Excerpt: The Removal Man

Chapter One

The screaming has stopped. I open my eyes.

I’m sitting at the kitchen table. All around, the evidence of my life. Dishes stacked in the sink, laundry piled in a basket. Wet clothes waiting to be dried. Toys on the floor – I avert my eyes. I can’t think about that. Not yet.

The pain inside me is so great that I feel like passing out. I want to scream, hurl my feelings into the empty air, but nobody is listening. Nobody cares. Why would they? I brought this on myself, after all. It’s my fault. All my fault. That’s what they said. Why would I not believe them?

After some time – I don’t know how long – I push myself away from the table. Automatically I reach for the switch of the kettle, flicking it upwards. A spark runs through me then, like electricity surging into the element, only the energy serves not to boil but to burn. Anger? Yes, there’s anger, but it’s not directed at them. It’s turned inwards, to me. It was my fault, after all. I believed them when they said that at first; I believe them still.

Walking like a zombie, I head for food.

Toast first: two thick slices of seeded batch loaf, stuffed into the toaster, set high so it almost but not quite burns the tender insides. Before it has time to cool, slap on the butter, great slabs that begin to melt into the crispy exterior: heaven on a plate. I keep going until all the butter has sunk into the toast and it can accept no more. Small puddles of unmelted goo remain on the surface; whenever I take a bite a little buttery droplet oozes from the teeth-marked edge and drips onto my plate.

I eat them before the tea has brewed and put on another two slices to enjoy with my cuppa.

They’re finished too quickly, though, so I break open a packet of chocolate biscuits and eat three, dunking them into my warm tea so the coating begins to melt even before it comes into contact with my tongue. Unctuous, creamy, soothing, it’s as if the mixture coats my nerve endings, blurring my feelings and removing the worst of the pain. Guilt will come later, I know that only too well – guilt on so many different levels – but for now I am comforting myself in the only way I know.

By the time I begin to feel better, I realise I have eaten more than half a packet of biscuits.

Finally, I allow myself to look up from my gorging. At some time while I have been preoccupied the kitchen has filled with people. There are my neighbours, some helpful, others prurient and disdainful; my husband, who is talking urgently to our social worker; a female police constable who looks ill-at-ease but who is watching him closely and from the television the face of the Secretary of State for Health looms over us all like Big Brother from ‘1984’. I turn away, back towards the wooden breadboard where the batch loaf sits flaunting its fluffy insides. The breadknife is serrated, sharp. The metal blade is cool against my skin.

I cut, once, twice, three times, and watch my blood mingle with the breadcrumbs. Then the screaming begins again.