I've thought long and hard about this (well a bit at least) and I finally decided to share this with you. Goodness knows I have banged on about BTL often enough and I thought I'd share the first chapter with you all. I don't know why I'm doing this I just am. I just think that I would like at least a few people to read a bit of it before I give up on it.
Hope you enjoy - but please make allowances.
BTL - Chapter 1
One minute I was fine and
the next…well I’m not sure what I’d call it exactly because I’d never felt like
it before but I was shaking and I could hardly breathe and all I could think
was, Oh my God! What’s going on?
Well to be honest there might have been the odd expletive in there as well but,
oh my God! What’s going on? was the gist of it.
Surrounding me was what I
can only say was an incredible light. It was like when there’s been heavy snow
and your eyes struggle to adjust to the sun shining off it. You know, like when
your eyes can’t really focus on anything because everything is so white. It was
just like that, except whiter. My eyes instinctively screwed up to protect
themselves like they would do on a really sunny day but this light wasn’t like
a sunny day, not even a very sunny day. This light physically hurt my eyes.
I tried to open them a couple of times but it
just hurt so much that I was forced to close them again and I was in complete
panic.
I was breathing in short
little bursts which I took in, held for a bit and then let out in stages. I
didn’t know what was going on or what was wrong with my eyes but I knew that I
was panicking. I’d never had a panic attack before in my whole life and I
couldn’t understand what as making me have one now. I just knew was that I was
having one.
But what on earth was that
light all about? I asked the question over and over in my head. What is that
light? What is that light? What is that light?
I also asked myself why it
was so noisy. There was noise all around me. Loud noise like when I’m watching
TV at my grand-dad’s house and he hasn’t got his hearing aid in. People were shouting. Lots of people were shouting
and someone even screamed. I wanted to scream myself but couldn’t. It was
taking everything I had just to breathe.
Oh my God, what was wrong
with me? Why couldn’t I breathe properly? And, why were my teeth chattering?
The answer to all three
questions had to be the same. I was scared. No, I was more than scared, I was
petrified.
I tried to think.
Somehow I knew that no
matter how much it hurt, I would have to open my eyes. It was the logical place
to start because I knew that I would never work anything out unless I could
see. I thought that rubbing my eyes might help so I gave that a go but it only
made things worse. So now, as well as the light, there were circles flickering
inside my eyes as if I had a migraine coming on. Ah, I thought, that’s
it; I’ve got a migraine forming. It would be worse than any other migraine
that I’d ever had before but that was the only explanation that I could think
of. Oh great, not only would I have a blinding headache in a minute but I’d
have the vomiting later. Yippee!
But that would have to wait.
Right now I had other things to worry about. Slowly, a millimetre at a time I
forced my eyes open and I blinked them rapidly in some desperate attempt to get
them to adjust to the light. They hurt like hell, but I’d managed to get them
this far and I wasn’t going to close them again so I forced myself to stop
blinking by holding my eyes wide open. My facial expression was probably
freakish but I didn’t care and anyway I doubt that anyone even noticed because
when my eyes eventually did open properly I was able to see that I wasn’t the
only one panicking.
To the left of me was a woman,
“Help,” she shouted.
“Someone help.”
“What’s wrong?” I had to
yell because the noise was suddenly deafening.
Apparently I didn’t yell
loud enough.
“What’s wrong?” I said again,
moving closer and shouting even louder.
But there was still no
response so I turned around to look for someone else to ask. There was a man
running towards me and I held my hands up in a gesture that made it obvious I
wanted him to stop but he didn’t. He just kept on running straight at me and I
had to jump out of the way as he passed by.
“Oh well thanks anyway,” I
shouted, adding ignorant bugger under my breath.
I looked after him, stood on
my tip toes to try and see where and what he was running to that was so
important. I couldn’t see a thing. There were too many people in the way. Heads
were bobbing up and down all over the place and the bodies were packed too
closely together.
I looked around for someone
else to ask but everyone seemed too preoccupied to even notice that I was
there.
Hang on a minute, where was
I anyway? Now that I could see I needed to work out where I was. Maybe then I’d
be able to work out what was going on? But why didn’t I know where I was? How
could I not know where I was? Oh my God, maybe I’d had a black out. Shit! I
knew that I should’ve got those headaches checked out. I’d just dismissed them
as nothing but it looked like they might be something after all. Okay so I’d
ring the doctor in the morning but right now I had to work out where I was and
what was going on.
What was the last thing that
I remembered?
I took a couple of deep
breaths and tried to calm down enough to think straight. I remembered being at
Mum’s house. We’d popped round to check on her because she said she wasn’t
well. She’d looked alright to me though and I was a bit huffed that she hadn’t
picked Na……Oh my God!
“Naomi!” the scream almost
burst my own eardrums but no-one else seemed to notice it. “Naomi,” I shouted,
“where are you?”
I whipped my head around, desperately
looking for my little girl.
“Naomi,” I screamed again,
“Naomi, where are you?”
But there were so many
people around and Naomi was just a little girl. I couldn’t see her anywhere.
“Have you seen my daughter?”
I asked anyone who would listen.
But nobody answered me.
No-one even noticed me.
But that didn’t stop me
asking anyway, “Please, have you seen my daughter?”
Eventually one woman did
speak. “God help her,” she said, “she never stood a chance?”
“Who?” I asked. “Who never
stood a chance?”
But the woman was looking
off into the distance beyond where the crowd had formed and I realised that she
had been talking more to herself than to me.
So now I had another
question to add to my list. In addition to:
What was the light?
Where am I?
And
the most important question of all,
Where’s Naomi?
I
now had,
Who
never stood a chance?
Who never stood a chance? Oh
my God no! Please anything but that. Please don’t let it be Naomi.
I may have been panicking
before but now I was in overdrive. Thoughts of Naomi and what might have
happened to her rushed through my head and there was a nightmare scenario
starting to form.
Was she the reason for the pandemonium?
Had something happened to
Naomi? I almost didn’t want to know the answer to that one because part of me
knew that the truth might be more than I could bear.
But bear it or not, I had to
know. I had to know what everyone was looking at and what had made the colour
drain from the faces of the people nearby. I had to know what had made a woman
scream in the street in the middle of the day. I had to know the reason but I
was terrified of what the answer might be.
I forced myself to take some
more deep breaths. I pushed my chest out as I took them in and puffed my cheeks
as they came out. I didn’t do this consciously, it was like my body was working
on auto-pilot and it did what it needed to keep me functioning.
I knew that the answer,
whatever it was, was at the front of the crowd, and for the first time since
the whole light thing had happened I was focused. I knew that I had to get to
the front of that crowd and I wasn’t worried about who I upset to do it.
Surprisingly though, I
didn’t upset anyone. I expected that I would have heard at least the odd grumble
as I barged my way through them but no-one said a thing. In fact I met no
resistance at all. It felt like everyone was moving out of the way so that I
could get through.
“Naomi,” I shouted again and I heard a sob in
my voice, “Naomi, I’m coming.”
And there she was.
