The Empty Room (30 page)

Slowly the sickness subsided. She flushed the toilet, sank to the floor and pressed her face to the cool tiles. Something sharp dug into her cheek. Glass, there was glass on the floor. She ran her hand along the tiles. The perfume bottles. What had happened to the perfume bottles? She realized she’d cut her foot, and blood now seeped from the wound, leaving a red blossom on the sole of her sock. She got to her knees and crawled to the bath. Water ran down the open drain. She turned off the tap.

What the hell had happened last night? Had she meant to take a
bath and forgot? Thank God she’d left the plug open or the whole apartment would have flooded. Yes, she vaguely remembered wanting a bath, pouring salts in. Sure enough, the plastic dish of salts was empty.

She peeled her sock off. It was just a little cut. Given the state of her, it was hardly worth noticing. She used the sock to sweep up the rest of the glass. All the pretty bottles, all her treasures, shattered and smashed. She found the tiny L’Air du Temps bottle. There was a chip out of the base, but the doves were intact. It made her want to cry, seeing those doves. The Chloé bottle was also unbroken, but the perfume had leaked out. Feeling a trickle of something, she put her hand to her cheek. Blood. Just a little. She got to her feet and went to put the bottles back on the shelf, but the shelf was gone. There it was, broken off its plugs, behind the door. She put the bottles on the back of the toilet tank. Had there been a fight?

Without looking in the mirror—certainly not that horror—she turned on the taps and ran water over her face. She cleared off the mucus and bile. She peeled off her filthy clothes.
Do not look too closely, just kick them into the corner
. Shower. She needed scalding water, and fast. She’d have to call the office, tell them—oh, right, there was nothing to tell them. She was the one who’d been told.

She stood in the bath and let the shower, the water hot as she could bear, sluice over her. She was covered in bruises. Her hip hurt. Her stomach was lined with sandpaper. Her mouth was lined with dead-horse glue. Images flickered through her mind. A sense of urgency, of vital information withheld, nipped at her.

It was important to remember what had happened. Colleen trembled and kept a hand on the tile wall to ensure she didn’t fall. She remembered the scene in David Moore’s office. The woman from Human Resources. She remembered telling them to fuck off. (That was clever, wasn’t it, a bell she could not now unring?) Buying booze. Oh, shit, the bathroom stall incident. The moment of the falling bottle playing over and over again in her mind, like some old movie reel on a loop, in which the bottle kept falling and shattering, falling and shattering. She had seen Helen after that. She remembered going to Helen’s. Her mother. Jake. Who was about to be a father, apparently, with no more use for her. So many snippets, but even more holes.

Jesus. If time existed so that everything didn’t happen at once, and space existed so it all didn’t happen to you, well, something had certainly fucked up somewhere.

She had to sit down, or lie down. She had to get something in her stomach. She carefully stepped out of the shower and grabbed a towel. It smelled of mildew and she threw it on the floor with her pile of clothes. She grabbed her old green bathrobe from the hook behind the door and inched into it, trembling like a beaten cur. She made her way down the hall. The light from outside was the sort of indistinct grey that could mean it was any time at all. It looked wet, the sky rough with low clouds. The clock on the stove said 11:30. Daytime, then. The bottle of vodka lay on its side in the sink and the lid was off. She righted it. An inch of liquor remained. That wasn’t possible, it must have spilled. The fumes hit her nose and
she gagged, her stomach convulsing. She considered taking a swig. It would settle her. At the thought, sour liquid squirted into her mouth. She spit in the sink.
Please God, no more. Please, please, please
. She ran the water and hung her head. Nothing more
. Thank you. Thank you
. She was feverish and chilled at the same time.

The water was cold now and she filled a glass to the brim. Even in the hangover fog she knew she mustn’t give in to the desire to gulp. She must be moderate. Sips. Small sips. Her tongue, which was a desiccated lump, began to plump under the water’s revivifying effects. She took the water and a handful of crackers and made her way to the living room. Never had the couch seemed so far. She curled up and pulled the throw over her. She nibbled and sipped. She wanted to die.

A flash from the night before. The knife. Her wrists. She cried out. The intruder had been her. She had been the murderer at the end of the bed. In a moment of terrible clarity, she pictured a kind of demon, a malevolent spirit she had called to her by drinking so much. She imagined she’d sent a beacon out into the cosmos and this hideous, silence-souled creature had slithered down it, all the way to her door. It would always know where she lived, now. There was no hiding from it.

They don’t call it “spirits” for nothing
.

It tiptoed up her spine on cat’s paws. It peeked out from the corners of the room. It lay beneath her pillow, waiting for her to fall asleep so it could reach up with its skeletal fingers and tighten its grip around her throat. It whispered in her ear.

It was the King of the Twisted Fairies.

It was a deft hand with knives.

Even as she vowed she would not drink today, a small clear voice in the back of her mind sniggered
. Wait an hour
, the voice said.
There’s a dance in the old girl yet
.

Colleen stuffed the corner of the throw in her mouth. She shook and tried hard not to scream. Her bowels cramped and the ice-pick pain curled her into a ball, and she knew she’d have to run for it. Then the mad, hands-out-in-front lurching stumble down the hall to the toilet. The fire in her gut. The hot, shameful splash. The stench. It was as though she were rotting from the inside.

Minutes later she rose and huddled in the shower, cleaning herself again. She got out, dried off, and sprayed the room with air freshener. The cloying scent made her gag. She felt hollow, feverish and shaky. She wanted to go back to bed.

In the bedroom she realized she’d have to strip the filthy sheets. She picked up the butcher knife, gingerly, with only the ends of her fingertips, and laid it on the desk. It seemed to twinkle malevolently. She didn’t want to look at it. She managed to get the sheets off the bed, her muscles aching with the effort, her joints throbbing. The mattress protector had to go, too, since it was damp, but the urine hadn’t soaked through to the mattress proper. Be grateful for small mercies. The duvet, too, seemed stained only in one patch. She could live with that for now; she craved warmth more than cleanliness. She threw the mess of sheets and mattress protector into the bathroom where her clothes lay in an accusing pile.
Later. She’d face washing everything later. For now, all she wanted to do was get more water and more crackers and crawl into the bed and sleep and sleep and not wake up until it was all over.

There were some bottles of club soda in the kitchen, unrefrigerated. She found one and, hugging it to her chest, walked like a person just getting her sea legs back to the bedroom where the bed and duvet waited for her. It was to have been her refuge, this room. Her writing nest. The stupid picture of Dylan Thomas’s writing shed, her ridiculous journal, the cold-eyed computer, even the Bible, so mute and black-covered and phony with those gilded edges. They mocked her. She grabbed her cell phone from the desk as she half-fell onto the bed. The message light blinked. She flipped it open and saw she had two messages. She lay on her back with the phone clutched to her breast. She was not at all sure she wanted to see who the messages were from. It was quite possible she’d made phone calls last night. It was quite possible the nursing home had been trying to get hold of her. It was quite possible she’d done some damage and would be expected to clean it up this morning. She couldn’t face it. Still, she had to know. She scrolled through the call history.

The nursing home. No surprise, only the rancid acid of humiliation. And a number she didn’t recognize, or did she? It had the same three digits as the university. Some bureaucrat wanting her to fill out forms, probably. To hell with it. She tossed the phone onto the bed beside her, reached for the computer and flipped it open. She hadn’t shut it off the night before and when the screen came
alive it did so to her e-mail program. Junk mail in the inbox. A note from Lori:
Hey, kiddo, just checking on you. Hope you’re okay. I’ll call later
.

At the top of the sent list was an e-mail to Jake. She had no recollection of writing it. She did not want to see what she’d written to him, but couldn’t stop herself.

Dear Jake,

This will the last yor hear from me. IBut I couldn’t go wiorthout reminding you of a afternoon. I’m listening to Tom Waits right now. Do you remember? That’s what we and I listening to: Tom Saits a song about a man haunted by the only womoon heever fucking lijved, treated herlike shit andleft, sound famiar? …

Colleen slammed the computer shut. Tom Waits? “Blue Valentine”? Oh, delightful, she’d ended up in that emotional cul de sac again, had she? Jake would read it. He’d know he had made the right decision. She was contemptible.

She wrapped the duvet around herself. It was obvious she owed a number of people apologies; possibly she owed everyone apologies. It was wisest to assume there wasn’t anyone she hadn’t offended in one way or another. The tricky part was going to be figuring out what for.

Should she check the mystery phone message? Perhaps with luck it would be the imagined intruder from the night before. Perhaps with luck he’d agree to come back and finish the job. She’d even pay him.

For several minutes she sat at the edge of the bed, staring out the
window over her desk. From that angle she saw nothing but sky, that putty-coloured smudge of indistinct clouds, the horizon invisible. There might be nothing out there at all save a muffled vapour pressing again the window. She could hear nothing, not even a car horn from the street so far below, not a bird cry, not the hum of the elevator gears, not voices in the hall. It was a silence so complete it was thick with all the things it was missing. It was hard to breathe through such a silence.

“You know my folly, O God; my guilt is not hidden from you
.” She had said the words aloud and they sat in the air before her, nearly visible. Psalm 69. Where had that come from?
“They that sit in the gate talk of me; and I am the song of the drunkards
.” An apt description, she felt. She was the song of the drunkards.

Colleen rolled into a ball on the bed. She reached out and picked up the Bible on the nightstand. Old training kicked in. She turned to Psalm 69 and, through cracked lips, began to read.

Save me, O God; For the waters are come in unto my soul
.

I sink in deep mire, where there is no standing: I am come into deep waters, where the floods overflow me
.

I am weary with my crying; my throat is dried: Mine eyes fail while I wait for my God
.

She stopped reading. If there was a God, surely—and quite wisely—He or She had written off Colleen long ago. She was on her own. The orphan, the outcast, the leper.

The phone buzzed and vibrated from somewhere in the vicinity of her left foot. It startled her and she fumbled for a few seconds to find it in the duvet folds. She flipped it open. That unknown number again. The university, but not her department. What the fuck, she might as well get it over with.

“Yes,” she said, one hand over her eyes.

“May I speak to Colleen Kerrigan, please?” said a woman’s voice.

“This is she.”

“Oh, good. Colleen, I’m so glad to reach you at last. This is Pat, Pat Minot, from the HR Department at the university. I have tried calling several times but there was no answer. I was beginning to get a little worried, to be honest.”

The woman made a sort of noise in her throat, perhaps her attempt at a chuckle. To Colleen’s ears it sounded as though she were gargling thumbtacks.

“What can I do for you, Ms. Minot?”

“Call me Pat, please. I did leave a message. Did you get that?”

“I don’t know. I didn’t check.”

“Oh, I see, well, probably just as well. These things are often better done face to face—well, not face to face, but you know what I mean. Although, I would like to see you.”

Colleen’s mind simply could not take in what she was saying. Whatever the woman wanted, Colleen didn’t have it.

“Are you still there?” asked Pat Minot.

“Yup. It appears I don’t have anywhere to go this morning.”

“No, of course not. I’m doing this poorly, I think. But I am worried
about you, especially after yesterday. That didn’t go at all the way I hoped it would.”

“Sorry to disappoint you.” It would be best not to tell the woman to fuck off a second time. Still, it was so tempting. Colleen heard her draw a great breath and then exhale.

“You haven’t disappointed me, Colleen, but I suspect you may have disappointed yourself. I know that was something I did on a daily basis when I was an active alcoholic.”

Colleen took her hand away from her eyes. Despite the crushing headache, the itch and bone-ache and nausea; despite the sensation her skin had been grated off exposing all the nerve endings, this new information flapped its way into her foggy brain. Colleen was more alert than she had been a few seconds before.
The woman who had fired her for being a drunk was a drunk herself
. My, my. Emily Post simply didn’t cover this sort of thing.

“Are you there?”

“Yes.”

“I haven’t made this kind of call too many times before, Colleen, maybe two or three times, but frankly you reminded me so much of myself yesterday that I wanted to talk to you right then and there, and I would have, but you didn’t seem entirely open to anything I might have said. Is that true?”