Counting backwards from ten

Just breathe deeply for me into the mask. When you wake up, it will be all over.
Here we go, counting backwards from ten ....

Ten, nine, eight……

Seven boys dated me the summer I turned sixteen. I’d dropped like a ripe peach, all dimples and coy lashes beneath my sunny curls, into their laps - and out. Wakening each morning to the tiniest of struggles to remember who was the flavour of the hour – was simply delicious. The rest of the day, squandered over trivialities, was a haze of mounting anticipation: the endless pouts at every angle, in every possible shade of pink, practiced in front of my mother’s dresser mirror. An entire wardrobe tipped out to engineer the perfect impression of deadly nonchalance. Hours caught between demure fluffiness or hard core flibbertigibbet - only to be totally abandoned for a last minute, do-or-die shopping spree on the New King’s Road - for something even more outrageous - because there was simply nothing to wear!!
Eenie meenie mynie mo…who is it tonight again? Oh right, the cute one with the freckles and that killer gap between his front teeth….

Six, five…

Five o’clock. End of the working week at last and a mad rush to jam unfinished work back into the in-tray. Poised for the daily chick fight for that last cubicle in the ladies, declining a quick half fag with Suzie from PR, a splash of perfume and a lick of lippie – and I was off to meet my Man Friday, he who would brook no tardiness. He’d be the good looking one propping up the bar at Tokyo Joe’s with his usual, for exactly a quarter hour. Blink, and he’s gone - there were plenty of other, prettier twentysomethings just round the corner. It was this elusiveness that attracted, his near unattainability. Walking out with him, I could never be entirely sure if I was his arm candy, or he mine. I was the hopeless moth to his consuming flame.

Four…

Four flights up – enough to induce cardiac arrest. A hell hole of a bedsit with falling down everything, but it was heaven to me - our small eyrie above the maddening crowd. It was fun at first, racing you to the top of the stairs, shedding every item of clothing till we burst into the flat, gasping for air and falling into each other in hysterical laughter. Then as the weeks rolled on you tired of it all – the stairs, the routine, me. It was just such a bore to you, no matter what I did to vary our days. One night, you simply did not come back. I waited two months before I finally gave up the key to the Lithuanian landlady on the ground floor, paid her most of my pay package, and moved back in with my folks. I could forgive you everything but the ignominy of this regression.

Three…

Three months – first trimester nearly over. How can you not have known - you skinny, modern girls! You are due December 21st. A Christmas baby, congratulations!
I watched these words float out in slow-mo, 3D, surround-sound from the doctor’s mouth. Like hearing a 33rpm vinyl ground at the wrong speed whilst tripping out on whatever it was that you smoked on a heavy night out.

Christmas. I could just see the whole clan, gathered as always, peeking through the curtains from the front parlour. All eyes watching me impersonate the Virgin Mary riding into Bethlehem, albeit without a donkey. Or a Joseph. My mother’s mouth, always slightly turned down at the corners where I was concerned, would be struggling to curve back up to show solidarity, and just enough martyrdom. As for Daddy, he’d be forever chopping wood for the fire, practically live in the outdoor shed so he wouldn’t have to look me in the face. By the end of the first week there would be so much wood it could last three winters with big snow. And it never snows in the winters round here.

Two…..

Two streaks of tyre marks gashed against the side of Craggie Pass, just off the N22 Highway at four in the morning. They end abruptly, like an exclamation point, against a pine tree trunk halfway down the ravine. The heaviest snowfall since ‘56 decides to bury us overnight, and I can still feel the shrillness of my mother’s voice like daggers in my back as I screeched off into the tempest. The war of minds finally erupted into a holocaust of words and I bolted. Was that but an hour ago? As the raw sting of charred rubber rose to assault the crispness of a breaking dawn, I deliberately kept my eyes only half opened: enough to see somewhere above me a blur of flashing amber-black-amber-black, but shutting out the deepening stench of heated metal against flesh, and the muffled questions from strange men’s voices asking me if I could move my legs. I had only an idea of wetness from the waist down without actually feeling the wet, but apart from that there was no sensation at all. For the first time in three months I can feel nothing but a glorious, light floatiness. I don’t want to move a hair and risk the next level of awareness…please, just let me sleep…..

One…..

One more blanket please, she’s coming round but shivering from the shock I think. Ah there you are dear! Didn’t I tell you, when you wake, it will be all over!

It certainly was. Back to square one.