Free The Devil I Know by Claire Kilroy

trolley, and wheeled to some senior functionary’s desk, where it was stacked with the certificates of the other souls awaiting the authorisation to be dispatched. I was dying for a drink.
    When I did not answer, M. Deauville repeated his question. ‘Do you wish to die?’
    â€˜No,’ I wheezed down the line. ‘No, I don’t wish to die.’
    Tocka tocka in the background – what was that strange noise? ‘Good. Go back to your hotel room,’ he instructed me. ‘I have called you a car. You will find it waiting by the hospital entrance.’
    I wheeled around. A man in a suit was standing by a black Mercedes, holding a sign which bore my name.
    â€˜I will call back when you have checked in.’
    â€˜Wait.’ I didn’t have M. Deauville’s number, but he had already hung up.
    *
    I have been here before. That was my first thought when I entered the hotel room. I took off my jacket and shoes and lay on my back on the bed. Was this the room? I couldn’t tell if it was the same room in which I had almost killed myself because they are all the same room. They are all hell. You cannot imagine the depth of the hole into which I had dug myself. At least, I hope you can’t. I leapt up and sprang across the room and wrenched open the minibar. It was empty. Everything was empty. I looked at the ceiling and moaned. And then M. Deauville called.
    *
    We were like lovers. We were holed up in that one room together for days on end like lovers, talking the long hours away. We shut the rest of the world out since the equilibrium we had chanced upon was so very fragile. At least, it was so very fragile to me. I was terrified of upsetting the balance, having spent my life upsetting the balance. But M. Deauville assured me that there was no such thing as a pattern that could not be broken.
    I had my meals sent up and I deposited the emptied trays out in the corridor. Housekeeping exchanged old towels for new at the door and replenished my stock of sparkling water. I did crunches and press-ups in front of the window and kept to my fourteen-by-twelve cell. For the first time since hitting his teens, Tristram St Lawrence was sober. I had broken my mother’s heart. With a racing pulse I picked up the phone. ‘Tristram,’ she gasped, ‘the Guards told me you were dead!’ I had not heard her voice in years. Too ashamed to call or show my face. ‘It’s okay, Mummy, I’m still alive!’ I was crying. So was she. I promised to come home but the connection went dead and my pledges vanished into the ether. I later discovered that she passed away the following day. It was probably for the best that I did not know this at the time. The news would have finished me.
    Did I go to her? Why ask me that question, Fergus? Here, in front of all of these people? You were at my mother’s funeral and you know well that I wasn’t.
    M. Deauville rang at the moments when I felt weak, and there were no moments when I felt strong. He had to check in with me day and night. I could not be left to my own devices for long. When I felt I couldn’t cope a second longer and had reached for the hotel phone to dial room service to order up a drink, on cue, my mobile would ring. It was as if he could read my mind. It takes one to know one, I suppose. I’d put down one phone to answer the other, overcome with gratitude tinged with resentment and the inevitable and apparently endless flood of shame.
    Once I started talking to M. Deauville, I found I couldn’t stop. It all came pouring out. I bared my soul to the man, revealed its shrivelled dimensions, allowed him to gauge its clotted heft, or what was left of it. He appeared genuinely concerned for its fate, wretch slab of offal that it was, as pitted and honeycombed as a consumptive lung. He accepted the sorry state of it and did not condemn me, but instead listened patiently as I droned on. I owed him my life. It was