I was about to explain that once the overdraft was paid, that would only make up fourteen euro, but I didn’t.
Thanks, I said.
Don’t you worry.
We hung up.
When I got home I had an email from Valerie. She reminded me that she was interested in reading my work and said Melissa had passed on my email address. That I had managed to leave any lasting impact on Valerie filled me with a sense of spiteful triumph. Although she had ignored me at dinner, I was now the interesting thing she wanted to unravel. In this triumphantly recriminatory mood, I sent her the new story, without even looking it over again for typos. The world was like a crumpled ball of newspaper to me, something to kick around.
That evening the sickness started to happen again. I’d finished my second sheet of pills two days before, and when I sat down to eat dinner the food felt gluey and wrong in my mouth. I scraped my plate into the bin but the smell turned my stomach and I started to sweat. My back hurt and I could feel my mouth watering. When I pressed the back of my hand against my forehead it felt damp and scalding. It was happening again, I knew that, but I could do nothing.
At about 4 a.m. I went to the bathroom to get sick. Once my stomach was empty I lay on the bathroom floor shivering, while the pain moved up my spine like an animal. I thought: maybe I’ll die, who cares? I was conscious that I was bleeding copiously. When I felt well enough to crawl, I crawled to bed. I saw that Nick had sent me a text in the middle of the night saying: i tried calling you, can we talk? I knew that he didn’t want to see me any more. He was a patient person and I had exhausted the patience. I hated the terrible things I had said to him, I hated what they revealed about me. I wanted him to be cruel now, because I deserved it. I wanted him to say the most vicious things he could think of, or shake me until I couldn’t breathe.
The pain was still there in the morning but I decided to go to class anyway. I took a minor overdose of paracetamol and wrapped up in a coat before leaving the house. It rained all the way into college. I sat at the back of the classroom shivering and set up a stopwatch on my laptop to tell me when I could take my next dose. Several fellow students asked if I was okay, and after class even the lecturer asked me. He seemed nice, so I told him I had missed a lot of classes for medical reasons and now I wasn’t allowed to miss any more. He looked at me and said: oh. I smiled winningly despite the shivering and then my alarm went off to tell me I could have more paracetamol.
I went to the library after that to start an essay that was due in two weeks’ time. My clothes were still damp from the rain and I could hear a thin ringing noise in my right ear, but I mostly ignored that. My real concern was for the acuity of my critical faculties. I wasn’t sure if I remembered exactly what the word ‘epistemic’ meant, or if I was still able to read. For a few minutes I laid my head down on the library table and listened to the ringing noise get louder and louder, until it felt almost like a friend who was talking to me. You could die, I thought, and it was a nice relaxing thought at the time. I imagined death like a switch, switching off all the pain and noise, cancelling everything.
When I left the library it was still raining and it felt unbelievably cold. My teeth were chattering and I couldn’t remember any words in English. Rain moved across the footpath in shallow waves like a special effect. I had no umbrella and I perceived that my face and hair were becoming wet, too wet to feel normal. I saw Bobbi sheltering outside the arts building and I started to walk toward her, trying to remember what people usually said to each other as a greeting. This felt effortful in an unfamiliar way. I raised my hand to wave at her and she came toward me, very quickly I thought, saying something I didn’t understand.
Then I blacked out. When I woke up again I was lying under the shelter with some people standing around me, and I was saying the word: what? Everyone seemed relieved I was talking. A security guard was saying something into a walkie-talkie, but I couldn’t hear him. The pain in my abdomen felt tight like a fist and I tried to sit up and see if Bobbi was there. I saw her on the phone, holding her free ear shut with a hand as if struggling to hear the other person. The rain was loud like an untuned radio.
Oh, she’s awake, Bobbi said into the phone. One second.
Bobbi looked at me then. Are you okay? she said. She looked clean and dry like a model from a catalogue. My hair was leaking water onto my face. I’m fine, I said. She went back to talking on the phone, I couldn’t hear what she was saying. I tried to wipe my face with my sleeve but my sleeves were even wetter than my face was. Outside the shelter the rain fell white like milk. Bobbi put her phone away and helped me to sit up straight.