Last One at the Party Page 5

  I spent the rest of that long second night wrapped in our spare duvet on the sofa. I was still too numb to be scared or panicked. I stared at the wall, silent, unthinking, and motionless for hours.

  I didn’t throw the T600 away and twice I picked it up to drink it, but I finally got bored of my dramatics and told myself either to take it or chuck it.

  As the sun started to rise I got up off the sofa, threw the T600 down the sink, and made myself a cup of tea.

  At some point during that morning I made my fateful phone call to Tom Forrest, the undertaker.

  To this day I don’t know why I rang, and I don’t know why he picked up.

  I could tell he was sick as soon as he answered the phone.

  In summary, I asked him to bury James, he acted like I was insane. Had I not seen the news? I tried to appeal to his basic human kindness, he said he was dying and had none left. I got angry, he got angry. I told him to fuck off and slammed the phone down.

  I told a dying man to fuck off.

  I really hope I’m not the last human alive.

  I now had a problem. A six-foot one-inch, thirteen and a half stone problem.

  I needed to bury James.

  We lived in a fourth-floor flat with no lift. There was no garden to bury him in. It was winter, and had been dry and cold for days; the ground was like iron. I didn’t even own a shovel.

  I sat and thought and became aware for the first time of the deadly quiet that surrounded me. I couldn’t remember when the moaning and sounds of pain had stopped reverberating about the building, but they had. I couldn’t remember a time when the building had been quiet; even during the last period of isolation there was the background noise of a TV or radio in the distance, someone entering or leaving, a cough, a sneeze, muffled conversation. Now there was nothing. Just the quiet hum of the fridge and the gentle shush of the central heating.

  I put on my coat, ran downstairs, and stood outside the front door.

  Silence.

  No people, no moving cars, no rumble of the underground, no planes passing overhead, no distant sirens.

  Nothing.

  I was on my own.

  I felt the first tiny prickles of fear collect in the small of my back.

  I crossed our road to the park in the middle of the square we lived on.

  It was, predictably, empty.

  There was a small patch of grass in the middle and I bent down and stuck a random plastic fork from my coat pocket into the frosted ground to test it. The fork broke. The ground stayed the same.

  There was no way I could dig a grave.

  I thought about lighting a fire on the ground to warm and soften the earth, but I didn’t know if it would work or how far down the warmth would reach. Plus, I didn’t know how to light a fire.

  I thought about pouring water on the ground to soften it but, again, was that practical for grave digging?

  I was beset with fear and hesitation.

  I stood up and looked at the houses surrounding the square, hoping and praying for a light on, someone staring out, some sign of life – anything to show I wasn’t alone. All the windows were dark and silent.

  Ginny was right. I was completely unsuited to the new world, and this was only my first day in it.

  I was cold so I went in to get a jumper.

  I opened the door to our bedroom, forgetting for a moment that James was in there, and the smell was so horrific I gagged and retched. The heating was on full blast in the flat, the window was closed, and James had been dead in there for nearly forty-eight hours.

  My first of many mistakes.

  My instinct was to flee. Under no circumstances should you enter that room was what my brain was telling me. But I knew I couldn’t just leave him.

  James couldn’t stay in the house, but I had nowhere to bury him and nowhere to take him. Damn you Tom Forrest.

  I decided to take James outside and then find a way to bury him. I would dig with my hands if I had to.

  I put Vicks VapoRub under my nose (it’s what they do in CSI) and went into our bedroom.

  Visually he wasn’t as bad as I had expected. James had a distinct purple tinge to him and was ever so slightly puffy. But there was no sign of actual decay yet, and there didn’t seem to be any bodily fluids leaking out of him. So that was good.

  My definition of ‘good’ was rapidly shifting.

  I left James in his Christmas pyjamas, but was worried about him being cold so manhandled him into his dressing gown and put a scarf and hat on him. Then I took the hat off and re-styled his hair because he always hated his hair being messed up.

  I put my hands under his armpits and dragged him off the bed.

  He was really, really heavy and surprisingly gassy. As his legs hit the floor, he let out a massive fart. My first instinct was to laugh, but then I remembered the six flights of stairs I still had to get him down, and my laugh disappeared.

  I dragged him across the bedroom, down the hallway, and to our front door.

  By this time, I was accustomed to the farts that accompanied each jolt of his body, but not to the lolling of his head and the way his arms flailed around each time I moved him.

  It had taken forty-five minutes to drag him about twenty feet. I was hot, sweaty and knackered.

  I sat for five minutes and then stood up and hauled him to the top of the stairs.

  I dragged him to the edge, turned backwards to the stairs and hoisted him up under his armpits again. I went to take a step back, missed my footing, and the dead body of James and the living body of me tumbled down the stairs in a heap of arms, legs and slowly atrophying flesh.

  The breath was knocked out of me and I lay under James, too stunned to move.

  Then I remembered he was dead, screamed, and pushed his body off me. It took a moment of jumping up and down, dramatically brushing imaginary death particles off my body, to realise I was fine and hadn’t hurt myself in the fall.

  James hadn’t fared so well. One of his arms was at a funny angle and his shin had broken and now poked through his purple skin and pyjamas. The blood that stained the material was dark brown.

  I clearly couldn’t carry him down the stairs, he was too heavy.

  Before I had time to think about how wrong what I was about to do was, I pushed his body to the edge of the next set of stairs and shoved him down them. He fell sluggishly and haphazardly, landing in a sprawled heap across the bottom three steps.

  I hurried down the steps and dragged him onto the hallway. His other arm was now broken, and one side of his face had sort of caved in.

  I sat on the floor and cried again.

  I couldn’t do it.

  There were four more flights of stairs, plus the steps outside down to street level, plus the thirty feet to the gardens, plus digging the grave, plus putting his body in and putting the earth back on him.

  I couldn’t do it.

  This wasn’t the sort of thing I did.

  Moving anything heavy was the sort of thing James took care of.

  I’d like to say I didn’t even think of just leaving him there on the landing.

  But I did.

  I spent a good ten minutes planning how I could make him comfortable using a duvet and pillows and how there must have been thousands of people in this situation who did the same thing.

  But I didn’t do it. I was too ashamed.

  I am still ashamed that I didn’t bury him. But at least I didn’t leave him in the hallway.

  I went back upstairs to get the spare key for Flat 9 on the third floor.

  Greg and Michael lived in Flat 9. I liked them. We had bonded over a shared love of 90s American teen dramas and used to meet once a fortnight to binge on the escapades of teens far better looking and emotionally mature than us.

  James thought Greg and Michael were ‘too gay’; an expression that I should have, but never did, challenge.

  I’d introduced them to my best friend, Xavier, once, as he too was a lover of men. Afterwards he sa
id to me ‘Remind me to introduce you to my friend Lorraine.’

  ‘Why?’ I asked.

  ‘Because she’s a woman,’ he had deadpanned.

  I actually knocked before I went into their flat. Yes, even in times of great stress and sadness one should never forget one’s innate British manners. Of course, there was no answer.

  I steeled myself for the sight and smell of them, and reapplied the Vicks.

  I thought they’d be in the bedroom, but they were sitting on the sofa together, empty glasses by their sides. Their eyes were closed, but they had turned to face each other in the last moments before they had fallen asleep.

  It was such a simple gesture of love in their dying moment that my heart ached for them. I felt bad to interrupt something so pure.

  But my selfishness won out once more and I went to get James.

  Through luck or judgement Greg and Michael’s heating had gone off and their rate of decay was markedly different. They were purple-tinged and slightly puffy, but had almost no smell.

  James, on the other hand, was now deteriorating rapidly, so I dragged him straight through to the bedroom and manhandled him up onto the bed.

  And there he was. My dead husband. For ever condemned to spend eternity in the bed of two people he thought of as ‘too gay’. There was a weird poetic justice in it that made me feel good and bad at the same time.

  I lessened my bad feeling by making James as comfy as possible. I wrestled his dressing gown off, re-aligned his broken limbs, took his hat off and redid his hair again. I plumped the pillow, snuggled him into the duvet and put the bedside light on for him.

  Then there was nothing else to do, so I wept.

  I wept for him, for the horrible way he had died, and for the life he would now never live. But mainly, I wept for me. I wept because I could still remember so vividly the time when he was the love of my life and I would have taken T600 in a heartbeat to be with him in death. I wept because, now that he was gone, I already missed him – despite everything, he had always taken care of me and I didn’t think I would be able to take care of myself. I wasn’t sure I knew how. I wept because, for the first time in my life, I was now alone. Really and truly alone.

  Before I left the room, I put the clock forward ten minutes.

  After I left Flat 9, I climbed the stairs back to my own flat. I could already feel the familiar rising tension and tickling fingers of fear pianoing up my backbone, and by the time I reached the top of the stairs I was in full-on panic mode.

  It was 2 a.m. and I was knackered, sweating, and filthy. But there would be no sleep for me that night. My heart was racing, my breathing was raspy, and adrenaline was pumping through my body as though it was trying to push its way out through my veins.

  This level of panic was, unfortunately, an emotional state I was well acquainted with.

  I had my first full-blown, heart-racing, vomit- and diarrhoea-inducing, unable to breathe or think panic attack when I was on my last ever assignment for the paper, just after I had booked the trip to Thailand and during the time that James was ignoring me.

  It made the smaller panic attacks I had experienced previously feel like a gentle walk in a cool, dark forest.

  There is nothing embarrassing about panic attacks or depression or discussing your mental health.

  I know that now.

  But my first panic attack was in 2012 and very few people were talking about mental health as openly and acceptingly as they now do. In 2012 I was still convinced that if anyone found out how mental I was I would be locked up. I was also, stupidly, incredibly embarrassed by my crumbling mental health. I was embarrassed that I was suddenly unable to commit to writing an article without feeling sick, or get into the lift at work without hyperventilating. I was embarrassed that I was only dragging myself out of bed in the morning to see James, and that most nights I went straight back to bed after getting in from work and just lay there. I was twenty-five, with an interesting and exciting job that I (previously) loved, loving parents, somewhere comfortable to live, food to eat and money to spend. I didn’t feel I had the ‘right’ to be this unhappy or that I had anything ‘worthy’ of panicking about.

  There wasn’t some massive trigger that caused that first full-blown panic attack. I mean, something happened that caused it, but I can’t say that one thing was the reason. It was the steady build-up of things not feeling right. Of me not feeling right.

  I suppose my brain had just had enough.

  I had been in Paris attending the last gig I would ever review. I was acting on autopilot; smiling, drinking, chatting to the band but, in reality, I was watching a happy fake me take part in my life while real me hid sadly at the back of my brain.

  I was desperate to feel something, anything.

  So, I broke my own cardinal rule and slept with the lead singer.

  It was rubbish.

  After a perfunctory tweak of my nipples, he reluctantly pulled on a condom (I at least had the self-preservation to insist on that) and we were away. After a couple of minutes he started to rummage around between my labia promising, ‘this will feel better’. I assumed he was looking for my clit. He didn’t find it.

  Afterwards we made five minutes of awkward small talk. Then he fell asleep and I stared at the ceiling until I crept out of the hotel room to get my flight home.

  I was on the plane back to Heathrow, knackered, hungover and ashamed, when I felt a weird tugging ‘down below’. I went to the toilet and thought my vagina was falling out. Reaching beneath, I almost passed out as I pulled something from within me.

  The used condom from the night before.

  He had pulled it off while we were having sex.

  And then left it in me.

  Stealthing wasn’t yet a thing at this time, or at least I’d never heard of it. Maybe this was the man that invented it, or maybe it was a complete accident that he left it in me, who knows.

  I think I was in shock at first.

  I put it in the bin, cleaned myself up, washed my hands thoroughly and headed back to my seat.

  Walking back from the toilet, I had a sudden urge to open the emergency exit. Not a fleeting thought. A full-on vision of leaning past the woman sitting next to it, pulling back the handle, and shoving the hatch out into the open air, sucking us all out with it. I actually stopped and leant forward before snapping back and no doubt matching the woman’s look of horror with one of my own.

  I rushed back to my seat, strapped myself in, and sat on my hands. Then I started to struggle to breathe. My heart was thumping out of my chest. I couldn’t get enough oxygen into my lungs. My vision started to go black at the edges. I was going to pass out. No, actually, I was going to vomit. Which I did. All over me, and the seat in front. I hardly noticed. I was busy having a heart attack, trying to breathe, sit on my hands and not scream all at the same time.

  I had no idea what was happening. I thought I must be going insane.

  The stewardess rushed over, moved the people next to me to different seats, and started to mop me up.

  I wanted to tell her. I wanted to tell her I was crazy. I mumbled something, stumbled past her, ran past the exit door and clattered into the toilet just before I shat myself. I sat on the toilet, leaking sperm and faeces, with my hands clapped over my mouth to stop myself from screaming.

  I stayed like that until the announcement came to take seats for landing.

  When I stood up I didn’t recognise the wild-eyed, gasping woman with vomit in her hair who stared back at me from the mirror.

  Which was appropriate because I had no idea who I had suddenly become.

  I made it back to my sour-smelling seat, strapped in, and looked for something, anything, that might help me cope.

  I focussed on the corner of the window next to me and whispered, ‘Corner of power’, and gently touched the corner with my fingertip. I counted to ten and then did it again. And again. And again. Until they opened the door to let us off the plane.

  Christ know
s where the corner of power came from, but it has saved me from tipping over the edge more times than I like to think about.

  I was convinced I was going to be arrested as I left the plane; that they must think I was a drug mule. But – despite sweating profusely, shaking, hopping from foot to foot at passport control and practically sprinting past customs – no one came for me.

  One of the unfair privileges of being white.

  I needed to get the morning-after pill.

  I sat in the A&E waiting room for about four hours. Well, actually, I paced in the A&E waiting room for four hours because I couldn’t keep still. I went to the toilet to throw up and expel copious amounts of watery diarrhoea again and again until there was nothing left in my body to get rid of.

  Obviously, I didn’t need to go to A&E, I could have just got the pill from a chemist, but I think I was hoping that by going to A&E someone would recognise my madness and help me.

  They didn’t.

  When the triage nurse called me in, her look of disapproval for wasting valuable NHS time due to my inability to use a condom properly or visit a chemist was enough to make me burst into tears. She passed me a tissue and patted my hand reassuringly. I very nearly yelled, ‘DON’T PAT MY HAND! I’M FUCKING INSANE. PATTING MY HAND ISN’T GOING TO HELP!’ Instead I gulped my tears back and took the pill she proffered.

  Then I left.

  I knew I should stop, go back to the reception desk and tell them the truth. ‘Please help me. I think I am going insane.’

  But I couldn’t.

  If I told them, I was convinced they would send me to a mental institution and then that would be it. I would be labelled crazy for the rest of my life. I wasn’t ready to have that label, yet.

  I should have taken solace in the fact I was still capable of thinking about my future, but I was spiralling out of control, so instead I went to the car park and stood in the rain.

  Once I was dripping wet and soaked to the skin I knew I had to make a choice. Go back into the hospital and be honest about how I was feeling, or go home and hope for the best.

  I went home.

  I hadn’t had a full-on heart pounding, vomit inducing, brain scrambling panic attack in a few years but I still recognised the signs of one approaching. I stumbled up the stairs from Flat 9, slammed through my front door and took the hottest shower I could handle.