The Best of Friends by Alex Day (accelerated reader books .txt) 📕

Gripping the rail even tighter, I start to count slowly in my head. One. Two. Three. When I get to thirty, that will be long enough. That will be enough time to know that the man has gone.

Four. Five. Six.

The screech of the doorbell stops my heart, shatters my nerves, and makes me jump sky high. I begin to hyperventilate, and as I do so I sink slowly to my knees, my legs no longer strong enough to hold my weight. Despite my collapse, I’m still poised, my brain on alert, working out what I’ll do when he tries the door handle. When he kicks the door down.

What the fuck will I do?

Tears spring into my eyes and I am filled with a sudden self-loathing. I brought all of this on myself. I might have summoned up the willpower to have stopped now, but the years of falling, of succumbing, are catching up with me nevertheless.

But I couldn’t help it, I can hear my inner self bleating to me, to whoever might listen. Yes I could, I retort, furious with myself for my weakness, my lack of self-control. I could have filled the idle hours with baking or crochet or doing charitable works, like normal people do. Like good people do.

But I didn’t.

Twenty minutes pass, then thirty, before I manage to haul myself upright. The bell hasn’t rung again. I don’t know if the man has gone; I daren’t look in the direction of the door. I retreat, heart banging against my chest, to the back of the house where its huge antiquity and grand history means there is a second staircase, for the servants of yore. I go down that and into the kitchen where I make myself a strong coffee with a nip of something for my nerves before I realise that I’ve got to get out of here.

I run the few short steps between the back door and the car and then, just before I jump inside, I remember that it’s out of petrol. Completely out. To the point where I only just made it home yesterday. I meant to text Dan to ask him to do something about it, bring some petrol home in a jerry can 70s-style, or get the garage to come round. Whatever is necessary. But I forgot. I stand, frozen, suddenly and terrifyingly incapable of moving. I don’t want to go back into the house, where I’ll have to check every door and every window one hundred times and even then won’t feel safe. But I can’t take the car.

Blindly, like a fugitive, I put my head down against an imaginary wind and slink around the corner of the house. I race across the circular gravel driveway where the ornamental cherry stands proudly as if there’s nothing at all to worry about. I reach the side gate, wrest it open and head out onto the green. At least there are people here, not just me, all alone. I look around me. Actually, there aren’t any people. On the main road through the village on the other side of the grass a few cars pass, but that’s it. I walk, as fast as I can, in the direction of your house, seeking sanctuary. Sanity. Self-preservation.

I’ve just started to breathe more easily when I hear footsteps behind me. It’s hardly possible for me to speed up because I’m going so hurriedly already, but I try to, heedless of how obvious it makes my fear to my pursuer. It must be him, the man in the hat. The shadow figure. I’m so frightened that I can’t work out if the breathing I can hear is mine or his.

I feel sick.

The hand on my shoulder makes me jump out of my skin. I let out an involuntary scream, high-pitched and animalistic. Why the fuck did I come out when I knew the man in the hat was prowling?

‘Charlotte! Goodness me you’re jumpy! Whatever’s the matter?’

Miriam. Not him. Just dear, sweet, innocent, irritating Miriam.

I’m weak and floppy with relief that quickly turns to anger at her scaring me like this, and then contrition as I silently acknowledge that it’s not her fault.

I shake my head. ‘I’m fine,’ I say, curtly. ‘But as you can see I’m in a bit of a hurry.’

‘I’m sorry,’ she responds, ‘I came to see you about the foraging club. I called round at the house but there was no answer so I assumed you were out and about somewhere.’

‘I was,’ I reply, curtly. ‘I’m out and about here, on the village green.’ It dawns on me, now my heart has stopped racing and my brain clicked into gear, that she’s dressed all in black, including her deeply unflattering black bobble hat. There was no stranger at the door. It was just Miriam. I take a long, deep breath. I’m becoming paranoid, unhinged. I’ve got to stop overreacting like this.

‘I just wanted to …’ Miriam starts but quickly tails off as I give her a dismissive wave and start walking again. I need to get away from her, from her tattling and prattling.

‘I’ll ring you about the foraging,’ I call back to her over my shoulder. I’m going at such a pace she trails in my wake and I soon leave her far behind, a shadow figure on the green, staring uncomprehendingly after me. I can’t worry about her. I’ve got enough on my plate. She’ll get over it; she always does. Her adulation of me never fails. I clench my fists and force myself not to be cross with her for frightening me so badly. She doesn’t know that callers to the house give me the heebie-jeebies. Why should she? I should just be grateful it wasn’t who I feared it might be.

‘No!’

I realise that I have cried out audibly into the quietude of the mid-morning village. The first sign of madness is talking to yourself, or is that the last? In any case, what really matters is that