Human Remains

refined my technique I took steps to guard against discovery. Taking their mobile phones away and leaving them with a replacement for me to keep in touch with them was one particularly genius idea. On more than one occasion I have sent reassuring replies to texts from people who seem a little concerned, and once or twice I have given up on people and not returned to them at all in case they are found.
    Each loss is a shame. Some of them were really interesting, too: ones whose transformation I had been looking forward to very much.
    All day today I have been trying to reassure myself that they have no way of connecting me with her. And if they do, what of it? I spoke to her. She invited me into her house. She asked me for help, and I provided it. I have done nothing wrong.
    Sitting beside the morose Vaughn, I can’t help feeling a shiver of arousal at the thought of Audrey’s rejection of him. And it is a rejection, no matter what spin he thinks to put upon it. She is not ready to commit to him, which means she might consider playing with someone else. She might consider me…
    ‘Do you want me to have a word with her?’ I ask.
    Vaughn looks up from his food. I can always tell when he is miserable because he chooses a sausage and egg baguette instead of a ham salad. This makes for a noxious concoction of brown sauce, ketchup and egg yolk which invariably dribbles down his chin (where it will be wiped) or down his sad brown tie (where it will remain).
    ‘Really?’ he says, or that’s what it sounds like through a mouthful of partially masticated meat-and-dough.
    I give him a disgusted look which I hope he takes on board. ‘If it might help,’ I say. ‘You never know.’
    His eyebrows furrow. It looks like confusion to me, but I can never quite work this out. Suspicion. Maybe it’s suspicion.
    ‘Or – not. It was just a thought.’
    He swallows the last of the mouthful and sups some of his pint. Then he clears his throat. ‘It’s a very kind offer, Colin. Thank you. But…’
    ‘But?’
    ‘Well – it’s just that Audrey… she’s not very – I don’t know – comfortable with you.’
    ‘Comfortable?’ Much as it galls me to find myself repeating everything Vaughn says to me, I can think of no better response.
    ‘After the dinner party. She said you were a bit strange. Anyway, sorry. I don’t think you’ll be able to help. Not this time.’
    ‘Strange? What on earth…’ I look at Vaughn and then at the remains of my sandwich, suddenly unappetising and stale. But strange could be a good thing, couldn’t it? Maybe she meant strange as in unusual – enigmatic – mysterious.
    ‘I think it was just that evening,’ Vaughn says quickly, apparently anxious to avoid offence. ‘She was in a funny mood even before you arrived. Hormones, probably.’
    I nod and murmur something to indicate assent, but inside I feel my blood churning in my ears. When I leave the pub and go back to the office, I cannot concentrate on anything. I feel the weight of it, the sudden desire to find Audrey and talk to her and ask her what she meant by the word ‘strange’. Even Garth and his disgusting ruminatory noises do not distract me. I work on a document for a committee meeting next Monday but Audrey does not leave me, not for a second.

Annabel
     
     
    In the hospital they put me on a drip and made me see a psychiatrist who prescribed me anti-depressants. The psychiatrist told me I’d experienced some kind of ‘episode’, which in years gone by might have been described as a breakdown. He said I had been through a lot of stress and I had not been able to process it, so my mind had shut down for reasons of self-preservation.
    It all sounded plausible, but there were things about it that felt wrong. My memory of the week before was not just hazy but downright incorrect. It felt as though things had happened which were not available for me to consider. Part of me was desperate to get back home and shut the door and forget all about it, to go back to being on my own, at peace with everything.
    When I said this to a nurse it prompted another visit from the psychiatrist, who asked me in a roundabout way, and then more directly, if I felt suicidal. He’d asked me this before, along with a whole load of other questions that I’d tried my best to answer.
    ‘Not really,’ was my response.
    ‘Do you feel like it sometimes?’
    ‘I don’t think so.’ Suicide was an active thing, a doing thing; it would require