I want her golden skin and her beautiful hair and that wonderful face. So I sit there and I watch it again, hugging my knees in to me. I don’t know how many times I’ve watched this film, but it helps. Because right now nothing else does.
12
What would you do if you knew you could not fail?
On Monday morning, I look at my stash of sleeping tablets. Only four left. So it’s either brave my doctor again or enter a life of crime where I try to buy them illegally.
You’re not cut out for a life of crime, says Mildred.
She is, naturally, right. I’ve never even got so much as a speeding ticket.
Dr A.J. Grant’s waiting room is full of people either coughing and sniffing or scratching. Must be a bad cold doing the rounds or the ‘strange insect bites’ time of year. I sit beside a tall man who is clearly unfamiliar with either deodorant or the shower. On the other side of me, a young mother is holding a very wriggly, very annoyed small baby. I attempt to smile at the young mother but she’s not in a smiling mood. Probably been up all night with the screaming baby: that never makes anyone happy.
Morning surgeries are always busy. I have been here over an hour and I have looked at my phone, sent a couple of emails, some texts, checked news and I’m fed up of blinking at the little screen. AJ, whom I have known since we were kids in primary school together, always has the worst magazines in his waiting room. He is interested in fishing, while his wife is interested in crafting. If Maura was here she’d be delirious but since I had no interest in either of these things, I just look gloomily at the pile of magazines and wonder if I should pick up the children’s Beatrix Potters and read them to myself.
A door bangs in the distance and suddenly AJ himself sticks his head round the door.
‘Ms Abalone,’ he says, nodding at me.
I leap to my feet, pick up my stuff and follow him post haste before anyone else can grab him and complain that their leg/lumbago/small child is in dire need of help. I have got to get out of here soon. The door to the surgery is barely shut before I say so.
‘Sorry, I don’t have a lot of time, AJ,’ I explain, ‘I’m just in for, er ... a renewal of my sleeping tablet prescription.’
AJ looks over hishalf-moon reading glasses at me. We are pretty much the same age and yet AJ has much more gravitas than I have: it’s probably thehalf-moon glasses and the fact that he is 150 per cent bald.
‘A repeat prescription,’ he says, looking at my file on the computer.
I wince. I knew this was going to be hard.
‘I’m still not sleeping.’
He just nods.
‘And I’m having nightmares.’
‘Still?’
‘Yes, still. It’s terrible ...’ I think of filling him in on my hideous dreams but there’s no time. ‘I need to be awake during the day and not crash the car with the kids in it and—’
‘How’s the victim support group meeting going?’ AJ asks, entirely ignoring me, which is pretty much what he used to do all those years ago.
Others used to try and set us up on dates but we were always just friends. I feel something brotherly for AJ, although not at this exact moment.
I change tack. ‘You know what happens to people when they have a traumatic experience?’
‘I do,’ AJ says, and removes the glasses to massage the bridge of his nose, which lets me escape the laser version of his gaze. ‘Is the victim support group helping?’
My eyes slide around somewhere and land on the wall behind his head.
When I came in to see AJ four months ago, looking for something to help me sleep, he knew I was serious. But he told me that sleeping tablets can’t be a long term solution.
‘I still can’t sleep without them,’ I say wearily, although I only try for half an hour at most on rare occasions. I can’t bear lying in bed, thinking, remembering.
He says nothing.
‘OK,’ I snap, ‘I haven’t gone to the victim support group, happy now? I’m trying to help Mum with Dad, and Scarlett’s going through so much, plus ...’ I pause because this is the worst: ‘Lexi’s bloody real mother has come back into her life and that’s stressful on a whole different level. I’ve got three young kids, a job, a sick parent, I just don’t have time to go to some meeting with a lot of people who are all going to sit there and cry.’
‘I don’t think that’s precisely what they do,’ AJ says mildly.
