by C F Dunn
Hush hung in the empty room, the only sound my heart beating frantically against my chest. My voice faltered.
“Matthew?”
I searched the deepening shadows, a persistent and growing dread settling heavy and without compassion. Pulling my jacket around my shoulders, I tiptoed towards the bedroom, as if he might be there.
“Matthew?”
A rising note of hysteria filled the barren space and, as realization hit me, I collapsed onto the cold floor, letting out a long howl of pain, ending in harsh, stifled sobs.
“No, don’t do this to me, I can’t do this any more…” And in the ensuing silence, I implored of Heaven, “Where do I go from here?”
My anguished whispers echoed around the room and came back empty. I knelt there, cramped and freezing and oblivious to the protestations of my body until darkness covered the room in a shroud and I faded into its obscurity.
I don’t know how long I lay there; long enough for my limbs to numb and set in the cold, and for the last of my tears to die away and dry on my face. Long enough for the moon to rise and shine in arrogant stripes across the floor; long enough to have raised my head, an answer – as clear as if spoken – showing the way.
I struggled to my feet and lurched like a drunk across my bedroom, forcing blood back into my legs. Slashing on the light-switch, I grabbed my mobile off the bedside table, fumbling the keys.
“Elena, please, I need your help. No, listen – don’t ask, please – just come.”
I didn’t pause to hear her worried voice as she began to ply me with questions but instead cut her off, holding back the tears that threatened to choke me again. I picked up the phone once more, punching another number into it.
Elena was with me in minutes, by which time I had dragged my flight bag out of the wardrobe, and frantically stuffed it with the minimal clothes I would need for travelling. Her sharp eyes assessed the state of the sitting-room floor and my ashen face; then her eyes dropped and she stared, horrified, at my neck and chest. I craned my head, but couldn’t see what she saw. I went into the bathroom, dazzling myself briefly before my vision adjusted to the stronger light, and peered in the mirror. Small, purplish bruises were appearing, speckled like smallpox across my skin. Elena stood in the doorway, her hand over her mouth, her eyes wide and fearful as she already came to the wrong conclusion.
“What happened, Emma; what did he do?”
I swivelled on her, taking the tops of her arms in my hands and forcing her to look me in the face.
“Elena, I want you to listen to me very carefully. Matthew has done nothing wrong; whatever else you might think, you must believe me.”
Her gaze flickered back to the bruises and I drew my jacket tight about my throat, cutting off the source of fascination; she looked back at my face.
“He’s done nothing wrong – understand?” I said, more fiercely.
She frowned and then nodded slowly, doubt still clearly at the forefront of her mind. “In a minute, my parents will be here and I will go with them back to England.” Her face fell, and her frown deepened. “But – and this is the bit I want you to remember – I am not leaving; I will come back. Tell him… please, Elena, tell Matthew that I have to get some things straight in my head; he’ll understand. Do you understand?”
“No, I do not.” She shook her head from side to side. “Must you go? If he has done nothing wrong as you say, why do you have to leave? It makes no sense.”
“Yes, I must. I can’t work this out here – I need some distance to think. Please help me pack; I haven’t much time if I’m to catch the flight.”
She pulled herself together, helping me make some sense of the jumbled mess. I snatched the tablets off my bedside table and, as a second thought, took the capsules as well, shoving them all in my handbag.
There was a loud, desperate knock at the door. Elena looked up, alarmed.
“It’s my father,” I reassured her. As she went to answer it, I scooped up the journal and Matthew’s translation, which I had hurriedly hidden in the folds of his scarf, placing them carefully in the bottom of my flight-bag among the jumper and socks. I managed to close the zip as my father came in, worry and tension close companions in his face. I anticipated his first inevitable question, but let him ask it anyway.
“What has he done to you? Where is he – what the blazes…?” He saw the remains of the table. “I’ll give him a good thrashing if he’s hurt you!”
He glared furiously around the room as if Matthew would be waiting there in the shadows.
“He hasn’t done anything, Dad, but I have. This is nothing to do with Matthew.”
I hoped it would be enough. My mother stood behind him and she firmly pushed him to one side as he began to argue.
“Leave Emma alone now, Hugh; we have a flight to catch and there’ll be plenty of time for questions – and explanations – later.”
She put both of her warm, soft hands around my face, searching out the truth. I bit my lip, controlling tears, and she nodded briefly, smiling sadly, before letting me go. I looked once around the room, memorizing it, the fading flowers less vibrant in the artificial light, an air of decay and abandon in the tangle of cushions and splintered wood on the floor.
“Wait,” I said, as we reached the door. I hurried back into my bedroom, gathering the blanket he had bought for me into my arms, and joined my friend and parents where they waited on the landing.
The journey to the airport was a blur, partly because by the time we left, cloud covered the blank face of the moon, but more because my mind began to retreat into darker recesses where it might find some semblance of comfort. My mother sat next to me in the car, not attempting to engage in conversation, her hand wrapped lightly around my fingers. I wouldn’t have been able to find the words I needed to say how I felt anyway. As we drove further and further from the college, the more clearly I saw the implications of what I did – and the more intense the pain of separation until it enveloped me, and all I wanted to do was turn back. But I wouldn’t, I couldn’t, not like this – not without answers, not now, not yet. And if Matthew wouldn’t supply them, I felt compelled to hunt them down myself.
Multiple sharp points of light indicated we were close to the airport, the traffic increasing as we neared, slowing our progress. Dad kept looking at his watch, fretting over the time. I rested my head against the cold glass and barely watched as the lights merged into one long line drawn out by the speed of the car. Several times, I thought I saw the sleek outline of a sports car, slung fast and low against the hugging ground and my heart sped with it, only to falter and stall as it passed us by.
We entered the airport under the interrogating glare of synthetic light. For once I let my father shepherd me through the crowded concourse, shielding me from the questions of officials and the curious faces of the flight-attendants on the plane. I sat by the window, oblivious to everything but the pain in my broken arm and chest that I had ignored until now, and the growing vacuum in my heart. A flight-attendant leaned over my mother towards me.
“Ma’am, you need to secure your seat-belt.”
I looked blankly at her and my mother wrestled with the buckle, pulling it tight around my waist, but the woman still lingered by us instead of moving on.
“Your bag, ma’am?” Her hand hovered near my bag.
“Don’t touch it!” I snapped, hearing someone else’s voice coming from my mouth. The startled woman stood back, ready to assert her authority, but I already looked away, staring blindly through the black glass into the night, not hearing what she said. I clutched my bag to my chest, pressing the edges of the hidden books against the bruises – his bruises, my bruises – that kept him close to me, and she didn’t try again.
We had reached cruising altitude when I became aware that my parents were talking in low, worried tones. I turned towards my mother, and she put her hand on my father’s arm to stop him saying something, but I didn’t care one way or the other; it was irrelevant what a
nyone thought any more.
“What is it, darling?”
“Please may I have some water?”
My father called the stewardess and she brought me a clear plastic cup of water, tiny bubbles clinging to its brittle surface. I managed to unzip my bag, but couldn’t release the bi-coloured capsules from their silver coffins. My mother took them, puncturing the protective foil and handing them individually to me so that I could swallow them and await the numbing anonymity they would bring.
By the time the plane touched down in England, a grey dawn rumoured on the horizon, and the stale fug of a new day hung like a pall over the sleeping buildings of my homeland.
I dozed fitfully as my father drove us back along the familiar old Great North Road, the long stone wall of the Burghley estate heralding the town of my ancestors. I felt no relief as we passed the George Hotel, nor as we crossed the bridge over the River Welland by the Meadows where I used to play. And as we turned before the spire of St Mary’s into the cobbled street where we lived and the sound of the engine died, the bell from the old church tolled. We slithered over the cobbles – slippery with the fine mizzle that fell from the clinging sky – to our blue front door. The stone-damp air of the old house was barely warm, but the ghosts of my past welcomed me in the flags of the foot-worn floors and the slow tock, tock of my grandfather’s long-case clock as it measured out time.
I climbed the sweeping staircase, barely noticing when my mother switched on the lights, so familiar each tread, until I reached the broad landing where the stuffed pike loomed in eternal belligerence from its glass-fronted case. On and up the servants’ stairs, along the dark upper hall and under the arch to the end – where the door opened to my childhood bedroom. Only then, when I shut the door behind me and felt the walls close in like a womb, did I allow myself the luxury of succumbing to the desolation that had been my constant companion since I left the States.
I did not think, I could not feel. Had I been in possession of a heart, it would have cleaved down its seam, because I left that better part of me in Maine. What I had now was but an empty shell; this was my self-imposed exile, my self-inflicted hell.
Below is Chapter 1 from Death Be Not Proud, the second volume in the series The Secret of the Journal.
Chapter 1
Abyss
I HAD GOOD DAYS AND I HAD BAD DAYS.
It wasn’t as if I could blame anyone else for the condition I found myself in, so I didn’t look for any sympathy. I knew that my near-vegetative state caused my parents hours of anxiety, but I couldn’t face the questions that queued in my own mind, let alone answer any of theirs.
I stayed in my room. Where I lay at an angle on my bed, I could watch the winter sun cast canyons of light as it moved across the eaved ceiling. Sometimes the light was the barest remnant from a clouded sky; at others, so bright that the laths were ribs under the aged plaster, regular undulations under the chalk-white skin.
I hadn’t spent so long at home for many years. Here at the top of the house, the cars droned tunelessly as they laboured up the hill beyond the sheltering walls of St Mary’s Church. Below, the voices of the street were mere echoes as they rose up the stone walls, entering illicitly through the thin frame of the window. I listened to the random sounds of life; I watched it in the arc of the day. And the sounds and the light were immaterial – the days irrelevant – time did not touch me.
Sometime – days after fleeing Maine – my mother knocked softly on my door, her disembodied head appearing round it when I did not answer.
“Emma, you have twenty minutes to get yourself ready for your hospital appointment; your father’s getting the car now.”
Her voice hovered in the air above my bed, and I heard every word she said, but they didn’t register. I didn’t move. She came into the room and stood at the end of my bed, her hands on her hips, her no-nonsense look in place. The lines creasing her forehead were deeper than I remembered, or maybe it was the way the light from the window fell across her brow.
“I know you heard me; I want you to get up and get dressed now. I won’t keep the hospital waiting.”
She hadn’t used that tone with me for nearly twenty years and I found it comforting in its severity.
“Emma!”
My eyes focused and saw her shaking, her hands clutching white-knuckled at the old iron-and-brass bedstead.
“Emma, I am asking you, please…”
My poor mother; with my Nanna in hospital and her youngest daughter tottering towards the edge of reality, she was strung out just as far as she could go, eking out her emotional reserves like food in a famine. I blinked once as I surfaced from the dark pool of my refuge, my mouth dry; I half-rolled, half-sat up. Wordlessly, I climbed off the bed and went stiffly to the bathroom down the landing, my mother a few steps behind me. I shut the door quietly on her, and turned to look in the mirror above the basin. Sunken eyes stared back from my skull-like head, skin brittle over my high cheekbones. Even my freckles seemed pale under the dim, grim light from the east window. Mechanically I brushed my teeth and washed, not caring as the cast on my arm became sodden. The bruises above my breasts and below my throat stood out against my fair skin. I pressed my fingertips into them, my hands spanning the space between each smoky mark. I closed my eyes at the subdued pain and remembered why they were there.
Mum waited for me outside the door, and I aimlessly wondered if she thought I might try and escape – or something worse. I understood the effect of my behaviour on my family; I understood and cared with a remorse that should have torn the very heart from me, had I one. But my head and my heart were divorced, and I witnessed my distress in their pinched, tight faces and harried, exchanged looks as no more than a disinterested observer.
I also realized that, from a clinical point of view, I probably suffered from delayed shock – the result of two near-fatal attacks in a very short period of time with which I struggled to come to terms. But neither Staahl nor the bear seemed even remotely important when compared with what had passed between Matthew and me that precipitated my leaving the only man I had ever really loved.
I dressed in what Mum put out for me, substituting the cardigan for my sage jacket, and all the while I ached, but I couldn’t tell whether the pain came from my broken body or from my heart.
The hospital wasn’t far from where we lived and my father parked in a lined disabled bay, ignoring the disapproving stares of the people sitting on a nearby bench. They stopped staring and averted their heads when he helped me out of the car, all the justification he needed in my fragile frame as I leaned against him for support. The strapping still loose, my ribcage felt as if the semi-knitted bones grated with every step I took, but I welcomed the pain as relief from the indescribable emptiness that filled every waking moment.
The double doors to the reception hissed back into their recesses, releasing a gust of warm, sanitized air. I felt suddenly sick as it hit my face, and I retched pointlessly, my hollow stomach reacting to the acrid smell of disinfectant, each spasm pulling at my chest, and I felt my legs give way beneath me. A flurry of activity and hands and voices alerted me to the fact that, although I was drifting, blissful unconsciousness eluded me.
“When did she last eat?” a pleasant-voiced man asked from beside my head. He lifted my eyelid and a beam of directed light hit me; I twisted my head to escape it. He lifted the skin in the crease of my elbow and it sagged back into place like broken elastic.
“She’s dehydrated as well; how long’s this been going on?”
Mum sounded tense. “Five days. She refuses to eat, she barely drinks a thing and she was already too thin. We don’t know what to do with her; she just won’t talk to us.”
Five days? Had it been so long? I counted only three. Five whole days without him.
“I’ll have to admit her – get her rehydrated. These injuries need seeing to and I’ll contact someone in the mental health team at the same time.”
My eyes flicked open.
“No,” I muttered weakly.
Humorous hazel eyes met mine. “Ah, she speaks; you’re back with us, are you? Did you have something to say?”
“No – I won’t be admitted,” I said, strength returning along with my stubborn streak.
“Well, you haven’t left yourself with much of a say in the matter – you’re a right mess. However…” he continued, “if you promise to eat and drink starting from now, I could be persuaded to reconsider.”
“If I must.”
I wasn’t far off being churlish but he didn’t seem to mind, and I wondered why everyone was being so kind to me because I didn’t deserve it, not after the way I treated them, not after what I had done.
The dry biscuit scraped my throat and the tea from the little cafe next to reception tasted stewed by the time I drank it, but it helped.
“Sorry about the biscuit.” The young doctor eyed it, pulling a face. “The nurses ate all the decent ones; there’s not a Jammy Dodger left in sight. Hey ho – at least that’s better than nothing, and I suppose we must be grateful for the little we are given.” He smiled cheerfully, his harmless chatter scattering brightly into the bland room. I stared at the ceiling, impassive and beyond caring.
I finished the tea under his watchful eye, his excuse being that business was a bit slow and he had nothing better to do than to sit there and watch me. He took the empty cup, chucked it in a bin and rolled up the wide sleeves of my jacket, revealing both arms.
“So, what happened here, then?”
He started to unwind the bandage on my left arm. My throat clenched uncomfortably, remembering the last time it had been dressed by Matthew as he stood so close to me – his hand on my arm, my skin running with the connectivity between us.
He misunderstood my reaction. “That hurt?”
“No.”
“OK, so what did you do here… heck, whew!” He whistled, “That’s quite something; not a case of self-harm, I’m guessing. Accident?”