Twenty-Seven

 

They called New York the city that never slept, but whoever they were, they were wrong and needed to check their facts because, as far Seph could see, it was London that never slept.

Pigeons pecked at the ground everywhere she looked, the sound of their flapping wings like a defective heartbeat. Yellow “For Hire” lights on black taxis swam in a sea of traffic. There were people everywhere, walking past, posing for photographs, laughing, drinking, eating, talking, swarming. Seph clutched her stag pendant as if it could project a protective cloak around her and form a barrier against it all. She hugged her arms around herself, squeezing them tightly. Who were all these people? Where had they all come from and what were they doing here? Why were they looking at her so strangely? What did they want?

She tucked her head down, hunching her shoulders to her ears against the constant jarring noise. It was like being followed by a two-year-old, banging a spoon against a pan. Every sound sent a jolt right through her skin, muscles and organs, right into her very core. Two men came out of a pub to her right and their barrelling laughter was so strong and forceful that she physically flinched. Seph scurried away, keeping her eyes down to avoid the bright lights everywhere she looked - flashing neon, blinking bulbs and static white shop fronts - they all assaulted her eyes so strongly that she had to squint against them.

She knew she looked crazy.

Maybe she was crazy.

Why else was she here?

Why else was she doing this?

Someone walked past her, leaving a scented trail of Joop!, the same aftershave Ben wore. For a sweet second, it felt like he was right there next to her. She tried to grab at the scent and keep it near, but it disappeared as quickly as it had come along.

Her eyes smarted and her throat tightened as the blackness of guilt and the sickening of shame swooped down on her. It had been two days since Ben had walked out, two days since she’d last slept or ate, and two days since she’d begun to spiral out of control.

The constant quickening of her heart made her chest hurt, but she knew it was only a fraction of the hurt she’d heaped on Ben, the man who’d done nothing but love her. He didn’t deserve what she’d done. She didn’t deserve him and now he’d left her. She put a hand to her breastbone. Her heart was beating so fast it was almost inhuman. Maybe it was trying to tire itself out and give up. She wished it would.

Seph stood at the edge of the curb and looked up at the traffic lights. Having to stand so still when everything inside her body was moving so fast pulled up a sense of irritation from depths she never knew possible. She didn’t want to have to stand still. She couldn’t. Not when her head felt so full and her skin felt so itchy underneath, and especially not with these people around her. All she wanted was to be alone but she’d tried that. She’d tried to sit with her thoughts, to really unravel them, to figure out why the hell she’d told Ben, why she’d cheated, why she’d booked a holiday she couldn’t afford on a whim, why she’d had the gall to think she’d be able to pay for it with the sales of her paintings, why anybody would buy them or even bother to turn up to the exhibition at all, why anybody would believe in her when she couldn’t believe in herself, why her mum had come all the way to London to check up on her, why Ben had told her he thought she had bipolar disorder, why Nico had it, why she’d picked up the phone to call him for the first time, why he’d left in the first place.

She’d sat in the middle of the floor in the living room, losing all sense of time as she’d asked why, over and over again, until she couldn’t even remember where she’d started or hoped to go. And the terrifying result of it all was that she couldn’t trust her mind. She couldn’t trust her thoughts because she couldn’t keep up with them and they kept morphing and changing from one thing to the next before she could catch them. And if she couldn’t catch them, were they even real to begin with? She’d decided to go for a walk, to occupy herself, to stop herself from thinking. She’d had no destination in mind and had been walking for hours. She hadn’t stopped since.

A gust of wind brushed over her as a bus roared past and brought with it a sense of something that felt like calm. It was the first time in two days that she’d had a moment of quiet in her head. The jarring noise and pain in the backs of her eyes stopped. For a few heavenly seconds, she felt clear.

You can’t trust it. You’ll go back to feeling awful before you can blink.

Seph shook her head, trying to push the voice in her head away.

Do you really want to go back to that? To feeling nasty and dirty and ashamed and angry and wrong?

She clenched her eyes shut as panic clawed its way around her neck. The idea of having to go back to how she’d been feeling for the last two days made her want to disintegrate into a trillion pieces and be carried away. It would be better, surely. Anything would be.

Traffic sped along the busy road in front of her. The rush of air from every vehicle that roared past made the hairs on her bare arms stand on end. Her feet inched forward until her feet were halfway over the edge of the curb.

Wouldn’t it be so much better to just stop it all?

It felt like someone was holding a clock, loudly ticking the seconds away until the inevitable moment she’d be swamped under that awful confusion and terror and noise again. She couldn’t let that happen. She couldn’t go back.

Do it. It’s better for everyone this way. You’ve already hurt them so much: Ben, Mum, Dad. You’ve hurt them all.

Seph dropped her arms to let them hang limp by her sides.

The pain will go away.

Anything had to be better than feeling that again. Anything and nothing.

Seph tilted her head back and, without opening her eyes, stepped forward from the curb and into the road.