The Courier & Advertiser (Perth and Perthshire Edition)
I don’t answer. Sometimes you have to be made to take responsibility. But I don’t say that to her
Icannot reply to my mother, or chat with my sister. To do so would be to invest in the future and I don’t dare let myself expand any further than the present tense.
What I am is right here, right now. I am the cold toilet seat pressing into my buttocks, the irritating drip of the cold tap.
I am the green tiles, the balding loo brush. I cannot think beyond my own griping pain, the stuck-fast pressure that has been building in my belly all day.
Mac
I come downstairs to find Lucie exiting the WC. She’s as white as a sheet and biting her lower lip.
“Good heavens, girl. Got a gippy tummy? You look like death warmed up.”
She smiles weakly. The only bits of colour in her face are the livid dents in her lower lip made by her teeth.
“Not feeling great. Maybe I’ll go –”
“Just go! Yes, indeed. Take yourself off to bed.” I hope she isn’t going to be sick. She has that clammy look, and her fringe is sticking to her brow.
Whatever’s wrong with her, she deserves it, but I try and come up with a pleasant expression. “You’ll feel as right as rain after a nap.”
She nods. “I’ll take home the laptop and your book and type up the rest of your story. Is that it? Is that the end?”
I glance at the canvas shopping bag leaning against the coat stand, trying to think back to what I wrote last.
“The harp is singing? Ah yes, proclaiming Bella’s guilt for all to hear!”
Responsibility
Lucie shivers. “It’s never going to stop, is it – the guilt? The voice isn’t going to stop until she takes responsibility for what she’s done.”
I don’t answer. Sometimes you have to be made to take responsibility. But I don’t say that to her.
Instead, I move over to the stand and unhook her khaki jacket. It’s unlined and insubstantial.
“This is very light, dear. Do you have a heavier one for the winter? You might catch a chill. We don’t want anything bad to happen to you.”
She looks alarmed, and I wonder, not for the first time, if she’ll stay, or if she’ll up and leave like the wild geese as soon as my manuscript is finished.
For some reason the thought disturbs me. It makes me feel cheated. Wrongdoers simply can’t be allowed to up and leave.
“I haven’t planned that far ahead,” she says. I proffer the jacket and she shrugs into it, meekly. Again I wonder if I’m making her nervous.
“That isn’t the end,” I say quickly. She darts me a look and I press home the point.
“Aren’t you wondering about the miller? And about how the harp was made? Oh, there’s more to come.” I tap my temple, as if it’s all up there, waiting to gush forth.
She buttons her jacket, slings the bag over her shoulder. “Write it down then. Let’s get it finished.” She opens the door, steps out into the cold.
Her attitude makes me bristle. “Hold on a minute. Don’t dismiss it all like that.”
She swings around. “Like what?”
Consequence
“Like these stories have no consequence. Oh they do. They do. You’ll find that out.”
She snorts, bats my indignation away with her hand and continues walking. How dare she?
“How dare you, Anna Madigan?” I yell from the doorstep.
“You slut! How dare you come in here upsetting everything?”
The girl stops dead in her tracks, turns around slowly. She’s a distance away now. I think she might be saying something but I can’t hear her.
I can’t stop the words coming out of my mouth.
I fire every vile insult I can muster at her, and she hunches her shoulders and hurries off into the distance.
“There are consequences, Anna!” I yell after her departing figure.
I remain on the front step until she disappears from view. Anna? Why is Anna always in my head? I shake her away.
Despite my winter woollies, an icy breeze does its best to raise gooseflesh on my upper arms. Lucie. I must concentrate on Lucie now. The story is nearly finished.
There isn’t much more to tell, but what’s left is the shocking part. It’s the bit that changes what you think you know.
Lucie
I go for a lie down, but I can’t get comfortable and end up sitting on one of the hard pine chairs at the kitchen table. I figure I should probably stay close to the bathroom, since I seem to have developed the frequent urge to pee.
The pain is restless, gripping me from time to time like a bad period. I make tea from Mac’s garden mint, munch on some dry crackers and watch Friends on my laptop.
Rachel and Ross are on a break, although the terms and conditions of it seem a bit muddy.
I’d had to finish with Arthur. “This isn’t going anywhere,” I’d said, as gently as I could. “It can’t go anywhere.” I won’t let it.
That last bit remained unsaid. There were a lot of really important things left unsaid in that conversation.
Mystery
You’ll understand. Soon. He took it so well I think I hate him.
I wanted him to fight for me, for what we could have had, but instead he was strangely passive.
I think he’d been expecting it all along.
But that was weeks ago now. I’ve tried to give up visiting the café, or the pub.
I sit in the cottage and watch Friends until the light fades.
Then I close my curtains so I don’t have to look at the mill.
Floss has stopped coming around because I refuse to let her in.
The particular mystery of her background is too much for me to handle at the moment, and I’m not sure where I found the energy to get wound up about it in the first place.
I can’t bear to walk beside the pond either. According to the story, Bella took her sister’s life there.
I’m just as guilty. I took something just as precious from Jane – not just her boyfriend but all the things she’ll never get back: her trust, her hopes for the future, her peace of mind.
Guilt is indestructible. I know there’ll be a reckoning, some day soon.
I have distanced myself from everyone who cares. It seems easier that way.
I am shrinking in on myself, but that’s not the whole story.
More tomorrow.