by Fiona Lucas
Most of the group ran back inside, including Lee and Gabi, but Anna and Jeremy were further away from the back door of the pub, so they ran from table to table, trying to find an umbrella that worked. The first one wouldn’t open and the second wouldn’t stay up. By the time they’d huddled under umbrella number three the rain was hitting Anna’s scalp and running through her hair and down her forehead. Both she and Jeremy were drenched.
“It would have been safer to make a dash for the lounge bar,” Anna said as she pushed a few damp strands off her forehead.
Jeremy smiled down at her. “Where would have been the fun in that?”
Anna shook her head and shrugged, smiling back. “Where indeed?”
And then, suddenly, the air thickened around them and it all didn’t seem so funny anymore. Anna swallowed and glanced back toward the pub.
“I think it’s easing—” she began.
At exactly the same time he said, “There’s something—”
They both fell silent.
“Anna,” he began again. “Would you like to have dinner with me sometime?”
No frills. No beating around the bush. Anna liked that approach, or she would have if her mind hadn’t been full of blaring sirens and flashing lights. The little alarm was making up for lost time. Her hand shook as she hitched her handbag strap over her shoulder. That fight-or-flight feeling was back again in full force, and since she wasn’t about to punch Jeremy on the nose, that left only one option.
Not Spencer.
I know, shut up, okay. I know. I’m dealing with it.
“I’m sorry . . .” she began.
“I don’t think I’m reading this wrong, am I?” he said softly, plainly. Not in an accusing way but in a curious, slightly confused way. “I mean, just then . . .”
Anna might be a coward but she wasn’t cruel enough to lie to him about that. She shook her head. “No,” she whispered. “You weren’t imagining it.”
“But . . . ?”
“You are nice,” she said forlornly. “You’re the first person I even . . .” She trailed off, obviously not as brave as she wanted to be. She looked down at her feet for a moment. “It still doesn’t mean that I’m ready,” she added, looking back up at him. “Not yet.”
“I see,” he said gently. There was a warmth in his eyes that made her want to cry.
“I’m so sorry,” she said.
He nodded, not in agreement that she had something to apologize for but merely to signal her message had been received and understood. “It’s okay. I can’t pretend I can understand what you’ve been through, but I do understand why you might be hesitant.”
“Thank you,” she replied quietly.
He nodded again, then turned and strode across the pub garden, turning the collar of his jacket up as he went. When he reached the back door, he gave her a nod and then disappeared inside. She stared after him, hugging herself, and the rain stopped as suddenly as it had begun.
Moments later, Gabi appeared. “Was that Jeremy? You were out here together alone?” she asked, not doing a very good job at hiding her glee as she looked over her shoulder.
“Yes,” Anna said, staring blankly in the same direction. For some reason, she felt hollow.
“And?”
Anna turned and headed to the gate that led directly onto the street. “And nothing.”
Chapter Twenty
Brody pulled into the parking lot of the big supermarket in Totnes. It was seven-thirty on a Monday morning, probably one of the quietest times of the week to go grocery shopping. However, he wasn’t here to go grocery shopping. Not exactly.
He ignored the neat rows of parking bays nearer the store where the majority of spaces were filled and pulled his Land Rover into the middle of a row of empty bays at the far end. He turned the engine off and sat there, taking stock.
His breathing was even. No headaches or tingling. His pulse was faster than normal, considering he was a pretty fit guy, but it wasn’t hammering. This is good, he told himself. This is okay.
He glanced at the book lying on the passenger seat. Panic Attacks and Agoraphobia: A Practical Guide. It had taken him a week to order it after the incident at Moji’s shop, another two before he’d opened the cover, and he’d been reading it on and off for the last month or so.
The early chapters on self-care hadn’t seemed very useful, so he’d skipped over them. He ate well, looked after himself, ran at least four times a week. Nothing new to learn there. He’d also skipped over the following few chapters of psychobabble, suggesting things like journaling. What was he? A thirteen-year-old girl? Besides, every time he picked up a pen, it was the same. His brain emptied and all he could do was stare at the blank page. Hardly a therapeutic pursuit.
What had caught his interest was the section full of practical tips and exercises. “Systematic desensitization” was where he’d eventually landed. He could see the sense in that: expose yourself to a situation that has caused panic before—but do it in a smaller way, tackle the situation in bite-sized pieces—and gradually you should be able to defuse some of those panic attack triggers.
This supermarket had seemed the obvious place. He’d had his very first attack here, right in the middle of the fresh produce section. At the time, he’d thought he was dying. He’d been sure he was either having a heart attack or a stroke, that something inside his brain had just popped, ripping through his consciousness, erasing neurons left and right, doing untold damage. Other shoppers had frowned and tutted, assuming he was under the influence of something other than his own brokenness.
While he wasn’t exactly whooping for joy inside his head at being back here, he did feel a tinge of excitement mixed in with the trepidation. The local farm shops he used provided excellent quality meat, fresh produce and a few grocery extras, but if he wanted something a little more exotic, he was out of luck. And he’d been hankering for Thai green curry for months now. He had all the right herbs and spices. The only thing missing was fish sauce, and his last bottle had run out almost a year ago. And the more he’d thought about it, the more Thai green curry had been all he’d been able to think about.
His plan was simple: three easy steps. A few techniques from the book combined with a bit of stern self-talk should power him through it. It wasn’t as if he was trying to do a full shop, cramming a shopping cart with items and staying inside the supermarket for up to an hour. Just one bottle of fish sauce. Five minutes, in and out. He could manage that.
Because what was he going to do if he couldn’t? If he couldn’t turn the tide? Live his life like a hermit, growing older and grizzlier and more eccentric in his windswept little cottage on the moor?
Up until now, he hadn’t thought much about the future, not long term, anyway. Not in the sense of years and decades instead of days and months. But listening to Anna talk about her future, full of pages yet unwritten, had made him think about his own.
When he imagined the book of his life, he couldn’t see blank pages ready for the touch of a pen. It was slammed shut. Locked. Hidden away in a dusty drawer and forgotten about. It made him feel like a coward.
So here he was. Day one. Step one. He had to do it.
His pulse kicked up a notch just thinking about it, then settled into a steady trot, but he didn’t let it deter him. He took a deep breath and reached for the car door handle.
The first half of the walk across the parking lot was okay. He used his imagination to paint over the top of what was there and turn it into a place that held no fear for him. The low-budget shrubs and spindly trees between the rows of vehicles became gorse and bracken. Scattered cars among the empty spaces became weather-hewn boulders. The sound of the traffic, only twenty feet away on the main road that ran past the supermarket, became the rushing of the wind between the rocky tors of the moor.
However, as he got closer to the store, it became harder and harder to keep the images in place. It was the noises that really threw him: shopping cart wheels rattling, car doors
slamming, bored children whining from their metal carts. He wasn’t used to it anymore.
By the time he got to the entrance, not so much a door but a large rectangular hole, he needed to stop, close his eyes, and breathe. Other shoppers wandered past him; he could feel the breeze from their movement, but he tried to ignore them, concentrating instead on counting to three as he breathed. In, two, three . . . Out, two, three . . .
He opened his eyes, keeping the rhythm going in his head. He was on the edge of the cliff of his panic now. This was what he was supposed to be doing, wasn’t it? Pushing himself, bringing himself closer to the edge than was comfortable without toppling over it.
He’d been keeping his focus blurred, trained on nothing in particular, but now he lifted his head and chose something random to home in on—a display stand, full of DVDs of last summer’s blockbuster action hit. He counted the slots, the individual cases, and when his head was full of numbers instead of the whispering panic, he began to move toward it. It felt as if he were edging his way along a tightrope, strung from the edge of his cliff toward the horizon, suspended over thin air.
What must have only been a few seconds later, he reached out to grip the cardboard edge of the stand. He was teetering on his cliff again now, so close to plummeting over the edge. Even though his eyes were fixed on the DVD display, all of his senses seemed hyper-sharp. He could hear the shopping cart wheels rumbling in the aisle next door. His skin prickled and his breath caught in his throat. Even though the aisles were almost empty, just a few determined early birds come to get their shopping before the morning rush, he felt as if he was in the midst of a jam-packed, crowded city.
On his cliff, he could feel air, cold and beckoning, beneath his toes. He could sense pebbles and scree skittering down the face of the rocks as the cliff below them started to crumble.
Push through, he told himself. It’s a supermarket, for God’s sake, full of carrots and celery, currant buns and tins of soup, not a war zone. Keep going. Just keep walking. Get what you need.
He put the DVD back, fumbling to get it into the cardboard slot, and then made his way to the end of the aisle at the back of the shop. From there, he moved along the ends of the rows, stepping-stone to stepping-stone, scanning the lengths of the shelves for a hint of any Asian foodstuffs—coconut milk, noodles, dark shiny bottles of soy sauce—but he couldn’t see anything like it. When he got to the place he’d always found them before, the shelf was full of baked beans and cups of instant noodles. It seemed as if someone had moved every single flipping thing in the supermarket around just to confound him.
He stared at a can of spaghetti hoops with miniature frankfurters, and his hand shot out to grip the shelf, squeezing it so hard the metal edges dug into his fingers.
Focus, Brody. Focus.
He couldn’t even pick out single items on the shelves now. All the colors and shapes were blurring together. He stumbled blindly down one aisle and into the next, only pausing when his chest felt so tight that he had to stand still to draw breath. By some bizarre, God-given stroke of luck, he found himself staring at a small glass bottle full of sour brown liquid, a curving dragon emblazoned across the label.
Fish sauce.
He grabbed it off the shelf and hugged it to his chest, closing his eyes with sheer relief. He couldn’t imagine feeling any more triumphant than if he’d climbed Everest in a single leap. But just as he was about to open his eyes and head for the bank of tills at the front of the shop, there was an almighty crash behind him. The bottle slipped through his sweaty fingers, and he only just managed to catch it again before it smashed onto the floor.
“Sorry, love,” a woman said cheerily, from a few feet away. “These shopping carts have a mind of their own!” And she began picking up the cans of bamboo shoots and water chestnuts she’d just knocked off the shelf.
Brody hardly noticed her. He certainly didn’t respond. Everything around him was melting into itself, simultaneously shooting away and becoming distant while feeling so close his skin crawled and he was sure he would suffocate.
He turned and started running. He ran down the aisle toward the tills but didn’t stop when he got there. He just sprinted straight through, the bottle of fish sauce still clutched in his fist, and kept going toward the natural light and fresh air of the gaping entrance.
He was almost there when a security guard spun around to watch him.
“He didn’t pay for that!” a voice behind him yelled.
“Hey!” the security guard shouted and began to pound after him.
As he ran, Brody fumbled into his back pocket and pulled out a twenty-pound note. He threw it in the direction of the security guard. “Sorry!” he yelled over his shoulder. “Can’t stop . . . ! Emergency.”
The perplexed guard bent down and scooped up the crumpled note, then stared after Brody. But Brody didn’t notice. He was too busy sprinting across the unforgiving pavement of the parking lot, which seemed to be expanding and stretching, like distances did in nightmares when something was chasing you. All he could think about was getting back to his car, throwing himself inside and locking the door.
Chapter Twenty-One
Brody sat in his armchair, staring at the fire burning in the grate and listened to Anna. When they’d first started talking, the calls had been more sporadic, but that had been close to two months ago, and in recent weeks they’d become more regular and more frequent.
“I’ve been trying to push myself to go out of my comfort zone, be a bit more sociable. You know, just being open to things,” she said. “People tell me it would be good for me.”
It seemed he and Anna had similar goals at the moment. Brody’s mind flashed back to the feeling of terror as he’d sprinted across Morrisons parking lot in Totnes earlier that week, and he felt his chest and face flush. He hoped she was having more success.
This evening, he’d made that stupid Thai curry, with his twenty-pound bottle of fish sauce. It had smelled amazing while it had been cooking, but when he’d sat down at his kitchen table, bowl piled with fluffy Jasmine rice and the fragrant sauce, he’d raised his fork but hadn’t been able to take a bite. It was tainted now. The flavor would forever remind him of his failure.
Another thing to cross off his list of experiences. Another thing to avoid. It struck him that while Anna’s world was expanding, his was continuing to shrink to practically nothing. “How’s that going for you?” He hadn’t meant his reply to have a cynical, slightly sarcastic edge, but it had come out like that anyway.
“Ugh!” was Anna’s only reply. There was a vague rustling in the background, and he imagined her sitting at the kitchen table and planting her head on its flat surface, feeling the cool of the wood against her forehead.
“That good, huh?”
There was more shuffling, and he sensed she’d adjusted her position so she could talk again. “It’s not terrible,” she said. “Not really. It’s just . . .” She broke off while she searched for the right word. “Different. And different is hard work. Sometimes exhausting, sometimes overwhelming. You know what I mean?”
Unfortunately, he probably knew that better than she did. “Yes.”
He could hear the smile of relief in her voice when she answered. “I knew you would.”
He loved that sound. That slight change in her tone when she’d managed to express something she needed to, the joy at both having released it and having had it accepted and comprehended. And he loved that he was part of that process, even if all he did was sit and listen. But in his shrinking universe, the fact that he could do anything positive, especially for someone else, was a rare blessing.
“My friend Gabriela has a new boyfriend,” she continued. “And she’s at that stage where everything he does is amazing, where every thought he has is an Einstein-worthy expression of wisdom.”
Brody let out a gruff laugh. “I can see what you mean about exhausting!”
Anna laughed too and the remnants of the jittery feeling that had nigg
led at him since he’d recalled the supermarket incident melted away.
“But that’s how it’s supposed to be, isn’t it?” she added. “At the beginning? You’re supposed to feel that way. And I’d be sad for Gabi if she didn’t, but . . . I’m going to sound like a horrible friend if I say this, but you’ve already listened to me rant and rave and cry, so you might as well hear this.” She shifted position, preparing herself. “That’s also part of the problem: they’re just so . . . so . . .”
“Sickening?” Brody suggested, making Anna chuckle.
“No,” she said. “I shouldn’t laugh. Told you I was awful. They’re just so loved up. And I’m happy for her, I really am, because she deserves this but . . .”
“It reminds you of what’s missing,” Brody finished for her.
“Yes,” she whispered.
For more than a minute they stayed like that, listening to each other’s silence on the other end of the line.
“And I know people do go on to marry again after the death of a spouse,” Anna finally said, “but it doesn’t seem real to me. It’s something I know logically, like a date learned in history class or the principle of gravity, but it doesn’t make it make sense here . . .” Brody heard a faint thumping sound, like a hand or a loose fist meeting clothing. “. . . in my heart. Because how could it ever be the same again? Do you feel that way too?”
Brody looked down at Lewis, who was napping in front of the fire, as usual, and he stalled by taking a sip of his whisky. “I understand what you mean” was all he was able to say. Now was not the time to explain.
“How about you? Will you ever get married again?”
He reached for the tumbler of whisky on the table beside him, held its comforting weight between his hands. “I don’t think so,” he said. Definitely not at the moment. Finding a new life partner wasn’t exactly a breeze when every time you came into contact with new people your knees turned to jelly, and you wanted to vomit.
“Do you get lonely? I do . . . Even though I can’t envision anyone else in my life, I find I don’t like having no one.”
