‘Darren doesn’t go easy, does he?’
He’s tired. He’ll shut up in a minute.
Luckily this time Alice was right. As the day wore on, his attempts at conversation grew few and far between, and eventually, as night fell, the only sound she heard from his side were the deep sighs and yawns of someone on the cusp of dreaming.
‘Wake up!’
Her eyes snapped open. It was pitch black. What the hell was going on?
‘Please.’
Alice was wide awake now and hit with the sharp realization that the cries were coming from the man next door.
‘Ross, please.’
His mumbling was growing more urgent. As far as she could tell, he seemed to be reliving something awful. Alice held her breath as she bore witness to his pain. The moans and the cries. It was all just muffled noise. Terrible, heart-breaking noise until—
‘Ross. Ross. Please God, wake up!’
The murmurings were getting louder and more panicked. Alice prayed that someone would come and shake him awake, but no respite came. What the hell was she supposed to do? She couldn’t wake him up. Wait, what if this was some sick joke he was playing? What if this was his twisted way to get her to talk?
Then she heard it.
‘Ciarán, no! No. No. No. Please no.’
It was a cry that shook with horror, a cry that rang out with such pain it reduced Alice to tears. This was anything but a joke.
12
Alfie
He woke with a start.
‘Jesus Christ, pull yourself together.’ He couldn’t help the words coming out. Tired of going through his own version of hell and back, Alfie’s fear had morphed into deep frustration. Why was he doing this to himself again?
Such a weak, stupid idiot.
As he said the words over and over in his head, his fist started to punch his surviving leg hard on the thigh. He wanted to fight this stupidity out of him, drum in some sense and logic.
‘Don’t do that, it’s the only one you’ve got, remember,’ a quiet voice came from just outside his curtain.
‘Mr P?’ Shame flooded him. Thank God his face was hidden from view.
‘Aye, kid. Now try and get some rest. Got some tricky crossword clues for you in the morning and I need you on top form.’
‘OK.’ A tear escaped down his face. Alfie closed his eyes and swallowed down the ball of sadness that had lodgeditself in his throat. He heard the shuffling of his friend’s footsteps making their way back across the room. If he’d woken up Mr Peterson, there was no way his neighbour was still sleeping. Still she’d not said a word.
As he lay there coated in sweat and barely able to breathe, he grew frustrated at how regularly he was finding himself back here. He’d spent so long trying to block out the flashbacks and bury what he couldn’t bear to remember about the accident. It seemed that just when he thought he’d done it, his brain served him up a cruel reminder that the battle wasn’t over yet.
When he’d first come around after the crash he hadn’t been able to recall much. The head injury he’d sustained had wiped most of the details from his mind. This, he often thought, was a small blessing. Then the flashbacks started. Thick and fast. He couldn’t believe it – as soon as he was starting to feel more stable, it was as though his brain had decided to flick the switch and take him right back to square one. His mind would revisit the wreckage regularly, sometimes multiple times a day. No sleep needed. It would take him over, at random and without permission. He’d never felt so out of control in his life. This wasn’t your average nightmare. This was real. This was time travel. His nose would burn with the toxic mix of petrol and rubber. His ears would be filled with the deafening crash, the screaming and the crying. He could see the broken remains of their car from where he’d been thrown on to the tarmac. Crumpled like paper. Trapped under the lorry whose path it had been forced into. Then he’d see them, and his world would come crashing down around him all over again.
At first he thought something specific might be triggeringthe flashbacks: a smell, a word, a time of day. He drove himself mad trying to pinpoint the exact things that dragged him back, kicking and screaming, to that night. No matter how hard he tried, Alfie soon had to accept that no amount of analysis would give him an answer. His brain had decided to throw rhyme and reason straight out of the window, and it was simply hijacking him as and when it felt like it.
The worst part always seemed to be the morning after. His entire body would hurt and the sleepless night would leave him drained of all energy. But he knew that, no matter how exhausted he felt, he had to find a way to drag his positivity out of the closet and put the mask back on.
‘Fake it till you make it, honey,’ his mum had always told him. ‘Trust me, during the dark days it was the only thing that got me through. I’d put a smile on my face and force a couple of laughs and then one day, I didn’t have to pretend any more. If you believe in something enough, if you tell it to yourself every moment of every day, then soon enough it will come to be.’
He knew if anyone had the means to survive the curveballs that life threw at you, it was his mum. And so he faked it. He faked it every single day until it started to become normality. Some days were harder than others, of course, but no matter how he was feeling on the inside, he made sure to wear a smile on the outside. Today was no different.
