A Question of Sanity: Chapter 6 A: Tits Like a Crescent Moon

Chapter Six

The next couple of days passed without incident. On Thursday, Ellie insisted that Matt go back to his flat, and back to work; he’d taken too much time off. She felt stifled and they had talked round and round the happenings of the last week until they were dizzy. When rational suggestion didn’t explain things, their theories had become more outlandish and bizarre. Although they laughed about it, Ellie was half convinced that she had been taken over by a crazed psychotic alien, or an evil spirit bent on destruction, or even that she was having out of body experiences and turning into a twisted, homicidal maniac during the episodes.

After Matt left, Ellie went for a long walk with Jake, first up Hoad Hill and then around Ulverston market. All the time she had her eyes peeled for trouble. She felt as though she was being watched, but told herself that she was paranoid. She hadn’t been able to settle to writing. Her hands were stiff and uncooperative and her mind was restless, unwilling to concentrate. After writing a mere couple of hundred words in half an hour, she gave up in disgust and felt the need for a cleansing wind to blow her anxiety away.

She came back feeling, if anything, more uptight than when she left. As she opened her garden gate, she very nearly turned away again. She couldn’t face whatever horrors might be waiting for her on the other side of her front door, the same door that had always seemed so safe and protective. Everything was just as she’d left it.

On Thursday night, the shadows in the lounge were long. Ellie and Jake snuggled on the sofa together, but Ellie was on edge. The room didn’t feel cosy and warm. It was claustrophobic and in her face. The walls seemed to move in an inch every time she looked at them. Taking Jake out, the darkness closed around her as the walls had done at home. The moon was hiding behind black night-time clouds, the shadows longer. They looked more oppressive outside than they were indoors. Twice she heard footsteps in the night behind her. Within seconds her heart was thumping and she was in a state of panic. Jake was nervous, picking up on her mood and growling low and deep in his throat. Both times it was only people going about their business. Ellie felt that there was no escape from her paranoia. It clung tight and followed her, even into sleep.

On both the Thursday and Friday nights, she slept with her bedroom light on. She hadn’t done that since she was a child. Her sleep was fitful and troubled. She woke feeling worn and irritable.

Saturday morning broke vivid and beautiful. It was one of those late October mornings reminiscent of the faded summer. One last rebellious splendour of autumn before it was bullied into retreat by the stronger, aggressive grip of winter. The sun shone bravely to melt the morning frost and the world was clean.

She felt an awakening of hope. Nothing had happened for two days and three nights. Maybe the nightmare that had taken hold of her life was passing. The illness she could do nothing about other than to keep fighting, but the awful, ever-present, feeling of danger and malice seemed to have passed. Ellie felt hope for a short but content future returning.

Matt was coming by shortly. Although they’d kept in phone contact the last two days she’d asked that he give her some space. Their relationship, though still intact, was fragile. They’d been tested and both of them were feeling bruised and delicate. She missed him and the realisation made her smile.

That evening, they decided they would meet providence with defiance. The night was to be part pleasure, part something else. It was decided, mainly by Ellie and against Matt’s better judgement, to go to Demons nightclub and see if there were any clues to explain how one of their matchbooks had turned up in Ellie’s lounge. It was an excuse to live a normal Saturday night, a night of forgetting and forgiving. Ellie was looking forward to it. It seemed so long since she’d felt strong enough to go out clubbing, but this morning she wanted to conquer the world. Matt was calling to collect Jake and take him to his house. They would be staying in Barrow and Ellie was looking forward to seeing him and felt happy in her new confidence.

Matt didn’t scan his identity when he arrived, he rang the doorbell. Ellie felt sad at this glaring sign that things weren’t right between them. Never mind, she thought, tonight we will have plenty of opportunity to work on that. Jake got to the door before her and whined wagging his tail. Ellie had told him that Matt was coming and the dog had been watching the door for him and waiting.

Instead of using George to open the door she went to answer it. Her irritation at him not using his entry access had passed and it felt nice to be answering the door to her man in welcome. It had the feeling of being taken back to the early days of their courtship, when everything was new and exciting.

Jake’s greeting almost battered the huge bouquet that he held in his hand. Ellie stood back, smiling. She knew she had no chance of getting a look in until Jake had been petted and calmed. A blurring of anxiety clouded her sense of peace as she remembered the last floral delivery to her home, but she suppressed the feeling almost before it had insinuated its ugly self into her mind. She pushed away memories of her nightmare and refused to think about roses desiccating and a pistol. Nothing was going to spoil today, nothing.

‘Hello, sexy,’ she murmured, managing to separate man and dog, ‘they for me?’ she gestured at the beautiful, scented flowers.

‘Nah, I bought them for Greasy Gertie down the fish shop, but she said they make her sneeze, so you might as well have them.’

‘Oh, that Gertie has no class. They’ll be far more appreciated by Jake and me.’

Matt left after a lunch that Ellie prepared while he showered. Their intense lovemaking had heightened the good mood that Ellie had woken in. She sat in her dressing gown for a long time. For the first time in weeks she indulged in peaceful reflection. She would never be complacent about her illness or of the death sentence hanging above her, but she accepted it now. And whatever the kneejerk reactions were that’d plagued her since she was given the results, they were in the past, she had a future to look forward to. And Ellie’s future was all the sweeter for the fact that it had a shorter lease than most.

She was still sitting at the table when the doorbell rang. Damn, she thought. It was Saturday afternoon and she’d forgotten that Jamie Matthews was due to arrive at one thirty. Jamie was a young lad from the town who came to help around the garden every Saturday for two hours. With some embarrassment at her state of undress, Ellie used the computer to let him in.

‘In here, Jamie,’ she shouted, when she heard him taking his boots off in the hall. She usually made him a drink and they discussed what she wanted doing before he made a start. The only difference this week was that Ellie was sitting in only a short satin dressing gown and was very aware that she was unwashed since she’d made love to Matt.

Jamie Matthews’ seventeen-year-old eyes almost jumped out of his head when he walked into the dining room and saw Ellie. In his youthful ineptitude he couldn’t disguise the body-scan he took of her, or the fact that his gaze rested just a split second too long on her exposed thighs. She pulled the dressing gown round her as firmly as she could and was furious with herself when she felt her cheeks burning. Jamie couldn’t meet her eyes and shuffled from foot to foot as he examined his socks. He was fixated with the small hole that his right big toe played peek-a-boo through. His face was crimson, right into his hairline. Ellie daren’t imagine what he was thinking and prayed to the god of purity that he didn’t think she was sitting like that for his benefit.

‘Right, Jamie,’ she adopted as normal a voice as possible under the humiliating circumstances. ‘You’re going to have to sort yourself out with a drink this afternoon. I’ve had a headache all morning and stayed in bed.’ She forgave herself for the outright lie. ‘I’m going for a shower; help yourself to something to drink and a biscuit. Maybe you could begin by going over the lawns, please. I know they were only done a fortnight ago, but we’ve had a lot of rain and they could use a tidy up.’ And they aren’t the only thing, she thought to herself, as she ran a hand through her tousled hair. This caused her dressing gown to open, revealing to Jamie, who had thought it safe to look up, the crescent of her left breast. Ellie beat a hasty retreat, knowing that the dressing gown only just covered her bottom and the very tops of her legs. Oh my God, she thought, the poor lad must be terrified.

In truth, terror wasn’t the uppermost thought in Jamie Matthews’ mind at that moment. His thoughts were wholly to do with concealing the movement in the front of his trackies.

Ellie felt her cheeks returning to their normal hue as the needles of warm water pounded into her naked body, her mind wandered to the young gardener as she soaped and stimulated the blood cells with vigorous lathering. They didn’t make lads in the Jamie Matthews mould when she was seventeen. Her male peers had all been pimply cretins, with buckteeth and halitosis. Jamie was a young hunk. He was well past the six-foot average height. Lads were wearing their hair longer these days and Jamie’s dark brown eyes always peered self-consciously from beneath a shaggy fringe that framed his sun-browned face. Ellie thought that Jamie probably had completely the wrong impression of her now. She just hoped that he didn’t say anything to his mother. Or worse, the lads he hung about with.

Jamie tried to concentrate on mowing the lawns. Ellie was a good boss and he was grateful for the extra Bitcoins that his Saturday job gave him. The new Government paid for all of his tuition costs and living expenses at college, but he still had to pay for his course materials. It was more than just job satisfaction, though. The truth of the matter was that it was an excuse to be near Ellie Erikson. They all fancied her. Pete Harvey even thought that she fancied him, because she had asked him the time at the bus stop one day.

Jamie knew that Ellie was way out of his league, being a famous writer and older and what with her fancy solicitor boyfriend, but he still had the hots for her in a big way. All the lads did. Jamie was a virgin. Despite his good looks and confident manner in most things, he was shy and unsure of himself around girls. They were a species he couldn’t fathom and Jamie was, by nature, wary of anything he didn’t understand. He had a good body, he knew that, and he had the rough, unkempt looks that girls go for, but none of that was an automatic license to self-confidence. He liked sport and computers and gaming, he understood those things. The offside rule was easy to understand, girls weren’t. Jamie was clumsy around them but he’d always been able to talk to Ellie, she was different.

The smaller front lawn was almost done. His balls were heavy and his cock throbbed, despite forcing himself to think about his coursework as a distraction. He turned his thoughts to the national failings of the government and its totalitarian regimes for social reform.  He couldn’t settle to work after being taunted by his boss’s naked tit almost flopping out in front of his face, and trying to force himself to think about politics wasn’t working. He carried the mower round to the back of the house.