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“Ah,” said Coal, gamely sympathetic but also uncomprehending.
The night was too cold for me to be sweating. “I’m lost,” I told her. “I’m really… I’m so…lost.”
She made a thoughtful noise. “Well, if you want my advice…”
“Yes. Please.”
“Find yourself.”
She didn’t offer it as if it was a particularly significant insight. She did, however, seem to think it was simple. I uttered something that I needed to believe was a laugh. “I wouldn’t know—I don’t know where to start.”
“Try looking.”10
The line went dead. She hadn’t said goodbye, but as a general rule, she didn’t. She just moved onto the next thing. It was enviable, really. And I’d turned out less proficient at moving on to the next thing than I thought I was.
I put my phone in my pocket. The cold had become familiar somehow, a steady ache, like a broken heart. The towpath was reasonably straight, and I’d be able to tell the river by its relative lightness. I didn’t want to turn back—it would have meant either walking past Edwin’s house or retracing my steps to my parents’, both of which felt like a different flavour of failure right then—so I went on. Which turned out, as I could have anticipated, to be a very bad idea. It was possible some part of me wanted it to be.
I knew the way, but darkness smothered all the details of the world until it was freshly unfamiliar to me, its edges bleeding grey. Every step forward was a step off a precipice. It was oddly…untethering, driving me to the opposite edge of the path, where I kept catching myself on the branches of whatever trees and busheslined it. They ripped at the backs of my gloveless hands, something bare and thorny striking at my cheek.
This was silly. Even if I couldn’t see well, it was extremely unlikely that I’d end up in the water. It was just, between the time of year and the time of night, if I did…I wasn’t sure if I’d make it out again. I’d likely spend a couple of days being dragged along the bottom of the river as my flesh swelled and my skin sloughed off, fish nibbling at my eyes and fingers, until at last I bobbed back to the surface somewhere near Folly Bridge. Just a bloated, undifferentiated mass that my poor mum would have to identify from my teeth and tattoos and maybe one remaining shoe ironically adhered to my otherwise ruined body. “He never would wear sensible footwear,” Mum would say, crying. And, God, even in hypothetical death I was making a mess of other people’s lives.11
2
I found a bench by banging into it and sat down, putting my head into my hands. I’d come too far for going back to be worth it, which was—for better or worse and usually worse—typical of me. Though, if I went on, there was a chance the boathouses would light my way once I got to them. Morbid imaginings of death by drowning aside, I was sure I wasn’tactuallyin danger. The worst that was likely to happen was that I would arrive at Donnington Bridge more shaken than a simple journey down the towpath warranted. The problem was, my body didn’t like not being able to see and kept reacting as if it was under threat. In a way, I suppose, it was. I was staring straight into my future.
Rising abruptly, I turned on the torch on my phone and set off again. The light made less difference than I thought it would. Enough to locate my keys or retrieve something that had rolled under the sofa, but it stood no chance against real darkness, illuminating in shades of washed-out nothing the sliver of path directly in front of my feet. Probably I should not have quickened my pace, though I thought it was adrenaline, the flight part of fight-or-flightwhich has always been my instinct, rather than overconfidence. In any case, I tried to walk over a frozen puddle I should have walked around, the blue burnished soles of my turquoise-and-tobacco oxfords offering no resistance whatsoever, because of course they wouldn’t. With my phone in my hand, I couldn’t even snatch at the bushes for support. My legs flew out from under me, and I landed hard enough to break the ice. Hard enough also to hear an actualcrackfrom inside my foot. I was too shocked for pain. Too distracted by cold water soaking through my jeans and the sight of my phone skittering into the Thames, vanishing with a bathetic plop.12
Then I looked down and saw the way my ankle was twisted. Which turned my stomach in its absolute wrongness. I was still not quite in pain, even if the possibility of it was beating heavy wings inside my head. Not wanting to give myself time to change my mind, I grabbed my foot and pulled it back into position. There was another crack and a grinding of bone that made me almost throw up. Followed swiftly and inevitably by a terrible, throbbing sensation that made me shove my knuckles against my mouth to hold back a scream. At which point I remembered I was halfway down the towpath, completely alone, nobody to see me or hear me, or judge me or pity me. That it didn’t matter if I cried out or cursed or wept. That I didn’t need to fear my own pain.13
So I took my hand away, unleashing a weak and wavering “fuck” to the blank, black sky.
“Fuck,” I tried again, wanting—for my own sake—to sound less pathetic and not entirely succeeding.
So much for nobody to judge me. I was here, after all.
My hand was still wrapped around my ankle, mostly because I didn’t think I could bear seeing it flop around again. God, I hoped it wasn’t broken. Because without my phone, if it was, I was thoroughly screwed. Something I’d never been a fan of.
I cast my gaze first in the direction of Folly Bridge, then towards Donnington, trying to figure out which would be further to walk…hop…crawl, whatever I could do. Unfortunately, it was equally dark both ways. Story of my fucking life.
A strange, wild laugh broke from between my lips.
Nothing about this situation was funny: I was cold; I was hurt; I wasn’t sure how to get help. But suddenly all I could hear was Edwin’s voice. See upon his face the look of loving exasperation I had surrendered all right to. “Only you,” he was saying, “could make a d-drama out of going for a walk.”
The pain in my ankle wasn’t subsiding. If anything, it was digging in deeper, like an unwanted guest into your favourite armchair. And my thoughts—because of the adrenaline probably—felt too light for my head. As dizzy as dragonflies in summer. But I knew I couldn’t spend all night on the towpath. Any other time of year, I would probably have been stumbled over in the early hours of the morning by a jogger, a dog walker, a whole damn rowing team. On Christmas Day, though? It was unlikely I’d see anyone.
This, too, was typical of me. Finding ways to strand myself beyond rescue.
I was going to have to try walking. Which first meant trying to stand. Which turned out to be impossible.
There was nothing I could brace against, and my foot wouldn’tbear the slightest fraction of my weight. I barely made it to my knees before my vision flashed white. And then I was crumpled on the ground again, my breath rattling in my chest, tears freezing on my eyelashes. This was what you got when you threw away a beautiful life with a beautiful man. When you couldn’t even tell him why. When you used a woman you admired to ensure there’d be no going back. I was crying in a puddle, and it was hard to argue I didn’t deserve to be.
It was a moment of abject self-indulgence, one I wish I could have claimed responsibility for ending. Instead, I was interrupted by light sweeping across the towpath. Too much for my eyes to adjust to. I put a hand up protectively, but all I was able to make out was a shadow—looming like a monster upon the bedroom wall. Then the steady footfalls of someone approaching. And an intoxicating rush of warmth from a body leaning over me. Not monstrous in the slightest.
I squinted upwards, blinking like Icarus before the sun. “My foot,” I explained, in an undignified wail, “was pointing the wrong way.”
The stranger seemed to think about this. “That’s not a good situation for a foot.”
“And I dropped my phone in the river,” I continued.
