Dying to Live

Chapter 10 - Late Night Phone Calls

London

Before Thailand

Why are phone calls which come in the middle of the night so frightening and intimidating? I guess part of the reason is you never get good news at three o'clock in the morning. No one phones you at three o'clock to say they've bought a new car. No one phones you at three o'clock to say you've won the lottery.

Hazel was staying over, just like every other night for the last week and a half. I still couldn't understand why we weren't living over at her place. My place was a bit of a tip and there seemed little point in paying for two flats when we only needed one. I'd just paid the next month's rent which had made a big dent in the little money I had left.

Her phone was in her bag but despite the Louis Vuitton soundproofing, her 'Don't Stop Me Now' ringtone woke both of us. She knew straight away it was her phone whereas I thought for a split second that I'd wakened up in a nineties-era disco... which wouldn't have been the first time that had happened to me. The mind can play funny tricks on you when you're halfway between a deep sleep and the land of the living.

"Hello?"

I tried to work out from the look on her face what was going on. When the tears started rolling down her cheeks, I got the impression all was not well. I'm intuitive like that... years of reading Cosmo at the dentist's.

"What? You said you had it. You promised."

I leaned closer to Hazel, trying to pick up the other side of the conversation. She pushed me away and continued her conversation.

"If I don't turn up he'll go crazy," she sobbed. "No. No." Pause. "Hello. Hello?"

"What the hell was all that about?" I asked once she'd hung up.

"Nothing. Please just leave it."

"What? You can't expect me to just 'leave it' when you've had a call like that in the middle of the night. Tell me what's going on."

"I can't, Dave" she said as she climbed out of bed. "Trust me, it's better if you don't know."

She looked good naked. I watched her wriggle into her panties. She could take my mind off the matter in hand without even trying. Although, to be fair she'd put my mind onto the matter that I now had in my hand.

"Shit. Where's my bra?"

She stomped around the room chucking clothes in the air to see what was under them. In my limited experience, bras were always under something. Eventually she found it, under the bed cover we'd pushed onto the floor.

"Hazel, please talk to me. Maybe I can help."

"No one can help me," she said. She finished dressing and made for the door.

"It's three o'clock in the morning."

"I have to go. I'll call you."

And she was gone, the bang of the front door slamming confirmed it. A nauseous sickness engulfed me so I stumbled to the bathroom and started to rifle through the little plastic bottles of pills which lived in the cabinet. Nausea pills, which ones were the nausea pills? One bottle seemed to ring a bell but it was too dark to read the label. I swallowed three of the pills in the knowledge that they'd cure my nausea, or they'd tackle some ailment I didn't have, like diarrhoea or a head cold or the nasty infection I'd had about a year earlier.

I shuffled back to bed, snuggled under the sheet and wondered what had just happened.

Something woke me five hours later and it certainly wasn't the sunshine. It was dull, damp and miserable outside, which pretty much reflected my mood. It didn't matter what had wakened me, all I wanted to do was talk to Hazel. It took a few minutes for me to come to and find my phone. I dialled her number.