Page 60 of Beautiful Ugly

“I think your mother might need something—”

“When doesn’t she?” Midge interrupts.

“I couldn’t quite understand what she was saying—”

“My mother wasn’tsayinganything. She hasn’t spoken a word or left the house since my father died.”

I heard her speaking. Twice. And I saw her in the graveyard.

“These days she just bangs her stick when she wants something. Sorry, Grady. I didn’t mean to snap at you, but today has been a lot. I’ll go and see to her.”

“Don’t feel as though you need to stay, I’ve got this,” Abby says when Midge has gone.

It’s a relief to get out of the house for all of the reasons, but it feels strange to leave Abby behind when I’ve only just found her. I can’t think of an excuse to stay any longer, and I don’t know whether telling her the truth would be the right thing to do right now. She seems to have a whole new life here. As I walk across the driveway, I glance at the upstairs window and see Morag. She’s frantically waving, almost as though she wants to warn me about something, but maybe she’s just confused. She stands so close to the glass that it starts to mist, then she holds up a crooked finger and writes backward in the condensation. Even from here I can read the letters:leave. She shakes her head sadly then backs away until I can no longer see her. As if she was never there.

I can still smell Abby’s perfume in the car as I drive back toward the cabin. It makes it hard to think about anything else. My mind is blown by the afternoon’s events, and the Land Rover almost swerves off the road twice because I’m too tired to see straight. Too tired to properly process anything that has happened. What Ineedis sleep, but what Iwantis whiskey. My wife is alive but she doesn’t remember me, and now she’s married to someone else. If that doesn’t justify a drink in the afternoon I don’t know what does.

As soon as I get inside the cabin I pour myself a glass of scotch—just a small one, since I need to focus or at least try to—then I sit and stare at the ocean while trying to come up with a new plan. The old plan was to get off the island as soon as possible, find out what Kitty meant in her letter, and hope that she liked the new book well enough to sell it and help get my life back on track. There was nothing left to stay here for until I ran into Abby.

Now I don’t know what to do.

So I do what I always do when I don’t know what to do and pour another drink.

One minute I want to knoweverythingabout the man she has married, then I want to know nothing. Nothing at all. “The tree doctor,” she called him, as though that was supposed to mean something. As if that might make all of this okay. None of this makes sense. How does someone disappear from the south of England and end up on a remote Scottish island? How can she have no memory of us? Of me? Should I tell her? Once again I find myself facing a moral dilemma with no right answer.

Now that I know she is here I can’t just walk away.

Abby is the only person I have ever truly loved. What if she does remember us one day?

I keep thinking I can hear someone creeping around outside the cabin, so I check that all of the doors and windows are locked. I think about what my doctor said the last time I bothered to go see him, about long-term lack of sleep leading to paranoia, confusion, hallucinations, and all the other great stuff he predicted if I didn’t find a way to switch off, learn to make my mind rest. I take a couple of sleeping pills he prescribed and wash them down with more whiskey.

I start to wonder if I imagined everything that happened today, if it was all just a dream, but then I take the Beautiful Ugly pamphlet from the pottery out of my pocket and there she is, mywife’s familiar face staring right back at me. I pour myself another drink. Then I leave the pamphlet on the desk and take out the walkie-talkie instead.

It isn’t mine, obviously.

I’m just “borrowing” it.

I’m hoping it might help me figure out what is really going on.

GROWING SMALLER

Ifall asleep—pass out—on the bed with the walkie-talkie still in my hand. My wife always said that it was impossible to wake me when I drank too much. But she was wrong becausesomethingdoes wake me and it isn’t the walkie-talkie. It starts as a small sound at first. The variety that infiltrates your dreams so that it becomes part of them. Hiding, unnoticed, until the sound is too out of place to fit within whatever you were dreaming about. Like an itch you have to scratch. It distracts me from the imaginary scenes my subconscious mind has conjured, pulling me from the no-man’s-land between sleep and wakefulness where dreams and reality blur. I hear the noise again and struggle to identify it.

It sounds like breathing.

And it sounds like it is coming from beneath my bed.

I wake up drenched in sweat. I don’t move but I do open my eyes, blinking into the shadows, adjusting to the dark. I keep perfectly still and listen.

At first, I think that it was just a dream within a dream, but then I hear it again.

Someone is slowly coming out from under the bed.

I am lying on my side and I daren’t move.

All I can see at first is a shadow, and again I think I must be imagining it, unable to believe my own eyes. But the shadow is shaped like a hand. Someone really is crawling out from beneath the bed very, very slowly. They must have been down there the whole time I was sleeping.

I should get up, defend myself, say something,dosomething.