Shut up.
Hypocrite.
I stepped back from the door.
If I knocked and I got no response, I’d have to break the door down. I didn’t want to break the door down. I didn’t even know if I could. Especially in my hungover state. Also, just because she didn’t respond didn’t mean she was lying on the floor of her basement with an axe wound in her face. There was every chance she’d left the house early. Yes, gone into town for a restorative fry-up at one of the pubs. Or perhaps she’d never made it home. Maybe she’d got lucky and copped off with someone else for the night.
I remembered her awkward stance, her lank hair and strange expressions. Not to mention that weird grin. It didn’t feel likely to me that she’d got laid.
I scratched the back of my sweating, itching neck
Better to wait. Yes. Wait and see if my neighbour emerged or returned home.
I went back inside.
It was deathly quiet without the sound of her rummaging about next door. I tidied the splintered wood into the boiler and set it going. Once the water had a chance to heat up, I went upstairs and washed last night off my hair and skin, hoping it would help give me some clarity or soften the churning in my gut. It did neither, but I felt cleaner. In body at least.
I threw my ruined Aran jumper into the ancient washing machine in the kitchen, only to remember that I hadn’t bought any washing tabs yet. I didn’t have the headspace to worry about that right now. I’d sort it later.
As my hair dried, the cool humidity rediscovered my skin, replacing the post-drink sweat with a sticky gleam. I sat wrapped in my towel on the living room windowsill and watched the driveway.
No one left. No one came.
I checked my phone. No notifications. No emails. No calls. No sound from next door. The house beside me stood silent. The house around me stood silent, too. The sun was hidden behind thick grey clouds, so I couldn’t tell whether it was morning or midday or afternoon or evening. Everything was still, so very still. Not like in a sense of waiting, but in a sense of there being nothing to wait for. There would never be anything to wait for ever again. That this was existence now: sitting in this house, watching out the window, until the dark came.
I checked the time again. It had been an hour. She could still be out.
Or she could be lying on the floor of her basement with an axe wound in her face.
I stood up. I should call the police.
And say what? ‘Excuse me, officer, but I think I hallucinated that I brutally murdered my neighbour with an axe and now she’s not answering her door. Can you go in and check she’s alright?’
I could already see the sideways looks, the concerned conversations, the gentle suggestion that perhaps I should speak to someone.
Or they could go inside her house and find her lying on the floor of her basement with an axe wound in her face.
A trembling grew in my limbs. My hands fidgeted in an attempt to release the uncomfortable build-up of energy, but it was no good. My stomach cramped and my thoughts darted about my skull as if each one was a bee and my head was an angry hive. I ran from the window and threw up into the kitchen sink.
Too much drinking.
It always did this to me. I was never any good at it. Now it was filling my head with awful visions and paranoia. No more alcohol. I’d stick to cranberry juice and everything would be fine.
Would it?
I leant on the sink and wiped my mouth.
If you’re not going to knock and you’re not going to break down the door and you’re not going to phone the police, then what exactly are you going to do?
I pushed myself up.
My neighbour was just out for breakfast or visiting a friend or doing her shopping or a million and one more likely things than lying dead in her basement.
I would go into the village, find her and then everything would be fine.
CHAPTER 19
I put on fresh clothes, grabbed my key and left.
