4 Coffees, 12 Months

12: Eve and the Dark Corners

Eve, March, week 3

A drumming noise was breaking the squeaky quietness in a drilling staccato, rapping over the sound of doors being pushed open and calloused fingers tapping on a keyboard. The  owner of the fingers, a young man in a blue apron, glared at me over the reception desk, and I realised that the drumming noise was me, nails rapping against the edge of the hard-backed chair I was sitting on. Dropping my eyes to my shaky fingers, I made myself pick up the cold cup of coffee by my side and take a sip, sinking back into the waiting chair uneasily.

To think that, at one point in the day, I had been laughing so hard I could barely breathe, my state of affairs seemed not only to have derailed, but crashed and burned and taken any good spirits with them.

The lights in the waiting room were fluorescent, but everything from the night outside to my breathing felt dark, regardless. I had grown used to that feeling; it felt like there were demons waiting for me at every corner these days, hiding behind sunshine that lured me into a false sense of security and made my reality hurt so much more when I stumbled back into the shade. The rope-y bracelet hanging from my wrist - the most precious artifact I owned in this world, with all its matted fabric and droopiness - provided a reassuring pressure against my pulse. I closed my eyes and took several deep breaths, sifting through the day’s events, grasping for a place to escape to that didn’t stink of disinfectant.

The morning had begun with a bus journey. I sat on the bus to Sebastian’s house, staring out of the window and seeing nothing but a pair of bright, cornflower blue eyes, unusually solemn, the skin around them unnaturally pale and smooth from the drugs being pumped along the blood vessels beneath. Thoughts of Auntie Lisa accompanied me as the bus rolled up to a roundabout.

Other than a brief encounter in the coffee shop during which we arranged the Saturday meet-up I was now bumping along the road towards, Sebastian had been off my radar since his birthday. First on the agenda were leaflets and cupcakes; Peggy had drawn us a sketch of some flyer ideas, and I tried not to widen my eyes at the way her hand so fluidly marked the paper, every granite sweep a mark of confidence. Sebastian seemed unsurprised - although, there was a closeness between him and Peggy that I was sure I didn’t fully understand.

My laptop and a box of eggs sat by my feet - the latter of which was giving me heart palpitations every the bus turned a sharp corner - my notebook rested open on my knees, a pen balancing on the page in the middle of a sentence. Writing an album review had fallen by the wayside whilst I obsessed over the one conversation that had stolen my sleep the night before.

Yesterday I had visited Auntie Lisa, and beyond the usual gingerbread comments and typical teasing, she had produced a small stack of CDs and passed them to me, her shallow breath catching with the effort of lifting them. Weak sunshine had poured through the window, playing on her face faintly, barely touching where her eyelashes used to be, whilst the machine that kept her breathing purred contentedly behind her armchair. Frustratingly for me, the bare minimum of palliative care was all she would accept now, and that knowledge hung miserably in my mother’s eyes every time she answered the landline phone.

“I was thinking you could do some album reviews for your blog,” Auntie Lisa explained as I took the CDs from her. According to the doctors, she was clinically depressed, and I couldn‘t help but wonder why that needed to be diagnosed. Auntie Lisa was a young woman with a brain like a motorway dying of lung cancer, and for some reason, the fact that she wasn‘t dancing around to carnival music over it was worthy of medical attention. “It’d be good practice for the music night, wouldn’t it? There’s a mixture in there, some of them are my old favourites, but a couple only came out last month.”

“Yeah, great idea,” I beamed, sliding through the CDs. “Thanks, Auntie Lisa! I’ll bring them back next week.”

“No,” she said sharply, and I froze, slightly startled. “I want you to have them.”