Anne Billson - Stiff Lips

She was woken by a hammering in her skull so hard it was as though someone were nailing her head to the floor. Sitting up was too daunting a task, so she had to make do with the view from where she was lying, although, even from a supine position, the effort of looking made her brain boil with agony.

Everything was veiled in a fine scarlet mist.

She heard a voice, but it sounded tinny, like someone on the other end of a long-distance telephone wire. 'You're OK. There's an ambulance on its way.'

Polly thought the first statement was cancelled out by the second, but didn't want to waste precious energy saying so. Her instinct connected the voice to a shapeless mass intruding into frame above her head. She thought it was probably a woman, and managed to wonder aloud where Robert had got to.

'Don't ask me,' the woman said. Polly tried to get her in focus, but there was something blocking her vision. She tried to move her head, but the muscles in her neck were refusing to obey commands from her brain, and each attempt ended in a fresh detonation of pain.

The shapeless mass loomed closer. Polly couldn't tell whether it had red hair, or whether the redness was due to the mist. The woman asked, 'Who are you?'

'Robert's girlfriend,' said Polly, realizing as she said it that this was no longer true. He'd hurt her badly, she didn't know exactly how, but now she would have no excuse not to leave him for ever.

The shapeless woman shook her head in a flurry of scarlet mist, and Polly heard her say, 'I'm afraid that's not possible. You see, I'm his girlfriend. Always have been.'

'I must have passed out again,' said Polly, 'because next thing I remember is waking up in hospital with my head wrapped in bandages. From the neck up, I looked like Egyptian mummy. After two operations and a day and a half of dithering, someone finally broke it to me that they hadn't been able to save the eye.'

'What had he done?' I asked. 'Punched you?'

'Poked my eye out with his bloody fork,' said Polly.

I breathed in sharply at the thought of a cornea punctured by hard metal and popping like an overripe grape. My own eyes began to leak in sympathy. 'And where was Robert? What did the police say?'

'You want to know the final irony?' asked Polly. 'You want to know the best bit? I told everyone I'd done it myself. I said it was an accident, I'd sort of dropped the fork and — whoops — fallen on to it, though I don't think anyone believed me. The consensus was that I'd stabbed myself to get attention, but everyone was too polite to say so.'

This shocked me more than anything else I'd heard. 'But why? Why didn't you tell them the truth?'

Polly shuddered. 'I never wanted to see him again.'

'So you let him get away with it!'

Polly turned her sunglasses towards me. 'Not really. Three nights later, he was dead, and there didn't seem much point. He slit his throat, you know. Just like he'd seen in his bathroom mirror. He said .'

'Hallucinations?'

'Or some sort of premonition. Who knows?'

'You must have been relieved to hear he was dead.'

'Relieved is not the right word, she said. 'Relieved implies the threat has been removed.'

I asked uneasily, 'What do you mean?'

In a gesture that reminded me of my grandmother, Polly tapped the side of her head. 'He's still in here,' she said. She stopped tapping, but kept her forefinger jammed against her temple like the point of a pistol. 'He's still here, and I've had to live with it. And I live with it pretty well, considering.'

'You mean he follows you around,' I suggested helpfully, 'and you can't see him, but your friends keep asking who your shadowy companion is?'

'Don't be ridiculous,' she said. 'I mean I still look back over our relationship and make a mental list of the warning signs and berate myself for not having escaped while I was able to. I should have known better. I did know better, but I was young, and when you're young you don't always do what's best for you.'

She fixed her shades on me. 'There's still life in this dead eye, you know. I can't wear the glass one they gave me, because I see things with it. It's enough to drive a girl crazy.'

Not for the first time, I wondered if Polly Wilson were crazy already. It was a ghastly tale, like an episode from a Gothic novel, but couldn't she have been exaggerating just a little? Things like that just didn't happen, not with Robert. Perhaps Polly had resented his talent. Perhaps she had put her own eye out, after all. There was something pent-up about her, something I sensed that made her a not altogether reliable witness.

I remembered to ask if Robert had left a suicide note.

'I don't know of one,' said Polly. 'You could always ask the other so-called girlfriend, of course. He might have addressed one to her. I couldn't bear to ask. I just wanted to put my life back together.'

'So he was two-timing you,' I pointed out unnecessarily.

'I think he was probably holding her in reserve,' said Polly. 'Maybe he had us stacked up, like jumbo-jets waiting to land at an airport. All I know is, if she hadn't arrived when she did, I would probably have bled to death. I never saw her again, and never asked after her, but I guess you could track her down if you wanted, the way you traced me.'

I wanted to stay and talk about Robert, but Polly had already lifted the curtain, and we passed beneath it, back into the shop.

'What was this other girl's name?' I asked as we wove our way towards the entrance.

'Ann-Marie something,' said Polly.

I stopped dead. 'You're kidding.'

'She did introduce herself at some point, but I wasn't in any condition to remember names.'

'I don't suppose it was Wilding, by any chance?'

'You know her?'

'Did she seem real to you?'

Polly laughed mirthlessly. 'Nothing seems real any more.'

I reached out to shake her hand, but she suddenly snatched her arm back as though I'd given her an electric shock. Her head was pointing like a gundog's, carried in a way that by now was all too familiar. She'd caught sight of something over my shoulder. I tried to follow the direction of her gaze, but all I could see was the gleam of the antique mirror on the far side of the shop.

'That made me jump too,' I said.

But now Polly was backing away from me, trying to put as many solid objects between us as possible. 'You brought him with you,' she hissed. You brought him with you, and you were trying to palm him off on me again.'

'No I wasn't,' I said. How could I explain that my own relationship with Robert was nothing like hers had been? That I was more than a match for him? That, for a start, I'd actually found his Why do women have legs? joke quite funny.

'Get out,' she said.

'I'm on my way.'

'Right now ,' she said.

The shadows had lengthened so that now I could hardly see her, but I could still hear her saying, 'Get out. Just get the fuck out of here.'

I didn't need any more telling. I knew when I wasn't wanted. I could take a hint.

Graham and I had patched things up after our tiff and were now seeing more of each other than ever. We had worked out quite a routine: we would start drinking in the Saddleback Arms at six or seven, adjourn to my flat at ten or eleven or whenever I couldn't see straight, have wild orgiastic sex, and pass out. I would open my eyes in the morning to find that Graham had already slipped off home, leaving his expiatory offering of chilled tea by my pillow. Maybe he just couldn't face me in the cold light of day, but I was glad he didn't hang around; being confronted with a face like Graham's was not exactly the best way to start the morning.

The fun did not come without great personal cost. I would wake up aching in every limb, with my head reverberating like the engine of a B-52 bomber. The hangovers were humungous and so frequent it was difficult to tell where one ended and another began. The diet of alcohol and pub food was also beginning to take its toll; there were permanent dark circles beneath my eyes, my skin was even blotchier than usual, and I felt podgier than ever. What I needed was a lazy holiday in the sun, but I'd left it too late in the year and besides, now I'd finally made it to W11, I found I really didn't want to go anywhere else.