That’s what the man reminded me of: a husk, with nothing but dust and spiders inside him.
I pull myself up to standing and the world rocks around me like it’s trying to shrug me off. I fish in my back pocket and I’m relieved to find my phone. I’ve never been robbed while I’m unconscious – I guess all the arm waving puts people off – but it’s something I think about. Anything can happen while you’re out. It’s like leaving your front door wide open. Except it’s not your house you leave unattended, it’s you.
My phone is dead, the screen dark. I press the power button again anyway. Nothing. Maybe it broke when I fell.
I let my head fall back and stare hopelessly at the cloudless sky.
Nothing is easy after a seizure. My eyes don’t work right, my fingers don’t work right. I’m only a twenty-minute walk from home but I might as well be on Mars.
The smart move would be to beg a passer-by to borrow their phone and call Mum. She’ll be working her shift at the local Waitrose right now and if I call her she’ll be in the car and down here in about three minutes flat, Liquorice Allsorts in hand.
Mum’s great in a crisis, I guess she’s had a lot of practice.
Or I could just walk?
It sounds simple, but trust me, it’s not. I might pass out again, or step into traffic. I’m scared. But I can’t shake the old man’s words.
Keep moving.
Something is off. Something about the weird old head-wound guy and the fact that nobody is even looking at me.
Keep moving.
I’m probably not thinking straight. I never make good decisions when I’m post-seizure, but all the same…
I need to go.
My blood feels like it’s boiling, my arms and legs twitch with the urge to start walking. I slip my phone into my pocket and point myself towards home. This is brave, I think. The first brave thing I’ve done in a long time.
I used to have this idea that epilepsy was just one thing about me. It didn’t have to define me; I could still have a life. I convinced myself it all came down to my GCSEs. They were the first great hurdle, I thought, the doorway to the rest of my life. I was going to nail my GCSEs and crush my A-levels and then I was going to get the hell out of this place. London. New York. Tokyo. Somewhere alive. Somewhere where the universe was actually paying attention.
But then my GCSEs came around, epilepsy took its chance to give me the biggest kick in the teeth it could and all my grand plans got scrubbed.
TWO
Most people with epilepsy get auras before they have a seizure. Visual disturbances, vertigo, distorted sensations. When I was little, my aura used to look like a person. I’d catch sight of something in the corner of my eye and turn to see a willowy man standing in the doorway next to me. Long and taut, with muscles on his arms and legs that stood out like twisted rope. I could never see his face, even when it was clear daylight, but I could tell, somehow, that he was watching me. He’d tilt his head to the side like he didn’t quite understand me. I’d freeze, my breath like a marble in my throat, until—
I’d open my eyes and Mum would be leaning over me, shouting, looking petrified. I didn’t know about epilepsy then. I used to think I passed out through sheer terror. But then Mum took me to the doctor and after a bunch of tests I got my diagnosis.
I stopped seeing the man after I started medication, but I still feel him. Now, my aura starts with a blue-grey tinge at the edges of my vision, followed by a rushing sensation, a sense of falling but not moving, as if the world is rearing up around me. And then there it is: the fear. Unreasoning and inhuman. The unshakable belief that somebody – something – is standing just outside my line of sight.
I walk on. The air is damp, the sky is a flat sheet of grey that looks like it’s welded to the grey of the roads and the poxy grey pebble-dashed houses. My vision is still messed up, blurry in some places and not in others, like one of those tilt-shift photos that make real-sized houses look like perfect doll-sized toys.
Home is twenty minutes away.
Home. My room. My emergency pack of Liquorice Allsorts.
I reach the roundabout at the edge of the town centre. There aren’t many people. The one or two I can see are on the opposite side of the road, so far ahead or behind they look like blurry smudges of oil in a Lowry painting.
Cars whip round the roundabout and hit the dual carriageway at a hundred miles an hour. I feel them more than I see them, a kind of whhmm as they go past, shaking the fence that divides the lanes and sending blasts of cold, gritty air right through me.
According to quantum mechanics, objects aren’t really there until you observe them. I learned this from YouTube, not my physics GCSE, by the way. What we call reality is just one way of looking at the world. If you listen to Heisenberg, objects only exist in relation to other objects. When they’re not interacting, they’re not really there.
Epilepsy brain. Sorry.
Thinking about physics keeps me calm and calm is good because anxiety is a major trigger for my seizures. Although, to be fair, so is hunger, lack of sleep, norovirus, physical discomfort in any form and the weather forecast in Paraguay. That last one is a joke … as far as I know.
Oh, and exams.
The irony is that I wasn’t even that anxious about my GCSEs. It’s just that two weeks of limited bathroom access, loss of sleep and long periods of time in a confined space with lots of anxious people turned out to be pretty triggering as well. By the time the day of my maths exam finally came, I’d taken so many extra meds that my brain felt like it was floating in custard. I was probably going to fail anyway but I would have liked not to have ended my school career by throwing up all over my paper and chipping a tooth on the sports hall floor.
One–nil to epilepsy.
I don’t see the kids coming the other way until it’s too late to cross over without it looking too obvious. There’s three of them, or is it four? Their blurry outlines blend and separate, blend and separate, indistinct wave functions in superposition. I narrow my eyes, trying and failing to make sense of them.
The only thing that’s clear is their sense of threat.
These kids are going to beat the living crap out of me.
That’s the worst thing about this town, it’s such a hole that pretty much everyone is looking for trouble if they can find it. And they’ll see “victim” written all over me.
Side by side, deliberately taking up the whole pavement. They might be my age … or a little older … or maybe a little younger. It doesn’t matter. Violence is inevitable. It’s usually a shove or some verbal. But I’ve been punched plenty of times as well. Getting punched isn’t the worst. The worst is when they kind of half swing but stop and you know they’re not really going to hit you but you flinch anyway. I hate that.
Walking home was a mistake.
Suddenly I remember my rizatriptan. I keep a blister pack of melties in my coat pocket and sometimes they help to clear my head. I find the packet and try to pop the foil but I fumble it and the pill pings on to the floor instead. I crouch to pick it up and then realize that I’m pretty much crouching at the perfect height for a kick in the face.
