can we skip the kebab? I just want to crash out, to be honest.’
‘Yeah, no problem.’ Kieran bowed slightly. ‘At your service.’
Bea woke on the cold bathroom floor with the ghost of a scream still on her lips. She didn’t have to wonder what she’d been shouting. She hadn’t had one of the nightmares for a long time, but whenever she did, she woke up gasping the same two words over and over again. Don’t go … don’t go … don’t go.
16
Eleanor
‘I thought they’d stopped – the nightmares? I thought you were doing okay with sleep and stuff now?’ Eleanor sat down next to her friend and handed her a glass of orange juice and a Pritt Stick. Bea gulped down half the glass in one go, like she’d spent the last week in a desert, and picked up one of the silver foil letters.
‘They had. I hadn’t had one since the day you told me about the accident. That was my first dreamless sleep in years. It’s hard to be scared of someone when you know they’ll be in a wheelchair the rest of their life. This wasn’t like before, though – I literally blacked out. I haven’t done that since the very beginning. It was seeing that book, the book I could have practically written myself, sitting on my bathroom shelf.’
She started spreading the letters on to the banner they were creating; noticing Eleanor’s frown, she picked up the ruler and began measuring the gaps between them. I’m going to have to redo the whole bloody thing, Eleanor thought. That’s all I need.
‘I know, that’s weird, right?’ She slipped down on to the mat next to Noah and flipped him on to his tummy, smiling at his immediate attempt to lift his head, kicking his legs as though he was swimming on dry land. ‘I mean, how could you order that and not know? You think Amazon sent it to you by mistake?’
‘I checked my account. Well, not straight away; when I woke up, I felt rough as anything, like I could have slept for a week, but I couldn’t bear the thought of closing my eyes again, so I just lay on the sofa staring at the ceiling. I must have dropped off again because I woke at about two a.m. and climbed into bed, but at least I didn’t dream again. Then at work the next day I checked my Amazon account – I thought if I did it with plenty of people around, there was less chance of me losing it again if I saw the book on there. But there was nothing. Well, nothing but the book I’d originally ordered – the one I thought I was pulling out of the package.’
‘Didn’t you check it when it arrived? How come you didn’t realise it was the wrong one then?’
‘That’s why it was in the bathroom.’ Bea winced as one of the foil letters stuck to her fingers. ‘Oh crap – I hope we have spares of these things. I’d taken it up to the loo to open it the night before, ripped it open, then heard Game of Thrones starting in the living room and just shoved it on the shelf.’
‘Must have been a mistake then; they sent you the wrong one.’ Noah started to grizzle, and Eleanor propped him up in his inflatable ring before it could turn into a full-on howl. She was still getting used to a baby’s attention span; it seemed like Toby had been so much more content to sit and play, but of course he’d been much older. This was uncharted territory. ‘You should have called me. Did you tell Fran?’
It was clear from the way Bea hesitated that she still hadn’t told her sister about what had happened to her – not this week, but sixteen years ago.
‘I thought you were closer to Fran these days?’
Bea nodded. ‘We are closer, but it happened so long ago, how do you bring that sort of thing up? “Hey, Fran, guess what …”’ She trailed off, unable to be flippant about what had happened to her a lifetime ago. Which just showed how much it still affected her, Eleanor thought; Bea could be flippant about just about any situation, no matter how bad. Sometimes it made her and Karen cringe, the way she could joke about the most sensitive of subjects; but not this.
It had worried them both at the time that she’d never reported what had happened – she’d