I delayed for a moment longer before speaking. Not just because it was difficult for me to talk about, but because I was trying to wrap my head around everything he’d just said and what it could mean.
‘You’re talking about the party in Farringdon?’ I asked him.
‘Of course.’
‘There’s . . . a lot I don’t remember.’
A lot I didn’t want to remember.
‘Tell me what you do remember.’
I blinked at him, aware of my breathing growing quicker, shallower.
It wasn’t that easy.
And not just because I was in denial, or because remembering anything about that night was painful for me, but because there was so much I genuinely couldn’t recall.
I knew I had to tell Donovan something. I believed him when he said he would go back next door and harm John if I didn’t.
But it was hard.
‘I have a lot of blanks.’
‘Then fill them.’
‘It’s not like that. It’s not as simple as you’re making out.’
I could have told him some of the things Sam had told me. About how the brain is wired for self-preservation. About how I wasn’t blocking, as such, but rather my memories had been absorbed, stored away until I was ready to process them fully.
I knew it was possible that as time went on – as I healed – the complete picture would come back to me, maybe even abruptly, like the flip of a switch, but until that time there was nothing I could actively do to force the situation and access my memories.
It wasn’t as if I wanted them gone. Not deep down. In many ways it would have been a lot easier if I could have remembered the assault and my attacker more clearly because that might have given me a shot at understanding why it had happened to me. Perhaps even closure.
I think that was the most difficult part. Not the things I couldn’t remember but the fragments I could, and how they were out of sequence and incoherent and refused to make sense to me. Whenever I had tried to put them together – really tried – it was as if my mind just . . . whited out, like a television that was on the fritz.
‘It was somebody’s birthday,’ I heard myself say.
He flinched. It was only subtle but I noticed it.
‘Or I think it was their birthday?’ I squeezed my arm, closing my fingers around the scar under my sleeve, thinking of how I’d been marked, branded by what had happened to me, and meanwhile looking over my shoulder towards the window, thinking of Sam coming home.
I could hear traffic outside. I could hear the wind stirring the leaves of the trees.
‘It wasn’t anyone I knew,’ I continued. ‘I don’t know how I got invited or why I was there. There were a lot of people.’
‘People you knew?’
‘No. I don’t think so.’
He seemed dubious. ‘You had to have known some of them.’
I shook my head, feeling the frustration build, gnawing at my insides.
‘I don’t know how to explain it. I can remember music and smoking and I guess I was drinking – I must have been drinking – because even the memories I do have are blurry. But I don’t drink to get drunk like that. Not usually.’
I looked down again at the way my hand had closed around my forearm. I was pretty sure I’d been left with the scar when I’d been pushed into the bath. Maybe I’d nicked my arm on something. Perhaps it had been something sharp my attacker had been holding. But again, I couldn’t remember for certain. All I knew was that I hadn’t been scarred before that night.
‘I think I had a meeting with a potential client not too far from where the party must have been. The meeting was at a bar somewhere near Farringdon. But I can’t remember which bar, or who the client was, or how they contacted me. I’ve walked around there since. Nothing seems right. Things had been going badly for me. My business was in trouble. I must have ordered a drink. A couple of drinks. But after that . . .’
Again his brow furrowed, as if what I was telling him didn’t fit with any scenario he’d anticipated. ‘Are you saying you think you met somebody in the bar who was going to the party?’
‘Maybe. Or maybe my drink was spiked.’
That stopped him. I could see that on some level he was having to reassess his assumptions, that what I was telling him was troubling him.
‘It would fit,’ I told him. ‘With what happened later.’
‘What did happen later?’
‘I—’
I winced and raised a hand to my head.
Pain again, though this time it had nothing to do with the blow to the back of my skull.
This pain was older, more ingrained, located to the left of my frontal lobe. I’d had it before when I’d flashed on that night, especially if I’d tried to force my memories, push my way through the blinding white glare. It was another reason why I’d shied away from trying to remember too much.
I heard Donovan’s bodyweight shift on the sofa cushions to my side and I squinted out through my fingers to see that he’d moved towards the edge of the couch, his elbows on his knees, hands clasped loosely together.
Was that concern on his face?
I watched as his gaze became distant and thoughtful, before he turned his head and looked away from me through the kitchen towards the basement.
Oh God.
My heart started galloping.
Not that.
The basement door was still open.
Was he thinking of bundling me down there and scaring me until I told him what he wanted to know? Maybe holding me down there until Sam got here?
‘I went to the bathroom,’ I said in a rush, feeling a spike of relief when Donovan returned his attention to me.
‘Go on.’
I swallowed. It felt like a peach stone was lodged in my throat.
I wished I could move the vase of lilies out of the way from between us. Their scent was making my sinuses sting like menthol.
I rubbed my aching temple but it didn’t help to soothe or ease my discomfort.
Nothing could.
Not the meditation exercises I’d practised, or the anxiety meds my GP had prescribed, or the therapy sessions Sam had run with me.
Sam had made it clear to me that he wasn’t a qualified therapist. He had friends he’d suggested referring me to. But I’d resisted. My trauma had been inflicted by one stranger. I’d been reluctant to relive it with another.
‘I really hate talking about this,’ I said.
‘Too bad, because I have to hear it.’
‘Please.’
‘Just tell me the rest. Now.’
I glanced at the door, imagining Sam getting home, picturing Donovan pulling him inside, attacking him . . .
‘Someone followed me in,’ I said, and the pain flared again in my temple, sickly and acute.
‘OK, someone followed you into the bathroom. How does that tie in to the roof?’
‘There was no roof. I keep telling you. There was—’ I broke off again, grimacing, clutching my head in my hands. ‘They locked the door behind them.’
—click.
‘Who did?’
And then I stopped.
I froze.
Because a new thought had struck me. A fresh and horrible idea.
‘Is that who is working with you?’
‘What?’
‘Whoever did this to me. Attacked me. Are they the one you’ve been calling? The one watching Sam?’
Because maybe they were afraid I’d come after them, go to the police, or – I don’t know – sell my story to the press or try to sue them.
I tried to concentrate, to think.
Could my attacker have been wealthy or high profile in some way? Were they afraid of a scandal? A #MeToo revenge?
But why now?
Again, I peered out through my splayed hands at Donovan. My eyes felt scrubbed and swollen.
He stared back at me with one eye half closed in a thoughtful squint, his head angled slightly to the side, mouth opening as if I’d finally said something that had connected with him.
‘Wait.’ He shifted further forwards on his seat. ‘Let me get this straight.’
I ducked lower under a fresh onslaught of pain. It was difficult for me to pay attention to what he was saying right now because my discomfort was too raw, the trauma too embedded.
‘Just . . . listen to me, OK? What you did is not something you can just get away with. It’s the whole reason I’m here.’
‘What I did? I didn’t do anything. This was something that was done to me.’
He leaned back, confounded, his eyes dimmed and searching. He looked a lot like someone who couldn’t tell if he was being duped or not.
‘What about what he did?’ I pressed. ‘What you’ve done? What—’
I hissed, bared my teeth.
White-out.
The pain in my head was overwhelming.
Blinding.
‘Hey,’ he said. ‘Hey, look at me.’
He clapped his hands as if he was trying to snap me out of it but it was much too late for that.
‘Focus. Talk to me. The bathroom. Someone followed you in and they locked the door and—’
—click.
And I was there in my mind again.
Just as I was always there in a part of my mind.
Just as I could never let it go.
The door locking and the stranger closing in on me and me falling and the shower curtain wrapping around me and my arm singing in pain and—
‘Stop this.’ I clamped both hands to the sides of my head, squeezing, cringing. ‘Stop this. Stop it, please.’