Thursday, 22nd December 2016 – Morning
I’m a few minutes late for work. Madeline is already in, but it doesn’t matter, not today. I still feel disorientated, as though I might be dreaming within a dream. I checked the bottom of Paul’s wardrobe after he left. The pretty pink bag and its black lacy contents were gone, he’d taken them with him. I doubt they were a gift for his mother.
I sit quietly at my desk as the rest of the cast assemble. Colleagues say, ‘Good morning,’ and I nod back, it’s like listening to a stuck record. I don’t feel like making conversation today, polite or otherwise, and my morning hasn’t been particularly good. When I think nobody is looking, I study the faces of the women in the office. They all look blinkered, a little weary, a lot lost. A collection of people treading water, trying to stay afloat in an unpredictable sea. They’re not my friends, not really; we’d all push each other under if it meant we wouldn’t drown. I conclude I have nothing to worry about; they can’t see the real me, they can’t even see themselves.
Madeline comes out of her office to bark at someone and I catch her eye. She’s talking to them, but she’s staring at me, and for a moment I’m convinced that she knows. There’s a terrible taste in my mouth that I just can’t get rid of. The nausea rises up through my throat once more and I head for the toilets, doing my absolute best to appear calm. As soon as I’m inside, I burst through a cubicle, flush the toilet and lean my head over the bowl just in time, hoping that nobody will hear me. It’s just bile, I haven’t eaten anything. I wonder if it’s nerves or guilt or both. Either way I need to fix myself and fast, I don’t have time for this. I hear Jo’s voice outside the door. She thinks I should pop to the chemist before we go on air, there’s one not far from our building. I think she’s right. I wait a while, to be sure that it’s over, then I open the door and wash my hands, relieved to see that I’m alone again.
I feel much better after the show. Madeline, however, is not feeling at all well. She’s been waddling back and forth to the toilets throughout the morning and is covered in sweat. She thinks it must be food poisoning. I think it is far more likely to be the laxatives I put in her coffee just before we went on air. Madeline likes coffee, she drinks a lot of it, never says no, as long as it’s black. She also likes to drive to and from work. She thinks public transport is ‘dirty and full of germ-ridden commoners’. She’s in no fit state to drive herself home now, so I offer to, much to her surprise and Matthew’s approval. I don’t think she’s going to go for it at first but, after another impromptu visit to the lavatory, she seems to come round to the idea and I am glad.
I carry her bag as we leave the office because she ‘feels too weak’ and I pretend not to know which car is hers when we reach the car park. She unlocks the black VW Golf, then passes me the key, before folding herself into the back seat, as though her car has metamorphosed into a taxi. She barks her postcode at me as I tap it into the satnav, then warns me to ‘drive bloody carefully’ and ‘watch for foreigners on the road’.
She sleeps as I drive and I decide I like her a lot better like this. Silenced. The poison is trapped inside her while she sleeps, opposed to seeping from her lips when she is awake.
I hate driving in London. It’s too busy and loud. There are too many people on the roads and all of them are in a hurry, though few of them have anywhere they really need to be. It’s better once we’re out of the city centre, the roads seem to widen and are less crowded.
When the satnav suggests we’re only ten minutes away from our destination, the car makes a warning sound and an angry red symbol glows on the dashboard.
‘You’re almost out of petrol,’ I say, observing the narrowing eyes of my passenger, awake again, in the rear-view mirror.
‘I can’t be,’ she says.
‘Don’t worry, I’m sure there’s enough to get you home.’
‘Do I look worried?’ We make eye contact in the mirror again. I hold her stare for as long as seems sensible when driving at forty miles an hour, then look back at the road ahead.
We don’t speak again after that, not until I turn left into the road where she lives. She barks at me again then, telling me where and how to park, but I don’t really hear her. I’m too busy staring up at the house she says is hers, unsure how to feel about what I’m seeing. I recognise this place. I’ve been here before.