“Yeah,” I say. “He is.”
*
ISTARE BLANKLY ATmy graphics tablet. At the clean white screen. I should do something, draw something. I know it’ll make me feel better. And I need to feel better. I shouldn’t have thought about Rob again. Why did I? But I can’t stop now. Can’t stop imagining all sorts of things—and that makes me think of Marnie. What if Rob had been dangerous and hurt me and abducted me? What if I narrowly escaped abduction?
I take a deep breath. I need to calm down. I need to draw.
“Drawing is an expression of the soul,” one of my lecturers at uni said once. She’d been standing at the front of the lecture theatre, wearing a long, flowing dress and a hideous neon-green shawl. She was one of those ‘weird’ lecturers. You know the type—the one who’s a bit ‘away with the fairies’ and drinks herbal teas out of a flask they’ve made by hand, who only washes their hands with lavender soap they made themselves, and can never seem to remember quite what they’re supposed to be doing. That was this lecturer. But her words stuck with me.
Drawingisan expression of the soul. Any art is. Raymond and I talked about this once, him telling me how making his computer animations is a way of connecting with himself again, of reminding him that he is more than just his Lyme disease.
But, as I stare at the blank white page on my tablet, I just feel empty. Like I have no soul. Maybe that’s why I can’t draw now—why I feel disconnected. Maybe the Lyme’s finally reached my soul, and it’s destroying me inside out, as well as consuming my body.
I want to draw something, but my fingers ache, and my head just doesn’t feel right. I still don’t feel right.
I set the tablet aside and stretch out on my bed. Maybe I should rest again.
And I feel a bit weird as I half-doze off, because I’ve rested a lot today, haven’t I? But appointments are tiring, and they affect me for days. I know that.
I must’ve fallen asleep because suddenly it’s dark. The darkness is a heavy fog over me and—
Something soft brushes against my face.
I jolt, fling myself upward, my hand flailing for my bedside lamp. I flick it on, heart pounding.
Something touched my face. Something touched my face. Something touched my face!
Fear rises in me, as I look around. What was it?
But there’s nothing out of the ordinary. Nothing...
There!
I see it.
A cat. In the corner of my room, perched on the top of my bookcase. So high up. A freaking cat!
We don’t have a cat.
Oh, God. It’s the neighbor’s cat. It’s been outside and in other houses, and now it’s in here, spreading the badness around and—
It’s watching me. Its tail is hanging down over the top shelf, brushing againstBefore I Go to SleepandThe Wife Between Us.
My heart pounds. My books! My precious books! Being touched by a cat! A cat is in here, and, suddenly, I can feel the fleas crawling on it. It’s infested! The fleas are getting on my books, crawling between the pages. And they’re multiplying too, an army of fleas invading.
My breaths make squeaking sounds in my ears. My chest hurts. The side of my face it touched—must’ve been its fur as it jumped over me—feels like it’s burning, like my flesh is corroding away.
How did this cat get in here? My window’s locked—it always is. My bedroom door is pushed to—half an inch of light filters in from the hallway, all around the door. How did it push through?
The cat watches me, tilts its head to one side, then licks its lips in the exact way cats do on cat-food adverts. It’s completely silent, and the hairs on the back of my neck rise as I stare at it.
I need to get it out.
But I’m frozen to the spot. I can’t move. As soon as I move, the cat will move. It’ll spring down from my bookcase, and it’ll touch more stuff. It’ll contaminateeverything. Hell, its fleas are probably everywhere already.
My fear ratchets up a knot. My head pounds, and I struggle to breathe. I don’t know what to do. I don’t know what to do. I don’t know what to do.
The cat’s going to make a mess on my bookcase. What if it already has done? I try to scan around my room quickly, but without actually moving my head. Got to stay still. Can’t move.