When Your Eyes Close: A psychological thriller unlike anything you’ve read before!. Tanya Farrelly

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       CHAPTER FOUR

       Nick

      Nick woke in the night to the sound of a woman’s voice in his ear. He flailed blindly for the lamp and knocked over a glass of water on the bedside locker. When he finally found the switch, the light dispelled the auditory apparition, but failed to slow his racing heart. The voice had been distinct, angry, but what bothered him most was he hadn’t caught the words that the woman had said – and yet somehow, he knew her voice: it was Rachel’s.

      Sweating, he sat up and threw back the covers. Rachel, the woman from his dream; why was it that she seemed so real to him now? He got out of bed and pulled on his jeans. His hands were shaking badly, and a pulse throbbed in his left temple. Had he been dreaming before the voice had woken him? He didn’t remember. He just remembered the voice so close to his ear that he’d jumped.

      Downstairs, Nick switched the kettle on. He gripped the counter wishing that he’d not poured out the half bottle of whiskey that he’d had in the press two days before. The prescription that the doctor had given him lay on the living room table. He’d been prescribed Valium and Librium, drugs whose names he was familiar with but had never anticipated having to use. The doctor had said there would be withdrawal symptoms, but he hadn’t expected to feel this bad. The drugs would have helped to ease the tremors, and now with trembling hands he made a mug of coffee, heaped in four spoons of sugar, and wished that he’d heeded the doctor’s advice to have the script filled right away.

      Nick took his coffee into the living room, and rummaged in his coat pocket for his cigarettes, but then remembered he’d smoked his last in the car after his appointment – his only immediate means of self-medication gone. He sat back in his armchair, sipped the too-sweet coffee. Bars of light filtered through the venetian blind and bathed the room in the orange hue of the streetlight. It fell on the painting that Michelle had bought him for his birthday the previous month, a print of Van Gogh’s Starry Night.

      Michelle. He was glad she couldn’t see him like this. She didn’t even know he had a drink problem, or if she suspected it, she’d never said. He was rarely drunk. Over the years his body had developed such a tolerance that he’d had to drink more and more to feel the effects. Michelle drank, too, but one glass of wine and she was more than a little tipsy. She hated the taste of beer and he suspected that she only drank wine to be sociable.

      Nick picked up his phone and scrolled through her last few messages. She’d said that she hoped everything was all right. If only she knew how not all right things were. He knew she’d stick by him, he wasn’t afraid of that, but why should she have to? They’d only been seeing each other for eight months and he didn’t expect her to take on the burden of his illness. He knew it was going to be awful, the abstinence and the unbearable wait for a donor to be found – for someone else’s ill fate to determine his continued existence.

      He thought about the length of time it might take to find a suitable donor, if they found a suitable donor. The doctor had been frank about that. Type O negative was the rarest blood group. He had to face the facts. Apart from that there were the horror stories portrayed in the media: patients who died while on the transplant list, all because there weren’t enough people carrying donor cards. He hadn’t had one himself, had never even thought about it before he’d found himself in this bind. He hated to admit it, but Susan had been right. He’d screwed up his life.

      When he’d met Michelle, he thought that things were turning around, that maybe he had a chance at real happiness, but now he couldn’t bear to break the news to her, to drag her into his self-made mess. The thought of letting her go was agonizing, but how could they plan a future when he couldn’t be sure that, for him, such a thing even existed? She deserved so much more than that.

      Nick gulped the last of his coffee, winced at the accumulation of sugar at the bottom of the mug and thought he might be sick. The caffeine had momentarily eased the thudding in his temple, but his hands were shaking worse than ever and he wondered how he was going to get back to sleep. He remembered an all-night pharmacy that he’d seen a couple of kilometres away and wondered if he was fit to drive. Then he picked up the prescription, stuck it in his jeans pocket and pulled his leather jacket on. He needed those tablets badly.

      Outside, the rain was still coming down. Nick ran to the car; he started the engine, set the wipers on full speed and drove out of the housing estate. He was shivering, but his skin felt hot. It was almost 2 a.m. when he pulled into the shopping centre car park, which was empty save for two cars he imagined belonged to the pharmacy staff. Shivering, he cut the engine and stepped into the wet night.

      The pharmacist looked at the prescription, asked him to confirm his address and disappeared out the back. One look at him and he was pretty sure the pharmacist could identify a victim of detox. Not only were his hands shaking, he was perspiring too. His hands and face were clammy to the touch. СКАЧАТЬ