Page 44 of Deep Blue Lies

FORTY-THREE

It’s a panic attack. I know it now, I’ve had them before.

Back in university, when things got too much.

A waiter appears beside me, speaking words I don’t hear, but I’m concentrating.

Counting my breaths, like they told me. Forcing my chest to suck in for five useless seconds, then out for five more.

It’s like breathing through a straw, not enough, but it’s not nothing either.

Relax, Ava. Let it go. You know what this is.

It feels like death but you just need to calm down.

Let it go. In for five. Out for five. Close your eyes. Step back. Step away. Just for a moment.

A glass of water has appeared on my table.

I guess it must be the waiter. I pick it up and sip.

It’s cooling, almost magical, I feel the sensation of it trickling down inside my body.

I hear the waiter’s words again. Are you OK?

I nod, not looking at him, still counting the breaths.

The straw I’m breathing through widens a little, lets in a bit more air.

I’m OK. I’m going to be OK. I sip again.

It’s just a panic attack. You’ve done this before. You know how to get through.

I rub a hand over my face, and it’s my hand again, no longer the alien claw I saw before. These panic attacks, they’re terrifying, like a glimpse of how the world really is, a reality normally hidden from us.

I shudder, feeling myself slipping back down into my earthly dimension. Yet one that’s forever changed.

A few minutes later I’m able to leave. I don’t check the bill. Just drop a twenty-euro note on the table and risk walking. I’m back, yet not the same as I was. What I’ve just read, the implications of it – my whole world has fallen to pieces. I’m not who I thought I was. I don’t know who I am.

I don’t know where to go either. Not my apartment, and not the beach either, where there’ll be people, staring at me, and where I’ll see the derelict Aegean Dream Resort, where my mother worked. The woman who isn’t my mother.

But I have to move. I have to walk. If I don’t the panic will come back, and maybe it’ll beat me this time.

So I just begin, taking streets at random, whichever has the least number of eyes watching me.

Soon I’m in a part of Skalio I haven’t seen before, and then the town itself starts to thin out.

I go past paddocks, a field of chickens, another with donkeys.

I keep walking, buttoning up my brain, not letting myself think about what I’ve just read and all that it means.

Eventually the town stops all together, but I keep going, more steeply uphill now, up the side of the mountain where Gregory Duncan’s house is, but long before I get there, the heat takes its toll.

I only sipped at the water from the cafe, and I’ve walked for over an hour.

And maybe I’ve cried a lot of liquid out too.

Either way, I’m thirsty. I keep hoping that perhaps I’ll come across a well, made of beautiful stone, where I can bring up bucketfuls of silvery, cool water, but of course I don’t, because that’s in my head, my mind still running two scripts, reality and something else.

Even a tap would do though. But there’s nothing. So I stop – really stop. Try and regain some sort of control.

Somehow it’s six o’clock already, the whole day gone, and even though the heat is cooling a little, my throat is still parched. I begin to make my way back down the same dusty, rocky path I’ve been walking up. I suppose I’ll go back to my apartment. From there…I have no idea.

As I pass the first few houses on the edge of town, I become aware of the noise of a motor, and for a moment I’m confused, because I recognise it.

Then I see her, on her moped that pulls to the left – Sophia.

She slows down just in front of me – I think for a moment because she’s seen me, but then I realise because she’s about to turn into a house.

But then she does see me. She stops, lifts the helmet off her face.

“ Ava? What are you doing here?”