Lifesaving for Beginners

the speaker with something hard. The garlic bread, maybe.
    Minnie is going to her Yoga for Pregnancy class, then home to cook dinner with Maurice. They got a new fish kettle that they’re pretty excited about.
    Ed said I could go to see Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part Two with him and Sophie but I said no. Things will have to get much worse before I agree to tag along on a date with my brother and his girlfriend. He said, ‘There’s another letter for you. It looks the same as the first one.’ It’s unusual for the college to do mailshots at this time of the year. They usually wait till the new year, when people are desperate for a change. I make a mental note to ring the college on Monday morning and tell them to stop writing to me. I don’t know why I bother making a mental note because, even as I make it, I know I’ll never do it. Minnie says it’s because I’m disorganised and slovenly. She doesn’t mean it as an insult. Just as a matter of fact. I couldn’t agree more.
    Thomas is probably playing Grey’s Anatomy with Sarah or Sandra or Sorcha or whateverhernameis.
    I turn on all the lights in the apartment. Even the lamp in the spare room, which is really Ed’s room. I turn on the oven. Switch on the telly. Nothing on. I mute it. Put on the radio. A Christmas song. ‘All I Want for Christmas is You’. I switch the station. ‘Joy to the Fecking World’. I turn off the radio.
    I don’t quite make it to the end of the family-size pepperoni, but I nearly do. Enough to do a fair bit of damage on the scales tomorrow. I manage to finish the wine, though. I realise this as I lift the bottle to pour another glass. I light a cigarette. I’m not supposed to smoke in the apartment. I made up that rule myself. It seems silly now. I’ll catch my death out on the balcony, I tell myself. Besides, it’s Friday night, I tell myself. And it’s only me here. Not like the pot plants are going to die of second-hand cigarette smoke, are they? Although they don’t look at their best, to be honest. Thomas bought them all. He said, ‘Aloe vera –’ when I touched an odd, spiky-looking one ‘– great for sunburn and pimples.’
    I said, ‘I don’t have pimples.’
    He broke the top off one of the stems, poured a sticky substance onto his fingers, rubbed them together and put them under my nose. I stepped back.
    ‘Smell,’ he said. I sniffed perfunctorily.
    Thomas said, ‘See?’
    I nodded and allowed him to smear a bit on my neck. It didn’t feel sticky. In fact, it wasn’t all that unpleasant, to be honest. It even smelled a bit like the aloe vera cream in the bathroom. Thomas undid the buttons on my shirt. Expertly. With the fingers of one hand. Like he’d done it a hundred times before he met me. And perhaps he had. We never told each other our tales.
    I said, ‘Eh, excuse me. What are you doing?’
    He didn’t look up. Just continued unbuttoning and then he unhooked my bra. One of those ones that opened at the front, which he called ‘handy’. He didn’t do anything for a moment. Just looked at them. My nipples were like football studs. Then he said, ‘Aloe vera is especially effective on sunburn.’ He said it as if he were reading it out from the Farmers Journal . Matter-of-fact.
    ‘But I’m not sunburned.’
    ‘I’m merely demonstrating.’
    Anyway, the aloe vera plant is dead now. And it’s not the only one. The one that used to have pale purple flowers has the decayed look of the long, long departed. Ditto the herbs on the windowsill. Basil and something that begins with a C. Coriander, maybe.
    The phone rings.
    The noise is huge in the quiet of the apartment. I walk into the hall. I might have drunk too much. My shoulders glance off the walls.
    It takes ages to reach the phone. The hall seems longer than usual. The phone keeps ringing. I pick it up. ‘Hello?’
    Nothing.
    ‘Who’s there?’
    I hear someone breathing. This is when I’m supposed to hang up. But the wine has me cosseted like a suit of armour.
    I say, ‘I know who you are.’ See what he makes of that.
    It works, because he speaks. After weeks of ringing up and saying nothing, he finally speaks. It is a man. A man with an English accent. His voice is low-pitched. He enunciates each word, like an elocution lesson.
    ‘And I know who you are, Kat Kavanagh.’
    My heart hammers in my chest. The kitchen door creaks in a draught and I jump. The hallway seems darker than before. I press the phone against my ear