Trauma by Patrick McGrath

some casual stranger—but in my eyes, and in Agnes’s eyes, in the eyes, that is, of the perpetrators of this occasional minor transgression, this flimsy infidelity, it didn’t really count.
Agnes certainly didn’t seem to consider it a matter of any great significance, remarking as we got dressed one time that it was like going to bed with an old shoe.
    “An old
shoe
?”
    “You know what I mean, Charlie. Comfortable and familiar.”
    Never a suggestion from her as to when we would meet again, or that very much had happened at all, in fact, other than the pleasuring of an old shoe. At the door, before we parted, she took my face in her hands and peered at me, frowning, with a small smile that was almost maternal in its tenderness, yet somehow more complicated than that.
    “You feel better, Charlie?”
    Her concern affected me. I was unprepared for the emotion it aroused.
    “Go home and look after that woman,” she said.

    A few nights later Nora again cried out in her sleep and woke us both. I switched on the bedside light. She was sitting upright with her fist pressed to her mouth, staring straight at the end of the bed as though somebody was there.
    “What is it?” I whispered.
    She was trembling. I touched her arm and she reacted as if she’d had an electric shock, more a spasm than a recoil.
    She turned to me, her face alive with horror. With a kind of muted wail she reached for me, and I held her. She shuddered in my arms. I rocked her gently, murmuring that it was all right now, whatever had happened was a dream, she was safe now.
    “Oh Jesus, that was bad,” she whispered.
    “Tell me.”
    “I want a cigarette.”
    We sat in the kitchen and I made a pot of tea and she smoked. So it was not just random material floating up from the unconscious, I thought. This was the second time. It took some persuading to get her to talk.
    “It’s not that interesting, Charlie, I’m sure your patients bring you much better stuff.”
    “Just tell me,” I said.
    I glanced at the clock over the stove. It was after two.
The city was quiet except for a distant siren. Her fingers were playing with the cigarette lighter, turning it end on end on the kitchen counter. Eyes staring out of the window, where south of us the twin towers were cliffs of blackness against the pale glow of the sky, narrow rectangular smears of light scattered across them. There was moonlight on the river.
    “Someone was following me.”
    Standard stuff of nightmare.
    “Go on.”
    “But that’s it!”
    “Who’s following you?”
    She shook her head. I asked her if she didn’t know or if she couldn’t say.
    “Is it a man? Is he threatening you?”
    She became thoughtful. She wanted to remember. This was good.
    “And there’s something else,” she said, “a sound, but it’s kind of negative, like the opposite of wind—”
    I saw her suddenly stiffen. I took her hand. She was tense and cold. She was wearing only a T-shirt and pajama bottoms. I asked her if she wanted her bathrobe. She did, so I got it for her. When I came back she had relaxed a little. I helped her slip into the robe. She was still shivering.
    “Drink your tea.”
    “I’ve ruined your night. But that’s all I can remember.”
    “And you’ve never had it before?”
    She shook her head. She didn’t think so. She wasn’t sure.
    “You could hear something like the opposite of wind. A sucking sound?”
    “There’s this noise it makes, sort of a rumble and a clatter. Loud. And there’s a roaring.”
    “Is it day or night?”
    “Night, I think.”
    “Inside or outside?”
    Her eyes suddenly filled with tears and again her fist went to her mouth.
    “Charlie, can I have a drink?”
    “Later. A rumble and a clatter, loud, you said, and a roaring. Like the subway? Were you in the subway, darling?
Was someone following you in the subway?”
    “And there was laughing.” She turned to me.
    “Someone’s laughing?” I said.
    “And he’s coming after me. Oh,