Birth, Marriage and Death

Smiles and Sleeping Pills

Poppy

I took my mug of tea into the lounge and sat on the sofa, setting the mug on the coffee table just in front of me. Resting my elbows on my knees I put my head in my hands and closed my eyes. Although I felt slightly better than when I'd woken from the nightmare I was still shaky and nauseous, my heart still beating far too fast for comfort. I knew from recent experience that it would take a while for me to even begin to feel normal again.

Scenes from the nightmare flashed through my brain, bringing tears to my eyes and making my breath hitch in my chest. Since Alex had died I'd had nightmares almost every night. They didn't always make me cry out and scream, and they'd never made me sick with fear before, but they'd happened almost every time I'd gone to sleep.

The nightmares were mainly about Alex dying, but not always. Others featured baby animals being tortured and killed in horrible ways while I could only look on in horror as I screamed for help, and the one I'd had the night before had been of myself being held hostage in a burning building, desperately looking for a way to escape. They terrified me and it was getting to the stage where I was scared to go to sleep at night.

The nightmare I'd had just now was the most common, but it had been more horrific and graphic than it had been previously. In this one I was at Alex's house, much as I had been the day I'd found him, and like the day I found him I'd gone into his room to see if he was okay. He'd initially looked like he was sleeping but then as I stood by his bed wondering if I should wake him I looked down to see that both he and I were drenched in blood and I was holding a large knife in my hand, its blade dripping bright red. As I'd looked around in shock I'd seen more blood, splattering the walls, pooling on the floor, saturating everything. It was suddenly obvious that I'd killed him, stabbed him violently in his sleep and I'd dropped the knife, put my bloody hands over my face and screamed.

That had been when I'd woken, that was when I always woke. This time the dream had been so bloody and vivid that I'd had to shower away the sensation of Alex's blood on my skin and even now I didn't feel completely clean.

I picked up the tea and sipped it slowly, hoping it would help to calm me. It was good; Ricky was getting better at making tea. He never drank it himself and had made me a fair few horrible brews in the past, but finally he seemed to be getting the hang of how I liked it. Strong and dark with not too much milk. Builders tea, some would call it.

Draining the mug I got up and took it into the kitchen, moving as quietly as I could so that Ricky didn't come down to make sure I was okay. I couldn't deal with him wanting to make things better, wanting to do something to make it all go away. I couldn't cope with having to talk about it, having to explain what had scared me to the point of sickness. I knew he wanted to help, but we both knew there was nothing he could do; if only there was.

I took a couple of headache pills and went back into the lounge, putting the television on low and pressing the required sequence of buttons on the remote to bring up the list of films we had stored on the recorder. I needed something to escape from reality for a while and settled on a Harry Potter film, the final one in fact, the second part of the Deathly Hallows. It was my favourite of all the films in the series and would hopefully provide the required level of escapism.

The next thing I knew I was trapped under something with a bright light shining in my eyes. Thinking I was stuck in another nightmare I moaned and turned my head, wondering what horror awaited me this time. But when I opened my eyes I realised it wasn't a nightmare, I was on the sofa in the lounge, tangled up in the duvet from the spare bed that had been placed over me while I slept. The bright light was the sun shining through the lounge window, directly onto my face. Relief that the knowledge that this wasn't a new terror flooded through me as Ricky appeared in the lounge doorway.