“Have you ever broken a bone?”
Pretty simple party queston – one that people whip out after a few drinks, leading to stories about falling off bunk beds or jack-knifing on icy roads. I’d always just smile smugly and say I’d never broken a bone because I was a better person than everyone around the table. Then I’d order another round of drinks.
I have a different story now.
(again, apolgies for the spelling mistakes, getting harder)
After meetin Derek and my ring finger snapping, I went to the hospital to get it looked at. Clean break, they said, and strapped it to my middle finger. Said it’d heal soon enough. I didn’t tell them how it happened – how do you explain that you attended a retreat with a weird fake-Irish woman who channelled your energy into reviving her daughter, then burned down every building and abandoned you? I said I’d slipped on my bath mat.
Two days later my rib broke.
I was dreaming. Not about Derek, this time. One of the others… another boy, many years ago, who I’d been far too obsessed with over far too little returned attention. We were in a sleeping bag, in a tent, some cacohponous festival happening outside. Pressed up against each other.
The pain woke me up. Sharp, horrible, across my sternum, then returning to a dull ache. No more sleeping on my front for me.
I thought about going to the hospital again, but did a quick Google and saw that there’s no real treatment for a rib break. Just time. Whatever time means now.
My aunt, Nóirín, was worried about me. Well, she’d been worried about me before I went to Ocras (or Carapace, or whatever you want to call it), but back then I’d been off the rails, drinking, doing drugs, throwing myself at anything with a dick and a heartbeat
Now I was… quieter. Shuffling around the house. On the Internet all the time, looking for evidence of Angela or any of the others. And staring at the Polaroid I’d found in Angela’s office, the one of me, with a single word scrawled on the back – “CRUSH”.
So when Derek called me to collect my things from his place, I should have said no. More questions, of course, but also there was the risk – the more I thought about Derek the worse I felt. The issue was that since I’d been to the retreat I was somehow thinking of him more – him and the others, every other man I’d been obsessed with ovr the years, all coming back to haunt me. And, like all good stories of love and obsession, I wanted to see him. I think part of me wanted to hurt, felt like I deserved it.
I went to his place, dodged questions about my finger, tried not to look directly at him. Could feel my heart beating a mile a minute. And springing a semi under my tracksuit bottoms. Christ, love is… embarrassing. If you’d call this love.
When he handed me a picture of the two of us on a hike in Edinburgh, I couldn’t stop staring at it – and I felt a sudden crack in my eye socket. Horrendous, horrifying, impossible… but I was getting used to the pain. When Derek offered to help, bring me to the hospital, I told him to fuck off because I’m a real gent.
I popped painkillers and headd to the hospital on my own – and that’s when I saw Holly. At the retreat she’d seemed so dithering, desperate to be liked, the first to speak and the last to think before she spoke. And here she was, running the accident and emergency department.
Aren’t people fun.
I watchd her eyes go wide when she saw me. I’d have done the same but, you know, cracked eye socket. I saw her trying to fob off the person she was talking to, head out of the room away from me… so I followed her, all the way down the corridor and into an empty exam room where she’d gone to hide.
“I don’t need this kind of negativity in my life. Not now.”
She punctuated this by lifting up her shirt to show the pregnancy belly she’d had confirmed at Angela’s retreat. On Holly, singificantly overweight, it shouldn’t have shown… but it did.
I explained to her about my finger. My rib. My fancy new eye socket, which she started examining. The obsessive thoughts that had gone up to ninety since meeting Angela.
“That must be because of what you did to Leila, it backfired. That’s not what’s happening to me.”
“Right.”
I glaed from under my shattered eyesocket.
“If everything’s going well, Holly, if everything’s hunky fucking dory, if your pregnancy is going absolutely swimmingly, then how is it you’ve lost about two stone since I saw you two weeks ago.”
She froze. She knew I was right.
Her cheeks were hollower, her belt tighter. And her pregnancy was showing far more than it should hav.
“If Angela gave you a pregnancy, then that’s great, I don’t want to stop it. But whatever happened to us there is killng me. You were the only one who knew about Angela and Carapace when we went there, you must know where they’re going to pop up next – to help me, to help the others. You’re a doctor – isn’t this covered under your, you know, oaths and stuff?”
She finished looking over my eye socket, apparently satisfied that I hadn’t squished my eyeball into submission – then handed me some stronger painkillers.
“I don’t know where Angela is. Or Carapace. But I do know where the others are.”
I smiled. It hrt.
We rocked up to Rita and Imran’s house in West London the next day – I had a good idea of the area but Holly had been able to track down their actual address, the benefit of having access to medical records.
Imran answred the door. He looked… rough. Not gaunt, just worn out, stressed, on edge.
“I was wondering how long it’d take for someone to arrive.”
He invited us in to their plush McMansion – there was the detritus of teenagers everywhere, sports gear on the floor, games consoles, unfinished food on the kitchen counter, but otherwise it had the whtie marble sheen of the nouveau riche.
We didn’t have to ask Imran what was happening to him – he just rolled up his sleeve and showed us. A bandage, which he pulled back to reveal a nasty burn. Another on his leg. Another on his neck, like a lovebite.
“Seems I’m going up in flames.”
I asked him what was causng the flare-ups (I winced at the term as soon as I’d used it). For me it was my obsession with all the men who’d played a starring role in my damaged psyche at different points. For Holly it was the idea of a pregnancy (she balked at this, but didn’t deny it). So what was Imran so obsessed with?
“Me.”
We looked over – Rita was standing in the doorway of the kitchen, laptop under her arm. She’d been working in her home studio (Imran had explained that she was a composer).
She poured herself a glass of wine and xplained that since Angela’s retreat they’d both been tormented (her words) with thoughts of each other. Not just each other, actually, but their early days – before Imran had become a stuffy academic and she’d become a runaway success (again, her words). They’d gone there to fix they’re marriage instead they’d become stuck in the permanent psychological torture of relationship nostalgia.
She knew the next question that was coming, pre-empting it by kicking off her shoe and putting her left foot up on the kitchen counter. She then took a knife from the chopping block and went for the foot… but the knife just scraped off, barely leaving a mark.
The top of Rita’s foot was like stone. Or marble.
“Part of my left hip too. And the index finger on my right hand.”
She sighed.
“All that money I spent on Botox, what a waste.”
“So I’ve got this CRUSH – that’s what my Polaroid said – and Holly’s got… what, she’s losing weight, and you two are—”
But Rita shushed me. Left the room. Imran turned to us.
“She does that a lot.”
She came back a few minutes later, and laid them out on the kitchen counter. The polaroids. Our polaroids.
Holly, Rita, Imran and Susan.
“From Angela’s office, before the drugs kicked in and we collapsed. I didn’t have time to grab more than this.”
She turned over the pictures, to see the word scrawled on the back – like mine had said “CRUSH”.
Imran’s said “BURN”.
Rita’s said “OSSIFY” (she smiled at this: “fancy word for a fancy lady”).
And Holly’s… “STARVE”.
Her hand instinctively went to her bump. More afraid for it than for herself.
And then there was Susan’s polaroid – I stared at it, the word on the back. I looked at the others.
“I’ll tell her”.
Susan’s polaroid had been a picture of her at work – I remembered her trying to get people to cover her shifts at the supermarket, and now I knew which one.
I turned up the next morning at the big Sainsbury’s in Harringay, Susan’s polaroid in my hand. I waked up and down the aisles for half an hour before I eventually spotted her, re-stocking nearly out-of-date meat in the Reduced To Clear section. She looked tired.
I approcahed. She rolled her eyes.
I told her that I’d met up with Holly, Rita, Imran, to find a way to stop what was happening to us.
She smiled wryly – I could see one of her teeth was missing.
I handed her the Polaroid, she looked at the front, and then the writing on the back.
“ROT”
She stufed it in her pocket.
“Look, I’m sure you’ve got a plan, and you’re going to work very hard and try to take down Big Bad Angela. And I’ll happily come along for the ride, if I can find someone to cover my shifts. I’d like to find out why Angela’s doing this, for one. You know, curiosity. But I want to make it clear that I don’t partiuclarly care what happens to me, or to you, or any of them. I lost my son. He died for no reason, and I’m stuck here. So if this thing kills me… I have to think that if there’s an Angela, then maybe there’s a heaven.”
I thanked her for her pep talk. Picked up a half-price packet of ham and put it in my shopping basket.
Susan reached into her pockt and pulled out a piece of paper, handing it to me. It had a name on it – “Zoe” – and an address.
“What’s this?”
“The woman who came to visit Angela in her office, whose husband died after one of the retreats. I found her.”
I smiled. Susan added a 75% off sticker to the ham.
What a time to be alive.
We caught Zoe at work too – it was a building site in Ilford, a pharmaceutical operation half-way through construction. She was mainly ment to be there for procurement but now she’d found herself project managing the whole thing after the last two guys had fucked it all up.
She didn’t take much convincing – she clocked off early, took us to the on-site creche. There was a café. Me and Susan and Zoe had cappucicnos and talked, watching through the glass at the toddlers and babies being taken care of by the overworked staff.
“First things first, I just want to say that this is the only time I’m going to talk to you. Angela threatened Freya – that’s my daughter – and as far as I’m concerned that means I’m not going to cross her again. If you do find her, you do not tell her you spoke to me.”
She looked around, as if she was already wondering if there were eyes on her.
Me and Susan noddd, trying to comfort her.
She sipped her cappuccino, and began.
“Seb was a nice guy, at the beginning. That’s important for me to say, because if I’d gotten with a dickhead and fallen in love with a dickhead and married a dickhead then that would say something about my judgement, and I do not have poor judgement. He was very kind to me, vulnerable even – he’d had some issues with his Dad, he didn’t tell me everything but he was open as a guy like him could be. We were happy.
“After we got married, things got a little more… tense. I’d always been comfortable with my job, fincnaially we were sound, but it was something that was playing on Seb more, the idea that he was leeching off me or something. Male pride. He wanted to pay his way.
“He got into stocks and shares, and annoyingly was very good at it. I say annoyingly because he started to get smug, and wouldn’t stop talking about it – so eventually over dinner one night I snapped at him and said that if he liked it so much why didn’t he quit his job as an accntant and go into the City for full-time trading. So he did.
“This might sound like a strange preamble, considering how weird things got later on, and how violent – but that job was the making of the Seb who defined the final years of our marriage. He went into a finance job feeling too old, desperate to impress his younger colleagues, his younger bosses, and in an industry that’s about 80% male that meant a new Seb. Late nights. Strip clubs. Cocaine.
“Which… fine. I mean, I’m not exactly squaky clean – the night me and Seb met we were both off our faces. But this was at the point we were trying for a baby, and Seb was having a second, drug-fuelled childhood.
“And then there were the comments about women. Little things, here and there. A comment about a waitress. Or one of his female bosses. Not sexual, just… disparaging. Of course, at that point, I’d no idea how far it had gone – that the parts of him that were his Dad and his inferiority complx and his new job were mixing together and metastasising into Seb 2.0. Who knew things about women. Who understood how the world worked. And who couldn’t keep his mouth… well, we’ll get to that.
“It all reached a head one night before Christmas – I was five months pregnant so I had an early one, but was woken by a knock on the door. Seb being dropped home by his manager, a gruff man ho told me that there would be “discussions” with Seb once he’d sobered up.
“Turns out Seb 2.0 – the star trader at his new job – had taken things a little too far. Smashed a bottle of champagne on the ground. Felt up a waitress. And when the female recetpionist at the venue had tried to kick him out he’d taken a shit in the lobby.
“I had to ignore the “felt up a waitress” bit. Because we couldn’t afford for Seb to lose his job when I was four months from going on maternity. So I helped him smooth things out with his manager enough that he was suspended without pay for a month and forced to attend AA meetings and corporate training.
“There were things I didn’t know then. The online stuff. The violnt porn which… you know, whatever, people are people. The social media accounts, less fun. Anonymous trolling of women on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter… ‘you fat bitch’, ‘someone punch some sense into her’, all that. If I’d known about that, I’d have divorced him and moved in with my Mum.
“The suspension hurt. The AA metings, he wouldn’t shut up about the woman who ran it. And the corporate retreat… well, that’s how Seb met Angela.
“I don’t know what happened that weekend. He went away on Friday, came back on Sunday – a little fuzzy on the details, a bit out of it. I thought maybe he was shy. Later I’d realise he didn’t actually remember much of what happened.
“I thought the retreat was going to help him, but instead he just got… worse. The constant comments. About women on the telvision, women on the bus, women on billboards we’d drive by. And the online stuff, he wasn’t even hiding it any more.
“And then, of course, me. Little digs at first, about my job or the weight I’d put on since I got pregnant, or how I was only getting this or that award because I was a woman working in construction.
“These are things that I would have left him for, before all this. The issue was – there wasn’t just something psyhcologically wrong with Seb… it was physical too.
“It had started a few days after he’d come back from the retreat. A woman on some talent show, short skirt, he made a comment, and I heard a…. click. Seb rubbed his jaw, like it hurt, then went back to watching. It happened again a few days later, when he was talking about my mother… click. And I noticed – Seb wasn’t quite closing his mouth fully. Like somthing was holding it open. Like his jaw was… well, like it was clicking open.
“Around the time he lost the ability to eat burgers – his mouth permanently open about ten degrees – he went to a doctor. They gave him muscle exercises to help. It didn’t work.
“Soon his speech was slurred, trying to form consonants without being able to close his mouth, his jaw permnently open further, further, further. It was scary. Eerie. But it didn’t stop him being a dickhead, so my desire to care was dwindling.
“By the time I went into labour, Seb looked like the entrance to a funhouse, jaw wedged open wide – relying on yogurt, liquid meals. Still he drove me to the hospital. I went into a room, gave birth. It gave me no small pleasure to know that whatever pain I was going through, Seb was expriencing a lot of pain as well.
“The midwife brought him in afterwards, once I’d been cleaned up (Seb was not the type to be there for the birth). He saw the baby in my arms, and I looked up at him and… I think part of me suspected this might happen, which is awful, but like I said by this time Seb was no longer a nice guy… I looked up at him and I said to him…. “It’s a girl.”
“And Seb’s mouth tore at the edges. Jaw opening so wide, screaming in pain as his skin tore, but also screaming at the baby, at it, like he hated it… and then suddenly he was stumbling towards me, skin tearing all the while, jaw opening. He shoved the midwife to the ground, clawing his way to the bed, reaching out for me, fists clenched, ready to hit me, hit the baby…
“…and then Seb’s jaw folded open like the top of a boiled egg. Ripped his head nearly in half. And he collapsed to the floor.”
Zoe stopped. Pushed her cappuccino away, like it wasn’t so appealing anymore. She stared through the glass at her daughter being tended to by a creche assistant.
“We didn’t go to the funeral.”
Me and Susan looed at each other. Both thinking about how much of Seb’s story would eventually apply to us.
“I’m sorry if that’s not good news. And I hope you find some way of stopping what… well, what I can see is already starting to happen to you. But after today, after this conversation, I can’t be involved.”
She took a breath – like she was making a decision. The reached into her bag, and pulled out a flyer, putting it on the table. It said “HIS HIGHER CONNECTION”.
“The next retreat. If you want to talk to Angela… that’s where she’ll be.”
Then Zoe stood up and went to collect her daughter from the creche.
Leaving us to stew over what happened to Seb – the shape of things to come.