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“And maybe, Flor, for your own good, you should draw a line under him. For what it’s worth, I think you’ve done the right thing by rescuing him, but now it’s time to move on. Remember, he knows where you live if he ever wants to find you.”
An ugly sob escaped. “I don’t know if I can do that.”
“I know you don’t, but you will. It’s the right thing. He will come back here if he wants to, when he’s well. But you can’t mope around waiting for that. It might never happen. And he… he might be a changed person the other side of this.”
“I love him, Nic. Out of nowhere, I wasn’t even looking, and wham!”
“That’s how love works, Flor. Look at Jerome. It finds you when you’re least expecting it, with the person you’re least expecting. And sometimes it doesn’t work out. We’ll get you through this, I promise.”
Lovesickness wasn’t a valid excuse for unpaid bills. Taking Nico’s advice, I dragged myself out of bed the next morning and went back to work. After all, when your dreams came untrue, what else was left? Somewhere in London, in a hospital, a sick man lived through an indescribable nightmare, and I couldn’t dwell on that right now. He was in a good place. And I had salt to harvest and a cooperative to run.
Before I left, I made Papi’s breakfast. An ominous overcast sky darkened the kitchen. No breeze either. That figured. Shit salt weather. Even the goldfinches had flown.
Papi sat in his favourite chair, accepting my reassurance that his clothes were his own with less aplomb than usual. He chewed through his coffee-soaked bread more quietly, too. I wondered if somewhere in his addled mind he recalled my unpleasantness of last night.
“What are your plans for today?” I asked.
“Not much. The usual. The diary says I’m playing boules with Paul at four. I’ll wander down and say hello to Beatrice afterwards, if the rain holds off.”
With a bowed head, he concentrated on eating. A tuft of white hair stuck up in a different direction to the rest, where he’d missed it with the old-fashioned gloop he used to stick it down. Reaching out a hand, I smoothed it flat for him.
“That’s nice,” I managed. “Say… say hello to her from me, won’t you?”
He nodded and swallowed. “I do every day. She likes hearing about you. She’s ever so proud of you leading the cooperative. We both are.”
We weren’t much for physical affection with one another, but I patted his hand. It distracted me from the huge fucking lump in my throat, which I blamed on too little sleep and a torrid twenty-four hours. Papi didn’t notice anything amiss. He tore off another strip of stale bread and dipped it in his coffee.
“Good salt weather, isn’t it?”
I stirred my coffee. “It is.”
CHAPTER 29
CHARLES
I hadn’t envisaged fighting this battle more than once, but here we were again. How did you wake up from a nightmare when you were not even asleep?
I’d properly thrown myself into La La Land this time—the episode earlier this year had been nothing more than a warmup for the main event. Then I’d been skating on thin ice, now I was submerged under and thousands of miles from a blow hole. For a couple of weeks, I even believed I was one of them. A demon shadow. A cockroach, the physical embodiment of filth. Erratic, fast-moving, catching folk out, delighting in exposing to everyone the futility of their fortresses. And then, in a flash, I switched to a speeding train, hurtling through a narrow black tunnel, all the stations whizzing by in a blur. Florian stood at one, waving to me. We didn’t stop. My mother tried to flag us down at another. We didn’t stop. And for hours, days, weeks on end, I braced to crash.
Don’t get me wrong, losing control of my mind was terrifying, but so much fucking worse were the lucid moments, the bright spots of awakening when I realised where I was and how I’d landed there. Because the clarity only served to underline my insanity. At least I’d managed not to kill myself. And, I was later told, I had Florian to thank for that.
After four weeks, Marcus was allowed to visit. He filled me in on a few details. Thanks to the right balance of medication, my paranoia had, by and large, receded, leaving me with a dull ache of low mood and on suicide watch, although everyone pretended I wasn’t. Frankly, I couldn’t muster the energy to kill myself and what was even more bizarre, I didn’t especially want to.
“Good to see you on the up, old chap. What’s the food like in here? Any good? It should be, this place is costing enough.”
“Possibly.”
I pushed a box of chocolates over to him. Any calories were good calories at this stage, according to my nurse. As long as I regained strength. “Have my share, too.”
I watched him, a man I realised I didn’t know at all, rifle through the top layer and then the bottom, hunting for his favourite variety. Having located it, he picked out all the matching ones from both layers. Anyone on the ward with a penchant for hazelnut swirls was in for a disappointment. He popped one in his mouth, loudly crunching the nut.
“Wife’s left me. Shagging one of the kid’s teachers apparently.” He swallowed and picked up the next chocolate. “Good luck to him; he’ll need it, the poor sod.”
“Sorry to hear that, Marcus.” Sounded like an appropriate response. My muzzy brain was a little out of practice.
“She’s not getting the house, that’s for sure. Nor the Bugatti. The divorce is going to cost me a bloody fortune.”
This morning, my daily conversation with my therapist had ventured onto the topic of my future. Only in vague terms, because orange still had a tendency to flare up whenever I was expected to make any kind of definitive choices. At breakfast however, I’d selected Weetabix without a hint of anxiety, which she’d praised. Like I was a fucking toddler. Anyhow, my homework for the next few days was to create two lists. Not to think about it too much, but to write on one list all the people and things that I liked. It, or they, could be something as mundane as a particular breed of dog, or Granny Smith apples, or as esoteric as Dadaism. So far, the list had Florian’s name at the top and the words silver and salt underlined below.
