The Weight Behind Me

I always knew when someone was behind me.

Not footsteps, exactly. Footsteps are honest things; they announce themselves and leave you the dignity of turning around. This was something else, a pressure at the base of my neck, like a hand held an inch from my skin, close enough that I could feel its warmth and never once its touch.

It started when I was twenty-six, the winter after my father died, and everyone had a ready explanation. Grief does strange things, they said. Grief makes the house breathe and the dark lean in. I accepted that for a month, then two, then a year. But grief fades, and this did not. By twenty-nine it had a rhythm. Strongest at dusk. Stronger in stairwells, car parks and long corridors, anywhere the world narrowed to a single line with me in the middle of it. Weakest when I walked backwards, which I did only once, on an empty street at midnight, laughing at myself. I never told a soul, because it proved nothing except that I was the kind of woman who walked backwards at midnight.

I told people anyway. That was my mistake, or the first of them.

“Paranoid,” my sister Mei said, not unkindly, stirring her tea. “You’re tired, Clara. You work too much.”

I told my landlord, Mr. Okafor, about the shadow that paused whenever I paused on the stairs. He checked the lights and found nothing wrong with them, then looked at me the way you look at a dog that has started to limp for no reason. I told my coworkers about the stairwell light that flickered only when I climbed alone. One of them, Dana, laughed and then stopped laughing when she saw my face, and after that she was careful around me, the way people are careful around a glass that has already cracked once. I told my mother, who patted my knuckles and suggested chamomile and a holiday.

Everyone had a gentle word for it, and every gentle word meant the same thing. It’s in your head.

They were right about the geography, though not the diagnosis. I would find that out later.

*****

I stopped telling people the way you stop picking at a scab: not because it had healed, but because I was tired of watching it bleed in public. I smiled when asked. I said I was sleeping better. At night I lay with my back to the wall and my eyes on the door, and the pressure sat at my neck like a patient animal, and I let it.

Then the pain started.

It began as a tightness between my shoulder blades, nothing worth mentioning. By September it had become a burning line down my spine, and by October I couldn’t turn my head without a hot wire pulling taut behind my eyes. I couldn’t sit through meetings. I held my coffee with both hands because my shoulders would no longer allow one. My doctor pressed here and there, ordered scans that showed a perfectly ordinary spine, and finally wrote a referral with the weary kindness of a man who has run out of options.

“Physiotherapy,” he said. “Try it. Sometimes the body holds on to what the mind can’t put down.”

I wanted to scream that I’d heard that sentence before, that every version of it was a polite way of saying you’re making this up. But I took the slip of paper, because pain makes beggars of us all.

The clinic was on the fourth floor of an old building near the river, the kind with brass door handles worn smooth and a lift that complained all the way up. The waiting room was empty. The receptionist’s desk was empty too, a lamp left on, a mug still steaming beside the keyboard. I sat and waited and felt the pressure settle at my neck as it always did in quiet places.

“Clara Moontail?”

The woman in the doorway was small and calm, with silver threaded through dark hair and warm brown eyes that went straight to my face and stayed there, which almost nobody’s did anymore. “I’m Ines,” she said. “Come through.”

Her room smelled of eucalyptus and old wood. There was a treatment couch, a window onto the grey river, a clipboard in her hand. She asked the usual questions. Any injury? Any falls? Any heavy lifting?

“No. But I think someone’s been following me.”

The words were out before I could stop them. I heard them hang in that warm little room and felt my face burn. “Sorry. I know how that sounds. Forget I said it.”

Ines didn’t smile. She didn’t reach for the chamomile voice. She set down her clipboard and said, quietly, “Tell me more.”

So I did. Three years of it, all of it, in a rush that left my throat raw. The dusk, the stairwells, the walking backwards. The people who’d dismissed me. Ines listened without interrupting, her thumbs pressing slowly along either side of my spine, and when I finished she was quiet for so long that I thought I’d finally said the thing that would make even her step back.

“Your sister was wrong,” she said at last. “And so was your mother. Pain like this has a source, Clara. You were never imagining it. I believe you.”

I cried then. I’m not proud of it. I cried on a stranger’s treatment couch because someone had said the four words I’d waited three years to hear.

*****

I went back twice a week.

Ines never rushed me. She worked at my spine with those warm hands, and though the pain never eased, though if anything it sharpened beneath her thumbs, she always seemed to understand. “That’s the knot,” she’d murmur. “That’s where it holds on.” And I would breathe through it and feel, absurdly, grateful.

She asked about my life and I told her. She asked about Mei, and I said we’d stopped speaking much. She asked whether my coworkers had been kind, and I admitted I’d been eating lunch at my desk. She said nothing, only nodded, and I felt the nod like a verdict.

“People who haven’t felt it can’t understand,” she said one evening, working at the base of my skull. “They mean well. But they’ll keep telling you it’s in your head until you start believing them. That’s the danger, Clara. That’s how they wear you down.”

“I know,” I whispered.

“You don’t have to tell them anything anymore. Only me.” Her thumbs pressed in. “I’m the only one who’s listened, aren’t I?”

I should have heard it then, the way the sentence leaned. But I was so tired, and her hands were so warm, and a lonely person will accept almost any shape of kindness if it is offered with enough patience.

By the third week I’d stopped answering Mei’s calls. By the fourth I’d called in sick twice. I spent my evenings with the curtains drawn, waiting for the next appointment the way I’d once waited for the weekend. The pressure at my neck had grown heavier, a hand no longer hovering but resting, and strangely, I’d stopped being afraid of it. Ines said fear was the knot. Ines said if I stopped fighting, it would ease.

“Look at it,” she said one night, her voice very close to my ear. “You’ve never looked, have you? Tonight, when you get home. Turn off the lights, stand with your back to the mirror, and look over your shoulder. Just look. And tell me what you see.”

*****

I did it at midnight.

I stood in my bathroom with every light off except the hallway glow behind me, and for a long while I could not make my body obey. Three years I had refused to turn my head. Three years I’d walked briskly with my eyes forward, like a woman crossing a bridge in wind. Now I put my back to the glass and made myself look.

My shadow stretched long across the tiles. It had my outline, my loose hair, my crooked shoulders, the tilt of my head.

And behind it, resting on mine, was a second set of shoulders. Narrow. Patient. A chin laid softly on my own.

I didn’t scream. Some part of me had always known. The shadow didn’t move, but the pressure at my neck softened like a breath let go, and I felt a wave of something so close to love that I wept again.

“You’ve been with me all this time,” I whispered.

Yes, said a voice, so warm and so close that I nearly missed what was wrong with it.

It sounded exactly like Ines.

*****

I told myself I’d imagined it. I told myself I’d spoken her name aloud and my own mind had supplied her voice, the way minds do. I went to bed with the pressure resting on my neck, almost companionable, and slept better than I had in years.

In the morning I phoned the clinic to book my next appointment.

“Moontail?” The receptionist’s voice was bright and puzzled. “I’m sorry, I don’t have anything under that name. When did you last visit?”

“Twice a week, for a month. With Ines.”

A pause. Paper rustling. “I’m sorry, there’s no Ines here. We’ve never had a physiotherapist by that name. Are you sure you have the right clinic?”

“Fourth floor,” I said. “By the river. The lift complains.”

“The lift does complain,” she agreed slowly, “but this clinic is on the second floor. And there’s no river near here.”

I hung up. I stood in my kitchen with my hands shaking, and then I did what I should have done on the first day: I took out my referral slip and read the address. It was a street I didn’t know. I pulled up a map. It was a block of offices across the city, nowhere near water.

Then I opened my bag and found the clipboard.

I don’t remember taking it. It had my handwriting on every page. Page after page of notes, in a hand that was mine and not mine, the loops too tight, the pen pressed hard enough to tear the paper. Dates. Sessions. And in the margins, in a smaller, neater scrawl, over and over, a single phrase.

Not yet. Not yet. Not yet. Soon.

“Don’t,” said Ines, from behind me.

I turned. The kitchen was empty. But the pressure at my neck had gone from a hand to a grip, and the voice was inside my skull now, not warm anymore but thin and sweet, like sugar over something rotten.

Don’t look so betrayed, Clara. You did so well. I was nearly done.

“You’re not real.” My voice cracked. “You’re a, you’re… I’m ill, I’m…”

Oh, you’re quite well, it said, and laughed. It was my laugh. That was the worst of it, my own laugh with something drawn out of it, hollowed like a tooth. You’re perfectly well. That’s what makes you so hard to wear.

I gripped the counter. My own knuckles looked unfamiliar. “Who are you?”

Three years, it said. Three years I walked behind you, and you wouldn’t turn around. Do you know what that is? To be this close, and have you flinch and hurry and call yourself paranoid? I was patient. I’m always patient. I waited for you to stop being afraid, and then I waited for you to be lonely. A pause, fond and terrible. You made it so easy. Your sister. Your mother. Your friends. All those gentle people telling you it’s in your head. I only had to agree with you.

“Why?”

The voice went quiet, and when it spoke again the sweetness had burned away entirely.

Because you were given the room, and I was given the wall. There was only ever space for one of us, and you took it before you even had a name. Do you think I don’t remember? Do you think I don’t remember being crowded into the dark while you grew fat on all the light? The grip at my neck tightened. I have waited a very long time to be the one who breathes.

*****

I ran. I got as far as the front door before the grip became a pull, the sort you feel in a dream when you try to scream, and my own hand rose and began, calmly, to turn the lock, to shut me in.

Shhh, it said. This won’t take long. You’ll go quiet, and I’ll go on. I’ll visit Mei. I’ll be so kind to her. I’ll ring Mother and tell her I’m much better now.

I sank to the floor with my back against the door and thought of every gentle person who had said paranoid and meant love. They’d been wrong about the cause. But they’d been right that someone needed to hold my hand while I was afraid. So I reached for my phone with the arm that was still mine and dialed the only number my fingers remembered.

“Mei,” I whispered, when she answered. “I’m sorry. You were right. I’m not well. Please come. Please don’t stop talking to me, whatever I say, whatever I say.”

You are such a disappointment, said the voice in my skull, very softly, very close.

“Don’t hang up,” I told my sister. “Not until you’re here.”

I heard her breath catch. I heard her say my name, and I held on to it with everything I had.

Behind me, patient as ever, something rested its chin on my shoulder.

It was still waiting.