The Courier & Advertiser (Perth and Perthshire Edition)
I can no longer hide from myself, from what I’ve done. I remain there on all fours, like an animal, wounded, trapped.
Something pops inside. Inside me. Water soaks my thighs, gushes into my wellies. Liquid splashes to the ground and the hot ash sizzles where it falls. “Oh dear.” Mac is beside me, even though I hadn’t seen her move. She’s surveying the wetness with a profound sadness. She smells otherworldly, of smoke and soot.
I’m mortified, clamping my legs together, tugging at my sodden nightie.
Her hand shoots out, finds the hard swell of my abdomen beneath the borrowed coat.
“How long have you known?”
I shake my head, still in denial. Real tears now, not smoke tears, trailing down to my chin. I can taste the salt.
Mac is still speaking. “Go inside. Go back to bed. Nothing will happen before morning. I’ve a few things to do here . . .”
She’s looking at the bonfire, which is starting to die down. The blackened rib-like things . . .
She hefts the rake into the heart of the blaze and they disappear from view.
“Go to bed, dear. We’ll sort things out in the morning.”
She moves away, whistling a strange little tune. Sobbing, I stumble back to the cottage.
Immersed
The plastic curtain around the bath is brightly patterned with polka dots, red, green and yellow.
As I sit on the toilet, waiting for the shower to run hot, waiting for my body to empty itself, they dance before my eyes.
In my head I’m joining up the dots; a child immersed in a puzzle, biting my lip, unable to figure things out.
As steam billows around the curtain I force myself to my feet, strip off my sodden T-shirt, release each welly with a dull, wet plop.
I climb into the bath and let the spray batter me. It’s scalding, but I don’t care. I’m numb.
For the first time in a long time I look down at my naked self. I splay my hands on either side of my abdomen and inspect my round football of a belly.
The skin is taut and smooth, the water bouncing off in rivulets. It looks like someone else’s skin.
My breasts are someone else’s breasts, larger than mine, pale and solid and blue-veined. I cup one of them, cautiously, as if it belongs to another woman and I’m not sure of my welcome.
The nipple is hard and brown and my palm comes away wet with milk. Everything is draining from me. Everything.
My legs can no longer support me and I sink slowly down into the tub, sink down until I’m on all fours, watching everything spiral down the drain, out of my body, beyond my control.
I can no longer hide from myself, from what I’ve done.
I remain there on all fours, like an animal, wounded, trapped. The hot spray pelts down on my neck, on my back.
I focus on the plughole, come to know it intimately, the brown plaque around it, the soap scum and the trapped hair.
Pain and fear overwhelm me. I am naked and shivering and exposed.
Eventually, I sit back on my heels, close my eyes, hold my face up to the gushing water.
The past has caught up with me.
Mac
Well, this is a bit of a pickle.
Lucie has been pregnant all along. That’s put a dampener on my bonfire, that’s for sure.
She was acting the innocent, but surely she must have known?
I’ve never believed all those stories about women popping out infants without an inkling that they’d a bun in the oven.
It doesn’t add up, but Lucie is very good at hiding things. Would she ever have confessed?
Well, regardless, her body has decided to end this charade. Some things simply cannot remain hidden.
Poking gently at the hot, powdery ash on the margins of the blaze, I wonder how best to proceed.
I cannot allow myself to worry about Lucie’s predicament right at this moment. I am consumed by my task.
I’ve started, so I’ll have to continue, to paraphrase Mastermind.
Magnus Magnusson would know what to do. Or I could have asked Anita, guru of all things bone, for advice, but instead I turned, against my better judgment, to the Google.
Too much information can be as unhelpful as too little. One Californian fire chief was almost poetic in his graphic descriptions of how the process works: Body fat can make a good fuel source, but it needs material such as clothing or charred wood to act as a wick.
Five years rotting in a water-soaked tunnel have denied me a fuel source, and the clothing I disposed of before things became too unpleasant.
That nice trench coat, the silky cream blouse with the butterflies on it, the too-young-for-her jeans.
I had thought to donate them to charity, since they were of such good quality.
Some poor soul would have been glad of that coat in this dreich weather, but I thought better of it.
I cut them up and burned them too.
The pendant I squirreled away in my study drawer. I had almost forgotten it was there, until Lucie brought to the surface all those horrible memories. It seemed very fitting to feed it through the mill. I recall a fragment of poetry – Longfellow, I believe: “A millstone and the human heart are driven ever round; if they have nothing else to grind, they must themselves be ground.”
Disposing
That about sums it up. Love is just a power play, with winners and losers.
The Bellas and the Annas and the Lucies might enjoy a moment of glory, but Elspeth and Jane and me – we’ve still got a tale to tell.
The disposing of the clothes – that was a bit of a low point.
That was when I let the embittered voyeur in me untwist, slick its way sickeningly to the surface.
After the outerwear, the bra and pants had to come off. Matching undies, wouldn’t you know?
Such a cliché. Pale cream with ecru lace trim. I’d peeled them away as a lover might – as Jim must have done – gently unhooking the bra, sliding the knickers down over her ankles.
The fabric was dank; her skin like hard candle wax. So, so cold.
I imagined how my husband would have traced her once-warm breasts with his hands, her narrow waist, and I wept hot, thick tears – bodily fluids in some ghastly subversion of what my husband did to her.
More tomorrow.