Zo

by Leanne Owens

  ‘You forged prescriptions?’ Andrew looked incredulous. ‘How could you even know to do that at fourteen? We all seemed so naïve back then. I couldn’t forge a note from my Dad saying I couldn’t do cross country, and you were forging prescriptions?’

  ‘You were naïve,’ she amended. ‘I had learned to hide so much of my life that a small thing like forging a script was nothing. When I was fifteen, Dad began to suspect that Mum was drugging him. He carried on about his right to do what ever he wanted in his own family. She cried about wanting him to leave me alone. I’d never been sure that she knew about everything that had been going on, but it seems she did. There was a row of epic proportions when she threatened to call the police and the minister, and he pointed out that no one would believe her. He said I’d never say a word against him. That night, Dad made her drink several glasses of wine. I think he added vodka to them, maybe even sleeping tablets.’

  Ally stopped. Closing her eyes, she pictured the scene from her teen years. ‘He ran her a bath and put her in it. I could see through the crack of my door into the bathroom. He sat on the edge of the bath and watched her. I told myself that he was watching over her, but he sat there and observed her slip beneath the surface. I didn’t know she was under the water as I couldn’t see over the edge of the bath from where I was, I could just see Dad sitting, smiling at her. The phone rang and he went out into the kitchen to answer it. I ran over to check Mum. She was lying under the water, dead. I knew I’d be next if I didn’t do something.’

  When she stopped to battle with the emotions that threatened to overwhelm her, Sandy leaned over towards her and gave her a hug. ‘I’m so sorry,’ she whispered.

  Ally gave her a small smile. She could not find the words to explain that she hadn’t felt grief over her mother’s death, only a cold conviction that she would be next if she didn’t act. When they were fifteen, her friends did not have the skills or knowledge to help her, and, like so many other things, she kept her knowledge hidden from them. She acted the part of a teenager in mourning and no one guessed the truth, not even the police who questioned her. She didn’t want her father charged with murder because the jury might acquit, or, if found guilty, he could be out of jail before too many years. She wanted him dead, not temporarily removed.

  It was all too dark and malevolent to explain to her fifteen-year-old friends who, like young flowers, had cleared the layer of weeds and were growing up in the light of her love. There were no regrets about keeping her secrets, although now they felt sorrow about not knowing about anything beneath the surface of her life.

  ‘I know,’ she replied understandingly. ‘It was so long ago, and it wasn’t anything I could talk about then. It was around the time that Elli’s father was going to force her to marry Silvio d’Este and she jumped off the bridge into the Arno, making everyone believe she was dead. I didn’t want to disappear like that because I had the four best friends in the world, and I couldn’t leave them, so that wasn’t an option.

  ‘It was a conversation with Zo about assassinations that were taking place in Florence that made me realise that I could kill my father. I doubt any other twentieth century fifteen-year olds had the opportunity to take part in how-to-get-away-with-murder discussions with some of the world’s greatest thinkers. Zo felt that murder was unfortunate, but some people were better off removed from the game. His friends believed that if someone caused more harm than good, and if they were the sort no one would miss because of their ill deeds, then murder could be acceptable. They stressed that it was important to never let your victim suspect what was happening – words that came back to haunt Zo when Giuliano did not suspect his friends who murdered him that Easter Sunday.’

  ‘Legally,’ Marcus spoke when she paused, ‘considering the abuse you’d been subjected to, and what you’d witnessed with regards to your mother, along with your age, it would be doubtful that any jury would convict you of murder.’

  ‘I’m fairly sure,’ Ally gave him a dry look, ‘that not guilty by reason of insanity would have been a distinct possibility, given that I was taking advice from men who were talking to me five hundred years ago.’

  ‘No offence,’ he smiled at her good-humoured grasp of how a defence counsel would play the card most likely to succeed, ‘but I’d probably be pushing that particular wheelbarrow as hard as my legs could run. To a jury – not to me after I’ve listened to you these past few days – but to a jury, and even medical experts, it’s fairly undisputable evidence of insanity.’

  ‘Yeah,’ she snorted, accepting the truth of his words, ‘I can see that it would be.’

  After taking a drink of water and tapping her pen on legal pad in front of her, she continued, ‘At the time, I just wanted to find a way to live, and I believed it came down to killing him. No one else could help me. There were no other family members I could rely on. My friends were too young. I couldn’t trust the police to believe me. It was a problem I needed to solve by myself. I pretended to be happy that Mum was gone, and he wasn’t even suspicious.

  ‘In his own twisted way, he loved me, and that blinded him completely. We planned a holiday to Halls Gap, and we went walking up Mt Rosea on a drizzly morning when no one else was about. We picnicked at the top and I had loaded his food and coffee with his beta-blockers. When he was on the verge of passing out, I helped him to his feet and had him lean over the railing at the edge of the lookout so he could get some fresh air. When he was unconscious, I checked that no one else was around, and pushed him over. There was a ledge on the other side of the railing, and I climbed over and made sure he fell off the cliff. Then I played the part of a teenager devastated by her father’s accident.’

  It had been a slow hike back to the car park where she found someone to help. The tears and shock appeared genuine, but she felt nothing. It had been a job, and she had done it. There were no emotions invested in the killing of her father apart from a measure of relief. It was easy to pretend to be a daughter in shock. She walked the path through time to Florence, and woke up in the Stawell hospital a day later, surrounded by care and sympathy.

  ‘It was pre-meditated murder. I’d even had him write some letters claiming how much he missed my mother. I told him that I wanted them as a keepsake for when I was older - a memento of my parents and their love. He was glad to write them as it assuaged his guilt. When the police found them in our house, they looked like the sort of letter a man would write when he missed his wife so much that he wanted to join her.’

  ‘Smart move,’ murmured Marcus, his attitude seemingly unchanged since learning she had committed murder.

  ‘Thank you,’ she answered without her usual smile. ‘Life went on from that point. I was safe. My aunt moved into our house to care for me, but I would have been fine without her. I had two lives to live, my own and Elli’s, and one life to forget. As you know, I made a pathetic attempt to reconcile the two by speaking to you about Florence and Zo, but it sounded insane.’

  Peter opened his mouth to say something, but Ally gave him a stop sign with her hand. ‘No, it’s alright, Pete. I held my secrets for so long that I was like Gollum with his ring. I lost all perspective. Listening to my stories over these past few days has allowed me to leave my cave and put everything in plain sight. It’s also given me the chance to look at my life rather than hide Gollum-like with my Precious. I was a child with an imaginary friend. I was a victim of extreme sexual abuse. I witnessed the murder of my mother and, in turn, murdered my father when I was fifteen. I had a place to go to where my imaginary friend kept me safe.’

  Ally stopped. There was a sense of Florence ripping away from her, like an iceberg beginning to break off from the glacier. Her revelations were severing the connections. She was seeing her life from a viewpoint that she hadn’t used before, and she saw what her friends had seen all those years ago – a woman with a mental disorder.

  Like a drowning person, she looked to Peter, her violet eyes scared of what she was seeing and feeling. ‘It al
l could have been imagined, couldn’t it?’ Her chest began to tighten and breathing became difficult as the ocean of awareness washed over her. ‘The abuse was enough to make a child invent a safe world, wasn’t it? A place she could escape to in order to survive what was happening. Seeing my mother murdered…’

  Watching Ally face the possibility that she had given up her life for a fantasy was tearing into the hearts of her friends. They had come to accept that Zo was real to her. It was tragic to see her grasp the possibility that her mind had invented their life together. Their instinct was to protect her.

  ‘He is real,’ Sandy said, tears running from her eyes. ‘Don’t doubt that. The man you’ve described over these past days is not an imaginary friend, he’s someone you knew and loved. I believe that.’

  Ally shook her head. The facts of her life were adding up to someone who had suffered from so much trauma that a fracture in her reality was an obvious consequence. As her friends saw the truth in her Renaissance life, now she could see the flaws. The iceberg cracked and almost fell.

  ‘Peter,’ her soul reached out to him through her eyes, raising a hand before she sunk beneath the surface and hoping he would take it. ‘Tell me the truth, in front of everyone. Is it possible that all of Florence – Elli and Zo, the memories, the talks, the tragedies, the laughter – that all of it, was a fantasy? Could my mind create it in all that detail? Is it possible?’

  ‘I can’t say,’ he replied. He didn’t want to answer. He believed it was not only possible, but likely. He also believed that he would accept her life in Florence as factual if it would keep her happy. All he wanted was to see her happy. Her life with Zo had given her happiness, and he did not want to take that from her. ‘The mind is capable of incredible feats, but I don’t know what your mind has done. I feel confident in saying that if you believe that your mind travelled to Renaissance Italy, then I will believe that, too.’

  She narrowed her eyes and considered his words. ‘It is possible, though, that if a child experienced extreme trauma, such as I described, that a form of psychosis involving imaginary friends and an imaginary world could be a consequence?’

  ‘It is possible,’ he admitted reluctantly, ‘but your experiences in Renaissance Italy do not sound like any I’ve heard of before.’

  ‘We believe,’ Sandy insisted. ‘We have loved your stories of Florence, and we do believe it was real.’

  ‘But what if it wasn’t?’ Ally met her eyes, and felt the iceberg crack once more.

  What if it wasn’t? she asked herself. It hit her hard. She had a mental disorder. Any child who had gone through what she had experienced, and who didn’t receive professional help, would have issues. Inventing a safe place with someone to watch over her was something a mind could do as a way of saving the child. It had been her mind that had saved her, not Zo. The glacier split in two and the part that was Florence and Zo fell into the ocean. The surge in consciousness that resulted smacked into her, washing her off the edge where she stood looking over the sea of her life. Her face went white and she collapsed onto the desk.

  It was almost an hour before she woke in her hospital bed with Peter, Andrew, Lynette, and Sandra sitting in chairs next to her. Their faces, strained with worry, turned towards her as she stirred and she swam up from the depths of her mind.

  ‘I have become a drama queen,’ she muttered regretfully. ‘Who’d have thought?’

  Her friends smiled in relief to hear her humour greet them.

  ‘I’m thinking of unfriending you,’ said Lynette with mock severity. ‘I don’t mix with girls who faint. It’s such a look-at-me stunt.’

  ‘Isn’t it just?’ Ally chuckled softly, her eyes half shut against the light. ‘Did it work? Did you all look at me?’

  ‘Yes,’ Sandy patted her hand in a conciliatory manner. ‘You hogged the limelight in a spectacular manner and had everyone’s attention.’

  ‘Good,’ Ally managed a smile. ‘You can’t have centre stage all the time.’

  ‘Around you, I never do,’ Sandy waggled her eyebrows up and down comically. ‘Which is how I like it, so that’s OK.’

  ‘There doesn’t appear to be anything physically wrong,’ Peter held up her medical charts. ‘We ran an EEG, did bloods and a cardio, and it seems there was no underlying cause for that episode. How are you feeling?’

  ‘Like a fifty-nine-year-old woman who passed out because of stress and mental exhaustion.’

  ‘That clears it up for me,’ he nodded with the hint of an eyeroll. ‘Any headache? Pain anywhere? Numbness?’

  ‘I’m fine, Peter. It was just me coming to the end of one life and transitioning to this one. It was traumatic to reveal those details of my early life – I’d spent a lot of effort keeping them hidden. What happens next?’

  ‘You can have a late lunch, if you feel up to it,’ he said.

  ‘No, you know what I mean,’ she grimaced at him ‘Not next as in the next half hour, but what happens now that you know what I’ve done? Do you contact the police, or should I?’

  ‘You’re currently recovering from depression,’ he said soothingly. ‘Or learning to live with it, since it isn’t like a cold that runs its course and then goes away. It is only natural that your memory of past events, such as the accidents that claimed your parents, should become mixed up with an overactive guilt complex, and resurface with the fabricated notion that you were somehow responsible.’

  Ally gave him a dry look, ‘I killed my father, Peter. That is not a case of psycho-babble-mumbo-jumbo and misplaced guilt – it is fact.’

  ‘Shh,’ he tapped his nose to indicate that they were keeping a secret. ‘Officially, your defence counsel has decided, in consultation with your psychiatrist and other lawyers and someone doing a wonderful performance of being a lawyer, that your memories of childhood events is not reliable due to the strain you’ve been under. It’s probably been healthy for you to speak about your childhood memories, but it goes no further. You released your personal demons, we saw them, and we’re here to keep them away from you. We are all in agreement that your memories – false and real – are not available to anyone else.’

  Closing her eyes, Ally sighed softly. She had doubted Zo’s advice when he told her to tell them about her time as Elli. She had extreme reservations about admitting to the abuse and the truth of her parents’ deaths. It seemed, as usual, he was right. A consequence of revealing the secrets of her life was that it allowed her to see her obsession with Lorenzo de’ Medici as her friends might see it. It was possible her mind had constructed him as a personal survival strategy, and now her mind was deconstructing him as she no longer needed him.

  A pang shot through her as she viewed the ocean of her life with the Florentine iceberg floating away from her mainland. She didn’t want to say goodbye to Elli, but life in Florence had been lonely for many years. It was time to say goodbye.

  ‘What is the third thing, Ally?’ enquired Lynette.

  Ally looked at her in confusion.

  ‘You said that when Zo met you between life and death the other day,’ Lynette reminded her, ‘he told you that you needed to do three things. First, tell us about Elli’s life. Second, reveal the secrets from your childhood. What is the third thing?’

  Passing a hand over her eyes, Ally inclined her head. The third thing. Her mind wandered back to the day when she thought she was ending her life in the gardens of Kamekura.

  When the loss of blood had her slipping away into the grey world, she found herself standing next to grey curtains, and beyond the curtains were people. She couldn’t see them but she knew they were there. It was as though they were having a party on the other side, while she remained in the colourless space outside that world.

  Lorenzo stepped out from behind the curtains and shut them behind him. He smiled at her and held out his hands, but she was unable to lift her arms to take them. They stood looking at each other, each examining the person in front of them.

  ‘You should not have come
,’ he told her, his voice sad.

  She tried to open her mouth and speak, but her facial muscles wouldn’t respond, and she stood, mute.

  Zo reached out to lay a finger across her lips. ‘I will talk. You listen. Did I not tell you to always choose life? You were never meant to do this.’

  Ally tried to shake her head in apology, but she remained frozen.

  ‘You were never meant to spend this life by yourself, dreaming of me. You were born to change the lives of others for the better – and you did change them. Look at your friends! Four lives that would have been lost long ago if you had not been the person to recognise the greatness within.’

  Again, she struggled to talk. She wanted to tell him that he had taught her to find the greatness in others. Even before Elli had run away from her family and Silvio d’Este, she had met with Lorenzo enough times that his thoughts and beliefs influenced her. Her actions in childhood to love her friends grew from the example he had given her.

  ‘It was not I,’ Zo shook his head at her as though he’d heard the words that could not pass her lips. ‘You reached out to them and loved them. You made them see the potential within themselves. It was always you, Ally. I watched from the shadows while you lifted them up into life. If I had not pulled you back to Florence that day when you were eight, you would have shone in this time, brighter than you can imagine. My interference damaged your life, but if I had not interfered…’ His voice faltered and he looked at her, his eyes full of love and sadness. ‘I could not leave you to his lust. I could not stop your father, and I could not stand by any longer and watch your suffering for his sickness.’