If Nicole noticed that Kate had been using her medication, she didn’t say anything—at least, not explicitly. But when she saw Kate watching her pop three beta-blockers out of their packet onto the kitchen table, she began, very casually, to explain to Kate what panic attacks felt like to her.
“Like the pavement is gonna open up and fucking swallow me whole,” Nicole said. She had just woken up and was wearing underwear and a T-shirt and eating peanut butter straight from the jar. Max had stayed at Elias’s, so it was just the two of them in the flat. “I used to just leave work and go home. I don’t even get embarrassed about it anymore. No point in making things any harder than they already are, you know?”
Nicole looked into the bottom of the jar as she spoke: her openness seemed to be an invitation, but Kate did not know how to take it. This was the closest she’d come to any kind of acknowledgment that there was something wrong.
“I do know what you mean,” Kate said carefully. “But don’t you sometimes think it’s easier just to carry on?”
“That’s how it gets you,” Nicole said, sucking her spoon, now looking at Kate across the table. The look felt like a challenge. Nicole stood and lifted her arms to tie her dark, wiry hair into a bun on the top of her head. “You know who knows a lot about this sort of thing?” she said. “My mother. She seems so together, but she’s been through it.”
“What does she know about?” Kate said. She was aware that she was failing to engage with the hints Nicole was offering, but she didn’t know how to be more direct. Nicole was unfazed, though.
“Anxiety,” she said, “panic attacks. If you want to stop having them. Or maybe just go to the GP. They’ll probably try to put you on a million pills, but at least you’ll get a bit of rest.” She screwed the lid back on the peanut butter jar and threw the spoon in the sink. “I slept like a light when I first went on anti-anxieties.”
Kate was confused. “Like a light?”
“Yeah,” Nicole said. “Completely out.”
Before Kate had had the chance to ask Nicole if she meant “log” rather than “light,” she had left the kitchen, and as Kate watched her go she wondered whether the skin on the backs of her thighs was as butter-soft as it looked. At moments like this, Kate feared that she had somehow become a misogynist, that when Lewis had fucked her, he had left something of himself in her. Perhaps that was why she found it so difficult to look away when Nicole walked around the flat in her black cotton underwear, the bones in her thighs looking like they might very easily snap.
Nicole’s apparent fragility was, for Kate, another source of anxiety. She had a new boyfriend, and sometimes, when he came over, she could hear them fucking; the sound of the headboard banging against the wall of the room directly above her, heavy breathing, escaped groans: these noises found their way into Kate’s bed, and even if she put headphones on and turned up the radio and pulled her duvet over her head, she still felt the thudding in her bones, the screws beneath her rib cage tightening.
Once, when she couldn’t sleep, disturbed by the sound of Nicole being drilled to the bed, Kate decided to commit fully to her wakefulness and went up to the kitchen to make tea. But the noise there was worse—the walls were thinner than the floors—and as the kettle began to boil over the sound of rhythmic thumping, she heard what she was sure was the sound of an open palm colliding with bare flesh, a smacking sound that grew louder and louder, accompanied by a low, animalistic moaning. In that moment she was overcome by an impulse to burst into the bedroom, to tear this attacker from Nicole, to kick him and to stamp his chest into the floor so that he would know how it felt to have his ribs crushed.
The kettle clicked, and Kate, instead of pouring the boiling water into the mug, poured it quickly and deliberately over her bare hand. Her instincts overrode her intention, however, and she immediately drew her hand away and thrust it under the cold tap. When the desire to burn and to be burned had abated, she sank down onto the floor of the kitchen. Only the sudden silence from Nicole’s room and the fear of being discovered there on the floor could move her, and she lifted herself slowly to her feet, pouring what was left of the water into her mug and taking it and her blistered hand back to her bedroom.
Despite the vulnerability Kate had projected onto Nicole, she had insight that Kate did not. Denial, just as she had warned, would only delay the inevitable. In early November, Kate’s least favorite customer, the creep she had told Max about, overstepped. He had his little rituals, calling Kate over because he was ready to pay and then spending five minutes rooting around in his pocket for change so she would have to stand there, waiting for him.
“Only you can make the milk so silky,” he would say when Kate put his coffee down in front of him. “Just how I like it.”
He must have been about sixty, and he walked into the restaurant cock first with his little chest puffed out and his narrow hips jutting forward. His name was Vernon, and he came there once a week every week and sat in his favorite spot by the window reading the paper for a full hour, buying only one coffee before leaving Kate with an inelegant tip and fast-growing nausea. He had a habit of looking at her legs, and she detested this. Today, Vernon had been upset, because his spot by the window had been taken by a mother who was breast-feeding her baby, and Vernon had taken out his venom on Kate, who had refused to ask the mother to move.
“It’s Broken Britain, I tell you,” said Vernon, shaking his head as he threw a ten-pound note on the table, “it’s disgraceful, vulgar.”
Kate said nothing, but took Vernon’s money. As she leaned forward she saw that along the inside of his collar was stitched a thin ribbon of red fabric.
“They can’t even get staff without ladders in their tights,” he said loudly as she walked away.
Kate didn’t go back to his table. Instead, she took off her apron and, with that particular clarity that only primal terror affords, put on her jacket, detached the key to the front door of the restaurant from her chain, and left it on the countertop before ducking out the back door of the kitchen. She was numb, her mind as if suspended in a viscous fluid, disjointed from her body that itself moved without weight, and she crossed the road, following her feet along the pavement and through the alley that led to the front door of her flat.
Time flatlined; she knew then what red was. She was on Zara’s bed, she saw the ribbon in Lewis’s collar. But this red was not a color, a warning sign or provocation, the bull’s rag; no, red was the filter through which she apprehended everything; it collapsed the time between her present and that moment that refused to remain in her past, so that her whole being, from the dilation of her pupils to the rhythm of her breath and the ice in her chest, recalibrated to respond to the sight of the world through it. And she saw then that if she had been so wrong about what a color could be, then there was little about the world that she had understood correctly.
Only later, in the safety of the bathtub with blistering water on her skin, did she begin to come back into herself, and still she could not fully comprehend the sudden lunacy that had overwhelmed her. Max. It was time, she knew, to talk to him and to tell him that something was happening to her; it was not possible to go on this way. By the time he came back, maybe an hour later, she was a little calmer. She had managed to get out of the bath and had dried herself gently, cautious because her body was still tender and still felt like it belonged to a stranger, but anxious to go to Max and tell him before she changed her mind. She put on a tracksuit whose thick flannel material hung loosely around her hips and thighs. But still her body was consumed by that strange iciness, her chest tight and frozen, and the wire embedded within her tautening whenever she thought about what she was going to say; what could she possibly say to Max other than that she needed him, that she needed help?
He and Nicole were sitting together at the kitchen table, arguing about the music Max was playing through his phone. Kate sat down without saying anything, and when he began to draw her into the conversation she found she could neither hear nor speak. She searched for words, and as she did Nicole rose up silently, squeezing Max’s shoulder before leaving the kitchen.
“What’s happening?” Max said. He shifted his seat closer to Kate, held her shoulder, touched her face. “You don’t look well.”
“I don’t feel well,” Kate said.
“Do you want some water? Paracetamol? Have you taken something?”
“No, nothing. Water, please.”
Glad to have something to do, Max got up and filled a pint glass. He sat back down, and he waited for her to speak.
“I think I might have quit my job.”
“Excellent,” said Max, “why?”
“There’s this man,” Kate said.
“What man?”
“I don’t know, just a man.” She started before faltering. “Listen Max, I think I’m going mad.”
“What did he do? What happened?” Max was looking at her intently now. Despite everything, Kate was glad to have his full attention, even if just for this moment.
“It just reminded me of something.”
“Reminded you of what?”
“Of before.”
For some minutes they spoke like this, Max inferring from ellipses and pauses what he could, Kate filling those pauses with as much meaning as she could without speaking, hoping that he would understand, that perhaps by seeing the uncontrollable shaking of her leg, her pale face and the drawn look, he would not only see the whole of her history but would also decide for them both that it did not and could not matter, what had happened to her, what she had done and had been done to her. But he wouldn’t engage, it was too terrible a thing to infer, it could not be gestured toward, it demanded to be spoken, and the one thing she could not do was speak it.
“The look he gave me,” she said, “the man in the restaurant, I’ve been looked at like that before.”
Max’s confused expression told her that she had lost him.
“Looked at you like what?” said Max. “What did he do?”
Kate picked up the glass of water Max had poured for her, waiting for words to form.
Max took his phone from his pocket—it was vibrating. He put it on the table. Before he silenced it, Elias’s name flashed up on the screen.
“Do you need to take that?” said Kate.
The phone stopped vibrating and then started again.
“Do you mind?” said Max. “I think he’s outside.”
Kate shook her head. She put the glass of water, still full, back on the table.