It had been a lifetime since she’d last tucked me in and I found it comforting. I lay there quiet and unmoving, hoping that the stillness would clear my mind so that I could forget and rest. It was a pitiful pretence, for sleep eluded me.
Three
I knew I was awake – and I didn’t want to be. I longed to be wrapped up in the warmth of oblivion. I wanted to undo the day before. I wanted it never to have happened. But I couldn’t. I knew that. Nothing would ever change it.
My childhood bedroom had long since been redecorated. Gone was the cobalt-blue feature wall. It was all floral now, pink and flowery. John had arrived in my mother’s life with his heavy, dated furniture and there had been nowhere else to put it all. So now my old bedroom was dwarfed by its interior. I lay still, only my eyes moving as I glanced around. It was far too busy for my comfort. One wall was framed solid with a built-in cupboard that my father had crafted many years before, the other wall compressed with John’s two free-standing closets, held apart by a matching, and equally oppressive dressing table.
I couldn’t breathe.
It was as though the air that threaded between all the furniture had pressed tight together around me, musty and dark. As though the past was clinging desperately to the ball-and-claw feet, hanging on tight like a sad, fading memory. It was a room that had been allowed to stagnate. It was a room that was no longer used.
I lay still, trying not to move my head, trying not to provoke the pain, trying to keep my mind as static as the air around me so that my thoughts wouldn’t push through. But they did. They swirled and eddied until they won.
How did I get here?
Where had it all gone wrong?
I played it over in my mind. The day before had started out as any ordinary weekend day. It was a Saturday, which meant I had slept in long past sunrise. This was a luxury I permitted myself, given that Monday to Friday I catapulted from my bed and rushed to the studio of the biggest commercial radio station in the country. Each weekday morning at six, as the digital clock blinked its exactness in red numbers on the studio wall, I woke up millions of listeners and brought them the first news bulletin of the day in what I liked to think of as my perky, crisp and articulate manner. But Saturdays were different. Saturdays were leisurely. There was no need to rush anywhere.
My son was with his father for the weekend. The day had been mine.
It was the twenty-fifth day of October 1997 and spring had finally reached its sell-by date. The morning had gone quickly and soon passed into afternoon. I had spent most of my time out on the veranda pretending to read, but the words had washed right over me. I had tried to concentrate but it was difficult, distracted as I was by all that had happened over the preceding weeks. So mostly my book lay neglected beside me. It had been far less demanding to squander time watching a hummingbird play a solitary game of tag between the leaves of the Aloe africana in the far corner of my garden than it had been to try to concentrate, to absorb words on a page. I had sat there watching mindlessly, hypnotised by the mundanity of it frantically flitting from one tubular pendant to another, a magnificent blur of jewelled feathers. The hummingbird, just like me watching it, both of us lost in the aloe’s succulent pride as it nonchalantly flouted the constraints of grass and gridded paving. The aloe, standing tall, boasting orange-red pokers like an aide-mémoire that life must be lived in profusion despite the season.
I had been trying to do that too.
My sister had popped around for a visit. One of those impromptu visits I had come to expect. She’d been by my side the last few weeks, watching me, phoning me, protecting me, even sleeping over occasionally, not wanting to leave me on my own for too long, afraid that something else might happen. We had talked about nothing and everything. We had drunk tea.
It was soon after she left that the ringtone of my phone broke the silence.
It was him.
I had watched it ring a few times before swiping at the green button, standing up as though I was shrugging off my fright, tossing aside my fear, like a coat I needed to escape, not yet used to its weight.
I had listened to him as he explained that he was outside my house, down on the street. The same street that had offered me no refuge a few weeks earlier. The one I had fled down late at night, my jacket hanging torn from my back, as I tried to get away from him. He was out there again.
“Please, I need to talk to you,” he said, his voice low and desperate.
It was the third time he had phoned in the past hour.
“You know we can’t see each other,” I said, as though to remind him.
It had been three weeks since the family court interdict had been implemented. I had secured a restraining order, a piece of paper that prevented him from being anywhere near me or my property. It stated clearly that he was not allowed to threaten me or harm me in any way, nor was he allowed to make any contact.
When the sheriff of the court served the papers on him, he’d laughed.
“Not worth the paper it’s written on,” he’d scoffed.
But he’d left me alone.
Then he phoned.
I ignored it.
He phoned again.
And again.
I broke the restraining order as I answered.
I listened as he gave me the words I so desperately wanted to hear. Needed to hear.
I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to do it.
Then he phoned daily, hourly even. Court records would later show it was fifty-eight times. Always apologising, often coaxing, sometimes shouting and threatening. I had taken his calls then just as I had taken his call the day before.
The first bruises had long faded and although I was still confused by his anger and unpredictability, I had become increasingly lulled by his endless calls of remorse and regret, the flowers, the air tickets and the offers to repair and pay for damages to my property.
His words, his kindness, his generosity, were making me feel whole again.
I didn’t want to believe that I was caught in a vortex of destruction.
I wanted to believe that I was above that, that I was more.
And for this I needed him to explain it all away, to minimise it, so that I could rationalise my horrible hurt. I needed his reassurance of a new beginning, and the certainty of a promised shift in his behaviour. I wanted him to look me in my eyes and ask for my forgiveness so that I could validate my worthiness.
I wanted to understand … and to ask why.
Why?
Why had he done this to me? To us?
Why?
As I had stood quietly on my veranda, listening to his desperation, his brokenness, I wanted his answers.
“Please—” he said. “I need to talk to you.”
As his words tumbled out, I allowed time to stand still. I let it stretch around me as I heard all that I wanted to hear. I was holding my phone tight, as tight as the sun was holding onto the day. I would drop my phone just as the sun would ultimately lose its grip, but for then it hadn’t. It had been so easy to reason my way through it … There was no darkness to shield him … It was light. He was on the other side … in municipal no-man’s land … neutral territory. Surely, I’d be safe. Surely?
I collapsed into that dark, grey, mouldy expanse of wrongness.
“I’ll come out to you,” I’d said. “I’ll be there now.”
Those were my words as I stood tall, back straight, like the aloe in the corner of