Chapter 159

I wake up with a throbbing face, shooting pain across my entire skull and forehead and the worst kind of headache from hell. I am on the cold, hard wooden floor of my apartment and for a moment I have no clue where I am. My body is stiff from it, and freezing from being here for a prolonged time in a very awkward position, like a dead animal.

Disorientated and woozy, I turn on my side and throw up when the taste of blood hits the back of my throat making me gag, and I realise that my face is covered in it. Feeling out my features, I can tell that my nose is a mess, blood crusted around it, and it feels like it could be broken at the bridge where it’s swelling badly and near unbearable to touch. Tracing it tenderly, so very carefully with my fingertips and recognising the burning ache of a bone that has to be at least cracked. My face already feels puffy and even though it’s still so dark I can tell I am completely alone in my surroundings. It has that eerie feeling of emptiness that comes when you are truly alone. It’s a moment that causes me internal pain and a huge wave of fear as I realise, I have been out completely cold and vulnerable in a place you wouldn’t want to find yourself unlocked.

My brain jumps to my last memories and I automatically push my hands to check my body and clothes erratically, feeling myself out and exhaling heavily as I do so. Pyjama bottoms are still on, as are my underwear and tank top over my sports bra. So I can thank my lucky stars I haven’t been raped … this time. They don’t tend to stop and re-dress you after the act.

The overwhelming ache of emotion hits me harder and I push it down, along with the burn of tears, thanking my lucky stars I won’t have to drag myself to a sexual health clinic and try and explain this away to be tested. It makes my head and heart throb as the realisation hits me how lucky I was this time; how lucky I am he didn’t kill me with the force he must have hit me, or did worse to me. I am so lightheaded with an obvious concussion that I barely feel like this is real.

I crawl until I get to the nearest piece of furniture and use it to lever myself to my feet, almost knocking it over on uneven legs, shaking and swaying all over the place before I slump down on top of it and feel around for the lamp on the table beside me. It’s not there, and as my eyes adjust to being awake, I can see my apartment is trashed, the lamp laying a few feet away in the light cast by the moon from the sitting room window. They must have been braver with me contained and dead to the world, and went through this place like enraged animals in a bid to find something of worth.

The door in front of me is wide open and I get up and walk unsteadily to it to close it. Not sure what else I should be doing.

It’s completely fucked up; bolts and locks are mangled from what I suspect was a crowbar entry that I slept through in my drugged stupor and my supposed security has ripped clean out of the woodworm ridden door almost effortlessly. They knew this door wasn’t a match and probably didn’t make much noise getting it open anyway. Sheer luck it was on a night I had put myself into an induced deep sleep to get well.

My door won’t shut and when I switch on the overhead light my eyes immediately go to the gaping hole in the floor by the window as the dull illumination shows me the full horror, and I literally sink to my lowest. I don’t care that the apartment looks worse than it did; it’s not really hard to make a shithole look more like a shithole. It’s what I can see that rips my soul out and the breath from my lifeless body in one fell sweep.

The hidey-hole for all that I have scraped and saved and kept together, the loose floorboard by the window, they found it.

I don’t even check, even from here I know it’s all gone and as I sink to the floor heavily, losing all life, I cradle my face in my hands and start to cry.

Everything inside of me dying all at once as all hope and light of a way out of this place is taken away on the breeze. They have just snubbed out my chance of a new anything; the theft of all that I had, my plans, what I could squirrel away, gone.

It’s one thing to start over when you have something behind you to enable a future, it’s another thing entirely to start over with absolutely nothing except a pot to piss in when you’re completely broke and all you had just got stolen by some arsehole looking to fuel his drug habit.

I’m screwed.

I literally have nothing anymore.

I now need my job more than anything just to bloody eat, and well, this place looks like home sweet home for a very long time at this rate. Even with its roaches, damp infested rotting walls and floors, and a million and one broken things needing to be repaired. This is my reality.

I let it all out in a long bout of sobs; gut aching with the effort and hating that it’s brought me to this state of desolation. Ever since that bastard broke me, all I seem to do is cry when shit gets on top of me. It’s not who I was, and I despise that it’s how he has left me. Camilla would have taken this in her stride, picked herself up and put herself to rights. I am so tired of trying to be strong and find a path through the hellhole that is my life. I’m beaten down and so sick of fighting tooth and nail to survive. A heavy, lingering sadness that’s always trying to drag me down with every step I take.

I sit and allow myself to cry it all out until I am weak and woozy and so exhausted that tears dry of their own accord. Not because I am able to stop them, but because my body doesn’t have the energy to sustain them.

I pull myself together, swallow the self-pity down with shame and struggle to get upright. Pushing back my hair, I try to get my mind on the task of securing my apartment and seeing what else they took; readying myself for the second wave of stomach punching realisation that it really is all gone.

The police are pointless, they won’t be able to do shit and all they will do is make me hang around while they take statements and then harass me to go to the emergency room, which I can’t afford. Not anymore.

I’m fucking penniless.

I turn to try and wedge my door shut, but it just keeps opening the more I push it, warped, broken somehow, fighting me all the way. I am too weary and dizzy for this, and I eventually jam a chair up against it in a bid to keep it closed while I get to the sink and clean the worst of my face up and assess how bad it is. It feels like I have been face palmed with a shovel.

The horrendous image blinking back at me under dim, buzzing bathroom lighting in a cracked mirror is sobering.

I look awful, my eyes are starting to circle with the tell-tale blue darkness and the bridge of my nose is swollen and bruised already. My skin pale and blotchy from tears and traces of being unwell and my eyes look red and veiny. The blood cleans away to reveal an ashen face and a swollen top lip. I’m guessing he got me right in the centre of the face and I might be lucky with just a cracked or bashed nose rather than a broken one. It feels extremely tender and makes me nauseous when I touch it.

It isn’t the worst I have had to deal with, it’s just going to get a lot of questions at work and piss Joe off that I’m not his star turn on for sleazy customers looking like this. My head is pounding and I’m not sure if it’s from this or the fact I feel like death and barely capable of staying upright. The room keeps swimming and the turbulent motion going off inside my stomach is making me queasy. My nose is running with both blood and mucus so that I have to sniff, which then hurts my bloody face. I am in some mess.