I feel pain that I have never felt and I cry out. The focus is on my scream and on my agony, and Lexie, suddenly, has escaped me. She bolts past, grabs the keys from the shelf where they were badly hidden. I didn’t think they needed to be. I never expected it to be about whether or not Lexie could get out because she was never going to get the chance.
I scream, but she doesn’t glance back to check that I am okay. She just bolts, back to her perfect life.
‘Bitch!’ I yell, but she has gone now, the door flung open.
I go to race after her but the pain is too intense. There won’t be a second chance.
All I can hear are my own cries and I look down to see my forearm, where my skin is burning.
It is reddening, deeper and deeper. I feel faint.
I sit down on my sofa and look up at the camomile tea now splattered across my wall. I try to focus on where it hit the paint as well as me, as the pain gets worse.
When he left, Luke took all the pictures from the walls and I painted everything beige. Luke took the imagination, along with everything else. Lexie and Tom’s walls are, of course, in colour.
Now, though, Lexie’s weak camomile tea adorns my wall, shaped like a map.
Art, in a sense, I think in a daze, like a tattoo showing off the defining part of my life. The first art on my walls since Luke took all the pictures away.
Maybe this is what the scar that is starting to come up now on my arm will be. Art too, in a sense.
I think about Luke sitting there on our sofa where Lexie was sat and I think, through an agony that is making me nauseous, I want desperately for you to be back. Whatever that comes with. I need someone to make this a real place again and to make me a real person. I close my eyes. Is that right? Is that what I want?
I want him to brighten the walls and colour me in.
The pain is making me delirious. It could, I think, be a good thing.
I thought that if I replaced Luke with a man who looked like him then I could squint and convince myself that things were the same. I thought we would move on and have a family and a sausage sandwich in the pub, and that the picture would be so close to being the same, I wouldn’t even notice the oddity. Like a Spot the Difference puzzle, of my life.
I gasp, once more, as another shot of pain runs through me. I should get some ice, call an ambulance, call Chantal, perhaps, but I can’t. Instead, I just sob in agony and wait, once again, for someone else to come. And once again, nobody does.