Free The Bed I Made by Lucie Whitehouse Page B

if they did feel better with him than anyone else. Our telephone calls, though, were unique; no one else could have had the exact same conversations. When he called me late at night, I had the sense that our voices were cocooned in the darkness, our two spots on the earth’s crust illuminated by the connection between us. But the calls did nothing to stave off my physical longing for him – the opposite, in fact. I craved him. Sometimes when he was away, I imagined him so vividly that I thought I could smell him, the traces of rosemary soap on his skin, the human warmth underneath. I ached to kiss him, unbutton his shirt, put my hands on him.
    About three months after we met, he rang from Spain. It was two o’clock in the morning and though I was in bed, I was awake, reading. I’d hoped that he might call and had the phone on the bedside table. I said hello, hearing myself smile.
    ‘Hello, Katie.’
    ‘Is everything all right? You sound . . .’
    ‘I’m a bit drunk. OK – I’m missing you, I admit it. I hold up my hands. Tell me, that game you were talking about – do I stand a chance of winning?’
    I felt my heart lift. ‘Well, I don’t know. It sounds to me like I’m winning,’ I said, with the bravado that was getting harder to fake the stronger my feelings for him became. ‘You’d better watch out in case it’s you that ends up giving yourself to me.’
    I heard him take a sip of a drink, the ice cubes chinking against his glass, and then a laugh full of pleasure. ‘Oh, I miss you,’ he groaned. ‘Why aren’t you here? I want to fuck you so badly.’
     
    In the bath the following day I lay motionless and let the water settle so the only movement was a trembling across its surface as I breathed. I thought about what would happen if I died. How long would my body be here before anyone came looking for me? It could be weeks. The ends of my hair floated on the surface. Had Alice Frewin thought like this? Had she imagined the boats out looking for her, finding her body? Had she hesitated at the last minute, trod water trying to keep her face above the freezing waves, spitting out mouthfuls of salt water, or had she dived in, dug her way deeper and deeper down into the darkness until the weight above her started to crush the air from her lungs?
    I stayed in the bath until the water was cold. The phone hadn’t rung since Richard’s email, I realised, three days before. I had cut myself off from him, run from him in horror, but somehow he had reversed the situation so that now I felt as though it were him who had severed contact. True to his word, he’d gone. He’d left me alone.
     
    The day after that, I had to go out. There was nothing left to eat. I wasn’t sure how many days it had been since I’d left the house – three? four? – but it seemed an incredible idea: inside, there was structure; outside, anything might happen. I had no choice, though. Talking myself through the actions, I put my long coat on over my T-shirt and found my ankle boots. My purse and the key were still on the counter from the last time. I took a deep breath and opened the door.
    A strong wind was blowing, funnelling down the passage and biting at my bare legs. I put my hands on my thighs to stop my coat flying up. In the Square, against the cloudless petrol blue of the evening sky, everything seemed supernaturally bright, as if I had been wearing a blindfold which had now been removed. It all seemed so definite and beautiful but distant, too: alien.
    At the checkout at the corner shop I waited with mounting impatience while the assistant, a woman with salt-and-pepper hair and round eyes that almost closed when she smiled, slowly scanned and packed the food. My hands were shaking with hunger as I took the notes out of my purse and when at last she gave me the change I dropped it and the coins rolled off in different directions, fleeing under the racks and spinning merrily away from me. I got down and scrabbled for