yolk which invariably dribbles down his chin (where it will be wiped) or down his sad brown tie (where it will remain).
‘Really?’ he says, or that’s what it sounds like through a mouthful of partially masticated meat-and-dough.
I give him a disgusted look which I hope he takes on board. ‘If it might help,’ I say. ‘You never know.’
His eyebrows furrow. It looks like confusion to me, but I can never quite work this out. Suspicion. Maybe it’s suspicion.
‘Or – not. It was just a thought.’
He swallows the last of the mouthful and sups some of his pint. Then he clears his throat. ‘It’s a very kind offer, Colin. Thank you. But…’
‘But?’
‘Well – it’s just that Audrey… she’s not very – I don’t know – comfortable with you.’
‘Comfortable?’ Much as it galls me to find myself repeating everything Vaughn says to me, I can think of no better response.
‘After the dinner party. She said you were a bit strange. Anyway, sorry. I don’t think you’ll be able to help. Not this time.’
‘Strange? What on earth…’ I look at Vaughn and then at the remains of my sandwich, suddenly unappetising and stale. But strange could be a good thing, couldn’t it? Maybe she meant strange as in unusual – enigmatic – mysterious.
‘I think it was just that evening,’ Vaughn says quickly, apparently anxious to avoid offence. ‘She was in a funny mood even before you arrived. Hormones, probably.’
I nod and murmur something to indicate assent, but inside I feel my blood churning in my ears. When I leave the pub and go back to the office, I cannot concentrate on anything. I feel the weight of it, the sudden desire to find Audrey and talk to her and ask her what she meant by the word ‘strange’. Even Garth and his disgusting ruminatory noises do not distract me. I work on a document for a committee meeting next Monday but Audrey does not leave me, not for a second.
Annabel
In the hospital they put me on a drip and made me see a psychiatrist who prescribed me anti-depressants. The psychiatrist told me I’d experienced some kind of ‘episode’, which in years gone by might have been described as a breakdown. He said I had been through a lot of stress and I had not been able to process it, so my mind had shut down for reasons of self-preservation.
It all sounded plausible, but there were things about it that felt wrong. My memory of the week before was not just hazy but downright incorrect. It felt as though things had happened which were not available for me to consider. Part of me was desperate to get back home and shut the door and forget all about it, to go back to being on my own, at peace with everything.
When I said this to a nurse it prompted another visit from the psychiatrist, who asked me in a roundabout way, and then more directly, if I felt suicidal. He’d asked me this before, along with a whole load of other questions that I’d tried my best to answer.
‘Not really,’ was my response.
‘Do you feel like it sometimes?’
‘I don’t think so.’ Suicide was an active thing, a doing thing; it would require me to launch into a process that involved activity. No: what I wanted was the absence of activity. I wanted to cease. I wanted to lie still and let the world carry on. Nobody said the word DEATH but it was in my head. It was the same thing as LIFE. For some reason, they were the same thing, linked by an invisible band, the end and the beginning and the end, an endless circle going round and round, a wheel. If I was not afraid of life, then I was not afraid of death. They were the same.
I think they had been on the verge of discharging me at that point, but instead they moved me from a medical ward to a psychiatric ward.
Colin
You want to know how it all started, don’t you? You want to hear how I went from a mind-numbing adult education course in how to make friends and influence people, to steering strangers down a path of self-destruction?
This is what happened.
In the beginning, there were three: Eleanor, Justine, Rachelle.
Eleanor was studying Italian in the room next door at the university, on a Thursday night. I saw her and wanted her. She had long hair that was heavy and dark and looked as though it would feel silky if