Girl in the Dark by Anna Lyndsey

bare forearm stretched out on the table in front of me, palm upward. It is bare because the day is unexpectedly warm and sunny, a sudden foretaste of summer, and I’m wearing a top with sleeves that only come down as far as the elbow.
    And I feel a sort of roughed-up sensation on my arm, as though someone is rubbing it with sandpaper. And I peer at my flesh, but can see nothing unusual. And it still feels odd, when I get home that night.
    I will always remember that arm—pale and creamy smooth, emerging from a turquoise cotton sleeve on to the grey Formica table top, all the colours vivid in the light streaming through the train window; and that odd rough sensation, the first gentle touch from the tentacles of hell.
    A few days later I am in the passenger seat of the car Pete is driving. It is nearly noon on a sunny day; thesun slants down through the windscreen. I am wearing trousers—a thin sort of cord. I notice a rough, burning feeling on the tops of my thighs. It lasts for the rest of the day.
    Middle of May: I am on my evening run. A brilliant deep blue empty sky, warm grey tarmac under my feet, low golden rays that make the boring brickwork of the boxy houses blaze, mixed scents of white blossoms.
    Suddenly I feel strangely hot all over, and break into a clammy sweat. I stop and stand on the pavement, disconcerted. It is as if something inside me is trying to get out through my skin, not just in one place, but everywhere. I turn and run for home by the shortest route. That night, I tingle all over for hours, and then go deathly cold.
    I still do not make the connection. I am focused on my face: that is where light affects me, surely not elsewhere, and my face has got much better. And on the rest of me, unlike my face, there is nothing to see—no redness, no roughness; my covering is intact. It must be some sort of allergy, I conclude, and apply myself to working out what I have eaten, or what I have inhaled, or what I have put on my skin. I go to the GP and am given a referral to an allergy clinic several weeks hence. I become fixated on chlorine in the bathwater when I have a bath one Sunday morning, a decadent luxurious soak in a sun-filled bathroom, and burn afterwards, for hours.
    I miss the final sessions of my piano course—feeling too weird, too often, to risk the trips up to town. The organisers say they will still let me qualify, if I send a tapeof my performance of the sonata I’ve been analysing, and write an in-depth essay on the use of twentieth-century piano music for teaching beginner and intermediate students, which I undertake to do.
    Towards the end of May, Pete goes away to a conference. Before he leaves, he prints out from the computer the wedding invitations we have designed, plus a set of address labels, and information sheets for the guests. It is my job, in his absence, to get everything sent out.
    So one day after lunch, I take all the mats off the dining table next to the south-facing French windows, and wipe it clean of sticky food. I bring down the different piles from the computer room upstairs, lay them out before me, and set to work. First, I stick labels on to the pile of envelopes. Then, taking each envelope in turn, I write on to an invitation the relevant names, fold up a sheet of information, and slip both inside.
    As I do it, my skin starts to prickle and burn.
    Reach—write—fold.
    Reach—write—fold.
    Burn.
    Neat white rectangles are building up around me, covering one end of the table, falling on to the chairs, spreading across the carpet like stepping stones.
    Reach—write—fold.
    Burn.
    And I am overwhelmed by the hope and hopelessness of what I am doing, by the impossible, unbearable contrast between the joyful invitation with which I fill each envelope and the random and fathomless thingrampaging through my skin, ever more frequent, ever more painful, that is lengthening, lengthening, lengthening the odds that this wedding will ever take place.
    I crumple over the