Remember Me
Heather Moore
Copyright © 2014 Heather Moore
KINDLE Edition
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book, or portions thereof in any form. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored, in any form or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical without the express written permission of the author.
This is a work of fiction. Names and characters are the product of the author’s imagination and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
PublishNation, London
www.publishnation.co.uk
For those who have loved against the odds
or in spite of them.
Chapter One
Even as she poured the whiskey, Catlin felt the effects of the first two decidedly large glasses begin to hit her. She wasn’t used to drinking – in fact, she despised it and nearly fifteen years had gone by since she last allowed a drop of alcohol to pass her lips. It was a stupid thing for her to do. She knew too well the destructive powers of drink. She had watched it claim and ultimately kill her father, observed as the curse of his alcohol dependence wreaked havoc with the lives of not only herself, but those of her mother and sister. So, what had she done? After the latest in a seemingly endless line of horrendous days she had gone into a shop and reached for the first bottle of booze she laid her eyes on. June 21st: the longest day of the year, in more ways than one.
Catlin began to lift the third serving to her lips, but between the recollections of the past and the wave of nausea that swept over her at the smell of the whiskey, she found it impossible to take so much as another sip. Dropping the glass with a clatter onto the table, she sank heavily back into her sofa with tears pricking the backs of her eyes. Part of her willed them on, wished for them to fall but the greater side knew it would not happen. She had lost the ability to cry some time ago, for her own situation at least. She had empathy for other beings, be they human or animal. She could cry for the living and the dead, but not one drop of pity could she shed for her own miserable state of existence. Had she read her own personal history in a book she’d have marvelled at the resilience of lead character for not having done more to erase their tainted past. The tears retreated, as predicted. She would not cry. It was weak and did nothing to alter the situation for the better and she chastised herself inwardly for being so pathetic.
She had thought the inability to feel any form of pity for her misfortunes to be the direct cause of her heart being wounded too many times and though Catlin had pieced it back every time it had been torn to shreds she believed it to be numb to all feelings or sensations. Life had not been kind to her. Her childhood was spent in fear of her drunken father and dodging the school bullies who delighted in tormenting the outcast or seeing how well she had perfected her landing technique by pushing her down the school staircases. Her teenage years continued similarly. Having grown taller than her father and adept at dealing with confrontations she was no longer as popular a target for his abuse but went from looking out for own skin to keeping her mother and sister safe from his explosive tempers. By her early twenties Catlin had grown accustomed to physical pain, barely noticing when she picked up an injury, and had learned how to mask emotional hurt so expertly to most it would have appeared as if she felt nothing at all.
And it didn’t end there. Life continued to hound Catlin with Fate seemingly having decided to use her for its personal doormat and she too became convinced there was no force left on any plain of existence which could hurt her. She had been wrong and barely six months had passed since she had discovered her error thanks to another cruel blow which had not so much dashed her remaining dreams as smashed them to smithereens. She realised then from the pain she’d felt that it was not her heart that was dead, so perhaps it was her soul? Something had certainly died within her – she had felt it wither away, heard its piteous cry as the mortal wound was dealt and with it went the ability to mourn for her losses and misfortunes, which were not only plentiful but great.
Not one person, not a single one, was aware of the living nightmares she’d endured and battled her way through, without the help of anyone and nothing but her own wilful nature to keep her going, but she preferred it that way. Growing up in the house she had, Catlin learned quickly that to show any sign of weakness was to give someone power over you and once they had it they could use it to destroy you. She had come to rely on her brains and abilities to solve problems, and besides, what right did she have to spread her woes around? Just because she suffered did not mean it was okay for her to pass on that hurt to others. There was enough pain in the world, in the lives of each person, for them to contend with without her adding to it. That did not mean there were not times when she wished there was someone she could turn to. Often she found herself sat in her apartment just speaking aloud, imagining someone was there listening without judging or offering up an unwanted opinion. Perhaps she was mad. She was pretty sure sane people did not talk to their apartments. She had heard of people talking to their pets, but their apartments? But there was no-one else to confide in, even had she wanted to.
She had no friends to speak of. There were acquaintances and contacts she had through her work, but no friends. They had deserted her in the early days when Catlin had started to get her work noticed but she was far from being a success. They had, quite wrongly, got it into their heads that a bestselling but self-published book equated to millions in the bank. She didn’t have that kind of money now, but back then they had believed she had thousands stowed away and when she failed to shower them with presents of great worth or huge wads of cash did not get tossed their way they thought her tight. How could you be a number one writer and not have money? The two things went together, didn’t they? Well, no, but they could not see that and so they fell by the wayside.
And as much as she loved her mother and sister they were both as unlike her as day was to night. They never understood her work, her thoughts, anything about her. It had taken some work to break away from them following her father’s death, for the pair had become so reliant on Catlin for every little thing that had she merely moved to another street in the same town they’d have panicked. So, persuading them that her moving to another country did not signify the end of the world was quite a task to say the least, and even then she had been forced to arrange for cleaners and gardeners to come in and take over the work Catlin had been doing for years.
It had been tough, but not as tough as it might have been had they been aware of the incident she had been involved in during the years she had been working in Scotland as a young woman, what they did to her that night. Had that piece of history been common knowledge Catlin would never have been allowed out of the family home by herself again despite now being in her thirties. Worse still would be that they would hold her responsible in some bizarre and twisted way. She remembered how, when she had come home and told her family she was being bullied by a second group of girls at school, her mother had said, ‘“What do you do to them?’” See it was always her fault. Even now, when her mother phoned and reported the cleaner had broken a cup or the gardener had pulled up the wrong plants it was her fault for having gone away. It was all right for her, the big success, swanning off without a care, but she wasn’t the one left to clean up the mess. Oh, and while she was there, could she remind them how to change the cartridge in the printer?
A success? God, if this was success she’d hate to have been a failure. Catlin could not deny that technically she was a success. She had, after ten years of hard work and virtual oblivion, made a name for herself as a writer and wit
h two stories turned into highly rated television adaptations, her newest series of books had been taken up and were in line for a movie make-over. For some unearthly reason she could not comprehend, her input had been wanted in this process. She was too old to dismiss such an opportunity, especially when Guy offered to do all he could to get her noticed (which, he naturally got a commission for!) and so that was how, with a bit of persuasion from her agent and publisher, she came to be living in a foreign country, in a city she both loved and abhorred, being a ‘success’. She was surrounded by the rich and famous, had the money to anything she wanted to when she wanted to do it, was living a life people envied but these things did not alter the fact that she was still alone.
Sure, she could have picked up the phone and moved her family over to join her (providing she could have convinced them to board the plane) or gone to one of the innumerable parties her fellow movie making pals were holding, but it was not that sort of loneliness. She had always felt isolated from the rest of the world, separate, as if some invisible barrier were between her and it, that she did not belong there in any way, shape or form. That was why she loved writing - it was her way of making the world fit her rather than her trying to fit into the world. In the pages of her stories, books and poems she could be anything she wanted, could go on fantastic adventures, be part of the excitement, fall in love and find her happy ever after, the things reality could not give her, but best of all, she could be herself.
In the real world, Catlin no longer recognised the person she had become. She had worn a mask of fake contentment for so long it had taken over her features. There was this double who looked like Catlin, spoke like her, sounded the same as she did but was not remotely like the girl she truly was, the Catlin who popped up in one form or another in all her works. She had hoped that moving away from everything and everyone she knew would set her free from this doppelganger, but she had forgotten where she was moving to and the business she was getting involved in and that being yourself was not necessarily a choice. That was one of the things she hated about the city and though Catlin had always felt like she belonged to another world or an age long passed, there it was all the more noticeable to her how little she fitted in. No, there was no-one she could have spoken to and as mad as it seemed to talk to a building at least the rooms she lived in kept her whisperings to themselves. They were far more trustworthy than human beings.
A soft, evening breeze shivered its way in through the open window opposite where Catlin was sat, stirring her hair and cooling her skin, bringing with it the scent of warm summer flowers down from the hills which were a short drive away. She liked living on the edge of the city, in the less affluent area of town, close to the wild country which lay like an oasis of calm beyond the towering skyscrapers and miles of perfectly straight tarmacked roads. Out in those hills she could wander freely, not having to maintain her façade of fame, for few of those she knew walked there. She was best suited to the trees, hills and mountains with their meandering trails and natural, unforced beauty.
She had been urged by many to move to one of the more high status residential areas, but Catlin was not interested in such an upgrade, being as happy as she could be among the poorer but genuine locals who, unaware of her identity, left her be and for this as much as any other reason, she kept her cheaper, one bedroomed apartment to the surprise and exasperation of all. It may have been small, but being on the top floor it came with the additional benefit of a roof terrace, allowing her unspoilt views of the distant, wild dreamscape she adored so very much. How she wished life could be as simple as it appeared when she strolled there, but it was not. Life was hard, cruel and often callous.
Crossing over to the window which had summoned her, Catlin peered out into the darkness. It was quiet, very few cars drove by below and with the street lights too few in number to be obtrusive the night was allowed to fall there without resistance, but off in the distance the glaring obscenity that was the heartland of the ridiculous industry she was part of fought violently against it. Okay, it wasn’t as absurd, garish or excessive as she held it to be, but to someone who could have been content to live in a tent had it been in a place she loved and offered her the life she sought to find, it seemed that way at times. Mind you, she had thought the same about the hotel she had worked in as a cleaner too, in the days before the money came in.
Catlin wondered if he would be there, strutting arrogantly through centre of the excitement. Why Fate had chosen to send him her way that day, she could not tell but she cursed the stroke of bad luck wholeheartedly. In the months since Danny had less than ceremoniously kicked her to the kerb, Catlin had pieced together the remnants of her shattered heart and broken dreams and found a way to move on from both losses. She had loved Danny in a way she had loved no man before. If he didn’t fully understand her, he got her more than anyone else ever had, and she had been foolishly daring enough to put her trust in him. What a bloody idiot she was. He was great until she became ill. It wasn’t too bad until the doctors offered up the possibility of it being cancer. She could, and indeed did, have forgiven him for not being able to cope particularly well while she underwent all the tests, no-one could handle that with a carefree grace.
It wasn’t cancer, but rather another condition which, though not life threatening, was certainly life changing. Catlin was told she’d never be able to have children. It was like a knife to her heart, for she had wanted to have a family for as long as she could recall, but as she did her best to adapt, Danny proved to be incapable of handling the news, and it was this Catlin could not forgive him for. The one time she had dared to let someone in, allowed someone to get close her and at the very time she needed him the most, he abandoned her. ‘“There wasn’t much else you had to offer,”’ he told her while leaving the apartment. ‘“If you can’t even have kids, there’s no point in planning any future with you because there isn’t one.”’ In the long and bloody months since that night Catlin had come to think she was over both hurts, but then he’d been thrown her way along with his newly pregnant girlfriend. A double kick in the teeth.
That was the cause of her reaching for the bottle. She wanted to forget the hurt, the pain and betrayal, all of it. Past. Present. Future. What future? There wasn’t one, not really. She could keep on writing, creating worlds of make believe where she could escape to, but it was all rubbish, none of it had any value or worth. It was sheer fantasy. And the problem with drinking to forget your problems was that it did nothing to solve them, it only temporarily removed them from view. Once day broke they were still there, waiting to be dealt with only now they had to be faced with a banging hangover for company. It hadn’t helped in Scotland and it would not help now. Why wasn’t there a way to shut them out permanently, a way to make everything go away in the blink of an eye? Catlin played it over in her mind – the demons of her past the encounter with Danny had woken. She had abided by one rule her whole life, to never look back. Until then she had not risked breaking it, knowing the demons were too many in number to be faced down, but after bumping into him she had not only looked but stopped whilst doing so and now they were upon her. There was no breaking free of their clutches.
Catlin lowered her stare so it fell into the ashy shadows of the street below. So near, but would it be far enough? She had read somewhere the minimum number of floors you needed to fall to ensure you weren’t just seriously injured, but the number required escaped recollection. She looked into the emptiness which had grown featureless as her vision blurred with concentration. Her heart raced with a convulsion of mortal terror and excitement, the same feeling she used to get when driving and seeing a bend in the road ahead she would put her foot down on the accelerator rather than easing off. It was only in such situations as those she felt alive. The dread of the thought which had entered her mind was matched in intensity by the relief of an answer to it all having presented itself. No, it wasn’t practical. The window was not high enough. The roof terrace? She began to withdraw b
ack into the room. She wondered. A hollow space at the spot she knew her heart should be spoke to her calmly, as if it had always guessed this moment was inevitable, and its reasoning soon drowned out the quiet voice which came from the back of her mind and argued against her thoughts.
Then she jumped, snapped out of her trance and returned to her apartment lounge. She had felt, or thought she felt, something tap her shoulder, a faint barely noticeable pressure had pulled her out of the demons hold, but their influence was too strong to be so easily dismissed. She glanced about the room and found it to be unchanged. Books still lay stacked in large piles by already over filled bookcases, the desk covered in the papers and pens and computer bits, the furniture, television, everything was there but somehow removed. She could hear the voices summoning to her, so haunting and frightening but irresistible as they called her name. She was like a child deliberately breaking the rules and doing something she knew to absolutely wrong but could not resist the temptation to do it all the same. Led on by these and followed by the demons, Catlin found herself mounting the stairs which led to the roof.
At the fence which ran around the edge of the roof she paused again and took another look down into the waiting and welcoming embrace of the void below and she wondered how much it would hurt. Her death would be pretty quick, she was sure of that, but was smart enough to surmise there was no such thing as an instantaneous death. How much pain might she feel in those last few seconds? Would she regret her choice when it was too late to change her mind? She wavered, her hands shaking uncontrollably as they gripped the fence. No, however it might hurt, the pain would be nothing compared to another thirty odd years of heartaches and disappointments to add to those torments already lived through. As for regret, she’d have more of those if not jumping turned out to be the biggest mistake of her life. She’d never summon the courage to do this again.
Remember Me Page 1
