die, that they needed to stop right now or it would be too late, but I couldn’t find the breath to tell them this one unbearably important thing
I tried to scrabble away, flat on my stomach, fingers clawing uselessly. A kick to my arse driving my face further into the carpet, and another and another. A man’s laugh, high and amped up and triumphal.
From somewhere:
—anyone else—?
Nah or they’d
Have a look. —girlfriend—
The laugh again, that laugh, with a new avidity driving it. Ah yeah man.
I couldn’t remember whether Melissa was there or not. On a fresh wave of terror I tried to push myself up off the ground but I couldn’t, my arms were weak as ribbons, every breath was a thick ragged snuffle through blood and snot and carpet fibers. The kicking had stopped; the hugeness of the relief washed away the last of my strength.
Scraping sounds, grunts of effort. The candlestick, rolled away under an overturned chair. I couldn’t even think about reaching for it but somehow it clicked a piece into place in my jumbled brain, night-night sleep tight, Melissa safe at her place, thank God— The light jabbing my eyeballs. Crash of tumbling objects, again, again. The green geometric pattern of my curtains, stretching upwards at an unfamiliar angle, fading and clearing and fading
That’s it
—has any—
—fuck it. Go
Hang on is he?
A blur of dark moving closer. A sharp jab to my ribs and I balled up, coughing, pawing feebly against the next kick, but it didn’t come. Instead a gloved hand came down into view and curled around the candlestick, and I had just time to wonder dizzily why they would want that before a vast soundless explosion blotted out the air and everything was gone, everything.
* * *
I don’t know how long I was out. None of the next part holds together; all I have is isolated moments, framed like slides and with the same lucent, untethered quality, nothing in between them but blackness and the harsh click of one rotating away as the next drops into place.
Rough carpet against my face and pain everywhere; the pain was astounding, breathtaking, but that didn’t seem particularly important or even particularly connected to me, what mattered the terrifying part was that I was blind, utterly, I couldn’t
click
trying to push myself up from the floor but my arms were juddering like a seizure, went from under me and face-first onto the carpet
click
lunatic swipes and dabbles of red on white fabric, rich metallic reek of blood
click
on hands and knees, vomiting, warm liquid spilling onto my fingers
click
ragged blue chunks of china, scattered (in retrospect I figure these must have been the remnants of my espresso cup but at the time my mind wasn’t working that way, nothing had any meaning or any essence, nothing was anything except there)
click
crawling through an endless field of debris that shifted and crackled, my knees slipping, the edges of my vision seething
click
the corridor, stretching away for miles, brown and beige and pulsing. A flick of movement far far away at the end, something white
holding myself up against the wall, staggering forwards jerkily as if all my joints had been unstrung. A terrible cawing noise coming from somewhere, rhythmic and impersonal; I tried desperately to speed up, to get away before it could attack, but I couldn’t break out of nightmare slow-motion and it was still there, in my ears, at my back, all around me (and now of course I’m pretty sure it was my own breathing, but at the time et cetera et cetera)
click
brown wood, a door. Scrabbling at it, grate of my fingernails, a hoarse moaning that wouldn’t form into words
click
a man’s voice urgently demanding something, a woman’s face skewed with horror, mouth wide, pink quilted dressing gown, and then one of my legs went liquid and the blindness came roaring back in and I disappeared.
Two
After that came a long period—about forty-eight hours, as far as I can reconstruct events—where nothing made much sense. Obviously there are big dark patches where I was out cold, and I’m unpleasantly aware that I’m unlikely ever to know exactly what went on during those. I did ask my mother once, but she got a white, tight look around her mouth and said, “I can’t, Toby,” and that was the end of that.
Even when I started to wake up off and on, my memories are dislocated fragments arranged in no particular order. People barking at me, demanding things from me; sometimes I tried to do what they wanted—squeeze