Page 44 of The Perfect Son
“I’m shaken up.” Scared out of my wits.
“Stay on the line and don’t move. I’m a minute away.”
Nausea tumbles in my stomach. I close my eyes and fight the urge to throw up.
“Should I call the police?”
“Wait until I get there. OK?”
I nod and inch toward the window so I can watch the street for Shelley. The phone is pressed to my ear and I can hear her breath in the microphone and the rustling sound of her movements. It reminds me of the man with the gravelly voice who called in the middle of the night.“I told you at the start of all this that I’m not a patient man.”
Was it him following me? What does he want, Mark?
I brush too close to the shelves and knock into a display of sweets. A packet of Haribo drops to the floor with a crackle of plastic. It’s when I’m bending down to retrieve them that I see the newspapers—knee height and spread out so that every front page is visible.
My breath catches in my throat and I make a noise, a yelp. Every newspaper, every single one—tabloid and broadsheet alike—has the same photo on the front page. I’ve seen the image before—watching the news on the TV in the hours, the days that followed the visit from the police. When I clung to every word about the crash, desperately praying they’d made a mistake. Got the wrong flight number, or found survivors.
I stopped watching when they showed the crisp white body bags lining the concrete beside the black, charred wreckage. There was no mistake, there were no survivors.
I’ve stayed off the Internet and Facebook, I’ve kept the TV channel on Jamie’s kids’ shows. I’ve hidden us away in our bubble of grief. But I guess somewhere in the weeks that have passed I assumed the news cycle had moved on to an earthquake or a political scandal. I was wrong.
My chest heaves up and down, up and down. I’m breathing, I know I am, but I can’t seem to get the air in. My head is spinning. It’s too hot. My scarf is too tight around my neck. The heat of the shop is suffocating me and I’m sweating under my clothes. The walls are closing in. I can’t breathe. I can’t think.
When I open my eyes the photo of the wreckage, the body bags, swims into focus and I read the bold lettering of one of the headlines: SUICIDE PILOT’S FAMILY FINALLY SPEAKS OUT.
Underneath is a smaller headline that reads:Seven Weeks On the Parents of Philip Curtis Break Their Silence.There’s movement at the door and I cry out as I turn. It’s the man in the black baseball cap here to get me.
I can’t breathe.
“Tess, it’s me,” Shelley says, her voice loud and clear in my ears. Istumble back, knocking against the sweets again, and when I blink Shelley is standing before me in her black winter coat.
“It’s OK, I’m here,” she soothes, wrapping an arm around my shoulders and steering me away from the newspapers and out of the shop, only stopping when we reach a bench on the street.
“That’s it,” Shelley says. “Breathe. You’re OK. You’re having a panic attack. You’re OK. Just keep breathing.”
A panic attack? It feels more like I’m dying. My heart is racing so hard it feels like it’s going to explode. My head is filled with helium and no matter how hard I try, I can’t get the breath into my lungs.
It’s another few minutes before I notice the rain drizzling on my face, soothing my hot skin. The day pulls back into focus—I smell the salt water in the air again and hear the cars moving on the wet road and the cry of the seagulls above my head.
The world has kept turning. I’m not dying.
“Sorry,” I whisper, drawing in a long breath.
“Don’t be sorry. Seeing those newspapers must’ve been a terrible shock.”
“I... I thought they’d moved on to something else. I didn’t think it was still news.”
“It’s not front page every day now, but it’s still a big story. I’m sorry. It can’t be easy seeing it.”
“There was someone following me too.” I sit up straight and look around. Shoppers are hurrying to get out of the rain. The street is quieter, the market stalls are packing up, and there’s no sign of the man I saw in the dark hoody and baseball cap. “Do I call the police?”
“Are you sure they were following you, Tess? One hundred percent sure?”
“Yes.” I nod.
“Can you tell me what happened?”
So I do. From the moment I stepped out of the alley until she called me.
