Part 1: The Strangeness of Fredrick Street - Chapter Seven

In Chapter Seven, a routine day turns into a nightmare for Sarah. Are those her memories? Who placed this order?

7

With the school run over and done with, Sarah's day opened up ahead of her like a California highway (or at least the way she pictured it due to the movies), but without the relative freedom that journey provides. She had much more menial tasks causing her a pit stop every half hour or so on her imaginary road trip down the coast. Driving into town, her To Do list for the day pinned to the dashboard in front of her, Dry Cleaners, Doctors, Butchers and Snacks - not listed in order of importance. Sarah permitted herself a few moments to bask in the intermittent silence afforded the car now that she'd dropped off the kids before the basking would turn to wallowing in the quiet and eventually the surge of guilt that she was enjoying a few moments alone of peace and quiet without the kids or her husband. Sarah was a creature of habit, who liked the idea of alone time more than actually being alone from her loved ones and whenever she was left in silence for too long her mind began to spiral, attempting to open doors to doomsday thinking. Quickly (trained in the art of quick distraction) she flicked on the radio and let the songs of the day fill the sullen and silent atmosphere of the car and push her thoughts of loneliness from her mind. 

Now that she'd planned the day, she was looking forward to the night's event more than she had been that morning. Maybe it was just over-exhaustion, her mental faculties and positive attitude run down with the lack of sleep and busy lifestyle. Despite her commitment to the early morning rise and run, she had found herself of recent nights tossing and turning, waking from strange dreams, the odd disturbing one, that ranged from round rooms, drowning in a tank of water and one particularly horrible nightmare wherein she seemed to be catching sight of her reflection in the bottom of glasses and in bar windows – the reflection a haggard, skeleton thin woman with skin the color of yellow pastel. It was perhaps this particular nightmare that made her push even further into her early morning routine and commitment to her self imposed healthy eating programme – the fear of becoming that woman gripped her all too strong. Although why the fear felt so prescient, she didn't know. She had no cause to worry that she was on that path or indeed ever had been. She never drank. She didn't do drugs. She didn't even eat fast food. But no matter how many times she told herself this, reassured herself about how fit and healthy she was, she couldn't shake that image she saw when she closed her eyes. And to make this fear even worse, the strangest thing had happened the day before which she had pushed to the back of her mind until now. 

Coming back from her morning run, there was a large delivery truck parked outside her house. Jogging toward the driver, leaning against the wheel wearing a fedora and a duster jacket (in this impossible heat no less), she unplugged her earphones and waited as he pushed himself away from the truck and moved toward her, breaking into a smile and taking off the hat. If it hadn't been for the slightly greying hair she would have sworn it was Idris Elba straight off the set of filming The Dark Tower (a fact she only knew because her son was such a huge fan of both King and Elba) complete with Gunslinger costume. He had a friendly face, startling blue eyes looking out from his dark skin. He took his hat off and checked his clipboard, still with that smile. 

"Sarah Barr?" he said, looking up at her from his clipboard. 

"That's me. What's all this?" Sarah asked, taking a swig of her water. 

"Looks to me like one hell of a party is what it is," he said, taking out a pen and passing over the clipboard. "Just give me a signature here and here and I'll get unloading all this party juice."

Sarah didn't take the pen, instead looked past him into the truck, confused. "Party juice?"

"My little word for it. Booze. Drink. Moonshine. You must be having the whole neighbourhood round."

Her heart had started to race, (which she accounted to the run) but nevertheless she started to feel a little woozy. "I didn't order any alcohol."

The man looked at her, taken aback. "You didn't?"

"I didn't. I don't drink. And the people coming to the party bring their own if they're so inclined."

The man scratched his head, looking back at the clipboard. "You are Sarah Barr though, right?"

"I am but I'm not the right one you're looking for."

He glanced back and forth at the clipboard and Sarah a couple of times and clicked his tongue. "Must be a mix up at the warehouse again. Mrs. Barr, I've very sorry to have troubled you with all this. I'll head back and find out what's what."

"It's alright. These things happen. I'm sure I'm not the only Sarah Barr."

He smiled wide then, in a way that made her a little uncomfortable. "I'm sure you aren't." He then leaned in conspiratorially. "You want one off the back of the truck? Nobody's going to miss one, see it as a token for all this inconvenience."

Stepping back a little, Sarah shook her head. "I'm fine honestly. Unless it's water you have back there, I'm not interested."

The man nodded and flipped his hat back on. "Right you are. You're a good woman Mrs. Barr. Apologies again."

And with that, he hopped back in his truck and drove off, leaving Sarah standing there, confused as all hell. It had been the strangest thing, the delivery turning up like that, right after those dreams had started. And even stranger was how thirsty she felt looking into the back of that truck, a thirst that, no matter how much water she drank couldn't quite be quenched. 

Her dream-like reverie on her nights of broken sleeps, the jaundiced food deprived version of her in the mirror & her weird moment with the delivery driver was interrupted slowly by the sound coming from the radio. As she pulled into the next lane and stopped at the red light, Sarah looked toward the speakers of the car and listened. Something about the song, the lyrics, stirred her into a hypnotic state. 

Bohemian Rhapsody. Queen. She'd been a fan in her youth. Had even cried when Freddie died.

All of a sudden, like a switch was flicked, images begun to flash through Sarah's mind, quick and violent, pulsing to the front of her brain and into the minds eye. Empty bottles. Syringes. Music loud. Powder on the table. A room full of pallid and paper-thin people. Cars. Traffic. An accident.

MMMMEEEEEHHHH.

Snapping out of her hypnosis, Sarah's mind rushed back to the present to the sound of pamping cars and angry drivers behind her. 

Driving quickly through the green light she'd been sitting idle at while the cars behind got angrier and angrier, she pulled over into the shopping centre car park and stopped the car, her breathing a little ragged and heart beating a touch too fast for someone who was only sitting in a car. What was that? She thought. She sat there for a few moments, wracking her brain as to what just happened inside her head. It was like scenes from a thousand broken movies, a film edit that was cut badly and jumped in places. Images, and scenes, playing in her mind like a memory. But from where? And who's? They're not my memories, she told herself, adamant. But was that true? The only way she could think to describe the experience was that it was like she was sitting down to watch a movie for the first time but as the opening credits started to roll, she realized she had already seen it. The empty bottles? Sarah didn't drink. And the syringes? She grimaced at the thought of a few painkillers and couldn't even bear to take a nasal spray, so why was she suddenly seeing scenes of excessive drug use in her head? And the accident, or whatever that was at the end. She had never had so much a parking ticket never mind being involved in any accident involving a motor vehicle. The whole thing happened so quickly and was so strange she couldn't wrap her head around it. One minute she had been sitting there, quite the thing thinking about the day ahead, about missing her kids and listening to a Queen classic. Then all of a sudden, it was like she was thrust into somebody else's mind to take an unwanted and unheeded trip down a particularly dark side street of memory lane. It made no sense to her. No whatsoever. 

Giving herself a quick glance in the mirror, Sarah touched her face. Healthy. Tanned. Just as it was supposed to be. Perhaps she was just fatigued. And, come to think of it, perhaps she'd not drank nearly enough water since her run that morning. Those two things combined with the fact she was filling her non-sleeping time with watching the 2am movies on the TV probably was filling her head with all sorts of images and her brain just was getting to sluggish about separating what was the truth from reality. She'd read about that in plenty of articles online about sleep deprivation and dehydration. That's itshe thought. That's the reason. No need to panic or run to Dr. Wyatt...no wait Fleming. She didn't have a Dr. Wyatt.

Popping open the glove compartment, Sarah took out a bottle of water and started to drink, trying to push that little wobble out of her mind. She was satisfied with her self-diagnosis and non-googled answers that she chalked it down to something that was nothing worth worrying about. She just needed more sleep and more water in her system. Nothing more. Nothing less. Stepping out of the car to the packed shopping centre car park, Sarah looked and saw that she was, somehow one of the lucky few to get a space so close to the door, despite the mid morning rush and the packed car park. Picking up her shopping list and locking the car, she headed toward the shopping centre, thinking no more of the images she saw and no more about the opening to that Queen classic that had started it all in the first place. She had a party to prepare for after all.