24 Hours: An intense, suspenseful psychological thriller by Claire Seeber

maybe.’
    ‘For us all.’
    ‘You do it then,’ I retorted.
    ‘No way.’ He stared at me. ‘Your body’s much better than mine.’ And then he grinned.
    I cringe when I look back. I cringe at how easily I was lost. One smile and I fell in.
    I didn’t go back. He called the class to an early close and took me to the pub. We ordered whisky macs and were drunk by five. I saw something in Sid that I responded to eagerly; something forlorn that he thought he’d hidden; that he managed to hide from most. But not from me. We drained the final glasses, and then he took me to bed in his artist’s garret. And it was a garret. It had a magnificent view of the clouds through the sky-light, a double mattress and not much else; his easel and oils stacked against the wall, a bottle of whisky on a wooden box, no visible food. Some Camus and lots of Ernest Hemingway on the windowsills. I hadn’t read Hemingway yet, and I had no idea about Sid’s preoccupation with death. I just knew the room seemed romantic in the extreme; it smelt of paint and turps and Sid.
    We fell into bed and we didn’t get out until the next day.
    Now I implore my female clients, ‘Don’t sleep with them until you are really sure you can handle what comes next.’ Old-fashioned, maybe – but show me a woman who can have really good sex and not attach in some way, and I’ll show you a genius, a liar – or a broken soul.
    I slept with Sid the first day I met him. What did I expect?
    Certainly not the punishment he meted out.
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    B ut even that wasn’t simple. Because Sid took me to bed, hooked me entirely – and then vanished.
    Hope died a slow and painful death. I yearned for him – and then I pushed the thought of him away, because it hurt. Stupid and naïve, I knew, after just one meeting – but I thought I’d glimpsed more. I knocked on his front door a few times, but the third time, when the landlady let me up the stairwell, I thought I heard female laughter inside, and I turned away, huddled into my own rejection.
    Later, I walked past the art college once or twice, dawdled down the road, dolled up to the nines, but when the door opened and a group of tutors came out, I ran the other way.
    Just when I had almost succeeded in forgetting him, he reappeared.
    Typical Sid. Sticking the knife-point back in the wound just as it was about to heal.
    That night he came back, it was sultry. A night when sirens wailed, as they wail continually in the city until we don’t notice anymore; a night when the pollution blurred the edges of the tallest buildings, hiding the sky from the ground. A night when the newest skyscrapers stacked light above us, and stumpy tower-blocks flicked into disjointed Lego-brick life as dusk drew in; as the DLR wended Blade-Runner -like between concrete and the stark shine of Canary Wharf. As the streetlights hummed and the kids on the corner doused their chips with too much vinegar and jostled each other in trousers that rested dangerously low: ‘G’wan blud’, throwing wrappers in the gutter. As the youths, all-hooded, youths who never cracked a smile, paced the pavements with their chunky dogs, and the young girls clacked past skinny-legged in shiny patent heels so high they couldn’t walk, let alone run from their hunters.
    As this vibrant life spread out before me, I came alive again simply because Sid came back.
    ‘Sorry,’ he said, simply. And he only said it once. It was a word he struggled with. That was a lesson I quickly learnt.
    ‘Where were you?’ I asked.
    He regarded me gravely for a moment with eyes that told me nothing.
    ‘Getting rid of the last one,’ he said, and then he smiled, baring teeth that were rather wolfish.
    Another rarity, smiling; something he was not good at.
    I said nothing; I didn’t really trust myself to speak. Because what was there to say? His words floored me; his words were enough.
    Did I wonder then about how easily he did it? Got rid of her for me, whoever she was?
    I