Oh Marina Girl Episode 42

The next thing that happened was so unexpected and so sudden that it still strikes me as surreal. Although it all happened in an instant, in my memory it occurs in slow motion.

I remember Liam distracted by a piercing wail and turning to see Pardos, my would-be saviour, mid-flight, her teeth bared, pouncing on him.

For an instant they were locked together in a momentous struggle, then Pardos sunk her teeth into his neck and drew blood.

Enraged, Liam struck her. She crashed her head against a corner of the bookcase and crumpled to the floor alongside me.

I scrambled over to her to determine the extent of her injuries and was stricken with horror when I found no sign of life.

In retrospect my forgetfulness remains inexplicable to me but it was only then, when I realised that I’d lost Pardos, that I remembered the skean dhu letter opener in my coat pocket.

At once I unsheathed it and, before Liam had the chance to react, I had pounced on him and sliced his throat open from ear to ear, gutting him like an envelope.

The surprised expression on his face set a seal on my triumph over the destiny Liam had ghost-written for me.

I had resumed my rightful place as author of my own story. Now that I’d regained control it was my turn to whisper into his ear.

“If Lisa had informed me that she was leaving me, as you say, might she not also have informed me – or maybe inadvertently let slip – that you were Will’s true father?” I whispered, for no other reason than to torture him with the cords of his own twisted logic.

Then, as I listened to the strains of his dying breath, I bowed over him to ensure that I’d be heard and added, “And, if so, then, correct me if I’m wrong, but surely that would mean that I’d have had no compunction about disposing of Will too – wouldn’t it?

“And that would mean that Will’s ‘suicide note’ must have been written by someone else. Who could that have been I wonder?”

A DEATH SENTENCE

I found myself marooned in the dead of calm that follows a storm leaving a landscape forever blighted by destruction in its wake.

All was still. All was quiet. All the words that needed to be said had been said. There was nothing more to say and no one to say it to. I sat contemplating the bloody letter opener in my hand. I listened to myself breathe and tried to assimilate what had just happened.

The more I thought about it, the more fictitious it seemed to me to be and I had to keep returning to the letter opener and the scene of death and destruction surrounding me to force myself to accept the indisputableness of the fact that what just happened had happened.

I fluctuated between a vertiginous sense of relief that all the anxiety that had been mounting since the receipt of Liam’s first letter had been resolved and a spiralling tailspin of foreboding that, far from having reached a resolution, it had only just begun to accumulate.

This eternity of morbid reflection and self-recrimination came to an abrupt conclusion when a possible escape clause occurred to me and I leapt to my feet and into action.

Moving with a swiftness and a precision born of a determination unthinkable a moment earlier, I kissed Pardos’s forehead, put my ear to her mouth and, neither hearing nor feeling any breath, transferred the letter opener from my hand into hers.

I then emptied a sackful of rotting vegetables and filled it with all the copies of Original Harm I could find – taking care to retrieve every last one.

Then I fled down the hillside and headed home to dispose of the sackful of books amongst the rest of the refuse at the bottom of the back green. It was only then that I permitted myself the luxury of a bath to soothe my aching limbs and attend to my numerous cuts and bruises.

Then I poured myself a couple of stiff whiskies in an attempt to calm my jitters and rein in my racing mind.

Where did I go from here?

I spent the remainder of the day and most of the night searching for, but never finding, a satisfactory answer.

Instead, whilst my over-active mind replayed the events just described over and over again, I listened for a dreaded knock at the door and envisaged, all too vividly, the police breaking in, arresting me, dragging me down to the station, battering a confession out of me and throwing me in a cell where I slowly asphyxiated from a massive claustrophobia-induced asthma attack ignored by my brutal captors.

This notion was, in itself, enough to trigger a real asthma attack, in the midst of which a means of finding an answer to the pressing question of which course of action I should now take occurred to me.

I picked up a pen and began to jot down what had happened to try and sort things out in my mind. The words I wrote are the words you’ve been reading.

For all the drivel Liam had spouted about me – and, take my word for it, it was drivel – he was right about one thing: I do seek to write my way out of predicaments, even if, on occasion, I find subsequently that I’ve written my way into them.

The following morning I rolled out of bed, gulped down cornflakes, showered, shaved, and caught the 44 into work, scanning the paper en route. The front page story told of how an intelligent missile had gone astray, exploding into a primary school, killing scores of children. I read the first couple of paragraphs then turned the page.

On disembarking, I headed straight for the office, my head still buried in the newspaper. It was only when I lifted it to behold the burnt-out shell of my former office block that I remembered the fire of the day before and made my way instead to the paper’s temporary premises, where I took a deep breath and squeezed into a different but familiar crowded lift to the first floor.

Once there, unable to resist the temptation, before I even removed my coat and hat, I stopped and glanced at the purple paperweight pinning down the pile of letters on my different but familiar desk.

For an instant they were locked together in a momentous struggle, then Pardos sunk her teeth into his neck and drew blood

More tomorrow.