She took a step forward and shoved Nose-stud backwards. Pushed her face close to Nose-stud’s. Let her see the fury and violence in her eyes.
‘Fuck you.’ Hanlon turned around to face the other two girls.
‘And you!’ she added, white-faced with rage.
Stunned silence and immobility. She turned on her heel and strode out of the toilet. No one followed. They had seen the look in her eyes, the contemptuous and professional way she had dealt with the alpha girl of the group. No one was going to challenge her.
She walked upstairs to her room, shaking with anger.
She unlocked the door and sat down on the bed. Her heart was thundering with adrenaline. She felt better than she had done for weeks. But then she thought about the doctor, her measured tones.
‘You can’t control yourself, Hanlon – worse, you don’t want to.’
Well, Doctor, I did. I did control myself. But, she thought, acknowledging the truth, she hadn’t wanted to. It had been a very near thing. Only she knew just how close it had come to unrestrained savagery. She’d wanted to drive her left fist into Nose-stud’s exposed ribs, repeated blows, and then a savage blow downwards with her straight right. She could see her nose explode, a bloody mess, as Hanlon’s knuckles shattered bone and cartilage.
She stood up. Her legs suddenly felt weak. She sat down on the bed. Shit. She began to feel very alarmed indeed. What is wrong with me? Stroke? she thought, starting to panic. Heart attack?
Unexpectedly, she yawned. What the hell was that about? She’d just been in a fight. She suddenly felt extremely tired. What was going on? She stood up and nearly fell over, went to the window and, holding onto the sill with one hand to steady herself, opened it wide. Her thoughts were confused. Momentarily she didn’t know where she was. It was 11 p.m. The sky wasn’t fully dark yet; it was an amazingly beautiful colour, a very deep blue/black. Now she felt dizzy. Was this some sort of post-traumatic stress? That had never happened before. She could hear the surf crashing on the rocks. She breathed in the smell of the sea and, underlying it, the not unpleasant umami tang of slightly rotting seaweed. The cool breeze from the ocean with its salt tang calmed her slightly.
In front of her was the car park, the single-track road a ghostly grey ribbon in the darkness; above rose the huge mass of a tall hill that the framed map on the wall of her room had told her was something unpronounceable in Gaelic, reaching up into the sky. She yawned again. The car park was surprisingly full, given the fact that there was hardly anyone actually staying in the hotel, and as she looked out another vehicle arrived. Did they have lock-ins? Big Jim would be up for it, that was certain.
She yawned yet again. It must be the sea air, she thought sleepily, woozily. Blackness beckoned, and then, as her legs threatened to give way beneath her she suddenly thought, Sea air, bullshit.
Like fuck it’s the sea air.
The room tilted on its axis and she nearly fell. I’ve been drugged. The thought was quite clear. Startlingly so.
Then the room started to spin, as if she were drunk. Her legs turned to jelly and she collapsed backwards onto the bed.
Before she blacked out, she thought of Big Jim, the bulge in his trousers, his final words to her, the piggy eyes of the boar ablaze with drink and lust…
‘I’ll see you later.’
7
Don’t fall asleep, Hanlon, she told herself. Just don’t fall asleep. Easier said than done. She would open her eyes, blink, stare at the ceiling and then forget what she was doing as her mind shut down. She could feel that she was fighting a losing battle against a dark, swirling cloud of unconsciousness.
Don’t give in… don’t… Big Jim’s coming… She thought of his gross flabby body, his budding erection, his sleazy smile. Wake up… WAKE UP!
She put her hand in her jacket pocket and her hand met an unrecognised object. Her fingers closed on it and she pulled out the zip-up bag with the white powder, Nose-stud’s coke.
She hauled herself into a sitting position, forcing her body to obey. Every other second she blacked out, so her progress felt like time-lapse photography. A series of freeze-frame stills.
Now she was moving her hand towards the bedside table.
Darkness.
Now she was pulling the bag open.
Darkness.
Now she was staring at it stupidly. Darkness. Now she was wondering what was in it and what she was trying to do. Darkness.
Now she tipped the contents of the bag out on the glass-topped table by the bed.
Several grams of coke, hundreds of pounds’ worth, lay in a snowy heap on the smooth reflective surface. If anything was needed to kick-start her fogged brain, she was now looking at it.
Hanlon blinked at it, zoning in and out of consciousness.
No time to try and find her bag and her purse to locate a note to roll up, she pushed her unruly black hair back out of the way and leaned forward.
She must have blacked out again because her head crashed against the glass as she shifted her weight. She was now sitting on the edge of the bed, bent double, head leaning on the cool glass of the bedside-table surface, staring blankly at the mound of white powder a few centimetres from her eye. From this angle and distance it looked enormous.
The coke high would snap her out of the lethal torpor she was sinking into. Either that or she would OD, her heart unable to cope with the enormous, potentially fatal, boost she was about to give it. Better dead than alive with Big Jim on top of her.
She closed one nostril with the tip of her
