Gabi shook her head again and muttered something about newbie mistakes. ‘Red flag, Anna. Nev and Max would be ashamed of you!’ She reached over to grab her phone off the bedside table. ‘What is his last name?’
‘Smith.’
‘Smith?’ she said, raising an eyebrow at Anna.
Anna looked over Gabi’s shoulder as she searched Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. When she’d finished, she waved her phone at Anna.‘This is suspicious. I don’t like it, Anna. I don’t like it. Everybody has some kind of online stuff these days, so it’s weird that he does not. What is Brody Smith not telling you – if his name really is Brody Smith?’
Nothing, Anna wanted to say, and she was about to when she remembered the feeling that had been creeping up on her recently. Brody was holding something back. She knew that as clearly and certainly as she knew that he was a good, decent man, and not a scammer or a pervert.
‘Just promise me – if you ever, ever think about meeting him, you find out more,’ Gabi said earnestly.
Anna swallowed. ‘Of course.’
Mind you, she thought as she eased herself off the bed and said goodnight to Gabi, it really was a moot point. She wasn’t going to have to worry about the ethics of it, because, as much as she wanted to meet Brody, he obviously didn’t want to meet her.
Chapter Forty-One
A COUPLE OF days later, Brody stood at the back door to Moji’s shop, his arms full. He felt a quiver, a flash of something across his consciousness, and his stomach dropped. He closed his eyes and felt the solid reality of the cardboard box he was holding, the weight of its contents. He breathed in and out, then opened his eyelids.
Okay. He was going to do this. This was a concrete opportunity to put into practice the things he’d only been working on in private up until this point. He’d laid his foundation: exercise, nutrition, better sleep. He’d rehearsed the techniques Ibrahim had introduced him to. They’d both agreed the next step was to use them in a real-life situation, and waiting for the next pair of hikers to appear on his doorstep was not really an option.
They’d kept the toolbox of techniques simple. First was breathing. Second, counting. He’d practised this lots recently, counting birds, trees, clouds. He’d even mentally prepared for being in the town, adding cars of a particular colour or a certain breed of dogs to his list, anything to distract himself from the mounting physical sensations. Because the more attention he paid to them, the more he was likely to tip himself over the edge.
The third technique was one he found harder to do, but which Ibrahim had suggested keeping in reserve, a last resort, if you like. It involved stepping outside of himself, outside of his symptoms, and analysing the panic as if it was an external thing, not something happening to him right then and there.
Moji’s shop was as good a place as any to start, partly because it had been a challenging situation in the past, and partly because Moji’s presence would help, but mostly because he’d been working all hours making wooden toys recently. Something was driving him, some lost creative urge.
Right. He balanced the box in one arm and reached out to knock on the glass. A couple of seconds later, Moji appeared. She beamed when she saw him, then unlocked the door and let him inside. He followed her through to the main area of the shop.
‘Cuppa?’ she said, waving an empty mug at him with a slogan across the front that read:Toyshop Owners Do It for Fun.
‘Please.’
Once tea was made, Moji set to work unpacking the box. She exclaimed and commented over every set of stacking rings and every pull-along dog (one of which looked remarkably like Lewis) or set of train tracks. However, when she got to the bottom of the box, she really started to gush. ‘Oh, wow! You made her for me!’ she said, unravelling an elegant elfin figure from the roll of bubble wrap. ‘She’s even prettier than the first!’
The new elf was indeed beautiful, even if Brody did say so himself. She had long limbs, pointed ears, and gently waving tresses. She clasped a longbow loosely, and there was a look of focus, of determination, on her finely featured face.
‘What am I going to do now?’ Moji said, laughing. ‘I don’t want to sell this one either!’
Brody smiled, but as she reached into the box to fetch the last item, he grew serious again. Moji looked up at him, a smile on her lips and a question in her eyes. ‘You made me more than one?’ She was still smiling as she started to unroll the protective layer of plastic bubbles.
‘Oh!’ Moji exclaimed again as she turned the little wooden figure over in her hands, inspecting it from every angle. ‘This one is different,’ she said.
Different, she certainly was, Brody thought. She was his Not Elf. He’d taken her down from the bookshelf in his study. While it had been nice to see her sitting there every evening, keeping him company, he thought it was probably better that he didn’t get too attached to her.
‘Are you sure—?’ Moji began to say, but at that moment the shop door opened and the old-fashioned bell above it jangled.
Brody froze. The hairs on his arms and on the back of his neck lifted. Ice cubes tumbled into his stomach and swirled around there. He began to breathe – in for three, hold for three, out for three. It was an exercise he’d repeated multiple times a day over the last few weeks and, as he began to feel the oxygen reach his bloodstream, muscle memory took over and he realized he had space in his brain for more than just the processing of oxygen.
He looked over to the shop door, where a woman in a chunky sweater and jeans was standing. She didn’t even make eye contact with him, just nodded at Moji and then began to browse in the books section.
He hadn’t tumbled into a full-on panic attack yet, and if he didn’t want to, he needed to find something to count…
But he couldn’t find anything suitable in Moji’s shop. It was crammed to the rafters with all sorts of different toys and objects, but he couldn’t find a pattern in any of them. No terriers or red cars here. The woman moved closer, only six feet away now.
He couldn’t get enough distance, not mentally, not physically. There was no room to pull back the lens from close-up into panorama and observe himself. Breath became harder to find. He started having that weird everything’s-not-real feeling, a sign that he was teetering on the edge of that dreaded slippery slope.
No. He closed his eyes. No! He did not want this to happen. He did not want to fail his first time out. Not when he’d tried so hard. He searched his memory desperately for anything else, but the only other technique he could remember was visualization, and he’d been pretty sure that wasn’t going to work for him.
