Dead Lovely (13 page)

It had been a long, excruciatingly painful twenty-three hours for Sarah, but quite therapeutic in the end.

She had learnt a lot about herself and about her past and had made some very sensible plans for the future – if she had one.

She’d regained consciousness about two hours after Krissie had left her. It was completely dark and she had a very normal response to waking up injured, wrapped in a tent, covered in blood, shoved in a crevice and left to die. After the initial shock started to wear off, she cried, shook and tried to scream.

Sarah was surprised by how long she maintained her hysteria. Despite several hindrances – she couldn’t move, couldn’t see anything, and couldn’t sustain a yell because her mouth was cut and swollen – she was still the champion of all panickers.

‘I’m gonna die, I’m gonna die, I’m gonna die.’ She said over and over again, for at least two hours.

She’d had a lot of practice, right enough. From the age of six she’d enjoyed regular panic attacks, usually triggered by being trapped in small spaces. She became aware of this at Marie Johnston’s sixth
birthday
party when, while playing hide-and-seek, she ran into Marie’s attic, and squeezed through a small door and into the dark eaves of the house. She giggled for a few seconds after closing the door before realising just how dark and dusty the place was, and then decided to get the hell out. Only she couldn’t. Because Marie and her brother Willie were holding the door shut.

‘Let me out!’ she’d screamed.

But they didn’t. They thought it was funny. And Sarah found herself experiencing something that a six-year-old should not experience. She honestly thought she was going to die.

Eventually Marie’s mum came up to the attic to see what all the giggling was about and opened the door to find Sarah sweating profusely, rocking back and forth, and chanting, ‘I’m gonna die, I’m gonna die, I’m gonna die.’

From then on, Sarah made sure to check every situation for escape routes. In movies, she sat in the aisle at the back. She never took the lift, never sat at the back of the bus, never used the underground, and spent the first few minutes anywhere new checking out the exits.

When they’d played ‘face up’ at the loch a few nights earlier, Krissie and Kyle didn’t realise that the
sleeping bag was no problem for her. She had the zipper in her hand. To get out, all she had to do was pull at it. At no point during the fifteen minutes in that sleeping bag did she think she was going to die. There was an escape route.

This problem with enclosed spaces had come up in one of her therapy sessions. But the therapist didn’t believe it started in Marie Johnston’s attic, especially once Sarah had admitted to having had similar fears for a year prior to that. The therapist believed it started at home, and dedicated the following sessions to trying to tear the truth about her childhood out of her piece by piece.

But Sarah did not break.

Okay, so when she was tiny her mother was away all the time, but she rang every night at bedtime.

Okay, so her father drank a bit, but then he left.

Okay, so her parents split up when she was five, but Sarah loved her new stepdad. He was a movie producer who made the best hot chocolate with marshmallows and had given her a signed poster of Mel Gibson.

No big deal. A normal messed-up family like everyone else had.

No big deal at all.

After the initial burst of anger and panic in the crevice, Sarah fell unconscious again.

When she woke again she wasn’t sure if she’d opened her eyes or not, because no matter what she did with her eyelids, it was still dark. It took a few moments to realise the terrifying truth, and it was impossible not to revert to hysteria. She was wrapped so tightly that she couldn’t move her hand, or her feet, or any other part of her body. It was so small, the space, that her nose touched the rock above her, the damp, cold rock. Her legs were bent sideways, so that her hips were in agony, and her shoulder was roaring with pain.

She was buried alive and she was going to die. Every organ switched on to high alert, adrenalin attacked each limb to DO SOMETHING. But she could not move, she could not do anything, and so the adrenalin buzzed around inside her trying to escape, like a bee in a jar.

She must have fainted over and over again, and every time she woke the bee, now a sworn enemy of hers, attacked her again. She became so aware of it that she could almost track its path around her, and could sense its slowing, from thousands of miles an hour to hundreds, to tens, to nothing.

To banish the noise, she spoke out loud through her swollen mouth and her voice scared her. It sounded like she had earphones on.

‘I’m going to be okay,’ she told herself. ‘I’m going to be fine. I have to think logically.’

So she asked and answered as many questions as
she could think of out loud, as if she was a doctor gathering information to diagnose a patient.

Can I move my legs?

No, they’re tied or wrapped – in a tent, I think.

Can I wriggle my toes?

Yes, I can wriggle my toes.

Is there enough air?

There are three cracks at least in the rocks. Don’t worry about that.

What the hell is that?

An arm.

I’m going to die. Oh my God.

You’re going to be fine.

Whose arm?

Oh my God, it’s my arm. What’s it doing there? I’m fucked. I’m buried alive.

You’re not fucked. Your arm is dislocated but it’s okay. You will be okay.

She worked out that she was wrapped in a tent up to her neck. She knew she didn’t have the use of arms or legs to help push out the rocks, even though they didn’t seem to be very securely lodged in the crack, she knew that her throat was aching for water, and that she was absolutely dying for a shit.

To keep her mind off the latter, she decided to make a plan. Only a month before, she’d watched a documentary about a guy who’d been left for dead on a mountain in the Andes. He spent days crawling with a broken leg through ice and mountains, and
eventually made it home. The way he did it was to take things one small step at a time.

If I can just get to that rock.

If I can just make it over that ledge.

If I can just slide down that fissure.

So that’s how Sarah spent the next while. The first task was to free her left arm from the tent.

If I can just wriggle enough to loosen the tent from around my body.

If I can just wriggle my hip twice to the right.

If I can just wriggle my hip twice to the left.

So she wriggled.

And wriggled.

Again.

Then again.

And every now and then she fooled herself into believing that she had made progress, but eventually she had to admit that for each wriggle that loosened the tent, there was a wriggle that tightened it.

She had been in the dark silence for hours when her phone burst into noise. It was ‘Scotland the Brave’.

It was piercing, thin and interminable and it was coming from her jacket pocket.

After the initial fright, she tried to be logical again.

One of her arms was dislocated and behind her neck. She could not get to the answer button with this arm.

The other was wrapped so tightly within the rolled fabric of the tent that she would never
dislodge
it.

Her legs were in the recovery position, knees slightly bent, but after several attempts to bring her knees towards her chest she realised that it was not going to happen. The crevice was too small, her legs were too tightly encased, and her boobs were too fucking big.

She rested when it stopped, and cried. Her only hope gone with the shining river.

She had not been resting long when it started again.

Over the next few hours, the phone rang ten times. Sarah became well acquainted with the stages of grieving, and gave each her all as the song rippled through her chest and around the crevice. She shrieked with shock, wriggled and fought, yelled and screamed, howled into her mountain hame, felt ill to the pit of her stomach, and then listened as calmly as she could as it cut short, at the same point in the second running each time …

It was almost a relief when the calls stopped, and she could rest.

Sarah had helped deliver a baby once, before she specialised in intensive care. What had surprised her was the woman’s determination not to disgrace herself. The woman was pushing out a kid,
screaming
for her life, saying things like, ‘You arsehole, get back here and hold my hand,’ but she was absolutely determined not to mess herself, and begged the midwife to warn her if this looked imminent.

Sarah had thought this was slightly ridiculous. Who cares about anything when your dignity is so past its use-by date?

Of course, the midwife reassured the woman that no such thing was imminent as she secretly whisked away a sanitary pad full of shit.

But as Sarah lay there, wrapped tightly in her tent-coffin, she understood. Holding onto your bowels is the last fragment of self-respect and you are programmed not to let go. But the energy and concentration required to hold this in was
agonising.
Clench, then breathe, count through the pain, hold, clench and breathe. At times there was respite, and Sarah would cry with the relief of it, only to be hurled back into the job at hand. Clench, breathe.

In the end, she was taken unawares when it passed the point of no return, and she cried as she unclenched and unleashed the last scrap of her dignity.

Lying in your own shit is not pleasant. It makes you want to be sick.

Lying in your own shit and vomit is not pleasant. It makes you want to be sick again.

After a hopeless cycle of expulsions Sarah took to breathing tiny little breaths at a time and then stopped noticing the smell and became delirious, chatting to the spider that ran across her face.

‘Hello, little one, hello Charlotte. Can you help
me? No, you can’t, can you? Tell you what, I’m going to push this one with my forehead.’

Sarah started to nudge the rock to her right with her forehead. She pushed, and then rested, pushed, and then rested, and when the blood began to pour down her nose and into her mouth, she licked it and then pushed again before slipping once more into unconsciousness.

What was that?

Sarah could hear something, some talking. A man saying something and a girl laughing.

She found herself saying: ‘I’m gonna die I’m gonna die I’m gonna die.’ But when Sarah heard her own voice she knew this was a dream because the voice was her six-year-old voice. She was little, and she was rocking back and forth and chanting. The door was locked in this dark place and the voices of the man and the girl outside stopped. This made her panic and she started banging on the dark locked door, over and over again.

‘No! Stop! Let me out!’

She woke and felt almost relieved to be in the crevice and not in that other place. She smiled.

‘This isn’t working, is it? Maybe these tiny little manageable steps work in the Andes, but not in the
Highlands. I’m going to make a list of things to do, with some unreasonably big plans. Number one: Let me tell you all about Kyle McGibbon.’

Some time later, as she lay amongst spiders in that black scary place, a rat scuttled up her torso and onto her face.

‘Hello,’ said Sarah with a comical deep voice. ‘My name is Sarah.’

Plans and positive thinking and worrying about shit and vomit had faded away long before the rat arrived. Sarah had been lying in a world of swirling daydreams, a world where a little girl was crying and where there was no God. This world was
self-contained
and almost soothingly dislocated from reality, and it felt like a rude interruption when the rock Sarah’s forehead had stained with blood fell to the ground with a thud.

Sarah was afraid. She felt like the little girl in the dark room did all those times when the door was finally unlocked by her stepfather.

Sarah’s stepfather was Mike, and he had the most exciting job in the world. He produced movies in Hollywood for years before moving to the UK to work on an exciting new television project. He’d moved to Glasgow after falling for Sarah’s mother – though later Sarah wondered if it was the photo of her five-year-old daughter her mother had carried around with her.

For a year, Sarah was in heaven. Her old dad who’d left her behind was replaced by a sparkling new one, who loved her more than anything and spoiled her rotten. Mike gave her money and sweets and made her the best hot chocolates in the
universe.
She’d sit at the breakfast bar and watch him heat the milk carefully in a small pot, and then mix the cocoa in a cup with a drop of hot water, and then add the sticky chocolate mixture to the milk and stir it gently. He would then pour it into a large white mug, place it directly in front of her, and watch her smile as he dropped three plump pink marshmallows on top. A wonderful feeling of contentment would wash over her as she watched the marshmallows melt into the warm brown milk.

Mike would also take her to the movies and read to her at night, and babysit when her mum went out and let her watch movies even if they were rated U, and all she had to do for him was invite her friends over a lot and then stay in the en suite like a good girl.