4338.206 · July 25, 2018 AD
Somewhere Past Midnight
The lamp in the corner is the only light left. Claire sits in its shrinking circle and waits for something she can't name — and the waiting opens doors she's spent eight years keeping shut. The town is talking about her. Paul is describing her to his mother. The walls are listening. And somewhere between the voicemails that beg and the voicemails that accuse, a different kind of darkness starts bleeding through — fluorescent lights, a baby crying, a voice she's tried to forget. By dawn, the number she's been calling all night will deliver a different message entirely.
Claire's night begins in stillness and ends in freefall. Past midnight, curled on the couch in a circle of lamplight, her mind turns outward — constructing with terrible precision the conversations happening without her. Gertrude at an afternoon tea, delivering the news with practised sympathy. Denise describing the café encounter to friends who pretend to be shocked. Paul in Adelaide, sitting in his mother's lounge room, finally free to say all the things he's held back for years. Claire populates these scenes with such detail and conviction that they stop being speculation and become memory — things that have already happened, verdicts already delivered, a narrative she's been written out of but can hear through the walls.
The paranoia gives way to something rawer. Claire's calls to Paul shift from desperate to furious — voicemails that accuse him of cowardice, that promise consequences, that pour out years of swallowed resentment. She throws his mug against the kitchen wall and stands among the shattered ceramic unable to bend down. And then, without warning, the past breaks through. Fluorescent lights flicker at the edges of her vision. The smell of antiseptic fills a room that should smell of nothing. A baby is crying somewhere she cannot reach, and a door will not open no matter how hard she pushes. These are not imaginings. These are memories — of a time after Mack was born when Claire became someone who needed to be watched, someone who had decisions made for her, someone whose own mother spoke about her in the third person to people in corridors. Postpartum. The word they used to make it smaller. Claire has spent eight years outrunning this, and tonight, with her defences stripped bare, it is catching up.
She takes four Temazepam where two were prescribed. The pills slow her body but accelerate her mind, stripping away whatever barriers normally keep the memories contained. Time jumps in chunks she cannot account for. The floor tilts. Paul's voicemail greeting stretches and distorts. And then, at dawn, the greeting disappears entirely — replaced by a flat automated voice informing her that the number she has called cannot be connected. The last thread between them, severed. Not silence but erasure. Claire recognises what is happening to her — recognises the edge she is approaching, remembers what waited on the other side last time. She finds an old prescription bottle at the back of the medicine cabinet, eight years expired, from a life she swore she'd left behind. She takes the pills anyway, on top of everything else, and meets the eyes of the stranger in the bathroom mirror who has no answer for the only question that matters.
