A Handful of Pebbles

by Sara Alexi

  He blinked.

  Sarah fell on all fours and crawled to be face to face with him.

  ‘Torin?’ she whispered. He blinked again. ‘You’ve torn your favourite t-shirt.’ She glanced briefly at the neckline. There was red moss on the fence post that came through his shoulder. Her trembling hand came up to touch his cheek. His hair was matted to his head with fresh but darkening ketchup. ‘Torin,’ she said as softly as she could; she did not want to chase him away. He gasped and his in-breath rattled. ‘My love,’ she whispered. He mouthed the words in reply. The whites of his eyes widened, his pupils dilated.

  Sarah moved her head so he would look in her eyes. He struggled for another breath, but there was no strength in his fight. He blinked once more, and the light changed.

  ‘Don’t go,’ she whispered. ‘No, please, please don’t go.’ But she knew no one could hear her words and a darkness swept over her, pinning her to the ground, making her unable to move even when two ambulance men tried to lift her. They prised her hands loose of Torin’s t-shirt and lifted her rigidly into an ambulance, where someone tried to make her drink tea. But the world no longer rotated, and her heart beat only because that was what it was programmed to do so she could continue to walk through life even though she would never wake.

  Chapter 20

  Nicolaos sits silently after she stops talking, his beads dropping one onto another. The goats close in around them, but neither of them throw pebbles to move them away.

  ‘So you married Laurence not because you were lazy but because you had given up.’ The shepherd’s words come slowly, reflectively.

  ‘I know,’ Sarah says. There are no tears.

  ‘Have given up.’ He corrects his tense. ‘So inside your head, you say your life was over when he died, so inside your head, you say there is no more happiness or love for you, so inside your head, you make no decisions or choices because you want to play no part.’

  Sarah nods. The amber beads hang from her fingers, swinging with her breathing.

  ‘Because if you live this way, you are never responsible ever again.’ Nicolaos swings and palms his beads.

  Sarah’s amber rosary stops moving.

  ‘That’s it, isn’t it?’ Nicolaos turns his head to face her. ‘You have opted out of making decisions so you will never again be responsible for the consequences.’

  Sarah’s hand, the beads visible between her fingers, cover her stomach. Her face contorts.

  ‘Didn’t you say you never actually made the decision to marry Laurence or something?’ he asks, but Sarah looks away. ‘Who decided to have the children?’ His words bear no mercy. Joss was an accident that she did nothing about, but does that make her so guilty? Even if it was Laurence who suggested they give their son a sibling, had she really resolved to be such a puppet in her life? The dark weight inside twists its sickening knot, pulling at her heart, jerking her forward until she knows, oh God yes, she knows, that she has avoided every decision since the one she made to mouth ‘I love you,’ which killed Torin.

  ‘It was my fault.’ Her utterance is high-pitched and inhuman. The tightness in her stomach grows and strangles her from the inside. One of Nicolaos’s arms wraps around her shoulders, encompassing, strong. He pulls her into his chest and wraps his other arm around her, too. She can hardly breathe, her cheeks are burning, her nose is running, her shoulders shudder as the emotion forces its release, emotions that feel like they are going to engulf her, and she sinks sobbing into Nicolaos’ chest.

  His grip remains firm as her guilt suffocates her and her sobs release the years of suppressed emotion. She had forgotten about the car. For years, the memory had been just her mouthing ‘I love you’ and Torin dead.

  As she continues to sob slowly, the intensity of the guilt she has harboured for years begins to ease. The sadness is still there, but the intense emotions she felt as a teenager begin to fade and they are slowly replaced by emotions that are more appropriate. His death seems real and tragic and sad, but no longer insurmountable. She continues to weep, mourning her loss as these more manageable feelings seep through her. Nicolaos’s arms stay strongly around her until she feels driven to find fresh air and as her head surfaces, his grip releases, his arms fall away.

  ‘Can you imagine Torin growing old, his joints creaking and groaning, his mind fading?’ There is compassion in Nicolaos’s voice.

  Sarah snorts and then sniffs. ‘No, Torin could not have put up with growing old. He would have walked off into the sunset.’ She is thinking of the car, how it stopped but then drove off.

  ‘Which is what he did.’ Nicolaos rubs the flank of a goat that is almost on his knee. He pats its rump and it moves off, but not very far.

  ‘He was only twenty.’

  ‘And he chose to go on a bike and he chose to go very fast, and so he chose the consequence.’

  ‘But if I hadn’t mouthed I love you?’ Sarah searches her pockets for a tissue but finds none and wipes her nose on the back of her hand instead.

  ‘He might have looked at you anyway, or looked at Liz, or gone even faster, or slowed down, or not seen the car.’

  ‘If we had listened to Liz? If I had not encouraged him by riding pillion?’

  ‘He would have gone anyway.’ Nicolaos’ voice is strong, reassuring in its certainty. ‘But you have decided that it was your fault, so you sacrificed yourself to a loveless marriage because even love is deadly. As long as you blame yourself and fail to forgive yourself, you will never move on.’ His beads click but his concentration is on Sarah. ‘I hope you don’t think I am being presumptuous, although, I suspect, you are ready to move on but the weight of the guilt is pulling you to ... well. I don’t know. You tell me where it is pulling you.’

  Sarah is struggling for breath. Her chest is so tight, her eyes are wide open in fear that she may never breathe again.

  ‘Breathe,’ Nicolaos commands as he takes her hand. She spasms and sucks in air. No words can escape her.

  ‘Here’s the thing.’ Nicolaos’ tone takes on a jolly edge. ‘And I know this after my years of struggling in marriage! As we talked about before, it is important to listen to your thoughts, dispute them when they are out of line, and replace them if they are not positive, because our thinking affects our behaviour and our behaviour dictates the feedback the world gives us.’

  With a pause in his talking, the cicadas seem louder than ever. A car changes gear on the road.

  His large hand with the blue beads threaded through his fingers sits on top of hers, which loosely holds the amber set. Blue beads, hand, red beads, hand. But she is still out of control, fighting to stop the tears, gasping for breath. She is glad when Nicolaos continues to talk.

  ‘My self-talk was so destructive, I would sit in my room with my silent television, saying to myself "my life sucks," and that there is no way out and "I am unlovable" and all these statements that are the end of any conversation I could have had with myself. What else but unhappiness could possibly follow?’ He tuts as if he is in wonderment that he survived at all. ‘I realised that if I sunk any lower, I would no longer be able to function. My work would suffer.’ He shakes his head as he says this, as if the idea were incomprehensible. ‘The sadness we like to label as depression, it is a luxury, you know. Poor people cannot afford it. I could not afford it.’ He faces her as he talks, as if he has got to the important part. ‘So when I started to consciously listen to my self-talk, I saw how destructive it was and so I weeded out the negative things that I was saying that were of no possible use to me. I replaced them with positive thinking, sort of repeated mantras that put me in a better place.’ He looks back at the sheep edging closer. ‘The result was that the people around me, the people I worked with, began to respond to me in a different way.’ He chuckles briefly. ‘I even began to have a social life, as colleagues asked me out for drinks and to barbeques until my television became nothing more than an object that collected dust in the corner.’

  Sarah feels weak and exhauste
d. But the tears are subsiding as Nicolaos’ voice rolls over her like comforting balm.

  ‘I am so sorry.’ She flicks her hair back, making a huge effort to compose herself. Pulling her hand from underneath his, she straightens her t-shirt and sits up straight. Nicolaos retracts his arm and runs his beads from hand to hand as she holds her chin high.

  ‘Ach, it is life,’ is all he says.

  ‘Yes, but I have no right to burden you with my life. You have your own.’ Sarah clears her throat.

  ‘Funny, I thought I was talking about my own.’

  Sarah looks through the network of branches above her head, squeezing her eyes almost shut against the sun. ‘I’d better get back and make lunch.’

  They stand and fall in step and walk without words until the olive trees thin out and Sarah is on the track that leads to the road into the village.

  ‘You okay?’

  Sarah nods.

  ‘Any idea what you might do now you have woken up?’

  Sarah shakes her head.

  Nicolaos picks up a small stone and throws it at her feet as if she is a goat getting too close. She sidesteps away so it does not hit her. He is grinning. Sarah scoops up the pebble and puts it in her pocket with the other two. There is a strange lightness to her limbs that fills her with hope, but she does not know what it is hope for, nor why. It seems odd that after recalling such sad memories, she feels a sense of joy.

  ‘Laurence?’ She calls inside the house, but there is no answer. She pours herself a glass of water and takes it outside. ‘Oh, there you are.’ Laurence is sitting by the pool, reading a paper. ‘Where’s Finn?’

  ‘Joss came by, took him into Saros for a coffee. Pru wanted to talk to him apparently.’ His tone is clipped, off-hand.

  ‘Oh God, that could be trouble.’ She sits on the other lounger. It would be nice to tell Laurence what happened with the shepherd.

  ‘You could’ve told me.’ He bites the words.

  Sarah blinks and shakes her head. ‘Sorry?’

  ‘The only way I knew you had gone to Liz’s was because Finn told me.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘Yes, exactly. I would have been sitting here with no idea where you were, worrying. It really is irresponsible of you, Sarah.’

  ‘Well, he did tell you and I am back now, so no harm done.’

  ‘It’s not good enough, Sarah. We have talked about this before.’

  Here it comes. This is usually about the time that the darkness inside becomes heavier. But this time, the heaviness does not come. Instead, there is a tension in her chest that rises to her throat and, uninvited, bursts out of her mouth.

  ‘Well, if you didn’t suffocate me, maybe I would not be so keen to have these moments where you don’t know where I am.’ Sarah slaps her hand over her mouth. She had not expected that.

  ‘Pardon?’ Laurence puts down his newspaper.

  ‘I was just conjecturing.’ She stumbles now. ‘That perhaps, if you weren’t so keen to know, well if I took more time alone ...’ Sarah cannot find the words. She spends hours, days alone when he is on a long-haul flight, she cannot defend herself. Laurence’s mouth shuts into a tight line, his eyebrows lower. His anger comes from pain. You cause this pain. Look what you did to his life. The thought flies rapidly through her mind

  ‘Why do you even want me, Laurence?’ She puts her glass on the teak poolside table and her arms drop, her hands hanging heavily. Laurence has a red face and neck; there is a lobster tan line were his shirt cuts a V onto his chest. Loose-skinned neck, like a plucked chicken. She cautions herself over such gratuitous thoughts but is thankful for them, as they do stop him from appearing scary.

  ‘What?’ His eyes dart left and right, his cheeks push up to his eyes as he grimaces, trying to understand.

  ‘I am serious. Why do you want me to be in your home when you come back from your extended trips?’ There is no anger in her voice, just exhaustion. He shuffles to a more upright sitting pose, his hands crossed over his swimming trunks.

  ‘First, you are my wife, so where else would you be? And secondly, it is our home, not my home, and thirdly, I work hard to bring in enough money to give us the lifestyle we enjoy and none of my "trips," as you belittlingly call them, are extended.’

  ‘Laurence, we don’t talk, we don’t have joint activities we do together, and we haven’t made love for, oh I don’t know how long.’

  He stands. He is less imposing in just a pair of bathing trunks than his usual suit.

  ‘We do talk. We go for a meal every Saturday if I am not working. Look, I don’t know what you have been discussing with Liz, but it does not become you to behave in this way.’ He takes a step towards her. ‘Neville tells me Liz is unhappy about some decision he has made with regards to his family. Well, that may be so, but that is Liz’s problem. I don’t want her life reflecting on ours, am I clear? Do we not have a good life, dinner parties, expensive hotels on our holidays, Michelin star Sunday lunches? We have our sons. We are a family.’

  ‘But why me, Laurence?’

  ‘What do you mean why you? You are my wife, you support me, you stand by me. I come home and you are there to greet me. I don’t know what you mean by "why you."‘

  ‘I mean as opposed to someone else. Someone who really adores you.’ Her heart bangs against her ribcage; she seems to be having trouble swallowing. Someone brave seems to have taken over what is coming out of her mouth, someone who is not scared of the consequences, and it is terrifying.

  His face whitens and his eyes squint against the sun. Poor Laurence. He has never, not once, stopped to ask her how she feels about their lives, about him. All this will be coming out of the blue for him. He deserves better.

  ‘I feel I have only been half a wife to you, a fake. I feel so much guilt, I spend all my time trying to please you. I am so, so sorry.’ She looks at him, feeling such pity.

  He gains some colour and his cheek muscles begin to twitch.

  ‘You are sorry? You are sorry for me? You are so conceited, Sarah.’ His fists clench. ‘How arrogant of you! Did you not think that Neville and I knew your little game when we first met you? Did you really think we were so stupid? Please, how insulting. You were two poor Irish girls on the make and you obviously had planned to bag yourselves some rich husbands. Well, I may not be rich by world standards, but I was richer than anything you had ever seen. It was like sitting ducks.’

  Sarah blinks rapidly. ‘What do you mean "like sitting ducks?"‘ Her words come out stammering in response. Everything has shifted. She is suddenly in a dream remembered, a certainty mixed with surrealism.

  ‘You think you were the only ones with a plan!’ Laurence scoffs.

  Sarah can feel her knees trembling. She staggers towards him, but only so she can sit on the lounger. He moves out of her way.

  ‘I don’t suppose you remember the one question I asked on our first night out.’

  Sarah’s mouth opens and closes, miming the words ‘can you cook.’

  ‘So you do remember, eh? Well, if you had been any smarter you would probably have figured it out. I’m amazed Liz didn’t. Neville had no intension of marrying her at all until his mother fell ill. Liz was the perfect solution to that problem. How could she not know his mother had been declining for six months and needed daily care before the wedding unless she was completely and utterly self-obsessed?’

  It is like hearing that the world is round after believing for years it was flat. Suddenly everything falls into place, suddenly making sense.

  ‘But me, us? You had no sick mother.’ Sarah’s voice has lost all confidence.

  ‘I wanted sons and I didn’t want to return to an empty house. Nor did I want complications. You were opinion-less, undemanding, and easy on the eye.’ It is the ultimate dismissal.

  An empty cavity opens inside Sarah’s chest. She wraps her arms around herself, trying to hold everything in.

  ‘The extended trips, the weekends of golf?’ She squeezes herself tight, prepa
ring for the truth.

  ‘Oh come on, Sarah, what do you think? I am a man and there was no zest of that kind between us.’

  ‘So.’ She hesitates. If she says the next words and the answer is what she thinks it will be, there is no going back. She stands again before she speaks. ‘Have you never felt any love for me?’

  ‘Do you feel love for me?’ Even though the words come out cold, emotionless, she cannot believe he could be so harsh, so unfeeling.

  ‘You mean all these years when I have gone through the motions, trying to behave so as not to hurt you, all this while you have felt nothing?’

  ‘I am not sure what you are expecting me to say. It works, Sarah. We have two great boys who I am immensely proud of. I have a well-maintained home that I come back to, meals on the table, pleasant company, and you have what you wanted: a good income, a beautiful home, and all the clothes and makeup you could desire without having to lift a finger to earn them.’

  Sarah can find nothing to say.

  ‘It works, Sarah, and you will be there when I get back from my trips because I am sure you don’t want to go back to County Clare. And besides,’ he loses his edge; his voice softens and becomes more familiar, ‘it will probably work even better now we are both on the same page.’

  Pushing past him, she heads for the house, the way blurred. She blinks away the tears. The house is too much of a dead end, she must move, keep moving. The gate is left to swing behind her as she runs.

  Chapter 21

  She cannot run to Liz; Liz is in a bad enough state as it is. Nicolaos? A shepherd she met on a hill? No, that’s crazy. She can’t worry Finn, and Joss is too like his father. Besides, he might tell Pru and she would probably delight in her suffering. Who does that leave? No one. She knows no one here.