I don’t know who she’s trying to convince most.
As one, we step outside.
The sky is raw and cold like pewter, the air is dead still. I stare back at the grey concertina doors with the giant “ACCIDENT AND EMERGENCY” letters above them and my stomach twists. It’s only been four days but this place feels as much like home as anywhere. Being here, with Chiu and Farah, is as happy as I can remember being. And now we’re leaving it, heading off into a hostile world.
“We’d better start walking,” Chiu says. “We’ve got a long way to go.”
I don’t want to think about how far we have to go. Back on the main road, the strangeness of this world asserts itself more clearly than ever. The buildings feel flimsy and unconvincing: detailed in places, blurry and indistinct in others. The colours are vague and leach into the murky distance. A barely perceptible tremor blurs the outlines of the houses like an elastic band stretched to breaking point.
This is the half-done underside of the world, I think. The steel and girders behind the facade, the tangled threads behind the embroidery.
We cross the roundabout that leads into the industrial estate, following the route that brought me to the hospital. I can still feel the stuttering presence of the traffic in the ordinary world even though I know now it isn’t really here. I imagine the cars pushing against the fabric of this world, ready to toss unsuspecting pedestrians and animals into this place in sudden flashes of bone and steel.
Chiu turns to us, his mouth open in a wide rictus. At first, I think he’s as terrified as I am but then I realize that he’s grinning.
“This is so cool!” he exclaims.
I glance at Farah. She looks pale. She tries, unconvincingly, to smile back.
“Oh, come on,” Chiu says. “You’ve got to admit this is pretty cool.”
Cool? I think. The same way falling out of an aeroplane is cool.
He jogs out into the middle of the road and struts along with his arms flung wide. “Zombie apocalypse, baby!” he whoops.
He looks back at us, his face shining with excitement. Farah gives a strained laugh. After a moment though, she goes out to join him. “Watch the treeline,” she growls, quoting a line from a TV show I’ve forgotten the name of. “They’ll be in there, even if you can’t see them.”
“It’s OK, Grimes,” Chiu replies, picking up the line. “I’m ready.”
They crouch-walk, imaginary rifles poised, watching for lurking zombies. But then they stop and stand looking uneasily around them. I feel it too. Something has shifted and their pretend fear has turned real.
“Do you really think there’s something out there?” Farah whispers.
“Not the way you mean it,” Chiu says. “Not zombies.”
“A feeling though,” Farah says.
“Something you know, but you can’t think,” Chiu replies.
The cold, gritty air clings to me like a shroud. I shouldn’t be able to hear Chiu and Farah talking from this far away, but I can. Reality feels thin and brittle. The wrongness was obscured in the hospital. The walls shielded us. Or maybe it was the proximity of other people in the ordinary world. Out here there is no such protection. Rawness blazes down on us like standing directly in the sun’s glare.
We can’t be out here for long, I think. It’ll drive us mad.
“Come on,” Farah says. “Let’s get some miles in before nightfall.”
We walk on. Over the bypass, down the hill. London feels like a lifetime away. Nine days. A million miles. A trillion miles. At some point it stops mattering exactly how far it is. We keep walking, stranding ourselves further and further from anywhere that might once have felt safe.
A little further and I catch sight of the tiled rooftops of my housing estate.
“My house is down there,” I call.
Farah nods. We cut off the main road and down into the warren of streets. Home is one of those little three-bedroom starter houses with the integrated garage and about fifty other homes that look exactly like it. It sits malignantly at the furthest side of a small crescent. It’s funny, but my feelings towards home were much more complicated in the ordinary world. Home was safety, predictability, order. I hated it at one level but needed it at another. Here, the strangeness of this world overwhelms any sense of familiarity and I see it for what it is: a self-made prison for me and Mum both.
The front door gives way after a shove, the obscured glass shuddering in protest. Inside, it smells of kitchen bins and carpet.
I know, instinctively, that it is still the morning of my seizure here. The shifting, elusive time of the Stillness has left this place just as it was, regardless of the four days that passed for me, Chiu and Farah in the hospital.
Everything is shadowed. Abandoned.
It’s small. Meticulously tidy except for the little kitchen table that heaves under piles of Mum’s notebooks, bills and junk mail.
I feel anxious. I never had friends over to my house in the ordinary world and I don’t know what Chiu and Farah will make of this place. I don’t like the idea of them imagining me here with Mum. A shut-in. I don’t like the idea of them seeing this version of me.
I head upstairs to my room, trying to make sense of the swirling mixed-up feelings in my head. My room feels alien to me: unmade bed, bunched-up clothes that never made it to the laundry basket, computer, a few piles of books. I thought seeing my room would help me remember the morning of my seizure but all the memories of all the identical mornings of a whole year of living like this are smeared into one. Did I shower first and then go down to breakfast on the morning of my seizure? Or was that the day before? It could be any one of a hundred identical days.
There’s a photograph of Grandad holding me as a baby on the hallway wall. He looks grim, I look vacant. I can imagine Mum twittering around, wanting to capture the moment, wanting to create the moment, and Grandad having nothing to do with it.
The photograph in the hallway stands as a kind of monument to him now, a reminder that this was his house and he gifted it to Mum and moved himself into sheltered accommodation right after my first seizure.
He wasn’t an affectionate man; he sometimes gave the impression that Mum and I were nothing but a matching pair of inconvenient liabilities to him. The house was an anomaly: the closest he ever came to letting slip that he loved us.
He liked to remind us about it often enough though.
“Surprisingly easy,” he used to say. “Three forms and not even long ones and you can give somebody a house.” As if his generosity – his love – embarrassed him and he preferred to pretend it was an administrative error instead.
I miss Grandad. It was easier when he was around: partly because he was old-school and he could never bring himself to believe that epilepsy was real. He thought me and Mum were making a big fuss over nothing which was annoying, of course, but helped me pretend along with him that epilepsy didn’t have to stop me doing anything.
I head back downstairs and find Chiu sifting through the piles of papers on the kitchen table. It’s a ridiculously small table, tucked into the nook between the work surface and the door. Mum likes to keep the house tidy – I think it’s the only way she has to exert some measure of control over the universe – but the universe pushes back in the form of junk mail and bills until it bursts out on to this table like a guilty secret.
