LITMIR.BIZ

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now, but she couldn’t worry about that. She slammed the door and found the ignition key and somehow rattled the car to life. ‘Fine,’ she said. ‘Everything’s fine.’ Then she looked up at the rear-view mirror, and everything was not fine.

      It had been knocked askew, so that it afforded a view of the worn and bobbled headlining. She reached up instinctively to adjust it, and then froze. She’d seen this film, too, and so she knew without a doubt as the fear slithered up her spine that the last thing she’d see as she twisted the mirror into place was a pair of eyes staring at her from the back seat.

      She closed her own eyes, all but oblivious to the spinning of her head. ‘Please,’ she said. ‘Please don’t.’

      Out of town, the traffic was light, but she didn’t want the traffic to be light because there was a police car behind her and nothing in front, no flow to keep up with, and the road was twisty with a fifty mile-per-hour speed limit, which seemed generous considering the blindness of some of the bends, but she didn’t want to appear to be driving too slowly. And concentrating on her speed and constantly checking her mirror for signs of interest was tightening her grip on the wheel, making her turns sharp and sudden and her straights a series of imprecise corrections. Every time she tried to relax her grip and focus on the road far ahead instead of right under the nose of the car, her speed crept either up or down, depending on which was more wrong.

      She’d turned the radio off to concentrate, and what felt like a sizeable swerve had resulted from that, so now she was afraid to adjust the heater, which was inexplicably on, and so was simultaneously burning up on the inside and shivering under a cold sweat on the outside.

      Annie was probably going to be sick.

      Finally, having endured this torture for what seemed like hours but in reality, she knew, was only five and a half miles, she witnessed a ray of glorious sunshine slice through the clouds of her panic; the little Gulf station she drove past every day but at which she’d never had cause to stop, save for that one time the garage next door had put an old convertible BMW up for sale on their cracked concrete forecourt. What a heap that had turned out to be.

      Annie mirrored, signalled and manoeuvred all at the same time and without slowing, so that she crossed the corner of that forecourt at forty-nine miles an hour before standing on the brakes and bringing the Renault up at a neat twenty-degree angle, ten feet past the pumps. She didn’t look over, just swivelled her eyes as far as they could go to watch the patrol car cruise past, braking as it did so, which gave her a fright, although the driver wasn’t watching her. She held onto the door handle nonetheless, ready to spring out of the car and attempt to vanish into thin air if it turned around.

      It didn’t.

      Annie gave it a full minute before she stepped out of the car, met the eye of the station attendant peering curiously out at her from the window, and strolled with what in her head was a kind of whimsical purpose into the store. She knew, though, as she stepped into the air-conditioned chill and felt her forehead light up with icy beads of sweat, that the attendant could see every one of her nerves jangling, and so, not trusting her voice any better than the rest of her, she didn’t try to speak. She just gave him a polite nod and a crooked smile and bought herself a Cornetto and a packet of crisps.

      Some time later – she couldn’t say how long, but her foot ached from feathering the accelerator and her eyes from bobbing on the ends of their stalks – she made it home. Or at least, she made it to the side of the road in front of her house. Home was another matter. The closer she came, the further she felt from the sanctity of that locked door. Like that famous shot in Jaws, where Chief Brody’s face zooms into tight focus as the background shrinks away, blurry and sickly and terrifying. A ‘trombone shot,’ they call it. Or a ‘dolly zoom’, because that’s how it’s done: dolly in, zoom out. Dolly in, zoom out. Dolly in, zoom out. Breathe in, breathe out. Breathe in, breathe out. Calm the FUCK down, Annie.

      Annie breathed, and gripped the wheel, and listened to the tick of the cooling engine, and tried to laugh at the thought of changing her name to Dolly Zoom. Maybe it could be her stripper name, she thought, if things got any worse at work.

      Eventually, her heart and her breathing slowed to something like a workable rate, and she rolled down the window and lit a cigarette, and smoked it right down to the filter as she stared in turn at each of the windows of the house. And then she stared a little bit longer, until she was satisfied that it was just a house, her house, empty, familiar, safe.

      Ha. Safe. Yeah, right.

      Annie reached up and twisted the rear-view mirror around to look at herself. She sighed at her smudged mascara, the worry lines etched black around tired, bloodshot eyes that had lost all of their sparkle, all of the intelligence that had set her apart from the pretty but vacuous girls at school, for better or worse. She thought, briefly, about digging some wipes out of her bag and cleaning the paint off her face then and there, but, deciding that whilst she was sober enough to notice, she was still too drunk to bother, she left it. Instead, she slapped the mirror roughly back into place, grabbed her bag, took a deep, steadying breath, and threw open the car door.

      It was only twenty yards to the house. She had the key out ready, gripped tightly between her thumb and forefinger and angled so that, hopefully, it would slip smoothly into the lock without her dropping it. Deep down, out here in the crisp afternoon light, she knew no one was going to sneak up behind her. She just didn’t think she could take another shot of adrenaline; that pure, irrational it’s-behind-you fear that would inevitably accompany a floorward fumble of the keys. And so it was, the jagged little shaft click-clicking happily into the lock, the lock turning smoothly within the door, the door falling ajar, Annie swatting it open with the palm of her hand and stepping inside and throwing it shut behind her without the merest glance over her shoulder. Whatever was out there was staying out.

      The relief, however, didn’t come.

      The house was cold, downstairs at least; the hedges and the blossom-laden trees shaded the south-facing windows. Upstairs, where the slope of the roof cut through the bedroom ceiling, it would be sweltering, particularly in that spot below the skylight so beloved of next door’s cat. But the cat hadn’t been around in a while, and the heat hurt Annie’s head when the drink started to wear off, so she dropped her bag beside the sofa and just stood for a while in the cool gloom, rubbing the goosebumps on her arms and trying to figure out what felt different. For a minute, or maybe three or four, she managed to distract herself from the unease in her belly by cataloguing the contents of the room: the lamps with their cracked-mirror finish, seemingly absorbing rather than reflecting the smoke-tinted magnolia of the walls; the television on its ill-fitting mahogany-look flatpack unit, its screen partly obscured by the stack of unwatched films; the cabinet full of Wade Whimsies, fastidiously collected in childhood but now little more than a twee reminder of an alien past. The ashtray that seemed to fill and empty itself of its own accord. The sofa that wouldn’t stay plumped up between her leaving for work and staggering home. The faint, sweet aroma that was sometimes there and sometimes not, and impossible to place when it was. The ticking of the clock. The ticking. The ticking. The ticking of the clock . . .

      Annie stared at the second hand as it did what a second hand does, at the precise speed a second hand does it. And she was sure, she was sure she hadn’t replaced the battery in that clock. However much she’d drunk, however many minutes or hours ago she’d drunk it, she was sure that clock shouldn’t be running. And she was sure, without daring to drag her eyes to her watch, that as much as it shouldn’t have been showing the correct time, it very much was.

      But there had to be an explanation, right? After all, she couldn’t remember everything she did after a drink or six. Most of the time she flat-out didn’t want to, but in this case she was willing to make an exception. So she stared at the clock and chewed her nail and racked her fuzzy brain and conceded that she had been under a lot of stress lately. That was why she’d been drinking so much, wasn’t it? The stress? It wasn’t a need, an addiction or even a habit. It was just stress. And stress can do all kinds of things to a person’s brain, her perception, her memory. And, even to Annie, that made a damn sight more sense than someone – than anyone –

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