Mrs Eccleston stopped as she realised Emma wasn’t listening. Her patient’s attention had shifted to the window. Mrs Eccleston craned forward over her desk to see what was out there, but her view was obstructed by the magnolia tree on a grassy knoll outside the tall window.
Emma watched the scene unfold on the street outside the office; a woman backed away from a man who staggered towards her, reaching his arms out to grab her. She was shouting at him. Emma couldn’t hear what the woman was saying, but it sounded like a name – the man’s name. The woman clearly knew him, and just as clearly felt threatened by him.
Emma’s first thought was that the man was drunk or high. The way he was acting, it could have been either.
But his walk was strange. It was not the unbalanced, sluggish gait of a drunk person, but more like the limp of someone with a disability. And the man seemed to be saying something to the woman – or at least trying to, his mouth opening and closing repeatedly.
Perhaps he was having some kind of seizure.
The woman was now holding her phone to her ear and speaking into it. Calling an ambulance. Or the police, maybe. Her backwards walk had slowed and she held her arm out to keep the man at a distance.
Mrs Eccleston rose from her seat and went to the window to see what was going on.
Suddenly there was a scream from outside. Emma got up and joined Mrs Eccleston. Both of them watched as the man bit down on the woman’s hand and she howled in pain, pushing at his head with her other hand which had dropped the phone.
Other people had been drawn to the scene by the commotion and now the bystanders crowded the screaming woman, struggling to free her hand from the man’s jaws. When they finally pried him from her, the man turned and tried to bite someone else, but two people restrained him and held him back.
Blood seeped from the bite mark on the woman’s hand and dribbled down her wrist. Emma moved away from the window, her face pale.
“Christ,” she said. “Should we call the police or something?”
Mrs Eccleston shook her head slowly, still staring out the window. “They’re already getting help by the look of it.”
“What was that?”
“I don’t know.” Mrs Eccleston turned to Emma. “Go home. Get some rest. Are you okay to drive?”
“Yeah, I’ll be fine.”
“Okay. Same time next week?”
Emma nodded.
*
Back home, Emma couldn’t shake the image from her head of the man biting the woman’s hand, blood dripping down her arm. She wanted to know what had happened, why the man had acted like that, what had been wrong with him.
So Emma did what she always did when she had questions. She went to Google.
The explanation that made the most sense to her was that the guy had been having a seizure of some kind and it’d caused him to act uncontrollably violent towards who Emma assumed was his wife or girlfriend. She knew that seizures could affect different parts of the brain and cause a variety of strange repetitive behaviours. She had googled all kinds of things related to seizures, heart attacks and strokes before, during a crippling bout of OCD when her health anxiety was through the roof and she was convinced she would die if she didn’t give in to her compulsions.
Yes. A seizure would explain the biting, the way the man had opened and closed his mouth over and over again as if he’d been trying to say something.
Emma opened her laptop and brought up the Google browser. She typed can seizures make you violent? into the search bar and hit enter. Several links popped up with reference to violent and aggressive behaviour in cases of frontal lobe epilepsy.
Scrolling through the search results, Emma suddenly thought, What am I doing? I don’t need to know this.
Her mental health had been good recently. The best it had been since the accident. So why was she obsessing over the details of an incident completely unrelated to her?
No, she had to stop. She couldn’t let herself spiral so easily.
Emma closed the tab, breathed in through her nose, held it for a few seconds, breathed out. Searching for a distraction, she realised she hadn’t looked at the news today, so she brought up her newsfeed and began scrolling through the morning's headlines.
There were multiple news articles with the words virus and infection in the title. Emma clicked on one and started to read it. It looked like another outbreak scare, like the Ebola thing in America a few years ago. The article reported multiple deaths in London and other cities across the UK that had been linked to an emergent virus.
Part of her wanted to read all of it and make sure she knew everything about this virus, so she could take measures to prevent herself from getting it. But she knew it was likely being blown out of proportion. And she was trying to distract herself from obsessive thoughts, not add to them.
Emma closed the newsfeed.
She decided to make a cup of tea and do some reading. She’d recently found books to be an effective distraction. You could get lost in another world with them, and it required focus to read, more focus than was needed to watch a film or TV show, making books more mentally stimulating.
As she filled the kettle and switched it on to boil, Emma heard a scream.
She looked from through the kitchen doorway at the living room window that faced the street, her heart thudding in her chest. The scream sounded like it had come from right outside her house.
Then she heard it again.
A figure zipped past
