A Book

"There is a chair in my house that I bought because it made me laugh in the showroom. I have never sat in it again."

"Finally," I said.

It came out of me on a breath that had been queuing up somewhere behind my ribs since about eight o'clock that morning, waiting for permission, and the sound of it in that empty living room was so pathetic that I was glad there was nobody awake in the house to hear it.

The kitchen was done. The milk was mopped and the floor was gone over twice and the cloth was rinsed and hung over the tap, and the shopping was away — properly away, not shoved in, because I had stood at that fridge and lined the tins up by height without noticing I was doing it, which was what my hands did whenever the rest of me had gone somewhere else. Sammy was down. I had stopped at his door and looked in for longer than I needed to: the blanket rising and falling, his mouth open, one arm flung out over the side of the bed. And Buffy stretched out on the rug beside him with her chin on her paws, exactly where she put herself every afternoon of her life, having entirely forgiven me for the milk.

The house was mine. For an hour, perhaps, if I was lucky. Nobody in it to be strong in front of.

I sank into my chair.

It was a recliner and it was not remotely beautiful and Nial had been threatening to take it to the tip for six years. It stood in the corner of the living room by the window, and from it I could see the length of the hallway one way and the whole of the front garden the other, and I had not chosen it for that. I chose it in 2012 because it was on sale and because I sat down in it in the showroom and laughed out loud. The leather had gone soft at the arms where my hands went. The seat had given up altogether and taken the shape of me. It was the one chair in that house where I had never once had to be anybody.

The frame creaked as it took my weight, and even that sounded wrong that afternoon. Too loud. Too pleased with itself.

My book was on the little table where I had left it on Thursday night. The Silence of the Lambs. I had been reading it in ten-minute pieces for three weeks and getting nowhere, and I picked it up and ran my thumb along the cracked spine and did not, for a second or two, let myself notice what I was doing.

Then I noticed.

I had locked my own front door behind me. My husband had been gone since nine in the morning and had not rung. There was a list of struck-out names lying on a blotter twenty feet away down the hall. And I had sat down in my chair and reached for a novel about a young woman walking alone into the dark to find a man who takes people apart.

I have never been able to leave a piece of staging alone. Not in a rehearsal room, not in a supermarket queue, not sitting in my own living room on the worst Saturday of my life. There is a part of me that stands at the back of the hall with its arms folded whatever else is going on, and it looked at that book in my hands and it said, quite clearly, oh, very good. Very neat. And who exactly are you playing this for?

I opened it anyway.

The bookmark came loose as I did and slid down onto the arm of the chair.

It was a chemist's receipt. Thermal paper, already going grey at the edges, curled up at one corner.

Triffett, Samuel — Prescription #4721.

I picked it up and held it and looked at it for a long time.

Seven days. That was all it was. I had stood at that counter seven days ago with Sammy hanging off my arm asking for a lolly and being told no, and I had taken the little white paper bag and the receipt that came with it, and walked out into Elizabeth Street and got into the car. And at some point that same evening I had wanted something to keep my place with, and my hand had gone into my bag, and that was what was in it.

A sedative. A mild one, Dr Carmichael had said, and he had said the word mild twice, and he had waited for me to be all right about it before he would write it down. It was sitting in the bathroom cabinet in the paper bag it came in, and the bottle was still nearly full, because it worked about one night in three, and because every single time I measured it out I hated myself so completely that afterwards I had to go and stand in the kitchen with both hands flat on the bench.

He was three years old. Sleeping was the one thing in the whole world he had ever been effortlessly good at, and he could not do it any more without a bottle in a cabinet.

And I had been using the docket for it to keep my place in a thriller.

I folded it in half, and then in half again, and put it back between the pages.

How did we get here?

Not months. Weeks. Nobody understood that, and I could not make Dr Carmichael understand it across that desk either — the speed of the thing. Eleven weeks earlier I had a boy who laughed so hard at The Gruffalo that he got hiccups, who would not let me stop, who shouted again, again until my voice went and I had to do the last page in a whisper. That boy still existed. He was asleep at the far end of the hall. And he was also not there any more, and I could not have told you which night it was that he left, and there had been no announcement.

And Nial. Where was Nial. Where was my husband at that precise minute, while his wife sat in a chair with a chemist's receipt inside a paperback and his son slept behind a half-closed door and nobody in that house had heard one word out of him since nine o'clock that morning.

I shook my head — actually shook it, the way I shook water out of my ear after the pool — and put my thumb into the page.

Enough. One hour. The chaos in a book has margins. That was the whole appeal of it and I had never once been ashamed of it: somebody else does the walking into the dark, and there is a beginning and a middle and, mercifully, an end, and I go with her and I come back out.

"Chapter Nine," I said.

I had been reading the chapter number out loud before I started since I was about nine years old and I have never known why. It was a cue line. It told whatever part of me was still sitting in that living room that we were going now, and that it could stop.

And it worked. For a while, it really did work.

The sentences took me. My shoulders came down a fraction, and then another fraction, and my jaw let go, and the room went soft at its edges — the hallway sliding out of focus, the mantelpiece receding, the heat pump turning into weather. The clock stopped being the sound of an anxious house and became the sound of a story instead.

And then, somewhere around the fifteenth paragraph, Clarice Starling stopped being a person in a book.

I laid the page down flat on my knee.

She knew. That was what got me. She knew before she could prove a word of it, before one man in that entire building would give her the time of day, and she went on anyway — not because she was brave and not because she was clever, but because there was nobody else who was going to do it and because she could not stop.

And I sat in my chair and thought: I know too.

I had known for a fortnight. I had no evidence that would have survived one minute of scrutiny from anybody — and a great deal of evidence that would have survived scrutiny of me, the prepaid telephone, the car door pulled twice, the woman who did not sleep — and I knew anyway. Something was in my house. Something had been at my son. And all I had to bring against it was a mother's certainty and a list of crossed-out names on a dead man's—

My whole body went cold.

Not dead, I said to myself, and I said it hard. Missing. Absent. Late. Not dead. There is no reason on this earth to think—

But my own mouth had already done it. Before I had thought it, before I had allowed it, before I had done a scrap of the careful editing I had spent the whole drive home doing — my own mouth, inside my own head, had put my husband into the past tense.

I went back to the book and held onto it.

I do not know how long I read after that. Not long. The words began to come apart on the page — the lines separating, sliding, the letters turning into shapes with nothing inside them — and I blinked, and pulled them back, and they held for about a paragraph, and went again.

Outside, the light had gone flat and low and colourless. The cloud had not shifted off that mountain since dawn and it was not going to, and the garden beyond the window had turned into a photograph of itself. Somewhere out there the rain was still going on the roof of the porch, small and steady and endless.

"Just a few more pages," I said.

And then a yawn came up through me from somewhere around my knees and took the whole of my face with it and pulled my jaw so wide that it hurt, and the book slid down my chest, and my body — which had been carrying every last piece of this since a phone went off on a bedside table in the middle of the night — simply put its hand up and said no.

I had not slept in the daytime since before Sammy was born. Not once. I have never had the constitution for it: I lie down at two in the afternoon and get up at three feeling like something dug out of a peat bog.

The chair had me. The leather had gone warm underneath me and it had my shape in it, and it pulled me down into itself with six years of practice, and I let it.

The clock, which twenty minutes earlier had been cutting that room into slices, changed key. It turned into a metronome, and then into a heartbeat, and then into nothing very much at all.

Everything went quiet and a long way off. The bookshelf lost its edges. The mantelpiece went. The framed poster from the 2014 Streetcar at the Theatre Royal — my last one, my last real one, with my own name on it very small down at the bottom — softened into a rectangle of colour on the wall and stopped meaning anything at all.

And all of it went with it. Sammy's arms. The bruises coming up in shapes. The car with the black windows. The pen going through the paper. The leaves in a dog's coat. Every one of them let go of me slowly and unwillingly, a finger at a time, and went and stood at the edges to wait, because they knew perfectly well that I would be back.

"Just a quick nap," I said. "Just five minutes…"

The book came to rest on my chest and rose and fell there.

And the last thing I had, going down, was my son. Asleep at the far end of the hall, in a room with clouds on the ceiling and a light on, with the dog stretched out on the rug beside him and her chin on her paws.

Safe.

It was such a good thought. It was the best thing I had thought all day.

And I let it take me all the way under.