By the end of the college day, consciousness had become an aching weight and had consumed me. I was already thinking about my bedtime routine, but I knew I had to get on with utilising the time and space to finish my piece for the exhibition. There had also been a suggestion from Will that he might be able to sidle down the hallway and drop me off home.
Since the first night when the cleaner had locked the door, I had begun setting up on the bench closest to the door, my work spread out across the entire bench. I believed that if something happened once, there was a good chance of it happening again.
I had moved on to the next phase of my project and was now working with more fabrics. I quickly became absorbed in the cutting and sewing, and I was pleased to see the coat taking a more solid shape. So far the flamboyance that I had planned out in my head and on the sketch pad wasn’t quite right, but it was starting to feel like a proper project and so I allowed myself a flutter of excitement at the prospect of completing the first creative thing in many years. This was a milestone, something I should feel proud of, but anxiety had a cheeky way of never quite letting you stay in that happy place for too long.
The room by now was losing quite a lot of light. It was nearly ten and the sky was almost black outside, and I had only one small lamp on the bench and all the blinds were drawn tight.
I stood up and went over to the corner to hit the main lights when the whole room plunged into a murky darkness. The lamp on the desk went out and the corridor outside went dark. I grasped around me for something to help me gain my bearings. I could just about see the bench a few metres in front of me, but there was no other light feeding through, which must have meant that the lights around the campus must have gone out as well.
I took a few steps forward until my stomach hit the bench. I tried to push away the panic that had begun to constrict my throat, but before I knew it, I could feel a tight grip around my wrist. I began twisting from it, trying to escape, to pull myself free.
‘Let me go,’ I said into the blackness. I started to grope around on the desk in front of me for my phone, but my hands just collided with one another. The panic was dialled up a notch as my thoughts began to spiral out of control. I dropped to my knees and tried to focus on just breathing in and then out for a longer breath, but the darkness had consumed any rational thought.
But amongst the chaos of my mind, I could hear footsteps; they were coming closer and closer until they stopped just outside the room.
Then I heard someone calling for Regi, but it was getting lost amongst the noise in my head.
There was a surge of light. The brightness was overbearing. I blinked at my surroundings from my safe place under the bench. I hadn’t realised I had found my way there. I turned around on my knees and saw two figures illuminated in the doorway by brighter lights in the corridor.
‘Regi,’ came the voice again, soft and feminine. I began to crawl out from under the bench at the same time as the figure came towards me. I rubbed my wrist where I could feel the lingering sensation of someone’s firm touch. I looked to the bench where my phone was sat next to my scrapbook, exactly where I had left it. I stood up, then turned and saw who had come into the room.
‘Sophia?’ I was confused. From behind her emerged Steve. ‘Guys?’ I couldn’t understand why they were both here. ‘Is everything okay?’
Sophia rubbed her face with her hands and sank into a stool opposite.
‘No, it’s not,’ she squeaked through her fingers.
Steve stepped forward and stood in front of me with his hands in his pockets.
‘It’s not, not okay. It’s, it’s a bit messed up,’ he said awkwardly.
I looked between them both, trying to bring my breathing back to normal.
‘Did you… was there a power cut?’
‘The lights went out for a second just then,’ Sophia said, and then she pulled her hands away from her face and looked at me. ‘Are you okay, Regi?’
I sucked in a big breath and blew it out. ‘Absolutely fine. I couldn’t find my phone when the lights went out. Just a bit disorientated. And tired.’ I shrugged off her concerns.
‘We wanted to tell you about us,’ Sophia said.
‘It’s okay.’ I waved my hand. ‘I know.’
A small wail escaped from Sophia.
‘Oh, you do?’ Steve went rigid.
‘Yes,’ I said, still slightly breathless. ‘I wanted to say something to you both, well to you, Sophia, but I didn’t know how.’ I thought about the pregnancy test. I would wait until they mentioned that.
‘Okay, well.’ Steve’s shoulders relaxed. ‘We wanted to come and say to you, here, tonight, away from the house and prying ears, we wanted you to know that we have every intention of telling Karen. You see, the thing is, Regi…’ Steve shifted his feet and looked around, perhaps for something of comfort to lean on.
‘The thing is, we are in love.’ Sophia looked at me, her eyes wide. Waiting for me to respond.
She said it so dramatically that I wasn’t sure I had
