Chapter Text
Tony’s quiet sobs were now accompanied by intense shivering and rapid breathing. Frances wasn’t sure if Tony’s excessive sweating was a byproduct of coming from that strange cave (where, by the way, she had no desire of going, thank you very much) right before they ran into one another, or those drug withdrawals he now experienced several times a day, or if it was a beginning of a panic attack. She was almost sure it was a mixture of all these things which meant the situation could hardly be any worse.
Frances remembered how Sam Fletcher suffered from panic attacks and oftentimes, they would be so intense she’d just fall on the floor and couldn’t move till the cold tiles turned as hot as her skin. The floor would burn so much that Sam was sure it left bloodied patches over both her cheeks. She’d be alone in her apartment, this twenty-nine year old woman, with her whole world silently falling apart second after second. It was before Sam got better, and then worse again, and it took her so much strength not to give up that Frances almost couldn’t bare it herself. She had no experience with drugs … well, neither with panic attacks, but she couldn’t let that happen to Tony.
“I have nowhere else to go,” he repeated. “Life seems so pointless … these clean, white-painted walls all around. At night … it comes crashing down … It’s nauseating.”
“But you’re not alone here,” Frances said in a low voice. She was looking at him but his gaze drifted off somewhere behind her, silent tears drying on his face.
He scoffed. “It seems like it.”
Frances took a step closer to Tony who was now within her reach. “Can I … can I touch you?” she whispered. Hearing herself say this out loud almost made her cringe away from his reaction. But Tony just murmured incoherently and didn’t draw back when she grabbed his wrist.
“Okay. Okay … Come on,” Frances said softly, “shall we walk back? Let’s go to your room. I’ll stay with you.” He was silent but obeyed.
She grasped his elbow and lifted his arm across her shoulders. Although Tony was leaning on her, she could tell he was holding a significant amount of his weight back. No man that big could feel as light with half his body pressed against hers. That was a good thing, right? Could that mean that he was more present than she thought? She knew her height certainly wasn’t helping the circumstances. On the one hand, Frances hoped he’d remember this and make fun of her, laughing at how clumsy they must’ve looked, but on the other … she wished his pain would go away and with it also all his recollections of the lowest moments, including this one.
Tony’s heavy breathing seemed to calm down a little bit. It was actually the first time Frances witnessed anything like that first hand and once again, she felt inadequate and completely deserving of all the horrible reviews coming her way there in the outside world.
“You know,” Frances said – more to herself – as she felt drops of sweat forming on her lower back and under her breasts, “I don’t even need to go into that cave to increase my levels of perspiration. This humidity will do it for me,” she sneered but stopped right away. He is losing it and you’re blabbing about sweating. Get a grip.
“Well …” she tried again in a light but vigilant tone, “you already know I write – wrote – romance novels. But I’m actually a great fan of crime fiction.” Maybe that’s why she was always imagining scenarios where someone would die horribly just doing mundane things. Like when she saw a man walking a dog across the street and vividly saw the man falling while his dog kept jumping around, ultimately tying his leash around his owner’s neck and choking him to death. Whenever Frances walked to her car in a parking lot, she would always check how many vans there were and if they had a backdoor. She, or any other woman, could easily just want to enter her car and someone from the van right next to her would open the backdoor, grabbing her, and murdering her right there in a broad daylight, without anyone ever knowing what exactly had transpired.
“And yes, I know …” she jumped again, as if to silence her mind, “you wouldn’t tell. It’s not like I’m killing off my characters right and centre … Anyway. Do you know Dashiell Hammett? He wrote this piece, Maltese Falcon, that skyrocketed him into the hall of fame of American hard-boiled novelists. Sam Spade became one of the most famous detective protagonists of the era and is even today.”
Frances used the back of her hand to clean her sticky forehead. For a bit, they walked in silence. In the branches of the trees around them, the birds were tweeting happily but that cheerful spirit couldn’t even touch the top of their heads.
“It’s true that Sam Spade was always a bit of a dick but still so charismatic that you just couldn’t help but imagine yourself as that femme fatale … now that I think of it, it was probably because of how Humphrey Bogart portrayed him … I guess I probably read detective stories as much as I watched them. You know, American crime stories, lovely murders from the British countryside where you’re left wondering how there can still be living people around …”
Frances paused and adjusted her right arm stretched over Tony’s waist. They were half-way there but it seemed like they moved even further from the main hall.
“Samantha Fletcher,” Frances blurted out. Was she talking too much? “She was one of my most cherished characters. Also the only protagonist that foreshadowed my love for crime though she of course had nothing to do with murders or corruption or … or bribery. Not that I shied away from these topics. But she was this broken woman in her late twenties but she had strength of Spade and perseverance of Jessica Fletcher, my other favorite detective character … I guess that …”
Frances thought about how she simply didn’t know enough back then. She was young with nothing to her name, and dumped all the common fantasies on this character, let her fall in love with her art professor who used her, broke her heart, moved away for two years, and then they still found their way back to each other. While Samantha couldn’t eat, had panic attacks regularly while dropping out of school, he left his wife, came back for her, and it was the typical love till eternity crap. Was this what those know-it-alls in publishing thought to be so outdated and “anti-feminist"? And they’d be correct. Frances couldn’t even envision doing this again to any of her characters now. At the same time, did she think that judging writers according to what they came up with even five years back was fair? Frances wouldn’t say that either.
“Okay, Tony, breathe. We’re almost there. You have to push through one last time. And then you will rest. You will rest all night and in the morning, you will see things more clearly, I promise. I just ... tried to say that there's strength in you. And I know it because you showed me kindness and that is sometimes hard to find when one hurts himself. And I know it won't make you better. But we have a couple more steps to go, come on – great! Wonderful. And look ...” Frances said though she knew Tony was looking down at his feet, trying not to crumble. "We're here."
When they entered the hall, it was already dark. Everyone must’ve been in their rooms already, getting ready to bed. Tony was still very quiet. Frances knew he was exhausted. She didn’t do right by Sam, she knew that, but at least she didn’t freeze when Tony opened up to her.
He was able to sit on his bed, lift his arms. There was just muted yellow light from the bedside lamp. Frances took off Tony’s sweatshirt, and knelt in front of him to take off his shoes. She reached for the zipper of his pants, mechanically, but his hand flew upwards, stopping her own mid-air. So, Frances rose back up without a word and sat next to him instead. He didn’t move. She listened to his breathing, now regular and deep, and waited.
“I will do it,” he muttered after a while. He got up, took his pants off, and sat down again, completely out of breath.
Frances watched him lying down and curling his whole body with arms around his legs, as an unborn child in a womb. Still sitting, she covered him with the soft duvet and left her hand rest on his shoulder. This will be a long night, she thought, feeling the heaviness of her own eyes, as if her own body tried to convince her to move across the hall to her own room, her own bed. But it wasn't hers, and this wasn’t Tony’s bed either. They were paying for it, but it didn’t make it home. What was her home anyway, and where would it be once she returned? Would she even recognise what was left of her insignificant little life? Maybe this alienation would disappear, she thought. Maybe they would all get used to it. Frances truly hoped they would. She couldn’t imagine leaving Tony in this state, in this room, alone.