by Jemma Wayne
“I’ve arranged for you to be hidden,” he hurried on more seriously, quietly, glancing back over his shoulder. “A man you know has agreed to take you. I’ve bribed the guards. Someone will come for you tonight. Be ready. Can you stand?”
She nodded.
“Good.”
Emily said nothing.
She felt nothing.
She knew of course that it was a reason for hope, but she had none. She knew too that Jean was expecting thanks, but she could not give it. She had nothing left and nothing to impart. She stayed silent, and waited for him to disappear back into the world in which he still existed and she never could. Jean however, seemed equally unable to speak. He hovered by the door waiting, young and uncertain as she was, despite his manly frame. Running his hand up and down the door he seemed to be considering something, wrestling with it, and then finally, slowly, he raised his gaze from the brown-stained floor to her bloodstained eyes. “I am sorry for you Emilienne,” he confided in a whisper.
Emily didn’t respond. What did he want from her?
“I didn’t have a choice,” Jean continued, but then abruptly he stopped. Because suddenly, Emily realised what he was after, and she found her voice.
It began with a laugh. An unsmiling cackle that hurt her throat and made her jaw click. For the first time in weeks there was something where there had been nothing. She could even name the feeling. As Jean stood there before her, a spear tied to his back, the keys to her prison in his hands, it grew stronger and stronger, and Emily realised that she hated him, and all those like him, with every ounce of strength that she had. And somehow it invigorated her spirit.
Standing up sharply, she stopped laughing. It was not possible for her to stand straight but she raised herself up as much as she could and held her head high. “You had a choice,” she said firmly, channelling the boldness of her mother. “It was I who had no choice. I still have no choice.”
“But I tried to save you.” His angular jaw pulsated. “You are still alive.”
“I would rather be dead,” she spat at him. “Living is not eating and breathing. You have stolen from me what life really is. You still have your mother and your father and your family. What do I have? What can I ever have now?”
Shaking his head as if to block out her words Jean moved closer, his eyes were dark, desperate, un-winking, his jaw quivering, a bead of sweat on his temple, but when he reached out a hand to soothe her she raised her own and he stopped in his tracks.
“Don’t you see Emilienne, they made us do it?” he pleaded. “I am a victim too.”
“No!” she yelled at him. “You are not a victim! You are a murderer! Get away from me!”
And now, stunned, hurt, as though it was he who had been hit by a machete, Jean backed away.
Emily couldn’t stop. Rage possessed her and held her up. “You will be punished one day for this!” she screamed as he hurried to close the door to her cell. “You will not be forgiven for what you’ve done! I will never forgive you!”
“Never. I will never forgive, never, never,” Emily muttered, oblivious to Lynn who was stroking her trembling hands. The clock on the mantelpiece chimed and slowly, fuzzily, Emily became aware of her surroundings. Somehow, her tea had found its way in safety onto the table and the curtains had been drawn. It was late. Lynn leaned over to the coffee table and handed Emily her water, wincing as she did so.
“Oh no. You’re in pain.” Emily noticed, the responsibilities of her present rushing back to her. “I haven’t been caring for you. You haven’t had lunch. I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Lynn responded. “It’s nothing. I’m not in pain. Not really. And it’s quite plain to see that I don’t want looking after. I would much rather look after somebody else than myself, exactly as you desire too.”
“Yes,” Emily admitted, amazed at how insightful Lynn seemed over and again to be. “It’s easier.”
“But it can’t be avoided forever. There are consequences.” Lynn paused. She put her hand over her side and breathed deeply. “I should have gone to the hospital months earlier. I knew there was something wrong.” She paused again and looked hard at Emily. “You’ll run a bath for me.”
Grateful, Emily nodded, took a deep breath of her own and stood up. She was still a little dizzy. When she tried to lift the tea tray her arms were heavy and as she moved towards the door her legs trembled beneath her, as though she’d been running all day. It was good however to have a task.
“You will have to forgive of course,” Lynn called after her as she reached the edge of the room.
Emily span around, the last of the biscuits flying off their plate.
“Haven’t you been listening?” she heard herself yelling in a sudden wild fury she hadn’t contemplated or intended for Lynn, and would surely get her fired. “They killed my family. They killed thousands and thousands of people. They hacked my brothers to death. They destroyed me, my whole life. He betrayed me. They betrayed us. I will never forgive them.”
“Well you can’t move on until you do,” Lynn observed calmly. “It’s what’s trapping you in the past Emily. Your hate. Your mind is still locked in that cell.”
Chapter
Twenty-Eight
Lynn lay flat in her freshly changed bed and let the tears roll freely from the corners of her eyes and down her cheeks, where they gathered in a pool of hot liquid in the crevice of her left ear. Occasionally a particularly distressing particle of a thought swam into the foreground of her musings and her face contracted in silent spasm, but the rest of the time she lay quite calmly as the sadness flowed from within her. A few feet away, in the spare room that Lynn’s mother a lifetime ago used sometimes to stay in, Emily wept in more violent bursts, but just as silently. An hour earlier she had helped Lynn into bed though they hadn’t spoken since the incident in the sitting room the previous day. The two of them had passed the time since then in quiet acknowledgement of the other’s presence: Lynn nodding her head when Emily brought her her breakfast, Emily closing the door quietly in understanding of Lynn’s morning headaches and a while later bringing her up the Sunday Times. Later Lynn had managed to make her way downstairs and switched on the TV to alert Emily to her presence, leaving the door open to convey to Emily that she was welcome to come in. And eventually, Emily had come in and sat silently, both of them taking breaths to start sentences and then never voicing them. But this friction wasn’t the cause of Lynn’s night-time tears, neither was the force of Emily’s story. The tears were in memory of another night like this long ago when Philip still shared a bed with her, in recollection of how she’d sobbed then with the same frustration and bitterness, and because, because of Emily, she was finally letting it go.
The boys had both been teenagers. Luke, she remembered, had just taken the last of his GCSEs and John had been given a lead role in the school play, a production of Romeo and Juliet in which he was to play Mercutio. Philip had taken them all out to dinner to celebrate both feats. Only during dessert did he announce his own news: after more than fifteen years at his law firm he’d finally been made a senior partner. As a bonus, he’d been given an extra week’s holiday, and, he informed them, they were going to spend it abroad. With the exception of a short trip to the South of France three years earlier, and the week they took skiing in Switzerland every January, in the years that they’d been married Lynn and Philip’s dreams of exploring the continent had somehow been replaced by trips down to Cornwall, that could be fitted in last minute around unpredictable cases. The prospect of a real, summertime holiday abroad was thrilling. She suggested Italy.
That night, she and Philip made gentle love, as they still did with reassuring frequency and afterwards, when he fit his familiar shape around hers as they lay down to sleep, her head was filled with the countless things she had to be thankful for: two successful sons, a loving husband, an upcoming holiday, health, financial comfort, God’s love. It was the rare kind of day in which everything had gone better than expected and
she felt she’d caught a glimpse of heaven on earth, her heart brimming with total peace. And then, without warning, she started to cry.
It had been an unpleasant shock to discover that she was unhappy in the midst of such apparent happiness. But there was suddenly a deep wrenching in the darkest regions of her soul that could not be mistaken for mere melancholy, or too many glasses of red wine, or a hormonal punch. It was instead a profound sadness, and though perhaps most stark in its juxtaposition to the euphoria of the day, Lynn recognised immediately that it was neither cursory nor something that had appeared from nowhere as it seemed. The happiness of that day, of her whole life she realised, stemmed from forces uncontrolled and uncontrollable by her. Because she had achieved nothing for herself. She had no career, she had written no treatise, her entire contribution to society had been the production of two sons - something she could have done a century earlier and seemed barely an accomplishment at all. Yet at every turn she was trapped by her own confusions, the dichotomy that ever since meeting Philip had resided within her soul: a longing to escape the confines of the domestic life she hadn’t meant to choose, and the urge to fiercely protect it. Realistically, she hated being away from Philip and the boys, so she could never be the type of woman who flounced around the world, but, thus, she was trapped. She loved her life and also despised it. Yet she couldn’t change it without destroying the very elements she most cherished.
Throughout that night, the constant evasion of a solution haunted her. The more her mind tossed around these circular arguments, the more powerless she felt, and the more desperate. And this angered her too. Looking down on herself – a slim, pampered white woman weeping silently in bed while her wonderful husband lay next to her in their beautiful home, while others starved and suffered real problems – she felt a repulsion for the egocentric obsessions of her mind, but she couldn’t stop them. And this made her feel more incapable still, more pitiful and more disgusting. As it grew harder to subdue her whimpers she slipped from bed and sat staring into the mirror of the cool, marble bathroom. The tears staining her red face revolted her. She dabbed at them angrily and muttered to herself to pull things together, hoping desperately that Philip would not hear her. That would be the final shame. She couldn’t bear the thought of having to explain it to him, of having him think that he and the life he’d provided for her weren’t enough to make her happy. They should have been, she knew they should have been, yet she couldn’t help longing for something more, something for herself.
For three nights, this silent weeping was repeated, leaving her haggard and tired in the mornings and finally making her so ill that she had to stay in bed and let Philip call for the doctor, to whom she pretended she had a cold.
At some point, perhaps days or weeks later, and typically without a defining moment or decision, she managed to calm herself. Gradually, she was able to lock away the pain she’d been harbouring, to dull her selfish desires, and tie her happiness once more to Philip and her sons and the ups and downs of their lives, to paint her face with happiness. To layer it over the dark creases of bitterness and regret.
Lying alone now, feeling the creases of her face, Lynn realised that this was what she had been carrying openly again of late, with all the scabs and ugly symptoms of the poison exploding out of her. It was an angry, venomous emotion and she’d been levelling it at everyone. Vera the most because, as Emily had so quickly seen, she was so much like herself.
Then however, there came Emily.
Lynn had not realised at first how powerful an encounter this would be, but getting to know Emily over the past months had fuelled Lynn’s sense of purpose. Her sense of doing. Acting. Like Emily’s mother had done. Real action. Real sacrifice. So she wouldn’t have another 20-odd years; she had had 58 good ones. It had been 15 years since Philip. There had been time. It was time. If only she could last long enough to see it through…
As the pain in her side forced Lynn to roll from her back into a foetal position, she rallied herself. She had things to do, things to last for. As if in disagreement, her body gave way to another thrust of silent spasms, and a new pool of water collected on her pillow. Lynn allowed the tears to streak down her cheeks without wiping them, she allowed the self-pity, she allowed one final glance back. She knew however that in the morning she would get Emily to change the sheets, and then she would discard them, along with the last remains of all her bitterness and doubt.
Chapter
Twenty-Nine
By the time Emily entered with her breakfast, Lynn was already awake and sitting up in bed with the telephone and a notepad on her lap. Immediately Emily was suspicious. She carried the tray of tea and toast and the vanilla yoghurt Lynn favoured carefully to the bed, laying it gently on top of the covers before shaking Lynn’s medication from the six different bottles arranged in height order on her nightstand, and handing it to her with a glass of water that was already standing waiting.
“I have something for you,” Lynn announced, taking the pills into her cupped hand and breaking the silence that had engulfed them over the past day.
Emily raised her eyes and the older woman triumphantly tore a page from her notepad and held it towards Emily. In beautiful, artistic script a name had been scrawled across the top of the page and underneath it was an address and a phone number. “Gensur?” Emily read tentatively. “Who is he?”
“It,” Lynn corrected, with difficulty dropping the pills into her mouth one at a time, concentrating hard on swallowing. “Not a person, a charity. GENSUR, Genocide Survivors.” She paused, but the explanation meant nothing to Emily. “For people like you Emily, for survivors of the genocide in Rwanda. I have a friend who used to work for the government, we were at university together, I’ve been on the phone all morning tracking her down and… anyway, she gave me the number. She said they’re wonderful. That they’ll help.”
“Help with what?” Emily ventured, holding the piece of paper at arm’s length from her body.
“Help you to work through what happened. Help you move on.”
“I don’t need help,” Emily retorted, her hands shaking. “I’m fine. You are the one who is sick. Is there something you need?”
Lynn however no longer seemed willing to trade provocations. “You are too proud,” she said earnestly.
“I’m not. I have no pride left at all.”
Lynn exhaled and laid her head back onto her pillow. She looked small, frail, beaten, her pale skin and soft hair lost in the vast folds of the pillow.
“Please go,” she said, more gently now and without lifting her head. “To GENSUR. For me. As a favour to me.” She closed her eyes. The jubilation of moments before was gone. “Please. Let me do this one thing.”
“Are you feeling ill Mrs Hunter?” Emily asked, this time meaning the question. She moved closer to the bed and felt her forehead. “You’re cold, and clammy.”
“Will you go?”
“Not - It’s just - ”
“Please.”
Suddenly, Lynn’s insistence irritated Emily. Why should the old woman care what she did? Why did it matter? Emily wasn’t used to mattering anymore to anyone. Nor did she want to.
“Leave me alone,” she muttered.
“Please,” Lynn urged again, this time opening her eyes and casting them at Emily. Her will shone through them, unassailable, despite age, despite infirmity.
And despite her exasperation, Emily heard herself agreeing.
This time, Lynn exhaled with relief. “Good,” she breathed now in short, strained bursts. “Go this afternoon. Straight after lunch. Luke will be back today.” Emily opened her mouth to protest but as usual Lynn’s directions were not up for debate. “You’ll spend Christmas with us,” she continued. “You’ll stay here. I’ll see you tomorrow.”
Emily couldn’t help but smile at the woman’s audacity. Even in her illness she was in complete command of herself and of everyone before her. She was so calm, so assured, so wise it seemed. She possessed such poi
se.
“Pass me those papers. From that top drawer. Before you go,” Lynn added, waving her pen like a wand towards a chest of drawers, as though she could conjure what she wanted.
Emily found them wrapped within a silk yellow headscarf. For a protracted moment she fingered the sunshine silk between her fingers, a memory of heat rattling somewhere deep inside her, then she brought the papers to Lynn. As she carried the thin stack she couldn’t help but notice the heading on the first page. ‘The last will and testament of Lynn Rebecca Hunter,’ it read. Without meaning to, Emily frowned, then felt Lynn’s eyes upon her.
“Don’t worry. I’m not going anywhere yet,” Lynn scolded as Emily hesitated with the papers. “I’ll see you tomorrow. You’ll tell me about GENSUR. Oh - ” she stopped and nodded back towards the chest of drawers. “And quite plainly, that headscarf must be yours.”
On the bus, Emily stared at the piece of paper in her hand for a long time. It had been many months since she’d heard a Rwandan voice, and even then it had been the Anglicised tones of Auntie and Uncle, who hadn’t been there. She didn’t know if she was ready to look into the eyes of another survivor, who would understand without words what her history entailed.
When Auntie had appeared in the refugee camp a year after the worst of the killings were over, and explained that she’d seen Emily’s face on BBC coverage of the camps, her greatest gift hadn’t been the promise to take her back to London; it had been the innocence in her eyes. She was a generation older than Emily and had seen things that Emily couldn’t then imagine, but she had not seen her mother being bludgeoned to death, nor Cassien’s severed head buzzing with flies. Unlike the people in the camp, Auntie’s eyes didn’t remind Emily of piles of dismembered limbs, or burning spires, or the smell of death.
By then, it seemed a lifetime ago that she’d given up hope: of Gahiji still being alive, of him finding her, of ever returning to her village where in any case if her house was still standing and if Hutus were not occupying it, she would have to live next to Ernest who might come one night to finish the job he had started. She lived day-by-day, pressed forward only by need: to feed herself, to avoid the still-roaming Interahamwe gangs who sporadically terrified the camps, to satisfy the anger that kept her alive. The future was behind her, and there was nothing to live for beyond the defiance of living itself.