Beneath the Skin by Nicci French Page A

her mouth, dark shadows under her eyes, a faint crease in her brow as if she has been frowning for hours on end. Her skin is looking slightly unhealthy, pale and a bit grubby underneath the tan. No earrings today. She wears an old pair of cotton trousers, oatmeal I think you would call the color, and a white short-sleeved shirt. The trousers are loose on her and they need pressing. There is a button missing on the shirt. She chews the side of her middle finger on her right hand without realizing. She looks around a lot, eyes never resting on one person for more than a second. Sometimes she blinks, as if she is having trouble focusing. She smokes all the time, lighting one cigarette from another.
    The feeling inside me is growing. When I am ready, I will know. I will know when she is ready. It is like love; you just know. There is nothing more certain. Certainty fills me up, it makes me strong and purposeful. She gets weaker and smaller. I look at her and I think to myself, I did this.
     
TWELVE
     
    I banged at the door. Why didn’t she come? Oh please come quickly, now. I couldn’t breathe. I knew I had to, everyone had to breathe, but when I tried, I couldn’t, not properly, though an unbearable pressure was growing in my chest. I took some shallow gasps, sounding as if I had been on a desperate crying jag. There was a tight band of pain round my head and everything was out of focus. Please help me, I couldn’t say, couldn’t shout. There was a boulder in my throat, in my lungs, stopping me from taking a breath. I couldn’t stand up any longer; everything was going blurred and gray-black. So I sank to my knees at the door.
    “Zoe? Zoe! For chrissakes, Zoe, what’s happened?” Louise was on her knees beside me, wrapped in a towel and with wet hair. She had her arm around my shoulder and the towel was slipping away but she didn’t mind, darling Louise, and she didn’t mind that people were passing and giving us very strange looks and probably crossing the road to avoid us. I tried to speak, but I couldn’t get any words out, just a strange, stuttering sound.
    She took me in her arms and rocked me. Nobody had done that to me since Mum had died. I was like a little girl again, and someone else was taking care of me at last. Oh, how I’d missed that; how I’d missed having a mother. She was whispering things that didn’t make sense, and telling me that everything was going to be all right, everything was going to be just fine, there, there, sssh, that’s right. She was telling me to breathe in and out, calmly. In and out. Gradually I started to be able to breathe once more. But I couldn’t talk yet. Just whimper, like a baby. I felt warm tears slide under my closed lids, onto my hot cheeks. I never wanted to move, not ever again. My limbs felt heavy, too heavy to stir. I could sleep now.
    Louise lifted me to my feet, holding her towel round her with one hand. She led me up the stairs into her flat and sat me on the sofa and sat beside me.
    “It was a panic attack,” she said. “That’s all, Zoe.”
    The panic was gone, but I was left with the fear. It was like being in a cold shadow, I said to Louise. It was like looking off the edge of a tall building, so tall that I couldn’t see the bottom.
    I wanted to curl up, sleep until it was over. I wanted someone else to take charge and make everything all right again. I wanted to go put my hands over my ears and close my eyes and it would all go away.
    One day, said Louise, trying to be reassuring, you’ll look back on all this and it will be something horrible that happened and went away. You’ll be able to turn it into a story that you tell people about yourself. I didn’t believe her; I didn’t believe it would ever go away. The world had become a different place for me.
    I stayed with Louise at her flat in Dalston, near the market. There was nowhere else for me to go. She was my friend and I trusted her and while she was around, small and sturdy and kind,