
I walked down to the staff locker room, which is my favourite place in the hotel, and immersed myself in my favourite human-contact-starved act – rifling through the belongings of the hotel employees, devouring their lives like my very own soap opera. I had been in there many times already, soaking up the details of other people’s mini dramas, and I knew all their secrets – who kept new underwear in their locker, who had an autograph book with hundreds of signatures in it, who kept three different mobile phones for his two girlfriends and one wife. I found out that Sophie had been trying for a baby
for a year and that she was due to be fertile again at the beginning of November. She had three different brands of pregnancy test in her locker already. I discovered that George’s wife had left him, and he’d kept the ‘Dear John’ letter she sent him. Emily had credit card bills from six different companies, all over £10k, all overdue. She was probably quite thankful for 6DM.
Eager for more snooping and more knowledge on this, my final day, I headed to the duty manager’s office and was surprised to find the door locked. If there are two things that I have learnt in my post 6DM life, it is that one: a locked door normally hides something of extreme interest, and two: locked doors are easier to open than you think. One big shoulder shove and I was in.
And immediately I regretted it.
There was nothing life-changing in the duty manager’s office. No mass of dead bodies, no lone crusader barricaded in to the last, no secret science laboratory working on a cure.
The room was decorated to welcome the duty manager back to work, or maybe just back in for a visit to work.
Deflated balloons, banners, and bows. All manner of pink decorations congratulating him or her on their new arrival.
A baby girl.
Born before 6DM? Most probably. A room decorated to welcome someone who never came back, to congratulate them on a baby that no one got to see.
Maybe that’s why the room was locked – people can only take so much sadness.
My stomach lurched and tears pricked suddenly at my eyes. A baby girl. A long awaited, much anticipated bundle of joy to love.
I know what it is like to want that, to long to hold a baby in your arms. To think you have that opportunity and then to have it cruelly snatched away.
I stumbled backwards, tripped over Lucky, and landed on the floor. I kicked the door to the room shut with my foot.
I walked slowly down the corridor with Lucky by my side.
I wish I could write that someone came just at that point. That I heard footsteps downstairs or a car driving down the street outside. That it was the army, the Red Cross, another lone survivor who wasn’t going to die as soon as they met me.
But no one came.
The only noise was the slap of my bare feet and the soft tap of Lucky’s paws on the floor.
I took Lucky to the kitchen and opened all the edible food that I could find: biscuits, crackers, frozen meat, big blocks of cheese, catering sized cans of beans and tomatoes. I wasn’t sure how long it would last, but it was better than nothing. I filled all available bowls with water and left them on the floor. Then I remembered that he mostly drinks from the toilet.
I got myself a glass of water.
I wandered through the building opening doors and lifting toilet seats to give Lucky access to wherever he might be most comfortable.
I took the water back to a new room with a fresh bed and fresh sheets.
I put it on the bedside table with the T600.
I sat on the floor with Lucky and stroked him and whispered over and over what a good boy he was.
When he was asleep, I picked him up as gently as I could and took him out into the corridor. He woke up as I put him down on the floor and immediately tried to get back in the room with me.
I locked him out.
He howled.
I cried despite promising myself I wouldn’t.
I opened the window so that I could hear and smell the rain that had inevitably begun to fall.
I am in bed, propped up on the clean, white pillows.
The T600 and glass of water are beside me.
It is time.
I am clean and dry and warm and comfortable and tired and sad and lonely and done with surviving in this world on my own.
I am not going to write some kind of dramatic final sentence or deathbed confession. I have done things I am not proud of and things that I would never have thought myself capable of – both good and bad.
I hope someone finds this journal. And if you also find a shaggy golden retriever at the same time, he likes to be tickled behind his left ear, and his favourite food is biscuits. Tell him I love him and, if there is an afterlife, I will be missing him in it.
If there is one message that I leave then it is this: I survived, but I never had a life.
It is time.
Then, as I was lying there, listening to the rain fall, smelling the sweet dampness coming in through the window and lifting the T600 to my mouth, I remembered.
In that briefest, tiny moment between life and death it was my sense of smell that saved me.
It was a smell that I remembered, or rather a smell that I had forgotten to remember, that saved my life.
Like I have said before, smell has always been my most evocative sense.
When I was young and my dad was working late I used to sleep with one of the boxes that his aftershave bottles came in. I cut eyeholes in the box and drew a smiley mouth on the front, but obviously that wasn’t the thing that comforted me (it actually looked terrifying). It was the smell.
I can smell when rain is due, when snow is coming, and when the seasons are about to change. I can smell a certain scent and instantly be transported back to yesterday, last week, last month, or five years ago. Like the smell of school, or a certain pub I went into when I was younger. I used to be able to identify different parts of London from their smell, Hyde Park Corner with the mixture of exhaust fumes and greenery, Covent Garden with baking cookies and beer, the Southbank with river water and ice cream sellers.
Smells can make me happy, sad, and scared. They can comfort me or send me spiralling into depression.
Before I left my mum and dad’s for the last time I took a T-shirt from each of their drawers and sealed it in one of the thousands of Ziploc bags my mum kept handy for emergency situations. When I am having a really bad day, I open one of the bags and bury my face into it, drugging myself in the memory of when I was young and loved and protected.
After over two years of trying for a baby with James, I could smell when my period was about to start.
I did everything right. I tracked my cycle, exercised, ate healthily, stopped drinking, took vitamins, we had sex according to a strict schedule, in the missionary position, with my hips on a pillow, and I lay that way for at least ten minutes after; trying not to move while precious sperm slowly leaked out of me. I read all the books, joined all the support groups, did all the research, and bought all the recommended fertility aids.
James did everything right, too. He exercised, ate healthily, stopped drinking so much, started wearing loose cotton boxer shorts, took vitamins, refrained from wanking in between my regimented sex sessions. He held my hand when we went to see doctors and consultants, held me close when I cried after every negative pregnancy test.
I tried to stay positive, tried not to get sucked down by the endless waiting, the endless cycles of temperature testing, sex, and then waiting again. I tried not to let James see how disappointed I was, that once more life was filled with dissatisfaction; but every now and then I would catch him watching me, and his face would look resigned. Resigned to the fact I was unhappy again.
I should have stopped, should have just relaxed for a while, taken a break. But I couldn’t; I was determined.
And every month I’d go to the toilet, have a wee, and just know I was about to get my period.
I would smell the blood on its way. James thought this was disgusting and ridiculous and impossible.
But I was always right.
I hadn’t smelt my period on its way since 6DM.
I hadn’t had a period since James died.
I put the T600 and glass of water back onto the bedside table, opened the door, and was knocked over by a near-deranged Lucky charging into my arms. He was shaking and whining in fear and distress.
I was crying and stroked him again and again, trying to soothe the pain from him.
‘I’m sorry,’ I whispered. ‘I’ll never leave you again. I promise.’
Then I went to get something f
rom Sophie’s locker.
I came back to my room and drank the glass of water on my bedside table for a completely different reason to the one I had originally poured it for.
Then I went into the bathroom, had the most important wee, and took the most important test of my life.
Then I waited for the longest three minutes of my life.
Then I looked at the results.
Then I drank another glass of water, did another wee, and took another test.
Then I did it again.
After checking the results of the third test I was convinced.
I am pregnant.
March 18th 2024
I was in shock, so the first thing I wanted after finding out I was pregnant was a massive alcoholic drink.
I actually went as far as to walk down to the bar and get myself a glass before I realised that drinking alcohol was no longer allowed.
I settled for a milk-less, joyless cup of tea instead, while feeling guilty about the several sips of gin I had drunk the previous day.
Then I remembered that it wasn’t just alcohol that I had subjected my foetus to. Cocaine, Tramadol, sleeping tablets. I think I had taken morphine a couple of times by mistake.
I started to panic about the effect this might have had on the baby. I know that you get a free pass up to about six weeks because Ginny told me that, until then, the baby is pretty much just a bunch of cells. I’m not confident this is true, but I’m clinging to it.
I haven’t had sex for nearly three months now, so I am one hundred per cent past the six-week point.
I definitely wasn’t detoxed from Tramadol by six weeks. Had I hurt my baby? How did I find out?
For the thousandth time I cursed Google for no longer being around.
In the end I settled for re-reading the information leaflet in the emergency packet of Tramadol that I still had. It said not to use when breastfeeding and not to take without speaking to a doctor or pharmacist if you are pregnant, but it didn’t say it would kill my baby.
I decided to believe it.
Last One at the Party Page 22