I know better than that too. With or without Bhodi, I’m stronger than the anxiety clawing at my back.
But fuck me, life is better with him.
I keep driving and rumble through the main entrance. Bhodi parks round the back, but I need a staff pass to get that far with the van. So I ditch it and hurdle the barrier on foot.
It’s late and the car park is lit by a security light that’s half broken. Shadows are everywhere and I decide that even when Bhodi’s home in one piece, I hate him fucking parking here.Sowhat? You’re going to tell him he can’t? Or follow him to work every day like a fucking psycho?
Considering it occupies my thoughts for the brief minutes it takes to search every inch of the staff car park, and then every space and bay beyond. I even check the side streets, but come up blank.
Bhodi isn’t here.
He isn’t fucking here.
I jog back to the van, my phone pressed to my ear, and I shout in frustration as my call goes unanswered, agitation flooding my veins again.
Bhodi, where are you?
I throw myself behind the wheel and leave the hospital car park with no real idea where I’m going, except that it’s not my usual way home. The city slips by me in a blur, my body aching with wasted adrenaline, a headache squeezing my skull. Honest to God, I feel sick with fear, and it’s so much worse than the PTSD that kicked the shit out of me after the crash.
Back then, I was afraid of something that had already happened. This is different—this isreal, and if even a hint of my imagination is on point, I could lose Bhodi forever.
My phone buzzes with a message. It’s on the seat and I can’t see it while I’m driving.
Despite the madness raging in me, I pull over before I pick it up.
Bhodi.
Nope.
It’s my brother and the caps lock on his smashed up iPhone is still broken from when he dropped it trying to stop me killing Charmaine’s mope of a fuckboy.
Sab: FIND HIM?
Tam: No. I checked the hospital. He’s not there
Sab: DID THEY SAY WHEN HE LEFT?
I’m such a fucking idiot.
Tam: Didn’t ask. I just looked in the car park
Sab: WHAT IF HE DIDN’T DRIVE THERE TODAY?
Tam: Then where the fuck is his car?
Sab: AT THE GARAGE. AT A MATE’S HOUSE. THERE’S A MILLION POSSIBILITIES BEFORE WHATEVER YOU’RE THINKING
Tam: You don’t know what I’m thinking
Sab: YOU THINK HE’S DEAD
Sab’s not shouting at me on purpose, but it feels like he is, and the words stare up at me, stark andloud. I drop the phone on the seat and start driving again, longing for a cigarette so much that I search the glove box with my casted hand while steering with the other, and as luck would have it, I found a squashed box of the rancid Silk Cut I downgraded to when I was trying to quit.
No Zippo. But I jam a smoke between my lips anyway and wrestle with the van’s corroded lighter. It barely gets warm, but somehow it’s enough to light the cig and I take an inhale of toxic smoke that’s a thousand times more kill than cure.
But it’s something to do, and the familiarity of the ritual brings me back to earth. I’m heading for the motorway, I realise,a route I usually avoid like the plague, but I’ve never told Bhodi why, so I know he still drives this way to and from work, chugging along in his battered Golf with no clue that my blood is soaked into the slip road he takes to get there.
The slip road that’s coming up ahead, but I don’t give a single fuck about right now.
