His voice is so abruptly gruff that I stop eating.
‘God, this is hard.’
Between my ears, my pulse begins to roar.
They are surreal, these suspended seconds before he speaks again.
‘Just tell me,’ I whisper.
He steps off the cliff, and I go with him.
‘I took that pill.’
I stare at him, and my mouth opens, but no words come out.
Freefall.
16.
Josh
May 2000
I know I need to explain. But short of teleporting Rachel into my head – into that moment, last night, when I was convinced I was dying – I know any explanations I have to offer will fall short.
‘I thought I was having a heart attack. I genuinely thought I was going to die.’ I lean forward, my arms heavy on the table, linguine abandoned. ‘I mean, now it seems... But, last night, it felt real. You have to believe me, Rach.’
She doesn’t say anything. She just stares at me, with wide, disbelieving eyes.
‘All I could think about was survival. Not leaving you. Wanting to live. I kept thinking about every other bloody man in my family and the way they... It seemed inevitable. A given that I was going the same way.’
Eventually, she speaks. Her voice sounds blank and taut, not at all her own. ‘But that pill isn’t designed to save you in the middle of a heart attack. If it works the way Wilf says it does, wouldn’t it do the opposite?’
I swallow. ‘I know. It was... I wasn’t thinking straight.’
‘So then... it can’t havebeena heart attack.’
I look down at the table. The wood is pockmarked with imperfections, little waymarks of our life together. The dent from a stray hammer, courtesy of some bank holiday DIY two years ago. Red wine rings from last Christmas. A scorch mark left by a hot wok, Valentine’s Day 1995.
Maybe I will feel relief, at some point. But right now, in the gentle heat of Rachel’s gaze, I feel nothing but shame.
We move to the living room and lie flat on our backs, splayed out together on the rug. From this angle you can see all the cracks in the ceiling, the fraying paint, the brown bloom on the plaster where the upstairs flat leaked a year ago.
But, for some reason, flat on our backs on the floor has always been our go-to place to talk. What is it about gazing skyward? An instinctive need to see the bigger picture perhaps, gain some kind of perspective?
Or maybe it is more primal than that. Maybe, deep down, we are all just animals, using the night sky to guide our way.
‘They made us do one of those personality quizzes yesterday, at the away-day,’ Rachel says, after we’ve been lying side by side in silence for a while. ‘You know:Do you like networking with strangers? Do you feel more easily persuaded by emotional arguments, or rational ones?’
On the rug, I turn to look at her. The air in the flat is cool now, and her skin is sprinkled with goosebumps. She is staring straight up at the ceiling, as if she’s stargazing, or waiting for a comet that may or may not come.
‘Anyway. It said I’mextremely prevention-focused.’
I think for a moment. ‘Does that mean pessimistic?’
‘It means I’m not a gambler.’
I just wait. But I think I know what she is getting at.
