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“Then I speak to a member of your team and arrange to get my sorry Irish arse back here for an appointment.”
My nurse frowned as he appeared to check a list, then smiled. “Looks like a hundred percent pass to me, Señor Strachan. Guess that makes you good to go.”
Luis held out his hand for me to shake. Instead, before I had time to chicken out, I gave him a brief but heartfelt hug and I was rewarded with an embrace that nearly cracked my rib cage. Hauling unconscious nutters around was clearly a good workout.
“Good Lord, I can’t leave you alone for five minutes can I, Strachan?” Lilith’s amused, upper class drawl came from the doorway.
Luis laughed. “Hiya, Lilith. Ah, I’m not even in the running, man. I know when the competition’s too damn steep.”
“Morning, Luis.” Lilith walked over to kiss me chastely on each cheek with cool lips and peppermint-scented breath.
“Just giving your man here some final instructions before we let him loose on the world,” Luis said. “For some reason, he doesn’t want to extend his stay.”
“I wouldn’t take it personally.” Lilith held out her hand to me. “So, all ready to go, Mr Strachan?”
I entwined my fingers through hers and picked up my bag. “Oh, far more than ready Ms Bresson, thank you for asking,” I said, and left my hospital room for the final time, heading for freedom, the summer, and home.
Chapter Nine
Finn
Luis hadn’t been kidding about having a few rocky days. That morning we’d received another anonymous note for the first time in weeks – this one a polite suggestion that we ‘watch our backs at all times’ – and whilst it hadn’t induced the total meltdown of previous letters, it still wasn’t the best start to the day a man could get.
Lilith and I went together to take the thing to the police station and were given the same frustrating response as before; that all of Blaine’s mail both coming into and sent from the prison was closely monitored so the letters definitely weren’t from her. We were also informed that Michael and Emily, Blaine’s adult kids had apparently been approached too. Emily was in Washington DC and Michael was in London and as expected both had denied any involvement whatsoever, and there was no evidence at all that might suggest one of them was our correspondent.
The mere mention of those names had hit me far harder than I’d been prepared for, and I had to fight against running out of the police station; I had a drug-dimmed flashback of Blaine offering me to Emily as part of her eighteenth birthday present, the poor girl’s look of horror when she refused, and her older brother’s glance of naked lust and jealousy in my direction as Emily ran from the hall. She’d fled to the USA the very next day and never returned, and to my relief Michael had had to leave that same evening for a meeting somewhere in Europe. I remembered thinking that for once I’d had a rare lucky escape.
A few hours later I’d been back to the Clinica for my weekly counselling session, where I spent a fun hour trying to avoid talking to Amina about my sex life, including a fairly excruciating and one-sided conversation about whether, as a ‘recovering survivor of sexual abuse’ I was still capable of wanking or not – You might need to spend time discovering your own body, Finn. Have you tried masturbating, or seeing what arouses you when you’re by yourself in the shower?
I could still feel the marks left on my palms by my fingernails hours later.
Until this conversation I’d been fairly confident that this was one area of my life that had managed to escape unscathed, thanks to Lilith’s endless patience with me and the fact that I fancied the very arse off the woman every time I caught sight of her.
Now as I called into the tiny store at the end of our street, I was assailed with the seedlings of a brand new doubt; that perhaps she was holding back in yet another attempt to protect me, or worse still that she might only be pretending to return my desire.
The shop sold just about everything we needed for our day-to-day existence, and it had become my job to call in for bread or milk or whatever we might need for our evening meal. No fuss, no drama, just a normal fella doing normal things. Until that morning.
Somewhere between the bakery section and the checkout, the world began to close in without any warning at all. Apart from my disgruntled mood there was nothing else wrong; I’d had a half-decent night’s sleep, there were no dodgy-looking characters standing near me, no flashbacks, no random can of baked beans suddenly breaking into a song and dance routine, nothing. Just a sudden gut-wrenching terror that descended on me as fast as a kestrel-strike and sent my pulse soaring so that I was tempted to drop my basket in the aisle and leg it back to the apartment.
It took every one of Luis’ pantheon of coping strategies for me to control my breathing long enough to pay for the shopping, and the young girl at the checkout must have thought I was some kind of raving nutter as I stammered out a hoarse ‘Gracias’ without daring to look her in the eye and fled the store.
By the time I got back home the worst had passed, although I still had enough adrenaline surging through my system to make me feel like I’d done a dozen rounds in the boxing ring.
I did my best to hide the shaking as I made my way upstairs to Lilith’s studio to drop off her bottle of mineral water, but I knew I was kidding myself if I thought she wouldn’t notice the second I stepped in the room.
Sure enough Lilith’s bright smile of greeting faded, to be replaced with an expression of pure concern. “Hey there, are you okay?” she asked as she put her paintbrush down. She walked over to meet me so that she could place the palm of her hand on my forehead. “You don’t feel too good, sweetheart.”
I twisted my head away from her touch, furious with myself for being an over-dramatic wanker. “Yes, I’m okay. I’ve been to my counselling appointment like a good boy and I’ve been to the store. I walked in, bought things, came back home. That’s classed as an ‘okay’ activity, isn’t it? Manageable, even for a basket case.”
She stepped back, instinctively giving me breathing space. “What’s wrong, Finn?” Her gaze never left my face and I knew that she was scrutinising me for signs of another meltdown.
“I don’t know, alright?” I snapped. “Maybe the cleaning product aisle is my new PTSD trigger – y’know, like some nonce cleaned his bathroom with lemon fresh bleach before he fucked me over the sink.” Lilith winced at my sudden crudity, but I couldn’t stop myself. “Or… or he used Spanish washin’ up liquid as lube, or maybe there’s no trigger at all and this is just as good as I’m going to fuckin’ get. Lucky you, eh?”
I turned away from her gaze and in doing so got my first real look at the portrait she was working on; Ed’s son and his fiancée, smiling out at me from the canvas and so real that they could have been in the room with us. It was a thing of perfect beauty, and it completed my transformation into a total cunt. “Oh God, would you look at that?” I asked.
“I’m looking,” Lilith replied coolly, suddenly wary. “Is there some issue with the shading that I haven’t addressed?”
“Lilith Bresson: artist, rescuer, trillionaire superhero.” I gestured at the painting. “This is what you can do, Lili. This is your fucking job, creating magic like this like it’s no big deal, and I can just about manage to buy groceries without shitting a brick just because you’re not holding my hand.”
