Artifact

by Bowes, K T

  Ed laid the paper carefully on Sal’s desk and gave the receptionist a cursory nod, acknowledging that she understood what it was. Then both of them looked at Jayden, transfixed on the doormat, her face a mask of horror.

  “Jayden?” Sal was speaking to her. In fact, she had been saying words for some moments, none of which had penetrated Jayden’s consciousness. Ed let go of the paper and looked towards Jayden with an expression of genuine consternation. Jayden managed to collect herself enough to unlock her office and disappear inside.

  She leaned back against the knotted wood, feeling its solidity underneath her hands and the back of her head. “No, no, no!”

  The gentle knocking vibrated against her body and caused her heart to restart properly. Blood surged through her body like an adrenaline rush and it was not pleasant. “Go away!”

  Jayden moved back from the door and began to undo her coat buttons with shaking hands. Ed turned the handle and entered without an invitation, catching her as she lifted her coat off her shoulders and struggled to release the cast. The sling had been left at home, more a hindrance than a help. Ed’s strong, capable fingers disengaged the edge of the plaster from the cuff of Jayden’s coat. “Nice run this morning?” she asked him bitingly and he nodded slowly.

  “Yes thanks.” He looked confused.

  Jayden turned away from his confirmation and drew in a deep breath as she sought oxygen and energy. To her surprise, Ed adjusted her clients’ chair and plonked his lean, muscular body down in it. Jayden bought herself time, fiddling to put her coat on a coat hanger and slide it into the built-in closet in the corner of the room. “I need to talk to you about a young girl coming in soon. She’s fifteen, goes to another church in the south of the city and her parents called me late yesterday. They need help. She was raped a few weeks ago and they don’t know where to turn...”

  “Victim Support,” Jayden said without feeling, her voice as cold as her chilling heart. “They’ll take her.”

  “She won’t talk to them, but her family know your supervisor and she’s convinced the girl to talk to you.”

  Bloody Rita!

  “No,” Jayden said with force. “No!”

  She was guarded and wooden and the curate displayed infinite patience and consideration towards her, despite the fact that the woman in front of him hissed and spat like a feral cat. “When you said that you’d had a bad experience...”

  “I’m not discussing this with you,” Jayden said spitefully, putting all the misery at his deception into her voice. He had stolen her key and tried to gain entry into her safe place, when all he had to do was knock on the door. Perhaps that was the problem; if he had asked, she would have let him in willingly.

  Ed rose slowly and eyeballed Jayden uncomfortably, causing her pale skin to blush uncontrollably. “She’s called Clara and she’s on her way in with her very distraught parents. This is the first time she has voluntarily left the house and I’m telling you to see her. For the love of God Jayden, we all have to do things we don’t like. You can help this child, so do it!”

  Ed pitied Jayden as she flapped and flailed in her seat, squirming like someone who’d been stung by a jellyfish. He walked decisively round to her side of the desk and pulled her to her feet roughly, ignoring the frenzied resistance. Jayden’s innate reaction was to hit out at him, but her heart overruled it and she found herself crushed into his masculine chest, his deodorant and aftershave filling her nostrils as she took deep breaths. “Everything will be ok,” he whispered, sliding his hands up the side of her neck and into her hair. “It feels right. It has to be you. It will be ok, I promise, I will pray for you. I’ll go to the vestry right now and do that for you and I won’t stop until you’re through.”

  He released her, calm now and kissed the side of her forehead slowly, tenderly as though he meant it. All feeling of betrayal and aggression at his deception over the door key seemed numbed and inconsequential as though Jayden had been put under a spell. “I’ll get Sal to let me know when she’s gone and then I’ll come for you. The whole time that she’s in this room, I will be praying for you. Trust me.”

  He looked back at her as his hand rested momentarily on the door handle. She reminded him of a daisy as she sat in her chair; her forehead leaned desperately on her good hand. She was a picture of dismay; a beautiful flower propped up by a delicate, fragile stem, given only the shortest of hours to bloom and delight. It almost broke his heart. Sal’s knock was tentative and Ed wrested the door open and greeted her with a smile that didn’t reach his eyes.

  The child and her parents sat in the reception area, each a bag of nerves for different reasons, each utterly poleaxed by circumstance.

  “Mr and Mrs Schofield. Clara.” Ed’s voice was pleasant and reassuring as he greeted the little broken family. Sal strode quickly across the room to Jayden, laying the white sheets of paper on the desk in front of her.

  “They signed a contract and the little girl’s filled in the initial counselling form. Ed drove it out to them last night. Shall I send them in?” Sal was concerned at the misery and self-doubt which leaked out of Jayden’s eyes and tried to smile reassuringly at her. “You’ve helped heaps of people in this community. They all love you. You’ll be great.”

  She turned on her heel, her bobbed hair swinging jauntily and her long skirt tinkling against the buckle on her boots. Jayden got shakily to her feet and walked to the door, as though bracing herself for the hangman’s noose. She arrived in the reception area, astounded at what she found there.

  It was the face of the girl’s mother who turned to her first. Grey-faced and gaunt, the unfortunate woman looked as though she hadn’t slept in weeks. She probably hadn’t. Tears threatened at the edges of her soft brown eyes like an overfilled reservoir. It would take the smallest inconsequential piece of minutiae to set the flood in motion, destroying everything in its noisy path. But the father’s face was agony to behold. Grief and Desolation soared around his head, digging their nasty faces into his and screaming, ‘useless’ at him, compounding his feelings of failure for being unable to protect his little girl. The teenager had been violated, but her family were being endlessly tortured.

  Jayden shook hands with them all, Clara included, fleetingly hoping that they didn’t notice the clamminess of her touch. Then they all sat down in the comfortable square of seating that made up the reception area. Ed sat close to Jayden, so close that she could feel his trouser clad leg through her skirt. It instilled comfort into her and something told her that he was already interceding for her.

  “I would like to see Clara for a while by herself,” Jayden began, noticing the sense of relief which crossed the teenager’s delicate features. “We should be finished in about an hour, so if you would like to go to the tea rooms around the other side of the church, or go for a walk...”

  John Schofield rose quickly to his feet. “No,” he said assertively, “we’re all in this together. You need to see us all.”

  Jayden took a deep breath in, but it was Ed who came to her rescue.

  “I agree with Miss Mitchell actually. I think she needs to assess Clara alone. You don’t have to leave the building; the tea rooms are an integral part of the church extension. I could use a coffee so I’ll walk through with you.” Ed stood up and indicated with his hand that they should follow him. Both parents were understandably reluctant, needing to provide a human shield for their precious child against further hurt. Mr Schofield looked as though he would protest again, but Ed’s reassuring face convinced him.

  They both kissed their little girl and promised that they wouldn’t be far away. She smiled, a tight action which appeared more like a grimace. Ed showed them down the corridor which joined the elderly church building to the counselling rooms, turning off before the back entrance to the nave. Jayden was hit with the sudden realisation that he had promised to go into his vestry and pray for her. She knew without a doubt that she needed him to. A single glance back in her direction from his stunning blue
eyes was enough to communicate wordlessly to her, that it didn’t matter where he was. A promise was a promise and he was not a man who broke them often.

  Back in her office, Jayden didn’t sit behind her desk. She pulled the second visitors’ chair up at right angles to Clara’s and grabbed her clipboard, giving the child a moment to adjust to her surroundings while Jayden read the childish scrawl on the initial counselling form. It made sad reading. Clara couldn’t sleep, needing medication to doze at best, hadn’t eaten properly since it had happened, cried uncontrollably without warning and felt as though her body hurt all over, all of the time.

  Jayden bit her lip and smiled at the tiny child adjacent to her. She had beautiful blonde hair which tumbled unkempt down her back. Starvation had made her skinny and her bones showed through at the wrist. It had caused her face to look tight and skeletal, huge brown eyes shining out, now far too big for the tiny visage.

  Jayden opened her mouth to speak, but to her surprise was beaten to it by the girl. “Aunty Rita recommended you. Nobody else in the family knows. Dad rang her yesterday and she said it had to be you. She told him you’d understand.”

  Jayden put her hand over her eyes, shielding her from the child’s hopeful expression. Inwardly she used every awful curse word about Rita that she had ever heard, shoving a few of them God’s way while she was at it. How dare she? Damn Rita! She had no right!

  Peace flooded her soul suddenly, setting her world back upright on its axis and a strange feeling of relief came over her. Be honest. The words came to her as though spoken out loud and Jayden looked up amazed, to meet the searching eyes of the girl staring at her. “Yes Clara,” she replied. “I do know exactly what you’re going through. Perhaps we need to walk out of this mess together. How would you feel about that?”

  Clara sighed as freedom folded her body backwards into the leatherette seat cushions. Her tiny emaciated frame seemed to shudder and sag with its momentary reprieve. “I’d like that very much,” she whispered.

  It wasn’t professional and it certainly wasn’t usual. The training manual or the lecture had no format for a counsellor who held the hand of a suffering child and cried with her, as she described the attack. Jayden felt the searing pain between her own legs again and the crushing of her slender windpipe, crying silently, big, swollen tears plopping onto the seat with a dull thud. Clara’s story didn’t have to be pulled or plied from her, it gushed and burst without release until it was all out in the airwaves, polluting them and healing her. The sons of Death swooped about the room, filled with glee at the recounting of the child’s horror but somehow sensed that their days were numbered.

  “Tell me what happened to you,” Clara begged as Jayden handed her another tissue.

  “Not today,” Jayden said softly. “Today is all about you.” She smiled and the little girl smiled back, the radiant beam of one who has spotted the broken bolt through the keyhole of her prison door and knows that release is imminent.

  “When you think about the situation as a whole,” Jayden asked, “what’s the very worst part of it? What is the one thing that keeps you awake at night, and strips away your hunger?”

  Clara blew her nose noisily and thought for a moment. But her answer was not in the least what Jayden had expected. Surely it should have been the invasive police procedures, checking for AIDS, infection, pregnancy, the rape act itself and the powerlessness of the victim, the indignity, the humiliation, but it was none of these things.

  “It was the look on Dad’s face when he got to the police station,” Clara said, shedding another willing crop of dreadful tears. “He looked destroyed and a voice in my head said, you caused that. That was the very worst part.”

  Jayden tried to halt the enormous intake of breath that threatened to blow her body wide open. It didn’t seem to want to stop coming, in and in and in it came. Fortunately, Clara chose that moment to try and get her nose under control and Jayden’s difficulties were masked by the dribbly sounds of a never-ending-nose-excavation.

  Guilt fluttered in front of Jayden’s face in all its ugliness. It giggled uncontrollably with delight at her suffering and clapped its gnarly hands with glee at the thought of her complete destruction. It would keep both females from everything that was good and pleasing, all the delights that their Maker had designed them for. When they contemplated the marvelousness of their intricate female parts, they would not consider the joy of a loved partner or the birth of their child. For them would be the memory of their abuse, their futile struggles and the pain of violation. Its sickening silent laughter was only halted by the counsellor speaking out its name. “Guilt.”

  Clara looked up, her tissue soggy and pitiful in her long delicate fingers. She looked questioningly at Jayden, whose breath seemed to release like a deflated airbed, slowly, quietly and without fuss. “It’s the guilt that is the worst,” Jayden qualified. “We were Daddy’s little girls and wanted him to see the best in us. There’s a shadow that crosses their eyes when they see what’s happened and have to face what we’ve become. It’s like the going out of a light. I agree.” She looked across at Clara’s red-rimmed eyes. “It is the worst part of all.”

  Clara’s face broke into a watery smile. She had pretty teeth, straight and attractive. She was a beautiful teenager and was going to be a stunning young woman. Jayden knew that the journey ahead would not be by the book. It would be unchartered, dangerous and beset by hazards at present unseen. But they would do it together. Jayden turned further in her seat, her clipboard and her notes forgotten, but the need to impart this one piece of wisdom into the girl, uppermost in her mind.

  “You were not responsible for what someone else chose to do to you, so do not take responsibility for any of the consequences either. You are not responsible for your father’s disappointment, or his anguish or his grief. Those belong to him and he will deal with them. Let them go and you’ll find your burden lighter. I release you.”

  “Thank you,” Clara smiled.

  Both women mopped themselves up and Jayden finished the session. She asked Clara to do some homework before their next meeting. The teenager had to find ten things about herself that hadn’t changed despite the attack. She could still be pretty, have nice hair and be good at maths. The rapist had already taken enough from her. Jayden would prevent him from stealing anymore.

  As Clara reached up to hug Jayden before she had fully grasped the door handle, Guilt let out a roar of fury and disappeared in a puff of smoke. Clara squeezed Jayden tight, but it was not the kind of contact that screamed of life rafts or gripping on to a solid object for dear life. It was to offer, as much as to receive, comfort, understanding and solidarity. Jayden held her in return and forgave herself for allowing this client to cause her to step outside her professional walls and knew inwardly that it would be all right.

  Outside in reception, Clara’s parents waited anxiously for their child to return. They expected the wasted husk who had gone in but were gratified by the teenager who emerged. Jayden shook their hands again and took the opportunity of an empty room, but for Sal, to suggest kindly that they each made appointments to see Campion. “I’d quite like to see you,” Clara’s mother said, with a hint of rejection in her voice. Jayden caught the look of dismay on the girl’s face and shook her head kindly.

  “I think that it would confuse my care of Clara,” Jayden said. “It would be better for all of you to see separate people. You can go together or alone, it’s entirely up to you. But Cam is the best, I can assure you.”

  They nodded resignedly and went over to make appointments with Sal, clearly at the ‘try anything’ stage of their crisis. Clara looked at her counsellor with a wan smile on her fragile face and to Jayden’s surprise, winked. “That’s what Aunty Rita said about you,” she whispered, and followed her parents over to Sal’s desk to book her own follow-up session in three days’ time.

  Chapter 21

  Jayden felt drained. After she had waved the family goodbye, she went back to her of
fice and slumped into her chair behind the big wooden desk. She suddenly seemed to have so much to process.

  Her father’s smiling face wafted across her inner vision, his full head of greying hair, often stuffed underneath a woolly hat as he went off to check his herd of prized sheep. Hannah had knitted a new hat every year and they were often misshapen, strange creations. Dan had pulled them on and pretended that he loved them, just to please her, no matter how weird they looked. Hannah still knitted them, only now, she no longer knew why. May took them down to a local homeless shelter and other men wore the wonky, pom-pommed affairs.

  Jayden had spent seventeen years of her life in no doubt that he adored her; she was his little girl and never a day had gone by without him telling her how beautiful she was or how precious. He had been a good Christian man, who loved his wife and two children. They had been the perfect family.

  His face as he had burst into the dingy squat in Bradford had been a mixture of anger and horror. His revered son had been slumped in a corner of the downstairs room, drooling as a needle dangled precariously from a vein in his bare foot. The heroin was contaminated enough to cause him instant health problems, but not to wipe him entirely off the face of the cursed carpet on which he had appeared to be little more than a wasted mound of clothing. Alerted to his child’s muffled screams of pain, Dan’s feet had led him instantly to the filthy upstairs room.

  Jayden ran her hand over her eyes, smudging the remainder of her makeup as she squeezed the bridge of her nose to prevent further tears leaking out. Her father’s face had been aghast with shock. It was as though he had held his breath in abject horror, not quite understanding at first what he was seeing. Wes had Jayden’s throat in his hand, pressing down mercilessly in his excitement. His other hand gripped a steel switchblade, already open and stained with blood. Her school skirt had been up around her waist and her face a blank, staring mask of fear. It had been a paralysing sight for a father. A school skirt was a childish, carefree thing, a pleated, tartan representative of girlishness. It didn’t belong there in that place. It should have been no part of that act. But then nor should his beautiful daughter.