But it’s easier thought than done. My drunken hike has taken its toll on my broken body and I can’t walk without dragging my stiff leg behind me. Returning my sorry arse to the uneven forest floor is so fucking tempting, but my body keeps going, limping towards the light in the fashion of an escapee from the set ofThe Walking Dead.
It hurts. I stumble so many times I take the skin off my knuckles steadying myself on fortuitously placed trees, but I don’t stop. Ican’t, and my dumb-fuck naïve self is so utterly convinced that Ludo will be waiting for me when I emerge from the woods that it takes me a full minute to reconcile myself with the fact that he isn’t.
Of course he isn’t. I stumble through the gate to the same quiet lane as when I arrived, and energy drains from me like water through a sieve.
You daft cunt.
I sag against the gatepost, grief and confusion crashing into me in a tidal wave of humiliating perspective. The buzz of my whisky binge has faded to a dry mouth and a headache, and I’m not altogether sure how I got here. The woods are a mile from my bedsit. Add in the trudge to the magical tree and back, and I’ve walked further today than I have since way before the accident.
I’m dead on my feet; I can’t imagine how I’ll ever get home. Or if I even want to... if I can face another night tossing and turning in bed until I inevitably give up and wind up outside, huddled on my bench as I wait for the sun to rise and give me a fucking break.
I don’t want to do it... any of it. But I have to. I’ve got previous for kipping on the street, and though I’m a long way from being happily too drunk to care, the old bill around here dislike me enough to stop and ask questions.
A night in the cells would probably finish me off.Fuck that shit.
I push off the gatepost and start walking, forcing my battered leg to keep moving, dragging my toes along the pavement. A car passes me. For a hot second I allow myself to imagine that it’s Ludo coming back for me, to drive me home, come inside and lock the doors so it’s just me and him forever, then I figure myself even more of a weirdo than before, and blacking out in the street is suddenly a viable option again.
Somehow I reach the end of the lane. Across the road is a row of three houses and a disused phone box. It’s a vintage one, painted red, still stuffed full of old-school calling cards. I can’t believe it’s still there, that it hasn’t been vandalised or nicked, but then, this town isn’t like that. The only idiot hooligan I can remember running the streets around here is me. And I can’t fucking run now.
A hysterical laugh escapes me. I stumble against a dry-stone wall and cling to it as if I’m drowning. It’s getting dark, and I welcome the shadows as they close in around me. Teenaged me was an idiot, and I’m an idiot still. For months I’ve existed for the sake of someone I’ll never see again, waiting for some kind of fucking epiphany to save me. And because it hasn’t happened, I’ve made one up. Got so messed up I’m seeing things in the one place I’ve always felt at home.
I need the woods. I need the trees. I can’t let whatever car crash is happening in my brain take them away from me. I justcan’t—
“Aidan.”
I close my eyes. “No.”
* * *
Ludo
Sometimes the worst has to happen to make things right. I ran all the way home from the woods, threw Bella’s dinner at her, and then sat in my living room window, fixated on the lane leading to the woods, convinced that if no one emerged after an hour or so, it was probably time to call Rita to come and rescue me.
It’s rare that I’m able to pre-empt a crisis, that I have the foresight to warn the people paid to care about me that I’m not okay. For a little while I thought I cracked it, that this time and the next I’d be ready for whatever was coming.
But nothing could’ve prepared me for the sight of Aidan staggering out of the lane and collapsing against the wall. In a heartbeat, the blurred lines between real and illusion cease to matter. Real or not, Aidan needs me, and I sprint across the road, barefoot and frantic.
“Aidan.”
“No.” He shakes his head and buries his face in his hands. “You’re not real. Leave me alone.”
“I am real.”
“You’re not. You never were.”
He’s in my head. There’s no other explanation for how he can echo my own thoughts verbatim. For how the struggle in him resonates so deeply in my consciousness that my hand shoots out to touch him before I can check myself.
I close my fingers around his bicep—a part of his arm I never touched in the hospital—and squeeze, to ground myself as much as him. “Aidan, I’m real, I promise. Just look at me... please?”
For a second I fear he won’t. That I’ll have to let go and leave him like this, and it will be a hundred times harder than leaving him in the hospital, but then he groans, an animalistic cry for help that cuts me to the bone, and raises his head.
And I barely recognise the face that stares back at me. I’ve never seen Aidan’s bright blue eyes unmarred by pain and morphine, but months down the line, perhaps I’ve forgotten how much his injurieshurt. How sad and lonely he was, despite how hard he tried to hide it with indifference and anger.
My hand slides from his arm and I touch his face, just for a moment, grazing the dark shadows beneath his red-rimmed eyes. “You didn’t get better.”
He shakes his head. “But you did.”
How does he know?Embarrassment ripples through me as I ponder what side of myself I showed him in the hospital. By my standards, the manic episode and subsequent crash were mild—crisis lite... diet crazy—but Aidan doesn’t know me any better than I know myself. How can he know that right now, I’m as stable as I’m ever going to get?
