Him: A dark and gripping love story with a heartbreaking and shocking ending by Clare Empson

Author:Clare Empson [Empson, Clare]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Orion
Published: 2018-08-23T05:00:00+00:00

35

Four months before: Lucian

While Ling and Catherine are out of the room, Harry corners me over by the sideboard, where I’m mixing more drinks.

‘You know what I’m going to say, don’t you?’ His face is passive, but I know him so well.

‘Yes. You’re going to warn me about getting involved with Catherine.’

‘Words to that effect.’

My friends know how drastically I fell apart when Catherine abandoned me – over-the-top expression, but that’s how it felt at the time. I didn’t simply fall apart. I took an overdose. It wasn’t just the misery of our break-up; there was more to it than that. Let’s call it a decade of childhood heartache, my father’s suicide, my mother’s lack of interest, a pervasive loneliness that had followed me through school and the first year of university, and that, despite the almost claustrophobic circle of friends, constantly threatened to overwhelm me. I’d bolted this stuff down inside myself and then Catherine came along, and the only way I can describe it is that it felt like I’d been travelling my whole life to meet her. She cured me, that’s what I thought, in my hopelessly naïve twenty-year-old mind; she released me from the bitterness of my past, from that boy brutalising his wrists in his bedroom, from the raging sixteen-year-old who left home without any clear idea of where to go. When she disappeared, literally vanishing without a backwards glance, the darkness crashed over me.

I tried to find her, of course, staking out her flat until her best friend Liv took pity on me.

‘She’s gone home,’ she said. ‘You could try her there.’

Her parents were kind but they wouldn’t let me speak to Catherine.

‘She doesn’t want to speak to you. And she doesn’t want to be in a relationship with you any more,’ her father said, on my third and final phone call. ‘I’m sorry, but there it is. I’m going to ask you to leave her alone now.’

Leave her alone. I wasn’t sure I could. What, never again talk to the girl who had finally made sense of my life? Never touch her again, never kiss the soft skin on the inside of her thighs, never hold her hand as I fell asleep? Never surprise her with breakfast when she woke? Never draw her, never undress her, never watch her eyes darken or hear her half-gasp as I pressed myself inside her?

Harry saved my life. He’d seen me in the evening, vehemently drunk, violently morose, and though he’d gone home and got into bed, he had lain awake worrying. Eventually he got dressed again, walked over to our house and found me unconscious on the bed, thirty minutes from fatality, apparently.

It wasn’t Catherine I was thinking of when I popped out two strips of temazepam (stolen from my uncle’s house for recreational purposes) and ground them into powder. It was my father, who had chosen the same route to escape. In those final moments I understood with piercing clarity what had made him do it.

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