all right on my own; when she hugged me at the door, I managed not to flinch.
After work Melissa came over, hauling a huge fragrant bag of Thai takeaway. She was so irrepressibly and touchingly delighted about me being home—spinning around the living room laying out cutlery like she could barely keep her feet on the ground, flicking on the sound system to some radio station full of peppy sixties girl groups, flinging a kiss my way every time she passed me—that I couldn’t help feeling a little more cheerful. I hadn’t been hungry since that night, but my fiery beef stir-fry actually tasted good, and Melissa gave me the whole saga of how she had spent the last week persuading my mother not to get me a dog (my parents loved Melissa; fortunately they weren’t the type to drop heavy hints about weddings and grandchildren, but I could see them thinking it): “She was totally set on it, Toby, she said you could never have a dog when you were little because of your dad’s allergies but this was perfect, it would be extra security and it would cheer you up—your dad kept going, ‘Lily, it’s not going to work, the management company—’ but she just went, ‘Oh, Edmund, who cares about them, I’ll talk them round!’ And Toby”—giggles starting to break through—“the one problem she could see, the only one, she thought you wouldn’t hoover and the whole place would be covered in dog hair. So she”—Melissa was giggling harder and I found myself laughing too, even though it hurt my ribs—“she decided to get you one of those great big poodles. Because they don’t shed. She was going to have it here waiting for you, she said it would be the perfect welcome-home surprise—” The image of me and the detectives walking into the apartment and coming face-to-face with a poodle in full pompom resplendence had us laughing so hard that I was startled to find myself trembling. It had been a long day.
As the evening wore on, though, I got edgy. Melissa—shoes kicked off, snuggled drowsily against me on the sofa—obviously assumed she was staying the night. As far as I was concerned, this was unthinkable, absolutely out of the question. I couldn’t even let my mind touch on what would have happened if she had been there that night, when clearly I would have been utterly unable to protect her. I started stretching and yawning and dropping hints about how it was going to be weird being back in my own bed and I might be kind of restless, so maybe since she had to get up in the morning . . . Melissa picked up on this quickly, ungrudgingly—yes, getting sleepy too, better go now before I doze off right here. “Soon,” I said, tracing a finger down the back of her neck as she bent to pull on a shoe.
“Yes,” she said, and turned fast to kiss me fiercely, “soon.”
I got her a taxi on my phone, so I could watch the little car icon tick towards her place, holding my breath every time it paused or took an odd turning. And there I was: on my own at last, in this apartment that felt so much like mine and yet in some insidious way not like mine at all, with my holdall dumped by the door like a long-distance traveler and with absolutely no idea what I was supposed to do with that night, or the next day, or the next.
* * *
The next couple of months were bad. It’s hard to say whether it was the worst time of my life, given everything that came after, but it was definitely the worst I’d had at that point, by a long shot. I was restless as a tweaker, but I didn’t want to go out during the day—I still had an underfed, off-kilter look, I still limped, and although my hair was growing back and I’d shaved the rest to match it, the Frankenstein scar still showed. I had some idea of going for long walks late at night, roaming the shadows of Ballsbridge in a Phantom of the Opera kind of way, but as it turned out I couldn’t do that either. I had been walking home at all hours of the night since I was a teenager, and it had never once occurred to me to be afraid; wary, sure, when I spotted a junkie on the scrounge or