I have started waking regularly in the early hours. In fact, it is rather more than simply waking up.
There is nothing gradual about it, no coming-around sensation. My eyes just snap open from the depths of deep sleep like I’ve been woken by a loud noise.
Each time it happens I freeze and listen but there’s nothing but silence. There is absolutely no reason for me to be so suddenly wide awake with a pummelling heart and painfully dry throat.
It’s as though part of me has flipped back to being that terrified young girl again. The rehashed and counselled Anna seems to be losing her grip just lately.
I don’t want to leave any room for thinking about the past or even what might happen in the future.
This morning it happens at three thirty a.m. and I am scared to move.
Scared of what? I haven’t got a clue and that just makes it worse. Perhaps it is the silence, the shadows.
I can’t move a muscle; I can barely breathe. I lie there in a state of terror, absolutely certain that something terrible is going to happen but without any inkling what it could be.
I think this is what it must feel like to slowly go mad.
I have lived in this house all my life, long enough to know all its noises. . . all those inexplicable little creaks and taps that you hear in the dead of night if you lie quietly and listen. But that isn’t the sort of thing that is fuelling my terror.
It’s more of an awful sense of certainty that the world is going to come crashing in on me in some indistinguishable way. I don’t know how or when it is going to happen, just that it most definitely will, and there isn’t a damn thing I can do about it.
All those years ago, I grew a little stronger each day by constructing a life of routine for myself. I had to put my head back together first and that took a whole year in the muted surroundings of the carpeted clinic with its crisp lawns and neatly bordered gardens.
I got better very, very slowly.
Eventually, within a few years, I had a life that just about held itself together.
I made sense of time mainly by doing certain things at certain times of the day. Nothing unexpected, nothing unusual. Just nice, reliable and simple tasks to drape each day around.
And when I was ready, the job really helped. My social worker had a contact at the Royal Mail and helped me apply. It was something else to hold on to: one of the few things I was good at and could take a pride in.
Now, it feels increasingly like there is nothing solid under my feet to keep me steady.
Once daylight floods the room and I am properly awake, the feeling slowly fades. By mid-morning, my heartbeat is normal and I’m not scared any more, just a bit bruised inside.
Still, after my shift I take myself down to Sneinton Medical Centre and join the seemingly never-ending sit-and-wait queue for those patients without an appointment.
For forty-seven minutes I sit there amongst the usual gathering of sneezers, coughers and squawking kids until, finally, it is my turn.
It isn’t easy to open up to a stranger, but I manage to convey my disturbed sleep pattern to the peripatetic doctor. I try to describe how I often feel afraid for no reason.
‘Anxiety,’ he says simply and scribbles me a prescription.
I am to try the sedatives to help me sleep, he says, and if things don’t improve he will prescribe something else, specifically for the condition. Happy pills, I’ve heard them called.
After seeing the doctor, I take myself off home.
I don’t go to see Liam, and I don’t take this morning’s bag of undelivered mail out of the boot.
I take a sedative and I take myself off to bed.
I sleep straight through until the next morning when I snap awake at just gone three a.m.
I lie still, watching, as the red digits count me through to nearly four. Finally, I muster the courage to push myself up into a seated position.
My lower back is wet with perspiration, and when I unclench my fingers, my palms are clammy and tangled up with my own hair.
The thin curtains allow the street lights to illuminate the room with an eerie orange glow that seems to magnify my dread. I can see Albert’s dark, curled form lying at the bottom of the bed, undisturbed by my movements.
I sit up and a dull ache creeps slowly up the back of my skull.
If I don’t take some migraine tablets now, I know the ache will develop into a fullblown tension headache that could take days to go. Yet something stops me moving, and I feel flushed and uncomfortable despite there being no heating on.
I throw off the quilt and sit with my legs bent up to my chest, my arms wrapped around them. Resting my forehead on top of my knees, I rock gently.
Perhaps Liam is awake, too. The doctor gave him sedatives but said that sometimes the pain could be bad enough to still wake him up. Ivy also takes sedatives at night to help her relax and calm her heart down.
I wonder what might happen if Liam needs help and Ivy is in a drugged stupor, unable to raise the alarm. If it wasn’t for the old woman’s stubbornness, I would stay over with them and there wouldn’t be a problem.
Should the worst-case scenario happen, I mean.
The hospital could have insisted on suitable home arrangements. They could have advised Ivy to let me stay over to help sort things out, at least for a few days.
To be fair, Ivy seems more grateful now that I am helping out with the daytoday tasks but she still fails to recognise there is a need for me to play a full part in their lives.
I’m tired of just being the woman who held Liam’s hand in the road. I want to show him that I am a real friend. Someone he can trust and depend on, I mean. I could never hope that a man like Liam would ever be interested romantically in somebody like me.
I glance at the neon numbers on my bedside table. Just gone four a.m.
I become aware of pain in my jaw and realise that I’m grinding my back teeth together. It reminds me of the long weeks that drifted into long months after Danny died.
I wiggle my bottom jaw a little to free it up but I don’t feel any better.
I think about how I am being really careful not to take any more time off work, so no one gets the opportunity to meddle with my round, but over the last couple of days I think I have probably delivered even less mail than usual.
It’s really important that I don’t draw attention to myself, give them reasons to look more closely at me at work.
Liam coming home from hospital was a distraction but he is depending on me to be there for him, and I plan to go over there this afternoon, when my shift is finished.
Later, when I am driving to work I decide on a new, more effective plan of action.
Instead of delivering the new mail each day, I’m going to refill the bags with the older mail that’s been stacked upstairs. Then I’ll deliver that mail.
That way I can be sure of falling only a few days behind at any one point, instead of the upstairs mail getting older each day.
When I get to the office, I head straight for my stretch of the mail counter.
‘Morning, Anna,’ Roisin sings as I pass her.
‘Morning,’ I say, slowing my pace a bit. ‘How are you?’
‘Oh you know, bored. Tired. The usual.’
I nod. ‘I’m not sleeping very well,’ I say and then clamp my mouth shut before I reveal more than I intended.
‘I know the feeling; it’s too much tea,’ Roisin agrees. ‘I get up to use the bathroom and then I lie awake for hours trying to get back to sleep.
‘Don’t forget that coffee,’ she says as I walk away. ‘Let me know when you want to meet up.’
I nod and smile and move away as quickly as I can without appearing rude. It would be a relief to have someone to talk to about my work problem. Someone who could help.
I pack up my mail bags quickly, not worrying about sorting the mail in order of streets. That detail ceases to matter when it is destined straight for the box-room mountain.
I’ve almost reached the exit doors when Jim Crowe appears and plants himself in my path.
‘Morning, Anna.’
I swallow hard, and a ring of heat begins its crawl from the base of my neck.
Jim peers down at the bags I’m carrying.
‘How are you getting on.’ He pulls himself up to his full looming height. ‘With the round?’
‘Fine,’ I say quickly. ‘No problems, Jim.’
‘You sure?’ He lowers his voice and grins at me. ‘You’ve only to say and we can split the round down for you.’
I don’t want less hours or massive change. I don’t want to let the people on the estate down.
Admittedly, I haven’t been able to see most of my customers for a while because of my circumstances but that will all change once I put my new delivery schedule into action.
I shrug and keep my shoulders relaxed. ‘Everything is fine.’
He flashes me a toothy grin and pats my shoulder as he strides past me into the main sorting area.
‘That’s what I like to hear,’ he booms. ‘Happy staff.’
I scuttle out of the doors, sweating under the weight of the filled pannier bags. I drag them over to the bike shed and drop them when I am out of sight and leaning against the shed wall.
The fine drizzle and dank air do nothing to alleviate my fuzzy head and pounding chest. Then a thick knot of panic pushes its way up from my stomach.
Deep breaths. Take some deep breaths.
I stand for a moment or two, looking at the bulging mail bags at my feet and thinking about the spare room back at the house.
The wall I’m leaning on feels soft and springy against my hand.
The scene of the accident snaps through my mind in short, jagged flashes. Liam’s face, glass fragments on the road, a seeping ruby pool spreading out from his broken head.
I stand for a moment until the shed wall feels solid again.
But the sickly feeling won’t go away.
When I get back to the house, I dump the mail bags just inside the back door and collapse down into one of the dining chairs in the middle room. I am too exhausted to go out delivering some of the backlog now.
I promise myself I will make up for it tomorrow. I will work really hard and deliver double the amount of mail.
Tomorrow, I will make a fresh, clean start.