I nodded. “Maybe. Maybe not.”
“You can do this.” But he didn’t sound entirely sure, and this unnerved me.
I went back to the door and turned the key. It clicked, I paused and then pushed . . .
CHAPTER 31
The door swung open, revealing a dark passage in front of me. It was so dark, it seemed abandoned and dead. I shivered as I took my first step inside. It was cold in here too. Instinctively, I reached for a spot on the wall and found the light switch. I flicked it on and the passage brightened, but it didn’t spring to life. Those were two very different things, as I quickly discovered.
The passage still looked dead; the only difference was that now that death was lit up. I walked down the dead passage and scanned the walls as I went. Their emptiness and starkness not only struck me as odd but left me feeling utterly cold. The walls lacked life, color, clutter or any mark that told you that a person lived here. I looked down at my feet. Two white envelopes with my name on the front lay there. I bent down and picked them up.
“Where are you? Get hold of me. Eugene,” the first one read. And the second: “Where are you? I can’t find you, I need to speak to you. Eugene.”
I looked up at Noah and waved the letters. “From Eugene, the guy that filed the missing person report.” I stood up and walked down the passage. It ended in a small living room. I reached up and laid my fingertips on the light switch. The act had a familiarity to it, as if my muscles remembered doing it, even if my head didn’t. But when the lights went on, when everything in front of me was illuminated, I took a step back in shock as I stared into the space in front of me.
Beige.
That was the only way to describe it. Not white, not brown, not even cream. But this strange in-between nothing color that covered absolutely everything. Covered the floor. The curtains, the furniture.Surely this wasn’t where I lived?I could not live here. There was no way I lived here. I liked pink and purple and shine and pattern, and everything about this place was the antithesis of that. It was cold, boring, clinical even. Which surprised me even more, because it had become clear to me that I hated hospitals.
“This can’t be where I live,” I said.
Noah shook his head in what could only be disbelief. He ran his eyes over me, looking at my clothes and then at the room. He glanced between me and the room and back again.
“The key fits in the lock, right?” I asked the question even though it was a stupid one and, clearly, I knew the answer to it already or else we wouldn’t be standing here inside the strange beige dead place. I took a few steps into the living room. I’d never seen anything so neat, so precise, so perfect, so surgical in my entire life. Even more so than the hospital. There was hardly any furniture in the room either. Other than the beige couch and a small coffee table. Oh look, a pop of color! A single brown scatter cushion on the couch. All the remote controls were lined up perfectly on the table, a couple of magazines, a book, all in a straight line. As if someone had taken a ruler and made sure everything was just so!
I couldn’t live here, could I?
I started scanning the walls again for pictures, photos to confirm that I was indeed the owner of this place, but again, nothing. No evidence pointing towards the fact that I was the person that lived here. Who didn’t have any photos on their walls? Any pictures?
I walked into the open plan kitchen area. White countertops sparkled and gleamed back at me, as if they had been recently cleaned. A long row of cleaning products, anti-bacterial wipes and anti-bacterial sprays were the only flashes of color in the entire place. Bottles of blue, pink, orange and green were the only things that looked alive around here. How ironic that the only living-looking things were the things designed to kill.
“You’re neat,” Noah commented.
“Apparently,” I mumbled.
“I . . . would never have guessed,” he said quietly.
“Me neither.” Noah was staring at the cleaning products, and I could see he was trying to reconcile these things with the person in front of him. Hell, I was. Up until ten minutes ago I was sure I was the girl that left the lid off the toothpaste and a dirty dish or two in the sink. I made a mess in the kitchen when I tried to cook. That was me, not this . . .
I picked up one of the bottles of disinfectant. “Kills 99% of all known bacteria and germs.” I put it back down on the countertop and walked over to the fridge, wondering what surprises would greet me there. I was expecting spices and chilis, coffee, chocolate and Coke and all those things that burst with flavor that IknewI loved. But there was nothing in the fridge other than a row of neat water bottles. One carton of soy milk, seven green apples and half a bag of sugar-free gummies. I opened the freezer and there, to my absolute surprise, were rows and rows of neatly stacked ready meals. I pulled one out and looked at it. Chicken breast. Brown rice. Broccoli. Organic, antibiotic free, allergen free, Non-GMO and dairy-free. I turned the box over and read the ingredients; there were no spices in this whatsoever. Nothing to give this plain lump of chicken meat and veg any flavor whatsoever. I reached in and took out another frozen meal . . . chicken. I took out another one, chicken again. And another one . . . also chicken!
“This is all I eat?” It was a question that I was posing to myself. To a myself that I didn’t know at all. “Is this what I eat every single day?” This looked like the blandest meal on the planet. This looked like, if someone had to deliberately go out of their way and intentionally try to create the world’s most tasteless meal, this would be it. And I ate it. And clearly I ate a lot of it.
I dropped the frozen boxes on the counter. They hit it with a loud bang. One dropped to the floor and I kicked it out the way with my foot, a spark of anger igniting in me. I grabbed at the other kitchen cupboards and started flinging them open. Two boxes of All Bran Flakes—that was it. I opened another cupboard and found four sugar-free protein bars. Vanilla flavor.
“What’s . . . what’s . . . how . . .” I stuttered, and slammed the kitchen cupboards and rushed out of the kitchen to the door I’d seen at the other end of the lounge. I opened it, flicked the lights on and as soon as it was all illuminated my fears were yet again confirmed and a terrible feeling started growing deep inside my belly.
CHAPTER 32
Beige. White. Only a bed. Single bed. One pillow. A side table with a bottle of disinfectant spray. I scanned the walls again for something, anything, that told me there was life here. That anyone with any kind of life had once been here. But the walls were as dead and cold as a mortician’s slab. I walked inside and pushed open the door to the en suite bathroom. And once again, I walked into a white tomb. This was a place where people came to die. Where personalities came to die. This place was like a vortex that sucked life out of things. I looked at myself in the bathroom mirror. This colorful thing reflected back at me in this clinical room. The two pictures side by side like this were a complete oxymoron.
That feeling in my belly grew. . .
The colorful version of myself had no place here. The version Andi had told me about, and I was convinced I was. It didn’t belong here. Itcouldn’tbelong here.Icouldn’t belong here. I caught Noah looking at me in the mirror. He had a look smeared across his face. The look was hard to truly understand. It seemed to be a mixture of so many things that it would take me ages to pull it all apart. But at the very top of it, the core, the one I could see most clearly, was concern.
This was confirmed seconds later when he asked me how I was feeling. I spun around and faced him in the small, white bathroom. I shook my head. That was all I could do. I don’t think I was able to put words to the feelings I was experiencing right now.How could I have been so wrong about something like this?Something so fundamental, like who I really was. I’d been convinced that in the last few days I’d managed to piece parts of myself together, but it was clear from this place that I’d been sorely mistaken. The picture I’d had of myself had been utterly incorrect. Fundamentally wrong.
The feeling in my belly twisted and thrashed as if it were alive. . .
