There was still so much to say but that was a start. If he ever came back to her with his reason for being so elusive, then she would have further words with him. She pressed send and waited for some kind of response. The message went straight through, to her relief, and now it was up to him to reply.
Clara tackled her washing, cleaned the kitchen floor and had the quartz kitchen tops sparkling as she fretted about the place, waiting. Every now and then she would check her phone again, in case she had missed any messages. Frustratingly, there was nothing and only the screensaver of Eleanora and Clara at the Oxford Shakespeare Festival, last summer, stared back. Clara remembered what a wonderful evening they’d had at Oxford Castle and Prison as they watchedTwelfth Nightwhile the sun went down around them. This year, she’d secretly hoped she could take Tom for the forthcoming open-air performance ofRomeo and Juliet. How romantic it would have been. Now she didn’t even know that she would ever see him again, let alone have a romantic night under the stars.
She was ready for bed and about to put her pyjamas on when her phone finally bleeped. In her rush to get to the phone she fell over the corner of her rug, almost hitting her head on the side of the table. She was so pleased when she saw Tom’s name flash up on the screen, but any relief was not to last for long.
Clara. I’m sorry. I’m not a good person. C U in the next life xx
In alarm, she dropped her phone, quickly picking it up to dial Tom back immediately. When it went straight to voicemail, she ran for her car keys. She had built up various catastrophic scenarios in her head, but suicide wasn’t one of them.
ChapterTwenty-One
As Clara drove over to Tom’s, she struggled with waves of nausea. What if she was too late? What would she find when she arrived? She broke the speed limit as she hurtled her Mini Cooper towards his home. It would have been easy enough to have walked the ten minutes but driving seemed more fitting. She thanked God that she knew his address. There would have been no time for questioning him on his location now. Clara knew it was important that she should call the police, or an ambulance, from the car. She was always so calm in a crisis; it was part of her job. This was different though; she was too close to the person involved. Although she tried hard to separate her emotions from dealing with this emergency, she wasn’t thinking clearly. She began to question whether she had misinterpreted the message and imagined the embarrassment of getting the relevant authorities involved when it turned out to be some kind of drunken text, or someone had taken his phone.
What if he simply meant he was leaving Oxford and she had misconstrued the message completely? Perhaps he meant it as a way of saying he wouldn’t see her again in this life because he was leaving her and moving somewhere far away as he was a bad person. But how could someone so nice be a bad person? What was it supposed to mean? Clara couldn’t possibly think straight in such a situation. Also, since Tom had messaged Clara, she wondered if he wanted her support to make sure he didn’t do such a tragic thing. She had seen it many times before when a person who was desperate would message someone in a bid to get the support that they truly needed and didn’t truthfully wish to take their life. Although her instinct was not to truly believe this theory as she rushed to Tom.
When she thought about it, she realised how often it was the quiet folk who smiled and seemed as though they had everything who were depressed. Tom was a happy chappy with a dry sense of humour. On the surface of it, there was no way he would do anything so devastating. He was that jovial guy who turned everything into a joke. She realised Tom fitted the profile exactly. Time was of the essence.
The problem was that there were roadworks and a temporary set of lights stopped her in her tracks. Nobody was coming through either way as they froze. Traffic was building up behind her as she waited and drivers beeped their horns impatiently. Clara flashed her lights at the camera on top of the traffic signal. She had heard that could sometimes alert the lights of your presence. She realised she looked stupid as she flashed those lights away but anything was worth it. She screamed in frustration and banged her head on the steering wheel as they stubbornly refused to change colour. Clara had a good mind to take her chance and drive through the red light but, despite a dire emergency like this, she knew that would be foolish. She regretted not taking her bicycle, even walking would have been preferable to being stuck like this. Eventually, the lights shifted to orange and she was through. Clara put her foot down hard on the accelerator and apologised to God and the police for breaking the speed limit.
The moment she pulled into a parking space around the corner from Tom’s home, she tried his number again. His phone was still switched off. She sprinted to his front door, banging on the glass with all her might. She didn’t even care about the consequences of her hand potentially going through it.
‘Tom, open the door. Open the door now!’ she shouted.
Clara still had some hope that Tom would walk to the door and have an apologetic story about how he didn’t mean it. She wanted him to tell her how she had indeed misconstrued the message. But, as she banged harder and harder on the door, she could see that either he wasn’t in or he was already... She tried not to think of the latter.
She stood back looking at the door and realised that all this banging was futile. She had to find a way to get inside. Searching around, she hoped there was a key somewhere. At the rectory, she always kept a spare under a flowerpot in case of emergencies. She looked at the yellow rose in a pot beside the door and searched underneath for any sign of a key, but found nothing. She lifted the worn doormat to no avail either. Then she checked under a flowering cactus behind the rose pot where she saw something shiny out of the corner of her eye. By the time she put the key into the keyhole, she realised her hands were shaking.
Pushing the door over a pile of post, she forced her way through and was immediately hit by the most nauseating smell. Instinctively, she raised her arm to cover her nose with the cardigan she had thrown on.
‘Tom, are you in here? Tom. Where are you?’
Clara dry-heaved at the smell.
‘Goodness, it smells like a brewery in here.’
She shoved a door to the left of her but nobody was there. The barren room gave hints of a bachelor pad with its lone chair and record player. The cover of a Fleetwood Mac album lay discarded on the floor. The needle was still going around the album, making a scratching sound. Clara fleetingly felt inclined to switch it off and put it out of its misery but decided she had more pressing matters at hand.
She ran straight ahead into the kitchen where the fridge door had been left open. She couldn’t help but notice how bare it was, and on the kitchen table there must have been at least ten empty beer cans. Lying flat next to a recycling bin, were three bottles of red wine that had been cleared out. She doubted that Tom would have managed to leave his home since he wouldn’t have got very far looking at the amount of alcohol he had managed to get through these past few days.
From the kitchen, Clara shouted for Tom and, when there was no response, she ran for the living room. She opened the door to find the room pitch-black and the stench of lager repugnant. She could see that there was something crumpled on the sofa, but couldn’t quite make it out. She switched the light on and knew that she would never be able to erase the sight of what she saw from her memory. She screamed Tom’s name, as she clambered over the empty lager cans, bottles and pill packets to get beside him on the sofa where he was out cold.
‘Tom, what have you done to yourself!’ She noticed how his skin looked waxy with a yellow tinge.
She huddled over him, shouting his name, but no matter what she did, he wouldn’t respond.
‘Come on! Wake up! Tom! Tom! Tom! You have to wake up!’
She repeatedly tapped at his face, which was cold and pale. Then, with one hand, she called for an ambulance as the other felt for his pulse.
‘Wake up. It’s Clara. You have to wake up, Tom,’ she shouted at him desperately, as she waited for the emergency operator to pick up. Clara searched for signs of life in between her tears.
As she opened up his grey towelling dressing gown to listen for a heart rate, a single tear dropped on his chest.
‘No, no, no. You can’t die on me, Tom. I won’t let you.’
Clara shook his head gently to stir him when she heard a quiet whimper.
Then she thought she noticed his hand moving. She stroked it while calling his name.
