Coming Undone by Terri White (ebook reader with highlight function .TXT) 📗

A few of the local stores are selling their remaining stock for cash only, but I have none and the ATMs are down. Everything else is closed – the bars, the restaurants, the liquor stores – and trees and power lines lie crumpled and broken in the streets.

I hear one of the people wandering around aimlessly like me say that there is electricity and cell signal uptown, so I start to walk. And when I hit 34th Street, there it is – half of the city lit up like it’s Christmas. My phone springs back to life – amongst the concerned messages, one from a friend from London who is in town.

We meet at a nearby restaurant, laughing, hugging. I haven’t had a drink in four days. We order cocktail after cocktail, and by the time I leave to walk back downtown, I’ve drunk sixteen. And somehow, somewhere, between sixteen French martinis and a pitch-black stairwell, I fall down while walking upstairs. Plunging in the darkness, flying, until I hit a wall hard with my body at the bottom.

I crawl back upstairs on my hands and knees, and the next morning I wake with a screaming, sticky hangover and what later turns out to be a broken shoulder. I tell everyone how I fell in the darkness. How unsafe it was. How the hurricane has a lot to answer for. How it isn’t my fault.

Six weeks later, it’s Christmas in New York. The festivities, for me, have begun in earnest. One morning, a note on yellow paper is pushed under my door: ‘Can you let me know you’re OK? I’m really worried about you. Your neighbour, x’. Clutching it, cold fear takes hold of me. I search, scrape my brain, my empty memory, for the source of the concern. Last night was the work holiday party in an ornate, gilded-gold hotel bar with the colleagues I hate smiling for, smiling at every day. I ordered the strongest drinks they had, over and over, refusing the trays of tiny white food as my stomach spun and cramped and my chest tightened and I heaved.

There’s a door number on the note. I fight the instinct to shrink and hide, dreading the knock on the door more than what I choose to do: walk downstairs and knock.

Knock, knock.

‘Hi, I live upstairs. I got your note!’

‘Oh God, are you OK?’

‘I’m fine. Totally fine. Why would you ask?’

She starts to talk. She arrived home late last night, looked up the stairs as she jammed her key inside the lock and saw a pile: a gold dress, red shoes and a woman who looked like me inside them, lying unconscious. Gathering the woman in her arms, she’d asked:

‘This is where you live, right? Are you OK? Can I call someone?’

‘I live in Camden,’ the woman replied. ‘I need to get home to Camden. Where am I? Can you get me a cab?’

She’d dragged the woman inside, put her to bed. I laugh at her, at this woman, at that woman.

Just two weeks after this: a note on my front door, in different handwriting, stuck there for the day that I’d lain inside, not moving.

‘Clean up your fucking mess. Your neighbour.’

A trail of food I don’t recall being unable to hold in my hands, from the front door on the street to my door. I laugh at her, at this woman.

Four weeks more after this: another resident holds the door open for me, his face hardening as I say thank you without meeting his eyes. He recognises my voice.

‘You’re the one who comes in singing and shouting and crying in the middle of the night,’ he says with barely disguised anger.

‘Am I?’ I ask.

Am I? I laugh, at her, at this woman.

Three weeks later: I’m leaving for work and the glass in the front door is smashed, the splinters and shards spread out like a delicate spider’s web, trying to reach me. I stop; I flinch. I’m not sure I didn’t do it. Did I? A picture lurks inside me: my foot, the door, I’m crying, angry. But is it a memory? A dream? Something I just imagined? It’s pulled further into the sea that’s flooded my brain and now it’s beyond reach and I don’t know, I’ll never know.

I spend more and more time in the shadows, less time bothering to look for her. I know she’s lost, if not gone entirely. The thin, sharp sheets that belong to someone else scratch my skin as I tug them tighter around me. The shouting and clamour and heat and spit and stab of the city collect on my shoulders. The weight makes my spine, my head, bend like the boughs of the trees that cover me. The weight comforts me even as it kills me.

I sleep.

I drink.

I drink.

Hours one and two I still feel lighter. So free. So myself. Hours three, four and five: the load gets strapped on, heavier than before, heavier than yesterday, somehow. My back buckles and the load snakes around each shoulder and forces its way inside my throat as I choke. I feel, I fear, that I can’t survive this. I will die doing this. And it’s OK, because I deserve this. I belong in this. I belong here. I’m at home. I can feel the fur under my toes. I tuck them under me, lay my head and prepare to rest. Hours six and seven are when the relief, the darkness comes and I feel nothing.

CHAPTER 17

Squatting within the shadows in the darkest corners of the city, I start to cut myself again. I don’t remember the pebbly path of consideration, the thoughts and questions that would count as such. Or is it simply that my hands just picked up the blade – naturally, easily – without conscious, never mind careful thought? What day was it when thought became action and I carved myself up again? Though it will have been night. Deep night, the