She stood in the hallway in her hospital pyjamas, holding a Sainsbury’s bag with her clothes in it. The clothes were still wet and smelled of seaweed. The bag also contained the stones from her pockets, so the handle was straining. The nurse who handed her the bag earlier at the hospital had raised her eyebrows. She asked if Heather needed a referral, but Heather just shook her head and took the bag, stones and all, glad to get an ambulance ride home.
She stared at the hallway. She’d walked out last night presuming she would never return. But here she was, tumour still eating her brain, apparently, and she’d suffered and recovered from a massive stroke in the meantime. None of it made sense. She dropped the bag on the floor with a clunk and walked to the kitchen, filled the kettle and switched it on.
Nice cup of tea.
She should be dead, twice over.
How the hell do you process that? Tumour, attempted suicide, stroke. She put a teabag in the Best Mum in the World mug, the one she used to remind herself that her daughter was dead. She was never meant to use that mug again, never supposed to take milk from the fridge again, taste tea and feel it warm her up.
Fucking hell.
She walked to the living room with a swish of her cheap pyjamas. She sat at the table where she used to eat meals with Rosie and Paul, when they played happy families, before everything went to shit. Saw the scratch on the table where, as a toddler, Rosie had gouged at it with a plastic knife. Those early years were exhausting, the constant demands, but she would give anything to have that tiredness back. She was exhausted now but it was different, soaked into her bones.
But she wasn’t dead.
She rewound last night. She was in the water, struggling to keep her head up, then the light, sparkling tracers, the smell, then she seemed to enter a dream. She’d presumed she was drowning, but now she wasn’t sure. She pictured something pressing against her body, wrapping her in a hug, pushing her back to shore.
According to the nurse, she was found on the beach by two teenagers who’d sneaked away from a bonfire down the coast. They called an ambulance for her.
She wanted to die last night. Had that changed? She didn’t believe in fate, and she was still dying. She drank tea and thought about the others in the ward. What was going on with the redhead and her husband? Heather would’ve told him to fuck off. But then it wasn’t as if her marriage to Paul had survived. The boy and the woman had recognised each other. And something had passed between the three of them when they saw that thing on the beach. She felt a tingle in her body, a frisson of recognition. Her dream from last night. It had washed up on Yellowcraigs, didn’t take a genius to realise some weird shit was happening.
She put her tea down and picked up her phone. It was still here on the table where she left it last night. She scrolled through the news until she found it. She skimmed the story, it didn’t say anything she hadn’t heard earlier. The council were trying to work out the best way of removing it. No one knew what species it was. She thought about that. The light in the sky.
She zoomed in on the photograph, looked at the smooth surface of its head. Two blank eyes at the front. What were the parts of an octopus called? She felt she ought to know, given she’d worked at SEPA for two decades, but all she’d dealt with were bacteria, parasites and pollution. She looked at the tentacles, striped skin, suckers underneath. She zoomed until the image was pixelated, narrowed her eyes, remembered her dream, felt the tentacles envelop her, imagined suckers against her skin. It felt good.
She looked out at her back garden, short grass, trimmed hedge. Why had she bothered? She was going to die, suicide or cancer, who the hell needs a tidy garden? She looked at her tea cooling on the table, rug recently vacuumed, fireplace dusted. She’d barely been alive yesterday, if this was all her life amounted to. Now it felt like there was something else, something bigger calling to her.
She went upstairs, pulled clean clothes from a drawer and got dressed. She went back downstairs then out the door towards the beach.