Free House of Small Shadows by Adam Nevill Page A

.’
    ‘Mmm?
    ‘Look, can we go? To my place so we can be alone.’
    She was following every word out of his mouth as if she could see them in the air. The blood stopped moving inside her body.
    But this wasn’t what she thought
it
was. They would go back to his place and he would smoke a joint and then they would end up in bed. He’d go mad for her in the hold-ups
and heels. In the morning he’d be as excited as she was about the Red House.
    ‘This isn’t the right place.’
    ‘For what?’ The question was out of her mouth before she could snatch it back. Her declaration was spring-loaded with provocation.
That will just make it easy for him.
    And it did. ‘I’ve been thinking. About this. Us. Fuck, this is hard.’ He started to smile as if he needed encouragement and sympathy from her to do what he was about to do.
‘You look gorgeous tonight, but . . . I have to go through with this. Sorry. I’m so, so sorry. The last thing I wanted to do was upset you after . . . you know. But I can’t keep
it up any more. I’m just so fucking miserable. I can’t do it. Us. I’m sorry.’
    And then he stood up and quickly walked across the dining room with his head lowered. Briefly, he paused to let someone enter the pub, and then almost fell out of the door in his haste to get
away from her.

 
THIRTEEN
    While Mike spoke, Catherine was sure the room had fallen silent. But now cutlery chimed and the PA system played something she once recognized but couldn’t identify now.
In the distance someone said, ‘a new till roll’, but their voice seemed too loud around her head.
    Catherine sucked in her breath and tried not to be sick into her lap.
    ‘You’ll be lucky,’ someone else said, but their face was fuzzy and indistinct.
    The room lurched like a ship in a gale, then righted, was solid and stable again. But it looked different. It was really bright now, clinically lit. She couldn’t lift her hands, she was
paralysed. And momentarily she thought she was sitting really close to the opposite wall and staring into its white painted surface. Then her vision seemed to retract across the room to her chair.
She could not swallow. Her jaw was so heavy. Her mouth was open.
    There was nothing but panic recognizable in the maelstrom inside her, faint but coming fast from the distance towards her conscious mind. Thin white hands were slapping around the walls of her
skull. She heard herself make the sound of a sob and thought she was sliding off her chair.
    She held onto the table and into her mind came a memory of her inability to breathe when Mike called her after so many years of silence. And she recalled the ever-expanding light and joy from
her heart that smothered and concealed everything else because the rest of the world no longer mattered when he came down to London to meet her. She saw snapshots of their weekend in Barcelona,
being drunk on the beach in Minehead, dressing up as a pony girl and jockey for a New Year’s Eve party, sex in a borrowed tent in the Lake District, a Latitude festival, the pregnancy test,
them sitting side by side on top of the Worcester Beacon and deciding
to go for it.
All of this flashed through her, life with him as it ended. And she knew that she was more in love with
him at the very instant he left her than she had ever been before. The critical point. He’d walked out at the very peak of her intensity. The damage he had just done could not have been more
severe if they had been together for another ten years before this scene occurred.
    Permanent damage.
    The waitress was whispering to the youth behind the bar. They were looking at her. Everybody was. She fumbled with fingers made from wood. Tears came off her chin and splashed against the back
of her hands.
Never coming here again.
Idiot thoughts came and went. She still couldn’t swallow. She was stoppered and stuck inside, nothing was moving. There was a cold pain inside
her stomach too now, like a cramp.