Prologue

The husband:

I am dreaming. I know I am dreaming because I am drifting, in and out up and down, in light and dark.

I am running. I am a runner. I always run. I don’t know where I’m running to, only that I am running away. I cannot even remember what I am running from, only that I cannot stop until I get so far away that I never have to face it again. I had been running for what seemed like hours and it is strange because the sun is overhead so it’s clearly in the middle of the day. Somehow this doesn’t feel right. I don’t know how but I know I usually ran early in the morning starting before dawn or evening before dusk, my head’s filled with images of open moorland with the sun low in the sky. It’s hot under that noon sun and I slowly become aware of my raging thirst and the stabbing pains in my arm, legs and feet and toes. And my ribs! Oh, they hurt so much I can hardly breathe. Now my shoulders ache like they weigh tons, I am so tensed.

I look around me in my dream, at the strange scenery of unfamiliar light woodland, I realise I am totally, utterly lost, which only intensifies my feeling of desolation. Now I am clearly running out of puff and so I stop stock still in this open forest. I’m panting, my lungs and every muscle in my body is screaming loudly in protest. My arms and legs shake and everything’s going black. I am on a worn track and ahead of me is a hazy figure, the first person I have seen in what seems like hours. A woman, I think, maybe a young girl in pigtails. An overweight girl. I don’t want to talk to anyone in this state of mind. So I step off the track for a moment, lean against a tree. My legs wobble, everything hurts except ... funny, my ribs and head don’t hurt any more. I will seize up if I stop, so I rejoin the path. Good, the girl’s gone. I run, I remember that I live to run. To pound the ground, drown out the sound.

Now I am on the ground, in my dream. I lay there unable, unwilling to move even if I could. My ribs hurt bad, and my head, my lips parched and I can taste the metallic flavour of blood. As well as desperate exhaustion I sense the pain of incredible desolation, but cannot for the life of me remember any reason why I should feel this way.

I know who I am, of course I do. I’m Tommy, you know, Tommy Barlow, and I was born in 1958, in Nottingham, to Ann and Alan Barlow. Recently married to my childhood sweetheart Sally. Yes, sweet Sally. I know I am an engineer, I work a lathe. Lying here in deep woodland, I can smell that ever-present aroma of hot lubricant oil from the lathe as my skin oils burn in the merciless sun, but everything else is hazy.

I know that I have an overwhelming desire to lose everything, I want to forget, I need to let it all go, every single thing. It’s hard though when I have those stark images burned into my brain. I want to scream but I need to breathe to make a sound and it hurts too much to draw breath, something wrong with my lungs, like I am drowning or something. Even with my eyes shut the welcoming inky blackness clears and once more those images return, etched onto the inside of my eyelids in full colour to torment me, with an accompanying soundtrack which fills my ears and echoes in my mind with abject horror. I think I want to die. No, I don’t just think that, I know I want to die.

My life, in fact any kind of meaningful existence for me, is over. Finished, ended, as if I never lived. I wish I had never existed, then I wouldn’t hurt so much. If only the pain I feel would blank out those unbearable pictures. Where the hell is the delete button when you want it?

Suddenly I cannot breathe at all, it is as if I’m drowning in my own suffocating sorrow. I am going under for the last time and I thrash my arms and legs about in a desperate bid to get to the surface and draw one last gasping breath, one brief reprise before that inevitable, welcoming, long time gone. Just the one gobbet of air to taste and savour for the very last time before I rest for eternity, that’s all I want, nothing more.