In Her Shadow by Louise Douglas Read Free Book Online Page B

colliding with one another and shattering into myriad smaller anxieties. I was so terrified, I could not bring myself to reach over and switch the machine off. It crackled and whirred, there was the sound of a cigarette-lighter clicking, an inhalation, and the voice returned. ‘ It’s me, Hannah, Charlotte Lansdown .’
    I sank down into a chair and put my head in my hands. It sounded as if Charlotte were pouring herself a drink. Iheard the gurgle of liquid, the chink of ice, and then: ‘ I just got back from singing and John’s not here and the idiot has forgotten his phone .’ She took another drag on the cigarette. ‘ Would you get him to call me and … ’ More rustlings, more crackles. ‘ Oh, it’s all right – he’s back! Ignore this message, babes. Hope you had a good evening .’ And she hung up.
    I exhaled the breath I’d been holding and steadied myself against the wall, pressing my forehead against its cool surface.
    I needed help. I couldn’t cope with this on my own. This was how it had started before; the beginning of my breakdown had been just like this, only the fear was worse this time. It was a cold fear, like the dead fingers of winter inside me, and it was encroaching faster. Less than twelve hours had passed since I saw Ellen in the museum, and already I felt as if she were standing behind me, breathing her chill, dead breath down my neck, watching, listening, waiting.
    I rummaged in a drawer, found my address book and looked up the number of my psychiatrist, Julia. I wrote the number on a piece of paper, and tucked the paper beneath the telephone.
    ‘Eight hours,’ I told myself. ‘Eight hours from now you can reasonably call her.’
    One night, that was all.
    I went to bed but I couldn’t sleep. I couldn’t make myself comfortable – my body seemed to be all bones and awkward angles and trapped nerves. A cat howled outside, in one of the gardens down the street. It sounded like a child in distress, and each time it made its banshee wail, the dogs in the neighbourhood barked in protest. I could hear the drone of traffic on the M32 as a distant background irritation, like a wasp in the room, and emergency sirens repeatedly pierced the night somewhere in the city. Worst-case scenarios chasedone another through my mind: I imagined bombs going off, buildings collapsing, madmen with guns, fires, people dying. I was too hot, and then too cold. I was parched, dehydrated, so I drank a glass of water and then felt too full. Whenever I closed my eyes, I saw Ellen’s face. Every time I drifted close to sleep, a memory would jump into my mind, a flashback to the earlier nightmare or some part of real life that I had forgotten.
    At 5 a.m., in the cool, grey pre-dawn light when the birds began their chorus and the cat finally stopped its yowling, I gave up and climbed out of bed.
    I had an idea that if I found a picture of Ellen, if I looked at her face, then the memory of her would lose some of its power. She had only been a girl, after all, a girl who died young. What was so frightening about that? Why had she turned into something so monstrous in my mind? I made some tea and pulled out the shoe-box beneath my bed where I kept the few items from my past that had survived my psychotic purges. I curled up on the white easy chair in the living room, listening to Holst with the cat on my lap, and I opened the box.
    I used to have hundreds of pictures of Ellen, but after I came back from Chile, I destroyed most of them. I did not want memories, or to be reminded. I riffled through the items in the box until I found the first of the only two images that remained. I picked it up and looked at it by the light of the reading lamp. I had only kept this particular photograph because Jago had taken it. Because he was out of reach, lost to me now, and because I had so little left of him, I had kept the picture.
    It had been taken on my thirteenth birthday outside the comprehensive school while we were waiting