This is the fourth night in a row.
I don’t go back to sleep. I shower, standing under water as hot as I can tolerate, and even that feels different. The pressure of each droplet is distinct. I can smell the minerals in the water, the old copper of the pipes, things I’ve never noticed before and can’t stop noticing now.
I stand in my kitchen at four in the morning, drinking tea I can taste with an absurd accuracy (Assam, second flush, slightly over-steeped, a trace of limescale from the kettle), and I try to make a list of rational explanations.
Stress. Hormonal fluctuation. The adjustment to rural life after years in the city. A vitamin deficiency, possibly. Iron. B12. Something measurable, something a blood test would catch and a supplement would fix.
The list feels thin. It felt thin three days ago. It feels transparent now.
The surgery opens at nine. My first patient is a Jack Russell called Nelson, who’s been brought in for his annual vaccinations. Nelson is small, elderly, and hostile to the entire medical profession, and under normal circumstances, he’d be a straightforward ten-minute appointment.
Today is not normal circumstances.
Nelson’s owner, a retired teacher called Margaret, is talking about the dog’s diet. I’m nodding and makingnotes and trying to focus, but her voice keeps splitting into layers. I can hear the words, but beneath them I can hear her breathing, the faint whistle of air through a nose slightly blocked on the left side. I can hear the click of her dentures when she pronounces certain consonants. I can hear Nelson’s heartbeat, rapid and suspicious. The rustle of his claws against the examination table. A conversation on the street outside about someone’s planning application.
All of it, all at once, at equal volume.
“Dr Clarke? Are you all right?”
I blink. Margaret is looking at me with concern. I’ve been standing with the syringe in my hand, staring at nothing, for what must be several seconds.
“Fine. Sorry. Just thinking about the dosage.” I smile, and it feels like a mask. “Right, Nelson. Let’s get this over with.”
I prep the injection site. Routine. I’ve done this thousands of times. Pinch the skin at the scruff, insert the needle at a 45-degree angle, and depress the plunger slowly and steadily. Simple.
My hand is shaking.
Not dramatically. Not visibly, I hope. But I can feel the fine tremor in my fingers as I position the needle, and when I go to insert it, I misjudge the angle. The needle goes in too steeply. Nelson yelps, more from surprise than pain, and jerks sideways. I pull backimmediately, adjust, and complete the injection properly on the second attempt.
Margaret doesn’t seem to notice. Nelson glares at me with the righteous indignation of a dog who has been wronged. I finish the appointment on autopilot, making the right noises about diet and exercise while my hands grip the edge of the examination table to keep them steady.
When Margaret and Nelson leave, I close the surgery door. Stand with my back against it, eyes shut.
I don’t make mistakes. That’s not arrogance, that’s seven years of training and five years of practice. I don’t fucking well misjudge injection angles. I don’t misjudge anything. I don’t lose focus during routine procedures. I don’t stand in my own surgery with shaking hands and wonder if I’m losing my mind.
I cancel my remaining morning appointments. I tell the two clients who ring that I’m feeling unwell, which isn’t entirely a lie, and I sit at my kitchen table and call the GP surgery in the next village.
The earliest appointment is Thursday. Four days away. I take it, because what else am I going to do? Tell them I can hear conversations through walls, and my skin feels like it belongs to someone else, and I keep dreaming about my bones rearranging themselves? They’d refer me to a psychiatrist, not a GP.
I make more tea. I sit. The cottage is quiet aroundme, or it should be. To my ears, it hums with small sounds I was never meant to hear: the boiler cycling, mice in the walls, Maggie’s voice next door talking to her cat, the heartbeat of something in the hedgerow outside, quick and light, a rabbit or a vole.
I press my hands over my ears, and it doesn’t help because the sound isn’t coming from outside. It’s coming from me. My body has become an antenna, receiving on frequencies I never knew existed, and I don’t know how to turn it off.
Roan doesn’t come today.
I notice his absence the way you notice a missing tooth: the space where something should be, the tongue returning to probe the gap. He’s been a constant presence for over a week, appearing at the coffee shop, the post office and Maggie’s garden with a regularity that I’d started to depend on without realising it.
Today, nothing. No casual stroll past the surgery. No text suggesting coffee. No manufactured coincidence that puts him in my path at exactly the moment I need someone to talk to.
I tell myself it’s fine. He has his own life. He has the land management and estate work he mentioned, the family obligations he deflects. He doesn’t owe me his time, and I don’t need his company. I managed perfectly well before Roan Mistwood walked into mykitchen with a welcome basket and a smile that made me forget to be cautious.
Except.
Except his absence makes everything worse, and I can’t explain why. The symptoms that have been building all week, the sensory overload, the restlessness, the temperature fluctuations that have me switching between jumpers and T-shirts every hour, are sharper today. More insistent. As if my body is reaching for something it’s been getting and has suddenly been denied.
At four in the afternoon, I’m standing at the window for the third time in an hour when I see him. He’s on the high street, walking quickly, head down, and even from this distance, I can see the tension in his shoulders. He doesn’t look towards the surgery. He doesn’t slow down. He passes the end of my lane without breaking stride and disappears around the corner towards the road that leads out of the village.
Something in my chest pulls tight, a physical sensation like a thread being drawn taut, and I press my hand flat against my sternum and feel my heart beating too fast beneath my palm.
