When they first saw me, Michael and Rose were shocked.
They didn’t want to touch me in case they hurt me. They thought the whole of my body must be in pain. And to a certain extent it was.
But a little over a week after Neil had helped me through the front door, they were over it. Rose even ran her finger gently over the train-track stitched scar on my forehead.
‘Does it hurt?’ she said.
‘A little.’
She said sorry, and smiled. It was the smile that gave her away. It excited her that her finger could cause tiny spasms of pain to shoot into my head. She touched the scar again.
The police had finished asking all the questions they wanted to ask. The doctor had told me that I had suffered only “an insignificant amount of damage” and my intense rage had subsided. A little.
Curiously, my sense of smell had heightened. The slightest whiff of anything had me looking around, hawk-like, trying to find the source of it.
Some smells I couldn’t identify. They were strange to me, and not easy to pinpoint. I became temporarily consumed with some of them. I couldn’t even make a guess. One in particular stuck with me. A sweet smell, sometimes sickly and stifling. I’d have to open the windows around the house and try to snort it from my nose.
I received endless emails, texts and calls from the school. Every day I opened another “Get Well Soon” card made by a fellow teacher’s class. I sniffed each card, ran my fingers over the paint and glue, some of it still damp.
Margaret, the head-teacher, told me to take it easy.
‘We can cope, Chris. We do not expect to see you again until you are one hundred percent better. Totally recovered.
At first, well-meaning comments like that seemed to make me feel worse. What if I was never one hundred percent better? What if I never totally recovered?
To get over my insecurities I gave myself a recovery deadline. Two weeks and no more. That would surely be enough. Certainly enough to go back to school.
Every day I made progress. Every day I felt a little better than the day before. I still had aches and pains. Still had scars and wounds. Still had a bizarre sense of smell. But as my two week deadline approached I felt pretty confident about making it.
Coincidentally (and I thought, significantly) my first day back at school was due to be Tuesday 29th February — the extra day of the leap-year. That was the plan.
At least it was, until I had the dream.
On the morning of the 29th I woke up, shaking. My pyjama top was damp, not only from sweat, but also from tears. I had been crying in my sleep. I ran the back of my hand along my hairline, and my ring caught the scar on my forehead. I squeezed my teeth together to stop from making a noise. The back of my legs felt wet. Wet and cold.
And I could still see her.
Not her face. Not her features. But her terror. Her weakness. I could still see everything about her that was possible to destroy. My heart rate picked up and the scar at the back of my head throbbed in time. I suddenly felt as though I’d just taken a run around the neighbourhood. A run where I had been pursued, almost to exhaustion. Sweat or tears trickled past my ear and dropped onto the pillow.
I had obviously shifted about a lot because Neil had woken up. He usually slept through everything, including the “extra loud” alarm we’d had to buy for him. So I must have been practically punching him in my sleep.
‘Are you OK?’ he said.
I opened my mouth to speak, but stopped myself. I knew if I started, I would cry. And I felt like I was done with crying. I had cried almost every day since the attack. Sometimes in pain, sometimes feeling sorry for myself. Sometimes because of rage.
When I first came out of hospital I had still been experiencing the dark feelings I’d had directly after the attack. For the first time I had understood what people meant by the phrase “pure hatred”. I had felt that. Not just for my attacker, but for people in general. For the world. And it really had felt “pure”. Not a dirty or evil thing, but a natural, free-flowing hatred of everything mankind. For a few days I felt addicted to it. I sunk myself into the feeling. Thought about people, some I knew, some I didn’t, no matter. I hated them all. Not Neil, or Michael or Rose. Not really. But everyone else.
If I ventured out of the house, I felt as though I could hurt people simply by looking at them. If looks could kill.
Christine Marsden — Primary school teacher, wife, mother. That had been me before some little shit had come along and messed up my life, and now I killed people by looking at them. Christine Marsden — eye-stare killer.
So I didn’t want to cry again. I nodded in response to Neil’s question.
He persisted. ‘What is it, Chris? Are you in pain? Are you hurting?’
I moved my hand across the bed and scrabbled about for his. He found mine and stopped it scrabbling. From somewhere in the house, the sweet, sickly smell hit my nostrils.
‘I had a nightmare,’ I said, and waited for the floodgates to open.
My eyes stayed dry. Neil said nothing.
‘It was like a nightmare,’ I said.
‘What do you mean?’
‘It felt like a nightmare — it was a nightmare — but somehow more intense. More real.’
‘The doctor said you might experience some problems for a while afterwards. “Post-traumatic-stress symptoms”.’ Neil squeezed my hand. ‘He did say you might even have nightmares.’
My eyebrow prickled with sweat and I let go of Neil’s hand so I could scratch it.
‘I know that’s what he said. But this was different. I don’t think this had anything to do with what happened. I don’t think this was related to the attack at all.’
Neil smiled a poor Christine type of smile. Condescending fucker.
‘Even if it wasn’t about the attack,’ he said, ‘it was almost certainly brought on by it. The doctor said —’
‘Shut up about the doctor!’
Neil shut up. Another condescending look.
‘I know what the fucking doctor said. But listen to what I’m saying. This was not related to the attack. N-O-T.’
I slammed my arm down on the bed and accidentally caught Neil’s arm. I opened my mouth do say sorry, but managed to snap it shut before anything came out.
‘This was a nightmare,’ I said, ‘but it was most definitely not related to the attack.’
Neil managed to keep his face expressionless. He didn’t look at me, or away. He tried not to nod or shake his head. He did everything within his power to remain neutral.
I started crying again.
He opened his mouth to say something but I waved him away. He shrugged, climbed out of bed and walked into the en-suite. To stop my tears I focused on what he was doing. The shower door creaked as he opened it; he turned the shower on; the door creaked shut again; the water hit the shower floor, then the sound changed as Neil stepped under the water.
I shut my eyes but the vision of the nightmare was still there. Like a negative on my eyelids, waiting for me every time I chose to come back to it.
Neil started humming.
My stomach cramped up and the last few deep-set sobs bubbled up from beneath my ribcage. I could feel my nose running.
I rolled out of bed, grabbed my bathrobe and took the few short steps from our bedroom, across the landing to the main bathroom. “The Kids Bathroom” we called it. It was a mess in avocado-green. The sink was caked in dried toothpaste spit, the ragged, blue bathmat was screwed up and damp on the floor. The toilet seat was up and there was something in the toilet that probably should have been flushed away. How the hell did the kids get ready in this? They must surely come out more filthy than when they went in.
I should have checked it. I had been so wrapped up in myself since the attack. I wished I had checked it.
Why the hell couldn’t Neil have checked it?
05