Find Me After (eBook), page 1
Praise for
“Mind-blowing! Find Me After is a sharply ambitious, rip-roaring adventure through a haunting liminal space.”
Brianna Bourne, author of You & Me at the End of the World
“A gripping and imaginative story with an important message about epilepsy, as well as an irresistible romance – this had me hooked!”
Lauren James, author of The Loneliest Girl in the Universe
Also by A. Connors
The Girl Who Broke The Sea
For Meg, Gil and Evan – lodged in my brain, as well as my heart.
I wondered whether the Stillness on the face of the immensity looking at us was meant as an appeal or as a menace. What were we who had strayed in here? Could we handle that dumb thing, or would it handle us?
Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad
AUTHOR’S NOTE
While Find Me After explores all sorts of cool themes like the nature of reality, the fragility of life and the uniquely rubbish experience of waking up after an epileptic seizure, its primary purpose is to entertain. For that reason, I want to make sure that readers are aware of potentially upsetting content that might be triggering or disturbing to some.
This story explores the experiences of young people in an altered state of consciousness where unsettling transformations occur. It includes scenes of body horror, murder, threat and violence. There are depictions of seizures and their aftermath, as well as the physical and emotional toll of illness. This story also touches on questions of faith and religion in ways that might not resonate with all readers. And, finally, there are a handful of swear words where the intensity of the situation warrants it.
If that doesn’t sound like your bag of eyeballs (oops, spoiler), this might not be the book for you. If you think you might enjoy exploring the darker corners of a liminal, eerie otherworld on the brink of life and death, where reality is not quite rooted in the physical world, and the not-quite-dead fight for survival … then come on in!
Contents
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraph
AUTHOR’S NOTE
ONE
TWO
THREE
FOUR
FIVE
SIX
SEVEN
EIGHT
NINE
TEN
ELEVEN
TWELVE
THIRTEEN
FOURTEEN
FIFTEEN
SIXTEEN
SEVENTEEN
EIGHTEEN
NINETEEN
TWENTY
TWENTY-ONE
TWENTY-TWO
TWENTY-THREE
TWENTY-FOUR
TWENTY-FIVE
TWENTY-SIX
TWENTY-SEVEN
TWENTY-EIGHT
TWENTY-NINE
THIRTY
THIRTY-ONE
THIRTY-TWO
THIRTY-THREE
THIRTY-FOUR
THIRTY-FIVE
THIRTY-SIX
THIRTY-SEVEN
THIRTY-EIGHT
THIRTY-NINE
FORTY
FORTY-ONE
FORTY-TWO
Back Matter
ONE
You know it’s going to be a bad day when you wake and feel pavement against your face.
My first thought: Oh, no, not again.
Then, context: Hi, I’m Kyle. I’m seventeen. I have epilepsy. This happens to me a lot.
I’m lying face down, twisted like a fifty-storey splat, the pavement wet and cold and gritty beneath me, the dampness of this morning’s rain shower spreading through the leg of my jeans. There’s a moment when I think I must have fallen asleep, because why else would I be lying down with my eyes closed? But then the world settles into place around me and I realize it’s happened again.
I’m on the high street in town. Grey concrete, leaden sky. Shoes and legs crossing indifferently across my field of vision. In the spaces behind them, I catch glimpses of familiar shop fronts, built like nuclear fallout shelters: Poundland, Specsavers, Boots, Timpson.
I hate this bit.
Coming back from a seizure makes you feel a special kind of rubbish. Hot and cold at the same time; my throat tastes like burnt pennies; my eyes feel like somebody took them out and put them in the wrong way round. I wait for the rest of my memory to come back. It always takes a few minutes, it’s the familiarity of the routine that keeps me from panicking. They call it postictal confusion. I call it sulky-brain-syndrome. Epilepsy is like a loose wire fritzing in your skull. You get a spark and that spark sets off other sparks and then the whole thing blows a fuse. All I can do now is sit tight and wait for the BIOS to reboot.
I roll on to my back and haul myself up until I’m sitting against the wall of the WHSmith. Pins and needles start up immediately in the arm that’s been crushed beneath me so I know I was out for a few minutes at least. I feel a tiny pinch of indignation that nobody checked in on me in all that time. They just went right on with their shopping.
I groan, maybe a little theatrically, maybe for effect. Is it wrong that I pretend I’m the action hero in an old war movie when I’m coming back from a seizure?
Go on without me. I’ll hold them off as long as I can.
It’s been a couple of months since my last seizure and I’d started to think I might actually have things under control this time. But I guess not.
I do my checks.
Have I wet myself?
No.
Have I messed myself?
Er … no.
Have I vomited?
No. Not yet anyway.
Hey, maybe today’s not going to be such a bad day after all!
You have to take the little wins with epilepsy. I had a fit in a public toilet once and woke up to find the whole world and my mother bundled into the gents, my trousers around my ankles and the remains of somebody’s damp cigarette lodged under my tongue.
That was a bad day. This is nothing.
But still … no context.
The first fingers of panic flicker in my chest. Usually it’s come back by now, the memory of what I was doing right before my brain decided this would be a perfect time for a lie down. But not this time. There’s just a hole. No, not even a hole: an absence, like somebody forgot to hit the record button and whatever I was doing before didn’t get saved.
I try to push the thought away. My brain is in brownout, bits of it are offline. The memories always come back in the end.
But what if they don’t?
This sort of thing bothers me sometimes. If I forget everything I ever was does that mean I’m still me?
Let’s not go there.
Epilepsy does weird things to your brain. It makes you feel like your thoughts aren’t entirely your own. My post-seizure brain is like an overeager puppy trying to sniff every urine stain in the park at the same time. Images flicker against the inside of my eyes: a storm that will swallow me whole if I’m not careful.
I look outwards instead. The street, the shops.
This is my town and I hate it; I remember that much.
It’s one of those grey little ex-mining towns in the Midlands. A kind of cross between an open prison and a theme park, where all the rides are rubbish but you can’t find the exit so you queue up anyway to pass the time. It’s the kind of town where anyone in their right mind packs their bags and gets out as soon as they can.
I’m working on that.
I try to think through the journey that would have brought me here, hoping it’ll jog some memories. Over the bypass, under the railway bridge. There’s a jacket potato truck just round the corner where I used to go for lunch when I was still at school. It’s only twenty minutes from home. I could have walked here or Mum could have dropped me off before work.
There’s just one problem with that theory.
I haven’t left the house on my own for over a year.
Not since my GCSEs went so horribly wrong and I gave up on … life. Being outside, like this, is a big deal. It’s not something I’d have forgotten.
I groan again. This is more of a lost-my-keys-down-the-drain kind of groan than a war-hero groan. The nausea has kicked in. The thing about epilepsy that everyone knows about – the seizures – aren’t so bad because you’re not there for that bit. It’s the way it feels before and the way it feels after that really sucks. It’s like I’m about to throw up and fall asleep and dismantle myself all at the same time. I’m guessing it’s about mid-morning, which means I may as well write off the rest of the day.
I can’t get over the fact that no one has stopped to help.
The last time I passed out in this part of town, I woke up to find an off-duty nurse moments away from giving me mouth-to-mouth resuscitation.
If I’d only pretended to be unconscious a moment longer…
Don’t judge, I was fifteen – what did you expect?
Anyway, I threw up all over her instead.
But today: nothing. I suppose that was two years ago; I was a kid and nobody likes to see a kid passed out on the street. It’s different now. I don’t exactly look like an adult but maybe I look old enough for everyone to assume I’ve passed out from too much drink or drugs. That would explain why everyone’s walking right past me like I don’t exist.
I’m not sure whether I’m relieved or offended.
Then someone does stop and I wish instantly they hadn’t. I don’t see him coming; I notice him suddenly, standing right in front of me, staring at me. He looks a little s urprised and a little worried and a little pleased all at the same time, like he’s staring at an Amazon package on his front step that he wasn’t expecting.
He’s a small, grey, rusty rake of a man. The scar on his head cuts a knotted track from temporal lobe to frontal lobe: a gruesome, twisted stretch of pinkish scalp where the hair will never grow back. It must be an injury, I think. I reach up and touch the small ridge of bone on my own scalp where the surgeon corkscrewed a hole in my head and cut out the epileptogenic lesion in my temporal lobe.
“Keep moving,” the man says, sounding kindlier than I’d expected.
“Wha—?”
“Keep moving or he’ll sniff you out.”
Fear rumbles inside me. His voice is so quiet I really shouldn’t be able to hear him but somehow I do. The sound and the colour of the rest of the world pales.
“You’re not where you think you are,” the man continues, urgent now. “When you figure that out, all you’ll want to do is close your eyes and wait it out. But you can’t, do you hear me? You’ve got to keep moving.”
Keep moving? I’m about to ask him what in seven-shades-of-hell he’s talking about when a woman comes up behind him.
Thirties, quite well-dressed, a bit school-teachery. She doesn’t see me, or she ignores me if she does. “Dad,” she says, taking his arm. “Come on, we need to get going.”
I watch them leave. For some reason I’m thinking about the time I was clearing out the garage with Grandad before he died. I upended an old armchair and a dead mouse hit the floor. I remember the shock, the cold drench. It wasn’t a mouse anymore, not exactly. Its insides had turned to dust decades ago. It was a dried up, furry husk with milky, unseeing eyes fixed on mine.
That’s what the man reminded me of: a husk, with nothing but dust and spiders inside him.
I pull myself up to standing and the world rocks around me like it’s trying to shrug me off. I fish in my back pocket and I’m relieved to find my phone. I’ve never been robbed while I’m unconscious – I guess all the arm waving puts people off – but it’s something I think about. Anything can happen while you’re out. It’s like leaving your front door wide open. Except it’s not your house you leave unattended, it’s you.
My phone is dead, the screen dark. I press the power button again anyway. Nothing. Maybe it broke when I fell.
I let my head fall back and stare hopelessly at the cloudless sky.
Nothing is easy after a seizure. My eyes don’t work right, my fingers don’t work right. I’m only a twenty-minute walk from home but I might as well be on Mars.
The smart move would be to beg a passer-by to borrow their phone and call Mum. She’ll be working her shift at the local Waitrose right now and if I call her she’ll be in the car and down here in about three minutes flat, Liquorice Allsorts in hand.
Mum’s great in a crisis, I guess she’s had a lot of practice.
Or I could just walk?
It sounds simple, but trust me, it’s not. I might pass out again, or step into traffic. I’m scared. But I can’t shake the old man’s words.
Keep moving.
Something is off. Something about the weird old head-wound guy and the fact that nobody is even looking at me.
Keep moving.
I’m probably not thinking straight. I never make good decisions when I’m post-seizure, but all the same…
I need to go.
My blood feels like it’s boiling, my arms and legs twitch with the urge to start walking. I slip my phone into my pocket and point myself towards home. This is brave, I think. The first brave thing I’ve done in a long time.
I used to have this idea that epilepsy was just one thing about me. It didn’t have to define me; I could still have a life. I convinced myself it all came down to my GCSEs. They were the first great hurdle, I thought, the doorway to the rest of my life. I was going to nail my GCSEs and crush my A-levels and then I was going to get the hell out of this place. London. New York. Tokyo. Somewhere alive. Somewhere where the universe was actually paying attention.
But then my GCSEs came around, epilepsy took its chance to give me the biggest kick in the teeth it could and all my grand plans got scrubbed.
TWO
Most people with epilepsy get auras before they have a seizure. Visual disturbances, vertigo, distorted sensations. When I was little, my aura used to look like a person. I’d catch sight of something in the corner of my eye and turn to see a willowy man standing in the doorway next to me. Long and taut, with muscles on his arms and legs that stood out like twisted rope. I could never see his face, even when it was clear daylight, but I could tell, somehow, that he was watching me. He’d tilt his head to the side like he didn’t quite understand me. I’d freeze, my breath like a marble in my throat, until—
I’d open my eyes and Mum would be leaning over me, shouting, looking petrified. I didn’t know about epilepsy then. I used to think I passed out through sheer terror. But then Mum took me to the doctor and after a bunch of tests I got my diagnosis.
I stopped seeing the man after I started medication, but I still feel him. Now, my aura starts with a blue-grey tinge at the edges of my vision, followed by a rushing sensation, a sense of falling but not moving, as if the world is rearing up around me. And then there it is: the fear. Unreasoning and inhuman. The unshakable belief that somebody – something – is standing just outside my line of sight.
I walk on. The air is damp, the sky is a flat sheet of grey that looks like it’s welded to the grey of the roads and the poxy grey pebble-dashed houses. My vision is still messed up, blurry in some places and not in others, like one of those tilt-shift photos that make real-sized houses look like perfect doll-sized toys.
Home is twenty minutes away.
Home. My room. My emergency pack of Liquorice Allsorts.
I reach the roundabout at the edge of the town centre. There aren’t many people. The one or two I can see are on the opposite side of the road, so far ahead or behind they look like blurry smudges of oil in a Lowry painting.
Cars whip round the roundabout and hit the dual carriageway at a hundred miles an hour. I feel them more than I see them, a kind of whhmm as they go past, shaking the fence that divides the lanes and sending blasts of cold, gritty air right through me.
According to quantum mechanics, objects aren’t really there until you observe them. I learned this from YouTube, not my physics GCSE, by the way. What we call reality is just one way of looking at the world. If you listen to Heisenberg, objects only exist in relation to other objects. When they’re not interacting, they’re not really there.
Epilepsy brain. Sorry.
Thinking about physics keeps me calm and calm is good because anxiety is a major trigger for my seizures. Although, to be fair, so is hunger, lack of sleep, norovirus, physical discomfort in any form and the weather forecast in Paraguay. That last one is a joke … as far as I know.
Oh, and exams.
The irony is that I wasn’t even that anxious about my GCSEs. It’s just that two weeks of limited bathroom access, loss of sleep and long periods of time in a confined space with lots of anxious people turned out to be pretty triggering as well. By the time the day of my maths exam finally came, I’d taken so many extra meds that my brain felt like it was floating in custard. I was probably going to fail anyway but I would have liked not to have ended my school career by throwing up all over my paper and chipping a tooth on the sports hall floor.
One–nil to epilepsy.
I don’t see the kids coming the other way until it’s too late to cross over without it looking too obvious. There’s three of them, or is it four? Their blurry outlines blend and separate, blend and separate, indistinct wave functions in superposition. I narrow my eyes, trying and failing to make sense of them.
The only thing that’s clear is their sense of threat.
These kids are going to beat the living crap out of me.
That’s the worst thing about this town, it’s such a hole that pretty much everyone is looking for trouble if they can find it. And they’ll see “victim” written all over me.
