Chapter 2
I
Two weeks had passed since the phone call and Ariadne was beginning to convince herself that it was all a hoax. Perhaps she was on the receiving end of a big practical joke. Ariadne didn’t want to be a victim of a big cruel prank. She didn’t want to get her hopes high only to be shattered by a phenomenal realization of her crude reality. She was all alone in this cruel world. The idea of France, the imagined intellectual superiority of the people, their assumed geniality had kept the innocence intact in Ariadne. France was more than just a place to her, it was an incorruptible idea of her childhood innocence. She was paranoid of someone playing on her vulnerability. She had to work hard to achieve everything she ever wanted. The idea of gaining a dream without effort aroused her suspicions. She was a cynic to not believe that a pumpkin could turn into a royal chariot. The whole affair had to be a hoax! There were no reasonable explanations for the occurrence of this strange event. The logistics made no sense at all. Ariadne’s skepticism of humanity helped her survive in this godless world. Perhaps that is what she needed to do. She was doing well without the offered sum of money and the big house in France. She could not simply accept this gift from the world of the dead. She had not even earned the gift. Life had taught her well that unearned gifts were usually the harbingers of trouble and there were seldom any exceptions to the rule. There would be many other big houses and several opportunities to walk freely on a shaded boulevard or laugh with casual mirth at a vineyard. All of it could wait. Ariadne needed to take care of her business and go on to become a self-made woman, a woman of substance. With these firm resolutions, the telephonic conversation was conveniently forgotten and no further attempts were made to revisit the fragmented pieces of a childhood for a grandmother who only recently died. Ariadne lived her life in circles and completed her daily chores effortlessly. She was a successful owner of a chain of spas and an accomplished woman of quality. She concluded two weeks of uneventful hard work with a joint and a hot bath.
The joint and the calming caresses of the lukewarm water took Ariadne back to the hall of scattered reminiscences of days gone by. She sifted through the complex layers of her past, gleaned every bit of disjointed memory she could find to make a concrete whole grandmother live in the crevices of her memory. She tried her best only to draw a blank. She could not recollect any hint of a grandmother anywhere. Could it be because her mother never told her? Perhaps because her mother never got the chance to tell her about the rest of the family she had. Those smoke-riddled wet hours in the pool unhinged Ariadne. She wondered how different her life would have been had her mother been alive. She would not have been sent away to live in a tattered orphanage and life would be stable. She would not have met her hatters. Ariadne tried hard to think of an alternative lifestyle for herself. She tried hard to imagine a school life where she could hang around with a girl gang of her own. She arduously attempted to think about what course her life would take if she had not dropped out of school. Just a little less of drugs and alcohol, and her life would have been a different story. She drifted off to the tipsy tunes of maudlin blues playing beside the pool. The harsh monotony of the doorbell brought Ariadne back to consciousness. She dressed hastily and went for the door, muttering imprecations under her breath. She did not like to be disturbed during her time in the pool. She disliked meeting anyone beyond business hours. But what she simply could not tolerate was someone interrupting the buzz in her head when she was high. On the other side of the door stood a man in an official black suit, with an expression of perpetual pompousness on his face. His hair was greased and combed neatly. The man at the doorway meant business. Before Ariadne could say anything, the man introduced himself.
“I am Kenneth Myers from Cliff & Richardson. This meeting is in reference to the last will and testament of Mrs. Lucy Arabella Silver. May I come in?”
Ariadne could not believe what was happening in front of her. The next hour and half transpired without any conscious contribution from Ariadne Silver as the legal representative from Cliff & Richardson clarified to Ariadne, the extent of the privileges extended to her by her dead grandmother’s will. She had to visit her grandmother’s house and correspond with the probate officer to seal the final transfer of ownership. Her grandmother was indeed real. She lived in France and had left her a lot of money and property. These thoughts were nothing short of outrageous and Ariadne could not help but feel bemused by her condition. Ariadne did not hear half of the jargon the legal representative was hurling at her. In her head, she was falling down the rabbit hole, into the Wonderland. The Wonderland seemed alright but something about it felt very wrong. She was about to realize her biggest fantasy at the cost of death of what could have been a start to a new family. Ariadne’s deep rooted resentment of her mother started surfacing. She could never forgive her mother for not letting her know about a grandmother in France. Would not she have had a better life without the orphanage, prostitution and gradual descent into poverty-stricken madness?
Ariadne took time to recover from the shock the lawyer gave her, in the morning. Once she was over the initial shock, she came to terms with her resentment for her dead mother. She packed her bags carefully, took only the bare essentials and organized her official documents in one single file. Ariadne wanted to make sure she would not be taken for a ride. She was a woman of experience and was aware of the skullduggery that went on in Western world. For all she knew, this could easily be a scam to rob her of her money. Ariadne would never be on the receiving end of a game; life had taught her better than that. She wanted to make sure everything would go according to plan. She would not look at the splendor of the Parisian markets until she got the promised money safely transferred to her account. Then again, if she did not think of the legal hassles and the morbid discovery of a dead family member, it all made Ariadne very happy. She would go to Paris, shop at the stores and eat outside a café. Ariadne would finally get to walk on those shady boulevards and drop nameless poems on the graves of dead poets. Ariadne wanted to live the French stereotype. She could almost smell the vineyards and taste the ecstatic sweetness of French red wine. Ariadne was completely undone by her dream. She made sure her trip to France would be a safe one. Her task was simple. She had to take the copy of the will the lawyer handed over to her and produce it at the office of the probate officer in Paris to claim her inheritance. From Paris to Salers, Ariadne would soon have a home in France. Somehow she could not believe her luck. Although she missed out on the Mad Hatter, the weird Wonderland had given her a lot of wonderful surprises. The fairy tale took off for Paris within two days of the lawyer’s visit.
II
Mrs. Lucy Arabella was born Lucy Arabella, the only child of Ariadne Arabella and Louis Dolan. Lucy Arabella was a fiercely independent woman for her time and always advocated liberation of the body. She earned her livelihood posing as a nude model for art classes and by freelancing with a counter culture magazine. Lucy Arabella studied in Sorbonne and grew up worshipping the avant garde poetry of Baudelaire, Gautier and Rimbaud. She suffered from philosophical detachment and held on to decadence for survival. Lucy Arabella met Ferdinand Silver in her baccalaureate days at Sorbonne and knew they were destined to die in each other’s isolation. They started living together and tied the knot when Lucy realized she was pregnant with Ariadne’s mother. The primary reason of conflict between Ariadne’s mother Sue and her grandmother Lucy was Lucy’s proclivity for a detached lifestyle. Sue got to know that Arabella wanted to go for an abortion and was forced to raise her as their child. An unplanned child coupled with an alcoholic husband made Arabella’s life miserable and unbearable. Ferdinand had lost his job and took to a life of drinking and gambling. With no money to buy food and greater debts incurred by gambling, he was forced to take his own life one fateful night. That was the most poignantly horrific sight Lucy Arabella Silver ever saw on waking up in the morning. She woke up to find her husband dead in his sleep, on his bed. Her creamy peach bed sheet
sparkled with the dead man’s blood. He had slit his wrist and slept for once last time beside his mon amor. Sue was only ten years old when her father had died and somehow she always held her mother responsible for her father’s death. Sue and Lucy had a bitter fight over the next couple of months till one fine morning; Sue woke up to find the house empty. She found a note in the kitchen that informed her that her mother had left Sue forever. She never cried, never spoke about her mother ever again. Right after her she got to know that her mother had gone away, Sue gathered herself together and went about her daily chores without thinking twice about her mother. Somehow, the cruel twist of fate had left such a deep wound in Sue’s mind that she got traumatized out of her wits. She did not quite understand how she felt. She felt hurt and mistreated. She was too young to understand her mother’s side of things. Perhaps Sue was not supposed to understand how her mother felt. She was just a child who needed to be taken care of. The intricacies of the adult life were not hers to understand. She was not even supposed to be a collateral damage in the rat race that the parents competed in. She was only supposed to grow up safely in her parents’ embrace till she could take care of herself. But the sins of the parents always visit upon the children and they suffer the worst, without a fault of their own. Whatever it was, she had lost all hope in humanity and had turned into a great misanthrope. Sue hated every form of human interaction and gradually started exhibiting symptoms of a confirmed sociopath. She did not understand her problem and did not know where to go. She felt unloved and ignored and learned to stiffen her jaws. She did not find anyone willing to sit with her for a few moments and try to understand her. There was no one around who would want to take this damaged little girl and show her that not all hope was lost. Nobody seemed to have the time apply the balm of care to her wounds. She was left absolutely alone and unwanted. Sue gradually took to drugs to keep her calm and soon fell victim to substance abuse. She was addicted to coke and heroin and was borderline alcoholic. Sue’s reckless lifestyle and a lack of productive endeavor soon landed her in a strip joint. Sue started working for the joint every night and gradually settled down to a moderate lifestyle. She met Kenny at the strip joint and they hooked up one night after having a lot to drink. Kenneth and Sue Silver were not entirely dissimilar from Ferdinand and Lucy. While Ferdinand and Lucy were the victims of an intellectual philosophy of detachment, Kenneth and Sue were instinctively emotionally detached. They did not know, rather refused to understand, nuances of social behavior, concepts of relationships or love. These were concepts that did not make any sense to either of them. They lived in the moment, enjoying their intoxication and the recklessness of their lives. They were born free and there was a constant war in their minds. Ariadne was a product of a family where matrimony was a cursed institution.
III
Sue and Kenneth started off well as a couple. They were not your regular run-o’-the-mill couple. Sue and Kenneth Silver were peculiarly similar. They knew each other perfectly and understood what they wanted. Sue’s loss had cut a deep mark n Kenneth’s heart. Kenny met Sue at the strip joint and immediately fell in love. He was a rich handsome American lad, out with his friends on the evening his girlfriend broke up with him. His friends took him to a strip joint and made him drink his grief tipsy. In a drunken state, Kenny remembered an oddly charming woman pole dancing a few yards away from him. He was immediately besotted by her looks and forgot his girlfriend within a minute. Kenny’s friends arranged for a little close dancing during which he had asked Sue out on a date, a real date and not a professional meeting. Sue obviously did not take him seriously and gave him her professional smile. She had been asked out on ‘dates’ all her life. She had mostly managed to answer them with a smile, specially learnt for the purpose. It neither meant a yes nor a no. But it gave her admirers hope and they continued to tip her and ask her out for special ‘dates’. Sue was swept off the floor when, the next day after her shift, she saw Kenny waiting for her at the parking lot. He was sober and convinced her that he really meant it when he asked her out. Sue had no other option but to say yes. That was the happiest Sue had ever felt in her life. She was finally beginning to appreciate life a little bit more since her mother bailed out on her. Kenny and Sue shared some of the best times together and really managed to get out of their grimy and bleak existences. They were doing fine till the recession hit and Kenny lost his job. They repeated the treachery of their predecessors and refused to learn anything from their example. Kenny took to massive drinking like Ferdinand and Sue became a slut. In order to keep herself going, she stuffed herself with crack till she finally overdosed on a batch of extra pure crack. She was holding on to Ariadne and asking for her forgiveness. Sue lay on the floor and asked for her mum. She helplessly called out for her mother and died five minutes after. If only little Ariadne could see the whirlpool of grief in her mother at the final moments, she would perhaps not have resented her for dying on her. As Sue felt life ebbing away from her, she realized that she had been a terrible mother to Ariadne, perhaps more terrible than Arabella. Her little daughter had never known a moment’s worth of love. Ferdinand was a good father to Sue till he took to drinking, but Kenneth barely cared. She fought hard to somehow survive. She promised herself to be a better mother to Ariadne if she survived. During the last few moments of her disappointing life, all Sue wanted was to survive. She did not want to leave her daughter. She knew only too well the tornado that would ravage her daughter’s life if she died. But her body, already too weakened by constant drug use, could not survive. Ariadne would never forget that face. She spent an entire night with her mother’s dead body, foaming at the mouth and contorting in rigor mortis. She would never forget the horror of that particular night. She sat motionless and still in front of her mother’s dead body. Ariadne tried to scream but her voice could not be heard. Fear and utter loathing stifled her voice and she sat in unaccountable mental agony for hours at an end. Every time she heard the door creak, she expected her father to enter the room and help her cry. The night changed into morning and the neighbors buried the body without much hue and cry. Ariadne did not move or stir. She sat still and waited for her father to return. Her father did not come back. Perhaps he was dead; perhaps he had no idea that his daughter had just spent her night with her mother’s dead body. Ariadne did not know what went wrong with her father but she took a resolve to not take society very seriously. She would never believe another man again and would only associate with men for purposes of survival. They were not to be trusted. She felt men were weak and any association with them would only weaken her. Ariadne was constantly disappointed by her father. He had returned after a day, heavily drunk and with a black eye. He did not seem to notice that her mother was not at home. Little Ariadne could never figure out if he knew that his wife was dead and that his daughter had spent a sleepless night with her corpse and a day alone after the shock. Ariadne grew up in foster homes and orphanages. She started off in a Catholic foster home where the foster father tried to rape her in her sleep. She ran out of that place and turned herself away from God. Ariadne turned into an atheist. The only divinity that she believed in was financial stability.
IV
Escaping a foster home is not a cakewalk. With a rapist on the loose, Ariadne had to be very careful. The only way she could escape that hell hole was by killing the rapist. The night seemed opportune. Ariadne had been waiting for an opportunity to strike back. Her foster mother was not at home for the night. The brute was alone in the bedroom. She had to wait patiently for him to be in deep slumber. She was not a woman who would settle for a charity home where her supposed protector would get to rape her whenever he felt like. The worst part of the entire situation was, the man molested her in the name of God. She heard the brute snoring. Ariadne wondered how he slept so peacefully after everything he did. The idea of criminals like him masquerading as saints disillusioned her. She had to kill him just on the basis of principle, if not anything else. Ariadne tiptoed her way into
the kitchen downstairs and stole the knife from the fruit bowl. With the knife in her hands, Ariadne lost no time and in a rush she entered her foster father’s room and stabbed him 12 times in the chest. It was a messy affair. The first hit had awaked him and he had tried hard to defend himself. Ariadne had to slash his wrists to limit his movement. She had to stab him another eleven times before he stopped breathing. She was covered in blood. Ariadne disposed of the knife and left her father to rot on the bloodstained carpet. She could not venture out in her bloodied clothes. She took a deep breath and washed herself. She took her bloody clothes and put them in a plastic bag. Ariadne ran out of the house and ran as fast as she could till she finally came to the highway having disposed off the bag in a dumpster on her way. There she hitchhiked her way out of criminal proceedings with the help of a pimp. She had to sell her body to keep it out of prison. Once her picaresque journey started in the whore house, life took a different turn and Ariadne turned into a woman of vision. Joseph was her first boyfriend. He was a pimp and an excellent peddler, the best in New York. Joseph swam in money and booze and was a favorite at parties and among women. He found Ariadne on the highway, drenched in sweat and pouting in despair and sleeping on a two dollar blanket. She was too afraid to say anything. She was still in shock. The only thing that Ariadne wanted at that point of time was safety. The need to kill the brute, who had attempted to violate her, drove her with unimaginable confidence to finish him as brutally as possible. But now that the deed was done, reality struck her hard. She realized the magnitude of what she had done. Fear gripped the girl. She was ready to pay any price for her safety. Her defenseless honesty turned Joseph on. He struck a deal with her. She had to give him a blow job to get to a safer location. Once they landed themselves in a quieter and safer place, Joseph sealed his deal with Ariadne and became her personal protector. Days rolled by and Ariadne’s business flourished. She had the virgin appeal. Every man wanted to be with her or at least share her with someone preferable. Ariadne and Joseph recognized their partners in one another and started living together. They were doing fine till Joseph started getting personal about his girlfriend’s profession. He lost himself to madness and ultimately asked Ariadne to quit her job and run with him to some other place. Ariadne knew better. She knew what she had to do and she did the right thing. Joseph and Ariadne broke up on a very ugly note. A lot of bones were broken and a lot of personal remarks were made. Ariadne’s heart was broken again and she swore never to turn to a man again. Ariadne quit Joseph’s circle and became a successful escort girl, lithe and professional- one to die for. Since her first break up, Ariadne had been to therapy and to church. She tried to restore her faith in God but failed when confessing her sins didn’t make her feel better. She was only advised to return to the path of God. But for a high school dropout with a history of abuse, God’s ways did not really satisfy the raging fire of hunger in the stomach or the flames of ambition. She tried talking to a professional and realized that some things can’t be expressed. Escorts did not have the luxury of other individuals who survived in the mainstream society. They could not tell everything without compromising their stance. Their pains were inevitable and they were expected to deal with it themselves. Sometimes the pain and the agony are so acute that conventional reactions are numbed out and what remains is a solid block of passive understanding. Ariadne always understood her situation and never questioned fate. She had learnt to live her life in isolation because nothing hurts more than shattered expectations. She lived the life of a hermit, separated from the soul of the society but connected to the flesh. She literally counted her days on Earth because she was tired of living. Suicide seemed too grand and superfluous an idea. It also seemed cowardly and exhausting. She had mulled over the idea and found that it was risky too. In case she did not die and her attempt failed, it would create a lot of problems and she would be asked a lot of questions. She did not like answering questions pertaining to her personal life. The only thing that could be achieved through suicide was closure. Ariadne was in no need for a closure. She needed to wait for the day when she would cease to exist. Each day that Ariadne breathed was cursed and filthy. She was cursed by the overwhelming misery of her family. Every woman in her family seemed to be fighting a ghost of misery unsuccessfully. Ariadne did not want to end up like her mother. She battled a constant fear of not turning into her mother. The more miserable she felt with time, the more she feared she was turning into her mother. She was determined to not end up like Sue in a pool of vomit writhing to stay alive. She slept hungry nights and lived in disease and decrepitude. There was money in her account and her shoe box, but she did not have an appetite. Her blood works were normal but she cried every moment she was alone. She was the picture of grace and sophistication when she went about her job, but inside she was a broken individual trying hard to gather up the pieces. It took a long time for Ariadne to save her money for a spa. She had to face far too much at a far too tender an age. Ariadne Silver would go off to sleep every night, humming a lullaby to herself. She kept herself warm with the palms of her soiled hands and drank water whenever she felt hungry. Ariadne Silver lulled herself to sleep at the end of the long hard day. In her dreams she soared over the valley of the hyacinths and ruled the Mad Tea Party. In her dreams she was truly Alice, slipping down the eternal rabbit hole, living an upside down life. Ariadne ‘Alice’ Silver was safe in her dreams.
The Love I Lost (Ariadne Silver Romance Mystery #2) Page 8
