[4] Eleven Minutes
I drove my normal route to work. It was Tuesday. I had taken
Friday off on account of almost dying on Thursday, and I had spent a fairly
quiet weekend with my fiancée, but I decided to take Monday off too. Just in
case I died then instead.
Crossing the little bridge on the way to the office I was
feeling ok. I could do this, I told myself. I was fine, and last week had just
been a one off. A blip. Just a little poorliness; I had rested for the best
part of four days, and in my lifetime I’d never rested for more than two days
to rid myself of whatever illness I was carrying. So four days was plenty of
time. I could do this, I told myself again.
I parked in my new car in its normal parking space. Other
people just parked wherever there was an empty space, some paid no attention to
the painted lines and one or two paid little attention to even raised curbs or
flower beds. Me, I liked to park in the same spot. I had only been working
there a month, but already people knew that parking spot as Andrew’s spot.
I walked in through the big glass door. The same big glass
door I had bundled out of five days earlier. Right away the stench from the
five thousand pound coffee machine hit me and I was almost sick. Again. I
poddled up the stairs and sat down at my desk like a zombie.
Computer on. Email open. Hundreds upon hundreds of pointless
emails awaited me, most of them from the American office – I was used to going
home of an evening just as the Americans woke up and started sending email
after email about project after project. Our department always scheduled a
meeting for the last hour of the day to avoid that crossover with America; if
we were away from our desks, the Americans couldn’t badger us non-stop about
all sorts of things we had put in to motion, or posted on social media or
something.
Then it started again. Eyes spinning. Head burning. I couldn’t
read the emails. I knew exactly what was coming. The tunnel vision; the impending doom; the
sense of no escape from anything, ever. I was going to die again.
I made my excuses about not feeling well and shut down my
computer. Steven, the sales guy sitting to my right, made some smart comment
about how I should perhaps look at my diet, and that perhaps my fiancée was
trying to poison me. Not helpful when I’m faced with the all-consuming fear of
thinking I’m going to dissolve in to a melty puddle. Not helpful at all, Steven.
Perhaps you should fuck off?
Once again I couldn’t get out of that awful building quick
enough, and this time I wasn’t going to wait for Jenny to phone the stupid NHS
111 number only to be carted off to hospital and told I wasn’t going to die. I
was getting out. I was so scared and I felt so ill I didn’t care. I didn’t care
if I had to smash my way through the big glass door I’d come through minutes
before. I just had to make it to my car, and I didn’t really care if I died
there, in the cold car park out the back of the office.
I did make it to the car. I opened the door. Flopped in to
the driver’s seat and breathed a huge sigh of relief. Eleven minutes I had
lasted. Eleven minutes of relative stability before my whole world came
crashing down for no apparent reason. For the second day in a week I was going
to die again. For the second time in a week I didn’t die.
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