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“The first thing to tell you is that after my mother committed suicide, I went straight back to work. She died on a Friday, and I was back in the office on Monday.”
“Why the hell did you do that?”
He took a long steadying breath. “It’s a very good question. My counsellor has since suggested I may have… ah… discounted the depth of my grief.”
Mon dieu, that was one way of describing it.
“He thought that I didn’t believe I deserved to… indulge myself, especially as I lived with the same condition. That I was scared I had the same weakness and would follow in her footsteps if I acknowledged my worries. And ultimately, that I was still in shock and not thinking clearly, too.”
Never mind the counsellor’s opinion. “What did you think?”
He hummed, the sound rumbling on my chest. “Now I’m mostly recovered, I have a lot of guilt that I was too busy, too wrapped up in work to recognise how ill she had become. Which is a fairly normal grief response, apparently.”
That made sense, although perhaps some parents tried to hide frailties and illnesses from their children, even grown-up ones, so they didn’t worry.
“Ultimately, I think my brain elected to miss out all the well-documented, understandable stages of grief—like denial and anger, and guilt that I could have done more, and go straight to acceptance. So that I could carry on as normal, avoiding processing not just her death but my belief in my own dire prognosis.”
He gave a humourless laugh. “I found out the hard way that if you ignore your body’s signals, it will take matters into its own hands.”
I remembered back to when my grandmother had died and my mother being unable to function properly for weeks. As though she were sleepwalking through the days. But my grandmother had been an ill old lady—her death had been expected and prepared for; losing an elderly parent was the usual order of things, no matter how sad at the time. Charles’s mother must have only been in her sixties, and her death had been horribly sudden, not to mention somewhat gruesome. “What happened?”
He blew out a long breath; it floated across my chest. “The official diagnosis was acute paranoid psychosis precipitated by a delayed grief reaction, secondary to resistant fixed beliefs. Which is a bit of a mouthful.” Another deep breath. I sensed this was a story he would never become used to retelling.
“I started seeing dark shadows in my head. In the beginning, it only happened at night when I couldn’t sleep. I recognised I was feeling low, because greys and blacks have always signified that. Not that I made any changes to accommodate how I felt, I just waited for it to pass. But then somehow, the shadows took on a meaning, almost like they represented some kind of creature, insects generally. And then I became fixated on the stupid idea that they were insects, and not just dark, formless colours in my head—I was sleeping very badly at this point, only a couple of hours a night. Swiftly after that, I convinced myself they were making themselves a cosy nest in the corner of the bedroom. Don’t ask me why my mind chose insects, by the way. I’ve no fucking idea. I wasn’t even particularly scared of creepy crawlies prior to that. If there’s a big spider in your bathtub, then I’m generally your go-to man.”
I should have found some comforting words, but I was too stunned. And possessed zero counselling skills. Instead, I waited for him to continue, staring at the dawn light creeping across the ceiling and concentrating on running my fingers through his fine hair as he found the strength to carry on.
“At first, I rationalised during daylight hours that the dark shadows weren’t real, they were just my colours looming a little larger than usual, and that I was overtired and stressed. I was working on a big project with Marcus, and I had a deadline to meet. I told myself that if I didn’t think about my mother or her death, and just ploughed on at work, then the colours would bugger off. And they did, for about a week or so.”
“Then what?”
He lifted his head to look at me, with a glimmer of a smile. “Are you sure you want to hear all this? Are you still here for all of it? You might be anxious about being alone with me by the end.”
On the contrary, I was beginning to think I wanted to be with alone with him more, if only to stroke his soft hair.
“I went to visit a client down on Canary Wharf—a part of London backing onto the River Thames. By the side of the pavement, I spotted what, in retrospect, was probably a real, live cockroach, although they aren’t especially common in the UK. I was taking a shortcut behind a restaurant, and I’ve since discovered that they tend to congregate around warm kitchens and large heating ducts. Usually, I’d have given a little shudder and carried on, like most people would. But it frightened me to death, because the shadows and grey-coloured shapes had only ever appeared in my room. Then, that night I was joined not only by the shapes, but I started to believe I could hear them scratching under the bed too.”
“Did you tell anyone?”
“God, no. They’d have all thought I was stark raving mad.” He barked out a laugh. “There’s the irony.”
I moved my hand from his head and began a slow sweep up and down his narrow back, my fingers drifting lower to the sweet hollow where it curved into the swell of his buttocks and back up again. He’d relaxed, his voice a little sleepier, the tension eased from his limbs. Who had held him close before me? And how long ago? Maybe I’d never be able to find the right words, but at least I could offer him this.
“To cut a long story short,” he continued, “I began seeing them everywhere. At my desk. On the Tube. In the queue at the supermarket. Out of the corner of my eye, I’d catch a grey blob scuttling away. I couldn’t concentrate on anything, and it got to the point I was petrified to close my eyes for even a second in case one appeared. A group of cockroaches is known as an intrusion, by the way. I found that out later. Whoever came up with that was a fucking genius, it couldn’t be more accurate.”
He yawned widely and I planted a kiss on the top of his head. “Anyhow, everything came to a peak when I locked a man, a very important client, in a cupboard chock full of grey blobs because he was pissing me off. I was scared, exhausted, turning more and more bonkers by the second, and, out of nowhere, I saw red. Bright, angry red. Metaphorically, and, unfortunately for him, literally. Which was the point at which my business partner, Marcus, realised I wasn’t quite my usual calm, debonair self and… um… here we are.”
I let out a snort of laughter. I couldn’t help it. Thank fuck, Charles’s shoulders began to shake too.
“There weren’t actually any creatures in the cupboard, obviously,” he qualified, “That part was all in my head. But the client was very, very real. And pretty fucking annoyed.”
I bet.
CHAPTER 17
CHARLES
I woke to bright sunlight and the chatter of tourists cycling up and down the venelle, feeling more rested than I ever imagined I would again. The other side of the bed was cold and empty; Florian had warned me he’d sneak out early to prepare his grandfather’s breakfast and then, of course, he had salt to harvest.
