“It took me a bit to get it, but once I did,” she whistled, “you made this all so much easier for me.”
She gestured to herself.
“Look at me. Do I strike you as the thing you have no wish to be? I don’t annoy anyone. I don’t go around with that perma-scowl on my face. I’m not so fucking needy I send everyone running for the hills, like you do. I know how to start a conversation. I know how to make friends. I get invited to work drinks. I’m easy to know. I’m easy to like. I’m easy to understand. I’m not going to bristle at some stupid comment. I’m not going to hold offense or a grudge. I’m not going to force everyone to tiptoe around me. I don’t pull a weird face at perfectly fine jokes. I don’t look wounded whenever anyone else is hanging out and I’m not invited. I don’t have to be invited to every fucking thing. I don’t randomly blurt out uncomfortable details about my childhood. No one knows what my childhood was like. As far as they know it was completely normal because I have weekly calls with my loving, encouraging mum, and my dad, who just has to ask a million questions about anything I’m into because it’s the way he shows he cares. They know what job I have. They know where I live. They know what matters to me. I’m not such a fucking mystery to them. I don’t hide myself away. I don’t have to blame them for every annoying thing I do. I don’t force people into awful uncomfortable silences where they realise how fucked up I am. I don’t want to push needles into people’s eyes. And I don’t crush people’s hands in standing desks.”
She tilted her head.
“I wonder how many people had odds on you bringing a gun into the office, you fucking psychopath. ‘Oh God, not Tamsin again. Oh God, not this shit again. Oh, thank God she’s gone. Thank God she left before she decided to take her inability to be a person out on anyone else.’”
I watched her silently. I had no arguments, no rebuttal.
She stared at me, eyes sympathetic.
“You know the truth, right? Deep down, you’ve got to know,” she said. “I’m not your shadow. You are.”
CHAPTER 55
She was right. Ever since I’d hit her with the axe, she’d become everything I’d ever wanted to be. It was as if we’d switched somehow. Only I was still just me. That’s why I’d failed. I never stood a chance from the start.
The earth, black as night, swallowed up the walls of the basement.
And then there was nothing.
No house. No basement. Just me and her in the darkness at the heart of the hill.
“You have to remember, the place where you’re going, it’s just emptiness.”
My neighbour stood over me, dimly lit in the half-light of this strange place. Around us an unending void. Her eyes glittered.
“Wouldn’t it be better if you just, y’know”—she leaned closer to me—“didn’t exist?”
“There’s nothing there that you didn’t already know in the first place.”
It was me. I was the monster.
“Just unzip the costume and fade away,” she continued. “No more pretending. No more struggling. It’s not like you were doing a good job of it anyway.”
The void found the edges of my feet.
“Whether it’s fear or pain or sadness, it’s just what you brought into it.”
All of this pain, this loneliness. I’d brought it here.
I saw as the outline of my toes started to fade, felt the edging loss of sensation.
“It would be a relief, right?” Her eyes were wide, wide as her hungry mouth. “A relief for everyone. Even you.”
Wide in that way when you’ve lost all reason to pretend you’re whole and happy.
I knew those eyes. They were mine.
“Don’t you want this over already?” she said. “Isn’t this absolute hell?”
“Own it.”
I closed my eyes and took a deep breath.
“Yes,” I said. “This is hell.”
