by Dani Atkins
Still clutching the thick cream-coloured invitation, I raised my head to look at my reflection in the mirror above the mantelpiece. In my eyes I saw the truth; returning to the town was only half the problem. The greatest fear was how I would cope with seeing everyone all together in one place again for the first time in years. Well, almost everyone. A haunted look fell over my face and that seemed appropriate, for I knew it wasn’t a reunion with the living that was going to be so hard to deal with.
I packed my bag mindlessly, not really concerned about what I took. It was only for three days, and then I’d be back in my own flat, able to lose myself once again in the anonymity of a big city. To many, I’m sure, it might sound peculiar but I’d actually come to relish living somewhere where ‘everybody didn’t know your name’. The only items I took more care in packing were my outfit for the hen-night dinner and the deep burgundy velvet dress I had bought to wear for the wedding itself. Thank God Sarah had eventually given in and accepted my refusal to be her bridesmaid.
‘But you have to,’ she had pleaded, and for a second it could have been the old schooldays Sarah, imploring me to become involved in some crackpot scheme or caper she had cooked up. Only this time I had held fast in my refusal. I’d felt bad, of course. But then I’d known what she was going to ask me, even before the words had left her lips.
It wasn’t often that she visited me in London, even though we kept in touch every few weeks by phone. Her job in the north kept her busy and of course her boyfriend Dave – fiancé, I mentally corrected – lived there too and quite rightly occupied most of her free time. I’d suspected what was coming when she had invited herself down for the weekend, and so saying no hadn’t been as difficult as I’d imagined, when I’d had sufficient time to rehearse it.
‘Oh Rachel, please think again,’ she had implored and she’d sounded so crestfallen that I had actually felt myself wavering. ‘There’s no one else in the world I want as a bridesmaid except you, please say you’ll do it.’ And when I’d shaken my head, not quite trusting myself to speak in case she heard the chink of doubt in my resolve, she had inadvertently asked the one question that allowed me to abdicate from the role without her pursuing it further. ‘But why won’t you say yes?’
And it was then that I’d taken the coward’s way out; answering her question by lifting away from my face the heavy swathe of hair I wore in a side parting and revealing the silver forked-lightning scar that ran from my forehead to my cheek. She’d pursed her lips and sighed, and in that moment I knew she had conceded defeat.
‘Ah, so she’s pulling the old disfigured face card again, is she?’ I’d smiled in response. Everyone else I knew pussyfooted around the issue, but Sarah was the only one who had the courage never to dress up her words in anything less transparent than the truth.
‘Well, if that’s what it takes to keep me firmly seated in a back pew and not wearing some frothy pink creation up near the altar, then yes.’
She’d looked at me mulishly for a second, and I thought she was regrouping her argument for another try, but she then appeared to reconsider and backed down, only murmuring in her defeat, ‘I wouldn’t have made you wear pink, you know.’
I’d hugged her then, knowing I’d let her down in a big way and loving her because she had let me do it.
Before closing the case, I reached over to pick up the small brown bottle of pills on the bedside table, intending to add them to my toiletry bag. I frowned when I felt the weight of the container, holding the bottle up to try and count the contents by the weak light filtering through the window from the overcast December day. There were fewer there than I’d thought, barely enough to last for the next few days. That couldn’t be right, could it? I checked the date on the front of the prescription label. It was only ten days old. I knew the headaches had been getting worse but I hadn’t realised I’d gone through this many painkillers so quickly. A cold tremor meandered down my spine. This wasn’t good. And while I could lie to my dad when he asked how I was, and even (stupidly) had tried lying to the doctors when the headaches had first started, I knew that sooner or later I’d have to face up to the truth. This was the warning sign they had told us to be on the alert for all those years ago. This was the reason why every phone call from my dad in the three years since we lived apart would follow the habitual pattern of ‘How are you? No headaches, or anything?’ And I’d been happy to report for the first two and a half years that I’d been fine; but for the last six months I’d been lying and saying I was still fine. Eventually I’d made an appointment to see the specialist I hadn’t had to visit since my early days of recovery from the accident. He’d seemed concerned when I had told him about the headaches and their frequency, and I was concerned because I’d actually played down their severity quite considerably. The pills he’d prescribed were not the answer and he had urged me to make an appointment to go back to hospital for further tests. I’d taken the prescription but not his advice and had put off making the appointment I knew that I could no longer avoid.
And all of this I had kept from my dad. He had enough to worry about with his own health problems. He needed this time to try and get well, without concerning himself over me all over again. He’d done far too much of that already. However bleak the outcome of his consultation with his oncologists were, he always would end by saying, ‘But at least you are all right now, thank God.’ I didn’t have the courage to take that away from him.
I’d sometimes wonder exactly how many mirrors we must have broken, or how many gypsy curses had been hurled our way to account for my family’s unfortunate history. First Mum; then my accident; then Dad’s illness and now these headaches. It made me wonder if there was some family out there who had been blessed with twenty-odd years of good health and luck, because we seemed to have been given their share of dark misfortune as well as our own. And it didn’t matter that Dad said that no one was to blame for his illness, because I knew that he’d only begun smoking again after my accident. It had been his way of coping with the stress. And if he hadn’t been doing that, then he probably wouldn’t be ill now.
So many terrible things were linked to that one awful night. A blinding twist of pain, worse than even the severest of my headaches, stopped my thoughts suddenly in their tracks before they were allowed to venture down that forbidden avenue.
I intended to leave first thing in the morning and had looked up the times for the first train from London. I’d already booked two days off work, for although everyone wasn’t meeting up until the Thursday evening for Sarah’s hen-night dinner, I hadn’t wanted to arrive late in the day. In reality I knew I would need the time to compose myself for the three-day visit and I had no way of knowing just how hard that was going to be until I was actually there.
I had refused Sarah’s offer to stay at her parents’ place. Much as I loved her family, they had always been more exuberant and excitable than my own, and I didn’t think I’d be strong enough to face that particular brand of crazy in the run-up to their only daughter’s wedding. They had seemed to understand and hadn’t appeared offended when I’d declined their offer and had instead booked a room in one of the town’s two hotels. Many of the guests would be doing the same, I imagined, although of course quite a large number probably still lived in the area.
As the train slipped out of the station and began the two-hour journey, I allowed myself to think of the people I would be meeting again that night. My friends from the past. It seemed strange that the bonds I had thought would bind us for ever had not proved as resilient as I had always believed. And it hadn’t been the passing years that had slowly severed the threads apart. No, they had been sheared away by a young man’s moment of insanity and an out-of-control stolen vehicle.
Sarah had been extremely careful and cautious when filling me in on news of our old group of friends. From visits to her parents and through the town grapevine she knew that after uni Trevor had returned to Great Bishopsford and was currently living with his girlfriend
, who Sarah had yet to meet, and was working as a branch manager in a bank. I found it hard to imagine the rock-band guitar-playing Trev of my teenage years in such a sedate and respectable lifestyle.
Phil was apparently still living the life of a nomad. He’d taken a gap year after university which had grown into a second year of basically bumming around the world. This wandering lifestyle had somehow metamorphosed into a job as a freelance photographer, and although his family still lived in the area, Phil apparently spent little time there between assignments, often electing those which sent him abroad for months at a time. Sarah said that when their paths had crossed, she sensed in him a restlessness that seemed to explain his lifestyle and reluctance to settle in any one place.
And then there was Matt… and of course Cathy, for now their histories were inextricably linked. I could tell how hard it had been for Sarah to let me know about them. How carefully she had chosen her words, picking just the right phrase, uncertain of the pain she might be inflicting. It must be just over eighteen months since she had told me that Cathy and my ex-boyfriend were now an item. As the words had settled down the phone lines between us, I had waited for any shard of pain that this news would bring. There was none; merely surprise. And not surprise that those two unbelievably beautiful people were together, just surprise that it had taken Cathy this long to achieve her objective.
I pushed this thought away, as I had when Sarah had first broken the news to me about their relationship. If I allowed myself to think of Matt, then I would be opening the door to our own sad little story and break-up, and that would lead to the reasons… and that would lead me somewhere I never allowed my thoughts to go.
As the clusters of houses and built-up areas gradually gave way to fields and open spaces, I could feel a palpable tension beginning to rise inside me. I swallowed it back down with a mouthful of revolting, bitter coffee bought from the buffet car and tried to focus instead on the purpose of the visit. This was Sarah’s weekend; Sarah’s big day; I couldn’t allow myself to ruin this time for her by having her worry about how I was going to cope with being home again.
That thought pulled me up sharply: home again. Was it really my home, was that how I still thought of it? I hadn’t lived there for five years, so technically no, it was not. But then nowhere else actually felt that it deserved that title either. Dad’s current address in North Devon, where we had moved during the long slow months of my recovery, was his home, not mine, despite the fact that I had lived there for almost two years. I suppose my small London flat was home, but it had always felt temporary and transient, chosen for its closeness to the convenient tube line rather than any emotional attachment to the building. Also, it was hard to form a deep emotional attachment to a rental property over a somewhat dilapidated laundrette in one of London’s less salubrious locations. I should have moved on when I had earned my first salary increase, should certainly have considered it by the next one, but there was a comfort in the known and familiar, however lacking in style it might be. In my more light-hearted moments I would refer to my flat as shabby-chic, but without the chic. That about summed it up.
As the train’s rhythm began to slow, I realised that the two-hour journey had passed much more speedily than I would have liked and when the androgynous voice of the tannoy announced ‘The next stop is Great Bishopsford’, I was alarmed to discover I was no more ready to face my return than I had been any time in the last five years. As the train shuddered to a halt I got to my feet and reached up to retrieve my small overnight bag from the overhead rack.
‘Allow me,’ a man’s voice offered from behind me, and before I could decline, strong leather-clad arms reached up and lifted down the small case. As I looked up to thank the stranger I saw the quickly disguised look of sympathy on his face as he took in the jagged scar that became visible as I raised my head. I smiled briefly in thanks and lowered my head, allowing the thick curtain of hair to cover the worst of my marked face. It was a habit I had developed over time; it was easier to hide the scar than to have to deal with people’s reaction to it. Those who weren’t shocked into silence might be tempted to ask about its origins and I had made a decision many years ago never to speak of it if at all possible. And perhaps that was what was scaring me so badly about being back home. Because how would the old group of friends get through this weekend without speaking of something so cataclysmic that it had altered each of our lives in some way?
I caught a taxi from the station, even though it was only a short walk to the hotel where I would be staying. But the walk would have taken me past our old school, and I wasn’t prepared yet for the memories taking that route might elicit. Inside the leather-seated interior of the cab, I resolutely kept my gaze firmly fixed on my knees and the floor and tried to avoid the inevitable for a little while longer.
The hotel room was clean and impersonal. No memories here as I’d never set foot in the building before, so that was fine. It took all of three minutes to unpack my small bag. I glanced at the bedside radio alarm clock. It was nearly lunchtime and I toyed with the idea of going down to the hotel bar for a sandwich, but at the last moment lost my nerve and phoned down for room service. ‘Baby steps,’ I told myself encouragingly. ‘Just take little baby steps and you’ll be fine.’ My reflection looked back at me doubtfully from the dressing-table mirror. If I couldn’t even convince myself, how on earth was I going to get through the next seventy-two hours?
After I’d eaten, I called Sarah on my mobile to let her know I had arrived. I heard the relief in her voice and was dismayed that she had not been entirely certain I was really going to come. That strengthened my resolve to be strong, if only for her sake.
‘Come over now, I don’t want to wait till tonight to see you.’ Her enthusiasm made me smile, but then Sarah always had. I just hoped Dave realised how lucky he was, getting to spend his entire future with such a special person.
‘Maybe in a little while,’ I promised. ‘And you have me at your disposal all day tomorrow, so we’ll get plenty of time to talk before you become an old married lady.’ She groaned at my words and uttered a very unladylike phrase in response.
‘Actually,’ I continued, ‘I think I’ll take a little walk this afternoon. See if I can face up to some of those old memories after all.’
‘Fancy some company?’ I smiled at her offer. She must have a thousand and one things to do, yet I knew she’d abandon all of them in a heartbeat if I said yes.
‘No, that’s OK,’ I replied, ‘I think I might do this better on my own, and anyway I’m getting a bit of headache.’ I brought my hand up to rub distractedly between my brows, as I realised this last was true. ‘So the fresh air will do me good.’
‘Well, don’t walk so far that you’ll be too exhausted for my hen dinner tonight.’
‘As if I’d be allowed to miss that! Are you doing the L plates and tiara costume bit?’
‘No,’ came the swift response in mock indignation, ‘I told you before, this is no tacky girly shindig. This is a mixed, grown-up and sophisticated dinner with all of my oldest friends, to celebrate my departure from spinsterhood. By the way, you have arranged a stripper for me, haven’t you?’
‘Absolutely,’ I replied, and was still smiling when I hung up the phone.
The air outside was much colder than I had expected, and I was glad of my thick woollen coat and knitted scarf wound tightly about my neck. Without any conscious thought or instruction, my feet found their own rhythm and began to direct me down the twisting side roads which would lead me to my old home. I didn’t intervene. This was the first stop I needed to make and this should be the easy one. No dark memories there, only happy ones from my childhood.
Someone had replaced the old picket fence with something much fancier made out of wrought iron, and the front door was now a garish green colour, but apart from that it all looked the same. There was a comfort in seeing that the house hadn’t been altered too dramatically, although the garden was better kept, I noticed, bu
t then Dad had never been much of a gardener. Also, fancy wooden blinds replaced the more homely curtains that we had preferred, but basically this was still my old home.
As I lingered on the pavement, I allowed a wave of memories to assault me, a kaleidoscope of images spanning the years. Yet still there were no dark shadows here. Up until five years ago this was the only home I had known and it still represented the feelings of safety and sanctuary which had eluded me in any subsequent accommodation. Standing on the pavement, feeling like I still belonged there, yet at the same time knowing strangely that I did not, I felt a dart of nostalgia pierce through me. I realised with a shock that this was the first time I had actually seen the house since the night of the accident.
The decision to move away, the packing up and sale had all been carried out during the long slow months of my hospital stay. Whether it was the right decision or not, who could say? My poor father had been desperate enough to do whatever he could to minimise my pain. Half demented with grief, I had clung to him desperately from my hospital bed and pleaded with him to let us move far away: so move we did.
Suddenly the memories coming at me were cyanide-bitter and I turned from the house and began walking briskly away. My eyes started to water furiously as a bitter icy wind blasted my face; at least I thought it was the wind doing that.
I walked face down against the gusting currents, my stride just short of a run. At the end of the street I stopped and hesitated. I was standing at a crossroads; in a physical as well as a spiritual sense. If it hadn’t been so heartbreakingly sad it would almost have been funny. The headache, which the painkillers had dulled to a persistent throb, now threatened to go into overdrive. I could use it as an excuse not to make my next stop. But I thought I’d been hiding behind excuses for too long now.
