Final Demand by Deborah Moggach

Author:Deborah Moggach [Deborah Moggach]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2002-05-01T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Two

DAVID SLEPT HEAVILY, those first weeks; he slept like the dead. It awed Sheila, that he could sink into oblivion, that the blackness could close him away from her as she lay beside him, waiting for dawn to lighten the curtains. Her pills were no use. They didn’t send her to sleep; nor did they quell the panic.

For she was terrified. She lay there, very still, trying to control it. To hold her body together needed every ounce of energy she possessed; she had to concentrate on it. But the panic made her bowels churn and she would have to rise from bed, very slowly, and make her way to the bathroom. Like an elderly person, she gripped the doorknob for support. Once seated on the toilet, it seemed impossible to think of getting up again. If she moved, the chaos would open up. It would claim her, pulling her down into nothingness.

Besides, why move? What was the point of being in one place rather than another? This thought alarmed her; she needed to shake herself out of it. So she would heave herself to her feet in preparation for the long journey back to the bedroom. Outside Chloe’s bedroom door she sometimes lost the will to move at all. When Chloe was small, Sheila would tiptoe in to check that she was still breathing. The miracle that she did.

Hours later Sheila would find herself sitting outside the bedroom door, chilled in her nightie. Dawn would arrive, eventually. Those early days in May, the dawns were beautiful. A detached part of her recognized this. There was one tree she could see, rising up behind the yard wall; it was misted with the tenderest green. Traffic was already building up, she heard the hum of it, but it seemed to be taking place a long way away, in another world entirely. It seemed extraordinary that they carried on driving, that people went on with their lives, getting in and out of cars, fuming in traffic jams, as if nothing had happened. People worried about things, about whether the plumber would turn up, wasn’t that strange? And stranger still that the days passed, one remorselessly following another. Did nobody realize?

She would climb back into bed carefully, like an invalid. She lay apart from David, for fear of touching him; she felt his skin would bruise. Her body gave off a sour smell. It was too much of an effort to wash. This alarmed her, but in a sluggish way. Besides, it hurt to move. Her bones ached; her guts felt corroded with acid. The sheer physical pain sometimes made it hard to breathe. David smelt too, of all the cigarettes he had smoked since Chloe’s death, thousands of them, and the whisky he was drinking at night.

So Sheila lay there, for what else could she do? She lay there, willing herself to stay sane. Ah, but the effort of it! Sometimes it didn’t seem worth the bother. She would just surrender herself up and free-fall, into the pit.

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