Story.
This is my English Extension Two Story. It is MINE. My blood, sweat and tears went into this piece of work. So please read it, and review if you can...
It’s a hot day. Summer. About three, maybe four, in the afternoon. The street stinks of exhaust fumes, sweat, sun screen, perfumes, deodorants and the stale air-conditioning smell which sticks to the office workers’ clothes. Overhead the sky is a merciless blue, the sun a harsh light, sending blinding glare off the concrete of the footpath and off the windows of the office blocks above.
Why here?
The street is full of teenagers, revelling in their first day of freedom. School is over for the year. Look at the girl. Look closer. She is young, as we count it. Sixteen. Seventeen at a push. Average height. She is fair haired, with paler blond streaks. Fake, obviously. You can see the roots growing out. She is wearing the unofficial summer uniform of Australia’s youth. Short denim skirt. Thongs. You can see the top of her swimmers above her pink T-shirt.
Why her?
The girl steps out onto the road. She has looked. Nothing is coming. The car roars around the corner. Speeding. It is red, but that is irrelevant. Licence plate YDM 458, but that, too, is irrelevant. The driver hits the brakes. It doesn’t matter, because the girl is too close to the corner. And we know, from the studies of our physicists, and their development of mathematical expressions to categorise life, that if we can substitute the right values into the equation F=(mv-mu)/t we can know with what force the car will hit her.
But any other person could tell you without the need for numbers, and equations which explain, after all, what? Any other person could tell you when, when not if, the car hits her, it will kill her.
She is going to die, at sixteen, here on this hot, crowded, smelly street, before the eyes of 223 people.
It’s almost inevitable.
Except.
This moment in time has been chosen for something different. And as the scream of the tyres and the more human sounds of shock rise to cover all other noise, as the stench of burning rubber overwhelms all other smells, the electrons surrounding every atom cease their frenetic movement.
Everything stops.
And in the abrupt silence, which is, after all, not deafening, a rather odd event occurs.
In the midst of the stillness, another girl moves. She is just a bit older than the girl who is, for this moment out of time, a living statue about to be hit by an equally still car. This girl has, if not beauty, then at least the sort of face and body her male peers would label “hot”; but there is something in her attitude which means people do not notice her, a sort of bruised emptiness, and she tells herself she is quite happy with this state of affairs. Whether or not this statement is true is hard to say, because we now know that truth itself is a lie - at least through its own inherent uncertainty.
Her name is Amanda, and while this may not be relevant, it is convenient, giving us something to call her, as she will feature quite heavily in our story, being one of the two main characters.
Amanda walks over to the younger girl (if you bear with me, her name will soon be revealed - have patience). She reaches out, and sees she is being watched by the only other alert face in this place, the only other unaffected by the sudden artificial stasis of the street.
The other steps forward. He is, of course, male. His appearance is not particularly noteworthy. Not ugly, but just another anonymous teenage youth. There is safety in anonymity, which teenagers have realised. So this boy, through sheer (though unconscious) force of will, now looks like almost every other westernized 16-18 year old Caucasian male. His convenient label is Steve. He has never met Amanda before today.
“We save her, right?” The confidence in Amanda’s voice makes a lie of the question.
“No.”
Amanda is not expecting this answer. You can see it in the way her face trembles, pales, eyes widening slightly.
“But…” She has already started to step towards the girl, but suddenly, checks her movement, “Why not?”
Steve, looking at her, folds his arms - a defensive gesture, any professional shrink would tell you that.
“Why should we?” And Amanda, normally so logical (or so she likes to think) takes a step back, flinching at his tone, momentarily bewildered.
“It’s not our problem.” Steve emphasises ‘our’, realises what he has just said, “It’s not my problem” and this second is spoken uneasily.
Amanda rallies; a motor neuron in her brain firing, her illusory equilibrium re- established.
“We can’t choose to let her die!” emphatically stated, emotional.
Steve smiles coldly, cynically, bitterly: “We don’t have to. She will anyway.”
Seemingly for the first time, Amanda notices the street. She makes a frustrated noise, and a wild gesticulation.
“Why would this have happened if we weren’t supposed to do something?” She takes a step forward, her voice stained with anger. “We should save her.”
And, shockingly, Steve laughs. Not all laughter is blithe and happy. Amanda can feel herself shiver at the poison in his - the bitterness.
“Wake up,” he says, “You’re making an assumption. Why would this have happened...” he mimics her voice, mocking her passionate plea. “We don’t KNOW.” He takes a step forward, and Amanda retreats, suddenly scared. But he doesn’t touch her, just throws back his head and shouts, “Why did this happen? Does anyone know?”
He doesn’t expect an answer.
He doesn’t want one. He shouldn’t have asked.
There are certain narrative conventions, which although clichéd cannot be ignored. One of these is the convention which states that if a character asks a question s/he does not want answered it invariably will be. But of course, Steve is not aware that he is a fictional character; he is therefore unaware this convention applies to him and so asks anyway.
And because the next character introduced has a half decent sense of timing, they choose the shouted question as an entry line. To call this character a person could be misleading. A personification, yes, person, no.
It (and it is It not he, nor she) is androgynous, sexless. Face perfectly symmetrical, pale, unlined, and far too cruel to be called beautiful. (Although beauty has its own cruelty, this is not it.) The apparition is dressed in the same robes muses and mentors have worn since time immemorial - from Delphi’s oracle to Obi-wan Kenobi.
Amanda and Steve take a step back. They are of course, surprised to see a figure so suddenly materialise before them, but compared to the far larger shock of time stopping, this is a relatively small happening.
“I am Anguish,” the figure says without preamble. And the voice is terrible.
“Who?”
“Anguish.” Repeats the figure calmly. It points to Steve. “Think of this as an experiment in human volition. You must decide whether or not to save her.”
“But…”
“Yes?”
“We don’t usually get time to think.”
“This is an experiment,” says Anguish. “It is not a REAL situation, it is totally constructed. Her name is Cate, if it makes your choice easier.”
Both humans look aghast. Naming something gives it worth. It makes the choice harder. Anguish knows this, of course.
“Do we get to see consequences?” Steve asks. “Because if we are being given time to think, we have to consider consequences.”
“Certainly,” says Anguish, “although, I feel I must warn you, if you choose to see the future, you will not remember it beyond this moment.”
“Show me my future if we DON’T save her,” he says, glaring at Amanda.
Anguish smiles.
~
He looks at his hands. He’s never really looked at them before, and now may be a bad time to start. Because his hands are wrecked. Over the last two days, twenty years of calluses have blistered, popped and been rubbed raw. The edges of his palms are bleeding, his knuckles are cracked, and his fingernails have been chipped back to the quick.
He thinks it’s fair to say that in the past two days he’s worked harder than he ever has before in his life. They’re still going, him in his place in the little production line, holding the sacks as they’re filled, tying them off then hoisting them to the next man. The rough hessian cuts into his already tender hands, but it’s better than shovel duty.
And slowly the sandbags build up the wall around their refuge. They’ve been doing this for the past forty- eight hours, and he’s only slept for about twelve of those. But it’s nearly over. The flood should peak within the next day.
It’s not raining anymore, so the sun’s come out. Which means it’s bloody hot, and - strangely for out here -muggy as hell. They’re all caked in red mud and everything smells of dirt and damp and rot.
It’s hard work. Physically hard, that is. It’s an endless grind of muscle and sweat. The bags are heavy when full. But at the same time, there’s a rhythm to it. It’s repetitive and strangely calming. Steve finds himself slipping into a reverie…
…“I’m not doing this anymore.” He was sitting in the Union café, and he meant what he’d said. He was quitting.
“Dammit Steve! Why?”
“Because it’s stupid! I hate it.”
Ash’d started talking, trying to convince him to stay. He tried to pay attention, really he did, but then he noticed the woman. He saw her hair first, long, almost silverblond, and then she turned, and he saw her face.
She was beautiful.
She was hideous.
A gutjerk reaction, as her appearance shattered every preconception he’d ever had about beauty.
Because the left half of the woman’s face was covered with a port wine birthmark. The skin was lumpy and red and ugly. The rest of her could have been designed by Botticelli. She’d seen him staring, given him a cocky grin and winked with her right eye.
“God, Steve.” Ash’s voice was disgusted now, and he realised she had seen the exchange, “you are a wanker.”
And Ash walked away…
…It’s Steve’s turn to rest. He and five of the others are curled in improvised beds on the lounge room floor. They’re all stuffed, but Steve can’t sleep.
If he’s worked harder in the past two days than he ever has before, he also thinks it’s fair to say he’s thought more. First time in near two decades, actually, that he’s allowed himself to think of his past, of his family.
Where had the past eighteen years gone? Where had his life gone? He was thirty- six years old and his entire world was a backpack of patched clothing and a jar of shiny rocks…
…“You did what?” His father only ever sounded that calm when he was incredibly angry.
“I quit Uni.”
And the yelling had started. In the end he’d stormed into his room and packed a bag. He’d meant to go stay with his uncle for a few days, but somehow, once he’d started driving in the rusty old station wagon he’d bought only two weeks before, he couldn’t stop.
He drove west. West and west and west and west. For hours, days, weeks. In a bit less than a month, he’d fetched up in a shanty town called Diamond…
…And suddenly Steve is being woken to take his share of the night shift. He groans, and stumbles into the kitchen for coffee with the rest of his ‘team’.
Outside, they move to the western edge of their fort. Steve is on top of the wall this time, packing the bags down. It’s quieter at night. No one speaks.
Up on the wall, the view is good. Except for the house, all he can see is water. Water stretches out to the horizon. It is brackish, stained red from sand and clay, but it’s flat and still and smooth.
Hard to believe that a week ago, this was dry paddocks of dead grass, the occasional patch of green. One week ago, they were stuck in the longest, driest drought the country had ever seen. He wonders how Alice’s family coped. So many didn’t. They left the land, got hard… mean… bitter.
It broke some of them. They hadn’t been able to settle anywhere. They’d drifted. Floated around this red dusty landscape. Forgotten home and comfort, lost some of the trappings of humanity. Like him…
…Diamond wasn’t a proper town. Officially, it didn’t exist. Unofficially, it was a cluster of caravans and tents and rusty cars, with people selling home brew out of barrels and food off the backs of trucks.
It sat amongst dirt and swill and muck, the land around it puckered with claims and small mines. Steve won a claim in a game of darts, and even though he’d been only passing through, he’d kept it. He might make some money after all. It’d only be temporary.
After three years, word had reached him through a new arrival that Steve Gardens was listed as a missing person. He’d sent his family a letter saying he was fine and asking them to please piss off. He thought he’d been in Diamond too long, so he decided to leave. Maybe next week, after he got things settled.
But next week became the next, then the next, and the days seemed to disappear, time swallowed by the claims. And as his hands got rougher, more calloused, he cared less and less. Until one day he woke up to find he had been in Diamond longer than anyone, and fifteen years had just disappeared.
And then the mines had closed, and the town dissolved...
…Steve blinks as a glare on the water alerts him of dawn. The light throws the world into sharp relief, and he notices a solid muddy smear above the water line on the sandbags below.
“It’s going down!” He doesn’t think he’s spoken that loudly, but he must have, because suddenly everyone is spilling out of the house, hoisting themselves onto the wall. A cheer goes up. It’s true; the water’s receding. Now they’ll just have to wait until it goes down, and keep an eye out for leaks.
Now it’s just waiting…
…When the town dissolved, Steve did what he’d done eighteen years ago. He got into his car, and started to drive. He stayed in the dry country, not daring to head east. East was a life he was still trying to forget. He lived strictly in the present.
He’d been driving for three days when one of his tyres popped. The long stretch of road was empty, but Steve had been stubbornly independent for eighteen years, and knew he could cope. Changing a tyre was easy.
He didn’t even see the snake, which had been sunning itself on the road, until he’d stepped onto it. And then there was a sharp pain below his knee, and his leg was on fire, and he’d yelled and grabbed the jack and swung at the bastard, smashing it, crushing it.
It was only when it lay dead on the road that Steve realised how much trouble he was in. He couldn’t drive on the flat, couldn’t change the tyre like this. He used rags from the glove box as a makeshift bandage, then sat down, outside, waiting to die.
He’d barely been there five minutes when he heard the car.
Not daring to believe, he’d flagged it down, and it had stopped. He was saved. The driver, a dusty looking woman, helped him bandage his leg, then drove him thirty miles to the nearest doctor…
…At breakfast, the food disappears quickly. After, everyone wanders outside. Now that the constant pace of work is done they’re all feeling a bit claustrophobic. Steve finds himself a seat and starts bandaging his hands…
…“Alice Lambert.” She had said, finally introducing herself.
“You saved my life.”
The doctor, after telling him how lucky he was, went on to explain that while he could leave, he’d have to take it easy for a while, two weeks recuperating.
Alice volunteered her place.
“You do the Good Samaritan often?” He’d asked, in the car, bumping along the road.
“Just being a decent human being,” she’d said.
And he’d stayed with her for two weeks…
… Floodwaters recede much more slowly than they rise. Eventually, the power will come back on, the phone will be reconnected. They’ll start dismantling the wall, start the mop up. But they can’t leave, not yet…
… The rain started the day before he was due to leave. The skies just opened. Next morning they heard the road had been washed out. There was going to be a flood.
A helicopter was coming to evacuate anyone who would go. Alice and her husband decided to stay. Save the house, if they could. They told Steve he should go, get out while he could. It wasn’t his house. It wasn’t his problem.
Steve agreed, which is why he was as surprised as anyone when he stayed.
“I’ll help.”
“You do the Good Samaritan often?” Alice had asked.
“Just being a decent human being.”…
…The floodwaters recede. Steve’s leaving. He has two phone calls to make before he goes. The first is to directory assistance. The second is harder.
It rings seven times before it is answered, and Steve takes a deep breath.
“Amanda? Hello.”
~
“That can’t be real. It’s not fair!” Steve cries before realising what he has said.
Anguish smiles, “It usually isn’t.” It looks at Amanda, “And you?”
The girl glares at Steve, “Show me mine, when we do the right thing.”
“As you wish.”
~
It’s funny how life works. Really odd. Random chance can change the shape of your future. If she hadn’t turned down that street, if she’d been standing two metres to the left, or to the right… For whatever reason, she’d ended up in exactly the right place. Cate had been about to be hit by a car. Amanda had saved her.
So had Steve, of course.
She barely noticed that, because she, Amanda, had saved someone’s life. For one brief, tiny incandescent moment, she’d held someone’s life in her hands. For that moment she’d had complete control over someone’s fate.
She’d loved it.
Part of her whispered, more…
But how to get more?
This was a riddle it didn’t take long to answer. She enrolled in a course in social work, and joined a Shelter as a volunteer. They assigned her a mentor, of course. Started her slow. Still, by the time she’d finished her studies, she knew the streets. Knew them intimately, and knew the ragged scraps of humanity who dwelt there.
They came in three groups. There were the Fallen Angels whose lives had gone wrong; they were born to this, or couldn’t help it. They did what they had to in order to survive. They had a made one mistake and were trapped. Then there were the Sinners, the wilful addicts, the thieves, the sluts, the dealers. The people who’d chosen this, who could change, but wouldn’t. The third group were the Prophets, broken people who drank Metho, and claimed that every day was Armageddon. Perhaps for them it was.
You couldn’t help the Prophets, save to give them a bed and a decent feed, but both Fallen Angels and Sinners could be saved. More satisfying to save the Sinners, but rewarding to help the Fallen Angels, too.
After five years she was the Shelter’s Golden Girl. She hadn’t failed yet. Not one of her cases had died. She’d held their lives in her hands, and saved them. For enthralling hours, days, weeks, she’d controlled their lives.
And she loved it, needed it, wanted it, always, more…
No one, least of all Amanda, realised she was just as much an addict as the people who spent every last cent pushing heroin into their veins. No one, least of all Amanda, suspected that her addiction could be just as destructive. No one realised that the more she worked, the more she needed to work, one more case, one more save, one more rush, just one more.
She had worked so hard the rest of her life disappeared. She’d had no distractions from her life at the Shelter. People whispered about her in awed voices. They used words like ‘altruistic’ and ‘dedicated’.
Altruism was dead to Amanda. She was dedicated only to herself.
Is saving lives a virtue when you do it for a hit?
***
When Eva quit, she was replaced as nominal boss by Gabe. Gabe was a rare thing, a believer, who meant the mouthed platitudes of the social worker, who could say he only wanted to help with absolute sincerity. Gabe, who was thin, his body eaten by a cruel illness, kept at bay through a daily cocktail of pills.
Eva’s case files were distributed between the other workers. Amanda only received one.
Leah and Rachel.
An off- again- on- again user, and her six- year old daughter. Leah, who was coping just enough to prevent Welfare taking the child. It wasn’t a case which required a lot of work. Most of the time, Leah was fine. Periodically, however, (maybe once in two years, maybe less), she’d go on a binge and get kicked out of wherever she was renting.
Usually, when that happened, she ended up at the shelter overnight, then went to her sister’s. Amanda met her once of course, (Leah, not the sister). Just to introduce herself, say she was taking over from Eva. She added, like she usually did, that she was always ready to listen. Leah was, Amanda decided, a Fallen Angel. She tried, but she just kept falling.
It was two months later when Amanda got to work to find that Leah had showed up at the Shelter just before midnight and been turned away. She was furious. She should have been called. She read the case file, listed all Leah’s usual haunts, and set out to find her. Leah hadn’t been gone long enough to warrant police involvement, and anyway, Amanda was chasing another save, another rush, one more hit.
When control is your drug of choice, and you work with the unpredictable, you set yourself up for disaster.
Leah was in the third place she looked. She was lying on her side, vomit down her front and pooling around her face. Her eyes were open. There was a tourniquet around her upper arm, a syringe still protruding from her vein. Rachel was sitting beside her, holding her hand, telling her to wake up. The six year old hadn’t realised her mother was dead.
She shoved her phone into the girl’s hand, told her to call an ambulance, to tell them the address and to say her mummy had had an OD.
And when she was sure the girl knew what to do, and was gone, Amanda walked over to Leah, (still warm), rolled on her back, wiped vomit from her face, cleared her mouth, and started CPR.
She knew it was pointless, but she was beyond feeling. Numb. Dispassionate. Mechanical.
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15
breathe… breathe…
The ambulance arrived after eight minutes, and took Leah away.
Amanda went back to the Shelter, with Rachel. Filled in the requisite forms, called the child’s aunt.
She’d seen death before, of course, at the Shelter, but it was never one of hers, she’d never failed before. Her control had shattered. Her illusory equilibrium - shattered. She was aching and numb and bitterly, bitterly empty.
Rachel’s aunt arrived.
Amanda stared.
Apart from the pale yellow eyes they shared, Rachel and this woman had nothing in common. Rachel was cute. This woman was beautiful. Her hair was long, pale blond, her skin almost translucent. But the entire left side of her face was covered in a horrible ruby red stain. If Amanda hadn’t been so carefully numb, the
contrast would have shocked her.
She went home, only the third time in five years she’d left work sick. She walked in the door, and started to shake. It hadn’t gone right. This wasn’t supposed to happen. She was shivering, nearly hyperventilating.
She wanted to cry.
She hadn’t since she was ten, had vowed not to, ever again. And now when she needed to, she couldn’t.
It was an inevitable progression for Amanda to kneel in front of the toilet and stick her fingers down her throat.
Control.
Ah, sweet release.
This was a much more efficient way to get the rush.
It was her secret for a long, long time. Until its frequency increased and she started losing weight, plummeting through thin and skinny and skeletal until she looked like one of the people she was supposed to be helping.
But she was fine. She was in control.
One day she fainted.
Gabe caught her, took her home. Bullied her into eating, and watched her for a long time. He told her to let it go, let it out. Cry.
But Amanda couldn’t cry.
Gabe left, and Amanda ran to usual spot in front of the toilet bowl. When she’d finished she felt better and worse then before. Gabe returned, handed her a notepad and a packet of pens. Told her if she wouldn’t talk, she could write. The stationery sat on the table between them. Shakily, she picked up a pen, and scratched words onto the paper.
Then she lost control. Completely.
Willingly.
The writing consumed her.
She wrote and wrote and wrote and wrote.
When food was put beside her, she ate.
The words took away her compulsion to vomit.
Her weight went up.
She got healthier.
She wrote and wrote and wrote and wrote, until the words stopped.
She felt raw.
She felt like all her emotional plugs had been ripped out of her with pliers and no anaesthetic. She didn’t
feel numb though, just quiet, and calm. Better than she had for ages.
She sat and started to edit her words, carefully rebuilding her control over herself.
She hadn’t lost her addiction, just found a new way to express it.
When she feels the need to scream and purge, she lets all go of control and writes. When the fit stops, she edits and rebuilds herself.
After a year, she sent her first manuscript to a publisher. They sent her back a contract and a request for more.
***
It was simple, really. Working in a bookshop wasn’t glamorous, but it payed the rent. The royalties she earned allowed for a bit of fun. The books received decent reviews. Not excellent, but decent. Occasionally someone recognised her as the person who wrote them.
Occasionally, but not often.
It was a quiet life.
And Amanda loved it.
~
“But…” Amanda sounds confused, “we get rewarded for saving her?”
“Who said that?” asks Anguish, looking quite delighted by her despair.
“Show me if we don’t save her then!”
~
Minus 9 months
She wakes up tangled in sweaty bedclothes, a dull feeling of nausea settling over her. Not regret exactly, but a bitter sense of self betrayal. She managed last night, to pretend that this was absolution. To pretend that they were shaping a meaning for themselves. That life was something other than watching Cate disappear under the wheels of a car when they could have - hadn’t - saved her.
In the soft light of morning, her virginity replaced by a dull ache between her thighs, she forces herself to face the truth. For her this was grasping at straws, sex to find meaning. For Steve it was convenient. She rises from the bed, dresses and sneaks from the room.
And two weeks later, when a line appears in the plastic window of a plastic stick, she laughs and cries until tears and breath are gone.
***
Minus 6 months
She’s finally given up. Left. Her mother’s sharp words and sharper silences have cut too deep this time. She’s tired and heartsick and three months pregnant with a child Steve doesn’t want.
That conversation didn’t go the way she’d planned. Her blurted confession sat bloated between them, souring the air. Then he’d given her money to ‘fix it.’ And she’d screamed, because she was keeping it. It was hers. Her atonement. He’d flung the money at her. Told her to go.
So here she is. Outside her cousin’s ex-boyfriend’s flat, hoping he is home. Hoping he will answer. Just as she reaches up to knock again, the door opens.
-Manda?
-Micky, hi… she trails off, not sure what to say, how to ask. Suddenly coming here seems so pathetically school- girl, so stupid.
-Well, come in.
Amanda walks in, hunching slightly, flinching away from the unasked questions in the air. The flat is saturated with them. It’s suddenly hard to breathe.
-I can’t… I just… I had to leave. Oh God. A wave of dizziness, ill timed. She presses a hand into her belly.
Micky looks at her.
-Sit.
Grateful she sinks into a chair while Micky disappears into the kitchen. She can hear him making tea.
Micky returns, and places the tea in front of her. She curls her hands around the cup, ignoring the scalding heat. It hurts. It feels good.
-You’re pregnant aren’t you?
Grateful, Amanda sips her tea. He knows. So she doesn’t have to say it after all. Her silence is answer enough.
Micky looks at her and smiles.
-You’ll have to pay rent you know.
That easy after all.
***
0 months Birth
They ask her if she’s sure about this. She’s checked into hospital, contractions have started. What can she do now to stop it?
But deep down, somewhere, inside, she knows they’re right. Keeping the baby to atone for not saving Cate is the wrong reason to keep it. But she let someone die. The child is her payment.
She thinks about this until the world dissolves and it is only pain and burning and pain and she’s tearing apart and in the gasps where she can think the nurses are asking does she want an epi… an epi…no she doesn’t the pain is hers, her payment, but it is ripping and tearing and maybe she’s dying in one last push - it hurts… and then it is over.
A girl.
***
2 months Smiling
Amanda Rederth, Uni Student. The title still seems surreal, like something from someone else’s story. But she’s enrolled, she’s going. Two month old Lily has a place in the crèche. Micky pulled some strings.
In three years, if all goes well, she will be Amanda Rederth BA, with a major in English Literature. She feels happy and light and free for the first time in ages as she places Lily in the cot at the crèche. The child smiles up at her. Her first.
And Amanda almost skips to her first class.
***
6 months Sitting
The only light in the apartment comes from the flickering computer screen, which is almost ready to give up the ghost. Amanda leans back, stretching and reflexively takes a gulp of coffee, grimacing to find it cold.
She’s struggling, and towards what she can’t say. Sighing, she looks at the words on the screen.
… the essence of the post-structuralists’ argument revolves around symbols. They argue that since words are symbols and symbols have different meanings depending on who views them, the meaning of words will change, and this change will be dependent not on the author, as was believed by the Leavisites, but on the responder. This shift from writerly to readerly texts led to Barthes’ most famous statement: that the author is dead…
God she hates this course. The whole thing feels like self- important bullshit. She’s always thought that postmodern academics sounded like wankers and now she seems to be becoming one herself. If she ever meets the fool who decided Postmodernism was part of English Literature, she’s going to stick something sharp in a Very Painful Place.
She casts a spare look at the child in the corner, and freezes. Lily is straining, face reddened in effort - and as Amanda watches in stunned silence, she sits. By herself.
And just like that, Amanda knows what to say. Lily sat for sitting’s sake. The point of postmodernism is that there is no point. Well. It might not be right, but it sounds good.
***
7 months Teething
August is cold and Amanda is so bloody tired. Lily has been grizzling, hasn’t been sleeping. Crèche is complaining that the child cries and Amanda has nobloodymoney anymore.
She cries in the night when Lily is asleep. Wipes away the tears with cold-numb fingers. She can’t afford a heater. She wants to give up.
The only thing stopping her is the jagged edge of a slowly emerging pride she didn’t realise was buried in her. But this pride is cutting through the softer parts of her personality like the teeth erupting from
Lily’s gums.
***
13 months First Word
Amanda, in her second year of Uni, feels a little stronger, a touch more confident. Sitting in her first class and noticing how many have dropped out, her confidence rises yet further. She hasn’t quit.
She lets the lecturer’s words waft past her. Something about the postmodern condition in contemporary society… and then realises he has just asked for an example - and he’s looking right at her!
Instead of lowering her eyes the way she usually does, she blurts, wildly, the first thing that crosses her mind.
- Baudrillard’s Simulacra in creation of celebrities.
And straight away, she knows she has said the wrong thing. Knows it in the way the lecturer hesitates before replying. Knows it in the sideways glances her classmates are giving her. She feels her face heat up.
At home, later, she is still blushing at the memory, when Micky dashes in, clutching Lily.
- Manda! She spoke.
- What did she say?
- She… and Mickey’s voice is sombre now… -she called me dad.
And Amanda laughs, bitterly, a sour sound which spills into the air. Looks like they both got it wrong today. Better not to speak at all.
***
21 months The Silent Child
Lily has stopped speaking. Overnight, she just… stopped. On the first day, Amanda didn’t really notice. She had exams, after all. On the second day, she started to worry. On the third day, her first exam, she sat there and the words wouldn’t come.
After, she went home, picked Lily up and walked to the doctor. He told her it was normal. Amanda knew better. And how bitter, after two weeks of exams in which her pen scratched across the paper leaving barely anything at all, how bitter to be proved right.
***
24 months Wonder
It has been three months since Lily spoke. Three months since she made any sound at all. She’s two now, a toddler. She toddles along beside Amanda, clutching at her leg with one pudgy hand.
Because she doesn’t speak, Lily observes, and points, and waits for Amanda to explain. She’s embarrassed Amanda before like that, and no doubt will do it again.
Only weeks ago, Amanda had experienced a moment of absolute panic, when Lily had momentarily vanished.
Only to be found not two seconds later, having followed the most beautiful woman Amanda had ever seen. Bar none. Very few people are so beautiful you cannot feel jealous of them. This woman was.
Then she turned to fully face Amanda, and Lily’s mother couldn’t stop a gasp escaping her lips. The entire left side of the woman’s face was a deep plum red. The skin raised and puckered.
And, yet, strangely, what should have been grotesque was not. The woman’s choice to keep her Mark in defiance of modern medicine gave her a sort of savage beauty. Humanised her. She wore the port- wine stain as a sort of half mask that revealed far more than it hid.
The disappearance had precipitated an epiphany of sorts in Amanda. Lily was more than atonement for Cate’s death.
Lily was (is) HERS.
***
32 Months Words
Her final thesis, 10,000 words is due in 2 months, and she hasn’t started it. Doesn’t know what to write. The umbrella topic is “Applications of Postmodernism to the Real” and words have failed her.
Lily is sitting at her feet, making her pink hippopotamus repeatedly crush a fire engine. And Amanda sits at her desk, staring at a blank page.
-Mum.
Amanda drops her pen.
-Mum.
Lily is pointing to her.
-Mum.
Lily has spoken.
-Yes, Lil
-Mum. Then she points to herself.-Lily.
And Amanda begins to scratch words onto her page.
***
34 months The Child Speaks
“Applications of Postmodern to the Real”
Postmodern Constructions in Contemporary Political Systems.
Amanda is sitting at a desk, words flowing from brain to pen to page. Something’s changed. She understands. She can do it. Even after two days of steady work, that realisation makes her giddy.
But as Lily sits at her feet, chattering steadily, she thinks maybe it shouldn’t.
She’s found her voice.
They both have.
~
“That’s not right!” Amanda sounds hysterical. “My life sucks either way!”
Anguish shrugs. “That is not my concern.”
“Then there’s no right choice!”
“Exactly.”
They both look at It.
“But then,” says Steve, looking confused. “What’s the point?”
“There isn’t one,” says Anguish, sounding quite bored. “You humans, always wanting ‘points’, always crying for ‘meaning’, always looking for ‘purpose’. Well none of that exists. The world is. Enjoy it.”
Steve is shaking. “Show me mine, then. If we do save her.”
~
The play is called Poisoned Apple an ominous title for something which promises to be ‘a meditation of life, love and marriage’. It is his and Cate’s anniversary, and his boss gave him the tickets. He tried to palm them off, but Cate decided she wanted to go.
He has a bad feeling about this: bad enough to pierce the apathy that surrounds him these days, what with work, a restless six month old and a two year old who still rises at five am.
Turns out he’s good at business. He’s worked hard to get where he is, youngest Senior Partner in the firm, money rolling in. He has a wife, two kids and a big house on the beach, just outside the city. He should be happy; he supposes he is, underneath the apathy. Tells himself it’s only normal for someone working sixteen hour days, with two young kids, to feel numb.
Sometimes he almost believes it.
Looking for a place to park he’s glad he remembered to congratulate Cate on how she looked. She, at least, seems happy, hosting cocktail parties and lunches, arguing with the young girl who looks after the kids, God… what’s her name? And he can tell this life suits her. This is what she wants, what everyone wants.
His bad feeling intensifies as he and Cate walk into the theatre and are taken to their seats. He is hit by a flood of nausea and as the lights go down, one thought hits him…
This isn’t going to end well.
And as the lights go up on stage, every person in the theatre gasps. Because the woman on stage is the single most confronting figure any of them have ever seen. She is dressed simply, in black, and this only serves to highlight her pale beauty. Her skin is translucent, hair almost white blonde. Her lips are softly pink. Every line of her face is perfect.
Which makes the puckered red skin disfiguring the left side of her face all the more confronting. And yet something in her expression defies them to pity her. She bears what should be tragic with a fierce pride.
And that is why so many recoiled, of course.
The woman lights a cigarette and takes a drag. She begins to speak.
“My marriage was, of course, a marriage of convenience. All marriages are. Anyone who says otherwise is lying, because love itself is a lie.”
The woman on the stage takes a drag, and points her cigarette at the audience. For one uneasy moment Steve imagines it is pointed at him, but then she moves it.
“I can see a few of you don’t agree with me. How have I arrived at this conclusion, you wonder.”
She gestures with the hand holding the smoke. It is a grand curling gesture, arrogant and impatient; leaving a drifting grey spiral behind it.
“It is quite simply a matter of logic. We do live in the age of consumerism, do we not? The hard part is realising that love is just another generic brand name. Once you’ve realised that, the rest is easier. But if love is a brand name, what is the product? That, too, is easy - love is just a pretty package and the product it is trying to sell is sex.”
The woman has been pacing animatedly, but on this last word, she sits on the lone chair, downstage.
“Love has become just another way for the squeamish to justify something WHICH DOES NOT NEED JUSTIFICATION! Sex doesn’t need pretty disguises - it is the very point of our existence.”
There is a startled, indignant noise from the man in the third row, and the woman points her cigarette at him.
“No? Well it is - reproduction. The whole point of human existence is to create more humans, just like the whole point of equine existence is to create more horses.”
She smiles somewhat sardonically.
“A rather bleak world view, perhaps, but at least it removes all those awkward questions like who am I?”
At this point the man in the third row stands up and walks out.
The woman on the stage smiles triumphantly and mimics another drag.
“I hate the way this society tries to sugar- coat life, and pretend it’s a fairytale.
“It’s not. In fact, the only part of any fairytale that shows any semblance to real life is Snow White’s poisoned apple. Life is a poisoned apple, so innocent looking, glossy and red. Fresh smelling, it sits like a cool weight in your hand. So you take a bite and it’s good. Crisp and tart and sweet all at once. And then your stomach cramps and burns, and your heart clenches - and you realise you’re screwed, you’re dying. That’s life. A poisoned fucking apple.”
The woman pauses, and Steve risks a look at Cate. Her face is pale with anger, but he himself is feeling a sick swelling in his stomach.
“But I’m getting off the topic. I apologise. My marriage was, of course, a marriage of convenience…”
Steve lets the woman’s words wash over him, and at the end of the performance, when the crowd doesn’t know whether to cheer or hiss, he lets Cate lead him back to the car. He nods, and makes soothing noises as Cate rants, reading the numb expression on his face as a similar sense of outrage, when all he feels is a stunned sense of recognition and a nauseating certainty that the woman’s words are true.
“Am I too late?” He has rushed into Maternity, ridiculously, holding a bunch of roses. He is assured he is not.
Cate is still capable of talking.
“I got promoted!”
She’s glad. Loves him…
*
The play has shaken him. He’s afraid to admit it, but it has. Was it true? Has he been living a lie for the past eleven years? Is sex ALL? Surely not. This has to be real.
*
He’s sitting in Bali with his one- year- old son, and his pregnant wife. He desires nothing. He ignores the shadows flickering. Time off is hard to get. He’s going to enjoy this holiday.
*
“I’m ringing about The Poisoned Apple? Yes can you tell me who…”
He slams down the phone as Cate wanders in, holding the baby. Better not to worry her.
*
Even seven months pregnant, Cate can host a party. He’s just been promoted. Everyone’s here. Life’s good. He loves his wife. Nothing can spoil this.
*
His wife is superficial. He’s never noticed before. But she is. She’s so shallow. Is he? All she cares about is the trivial. The minutiae. But that play can’t be right, can it?
*
Cate has been sick. He’s worried. She’s never sick. The reason comes out in a rush.
“I’m pregnant.”
He lets out a wild whoop, picks her up, and spins her around. He cannot stop smiling. He’s never been happier.
*
“Can you tell me who did The Poisoned Apple? Right, thanks.”
He hangs up just as Cate comes in.
“Who was that?”
He doesn’t answer.
She makes a rude noise and walks out.
*
“I found it!” Cate sounds giddy.
“Found what?”
“You’ll see.”
And she blindfolds him, takes him for a drive, stops and tells him to take off the blindfold. It’s a house. She’s right. It’s perfect.
*
They’ve never fought like this before. Not with Cate hysterical and throwing crockery. Not with him defensive and edgy and unsure. He’s still tossing up whether or not to ask about the play.
*
His palms are sweating. Everyone always says the tie feels like a noose, but he’s not feeling it. His palms are sweaty though. Then Cate is walking down the aisle and she’s never looked so beautiful.
*
He sees her in the street. She’s hard to miss. He accosts her. Asks her.
“Was it true? The Poisoned Apple?”
She stares at him.
“It’s from a book,” she says, “Whispers.”
*
He brings flowers with the good news. He has a job. A good, respectable, well- paying job. They can marry. They can afford it. She flings her arms around his neck.
*
He loses his nerve for a while. Doesn’t want to know. Avoids Cate, who barely speaks to him anyway. Works late. Sneaks into a bookshop, finds Whispers, and laughs to see Amanda’s name on the cover.
*
He loves her. He didn’t think it was possible, but he does. He loves her. So at the restaurant, he bends on one knee.
“Marry me?”
“Yes!” And she’s squealing.
Happiness, bliss.
*
He rings Amanda’s mother. Asks for Amanda’s number. He rings from a payphone. Can’t risk it from home. This is crazy. This is stupid. He has a good life. He’s giving it up on a whim.
*
A tangle of bed sheets. Noises which are only appealing while doing this. Six months seeing each other, and only just coming to this. They fit so well together. And it’s good.
*
They fight again. No crockery flung this time. Just words.
“You’re never around!”
And questions.
“Are you having an affair?”
Steve stares at the woman who maybe he loved, if love ever existed. Then he walks out.
*
First date. They go for coffee. They talk, they get on well. He likes her, she likes him. They exchange numbers.
*
Amanda answers on his third call. He hasn’t spoken to her since they saved Cate together.
“Poisoned Apple,” he says, “is it true?”
“They’re only true if you make them,” she says. “When I wrote them, I was depressed.”
The phone clicks. He’s out of money.
*
“Steve!” He’s late to the party and can hear Ash calling him. “Steve!”
Ash is talking to a first year, a girl who looks familiar.
“This is Cate,” she says.
“I know you,” says Cate, “you saved my life!”
*
He packs his bags. He knows what to do.
Cate is standing by the front door, her face a mask.
“Goodbye,” he says. “You can keep the house.”
And he turns, and walks into the sunset. The glare is terrible. He squints.
~
Steve sinks to his knees.
“You can’t do this to us! You can’t make us make this choice.”
“I can,” says Anguish. “I must. It is what I was created to do. You must choose. Does Cate live or die?”
Steve and Amanda huddle together. They talk in whispers, I cannot hear what they say, so neither can you.
They are my characters, yes, but even my control goes only so far. In the end, they make their own choice, as do we all.
“You will not remember this,” says Anguish. “When you choose, you will think it was a spontaneous choice, not considered.”
Steve and Amanda look at Anguish.
“What is your answer?” It asks, at last showing some interest.
And they choose.
There are supposed to be different fonts, but I don't know if it worked. I need to learn formatting.
ETA: It worked! Hooray.
It’s a hot day. Summer. About three, maybe four, in the afternoon. The street stinks of exhaust fumes, sweat, sun screen, perfumes, deodorants and the stale air-conditioning smell which sticks to the office workers’ clothes. Overhead the sky is a merciless blue, the sun a harsh light, sending blinding glare off the concrete of the footpath and off the windows of the office blocks above.
Why here?
The street is full of teenagers, revelling in their first day of freedom. School is over for the year. Look at the girl. Look closer. She is young, as we count it. Sixteen. Seventeen at a push. Average height. She is fair haired, with paler blond streaks. Fake, obviously. You can see the roots growing out. She is wearing the unofficial summer uniform of Australia’s youth. Short denim skirt. Thongs. You can see the top of her swimmers above her pink T-shirt.
Why her?
The girl steps out onto the road. She has looked. Nothing is coming. The car roars around the corner. Speeding. It is red, but that is irrelevant. Licence plate YDM 458, but that, too, is irrelevant. The driver hits the brakes. It doesn’t matter, because the girl is too close to the corner. And we know, from the studies of our physicists, and their development of mathematical expressions to categorise life, that if we can substitute the right values into the equation F=(mv-mu)/t we can know with what force the car will hit her.
But any other person could tell you without the need for numbers, and equations which explain, after all, what? Any other person could tell you when, when not if, the car hits her, it will kill her.
She is going to die, at sixteen, here on this hot, crowded, smelly street, before the eyes of 223 people.
It’s almost inevitable.
Except.
This moment in time has been chosen for something different. And as the scream of the tyres and the more human sounds of shock rise to cover all other noise, as the stench of burning rubber overwhelms all other smells, the electrons surrounding every atom cease their frenetic movement.
Everything stops.
And in the abrupt silence, which is, after all, not deafening, a rather odd event occurs.
In the midst of the stillness, another girl moves. She is just a bit older than the girl who is, for this moment out of time, a living statue about to be hit by an equally still car. This girl has, if not beauty, then at least the sort of face and body her male peers would label “hot”; but there is something in her attitude which means people do not notice her, a sort of bruised emptiness, and she tells herself she is quite happy with this state of affairs. Whether or not this statement is true is hard to say, because we now know that truth itself is a lie - at least through its own inherent uncertainty.
Her name is Amanda, and while this may not be relevant, it is convenient, giving us something to call her, as she will feature quite heavily in our story, being one of the two main characters.
Amanda walks over to the younger girl (if you bear with me, her name will soon be revealed - have patience). She reaches out, and sees she is being watched by the only other alert face in this place, the only other unaffected by the sudden artificial stasis of the street.
The other steps forward. He is, of course, male. His appearance is not particularly noteworthy. Not ugly, but just another anonymous teenage youth. There is safety in anonymity, which teenagers have realised. So this boy, through sheer (though unconscious) force of will, now looks like almost every other westernized 16-18 year old Caucasian male. His convenient label is Steve. He has never met Amanda before today.
“We save her, right?” The confidence in Amanda’s voice makes a lie of the question.
“No.”
Amanda is not expecting this answer. You can see it in the way her face trembles, pales, eyes widening slightly.
“But…” She has already started to step towards the girl, but suddenly, checks her movement, “Why not?”
Steve, looking at her, folds his arms - a defensive gesture, any professional shrink would tell you that.
“Why should we?” And Amanda, normally so logical (or so she likes to think) takes a step back, flinching at his tone, momentarily bewildered.
“It’s not our problem.” Steve emphasises ‘our’, realises what he has just said, “It’s not my problem” and this second is spoken uneasily.
Amanda rallies; a motor neuron in her brain firing, her illusory equilibrium re- established.
“We can’t choose to let her die!” emphatically stated, emotional.
Steve smiles coldly, cynically, bitterly: “We don’t have to. She will anyway.”
Seemingly for the first time, Amanda notices the street. She makes a frustrated noise, and a wild gesticulation.
“Why would this have happened if we weren’t supposed to do something?” She takes a step forward, her voice stained with anger. “We should save her.”
And, shockingly, Steve laughs. Not all laughter is blithe and happy. Amanda can feel herself shiver at the poison in his - the bitterness.
“Wake up,” he says, “You’re making an assumption. Why would this have happened...” he mimics her voice, mocking her passionate plea. “We don’t KNOW.” He takes a step forward, and Amanda retreats, suddenly scared. But he doesn’t touch her, just throws back his head and shouts, “Why did this happen? Does anyone know?”
He doesn’t expect an answer.
He doesn’t want one. He shouldn’t have asked.
There are certain narrative conventions, which although clichéd cannot be ignored. One of these is the convention which states that if a character asks a question s/he does not want answered it invariably will be. But of course, Steve is not aware that he is a fictional character; he is therefore unaware this convention applies to him and so asks anyway.
And because the next character introduced has a half decent sense of timing, they choose the shouted question as an entry line. To call this character a person could be misleading. A personification, yes, person, no.
It (and it is It not he, nor she) is androgynous, sexless. Face perfectly symmetrical, pale, unlined, and far too cruel to be called beautiful. (Although beauty has its own cruelty, this is not it.) The apparition is dressed in the same robes muses and mentors have worn since time immemorial - from Delphi’s oracle to Obi-wan Kenobi.
Amanda and Steve take a step back. They are of course, surprised to see a figure so suddenly materialise before them, but compared to the far larger shock of time stopping, this is a relatively small happening.
“I am Anguish,” the figure says without preamble. And the voice is terrible.
“Who?”
“Anguish.” Repeats the figure calmly. It points to Steve. “Think of this as an experiment in human volition. You must decide whether or not to save her.”
“But…”
“Yes?”
“We don’t usually get time to think.”
“This is an experiment,” says Anguish. “It is not a REAL situation, it is totally constructed. Her name is Cate, if it makes your choice easier.”
Both humans look aghast. Naming something gives it worth. It makes the choice harder. Anguish knows this, of course.
“Do we get to see consequences?” Steve asks. “Because if we are being given time to think, we have to consider consequences.”
“Certainly,” says Anguish, “although, I feel I must warn you, if you choose to see the future, you will not remember it beyond this moment.”
“Show me my future if we DON’T save her,” he says, glaring at Amanda.
Anguish smiles.
~
He looks at his hands. He’s never really looked at them before, and now may be a bad time to start. Because his hands are wrecked. Over the last two days, twenty years of calluses have blistered, popped and been rubbed raw. The edges of his palms are bleeding, his knuckles are cracked, and his fingernails have been chipped back to the quick.
He thinks it’s fair to say that in the past two days he’s worked harder than he ever has before in his life. They’re still going, him in his place in the little production line, holding the sacks as they’re filled, tying them off then hoisting them to the next man. The rough hessian cuts into his already tender hands, but it’s better than shovel duty.
And slowly the sandbags build up the wall around their refuge. They’ve been doing this for the past forty- eight hours, and he’s only slept for about twelve of those. But it’s nearly over. The flood should peak within the next day.
It’s not raining anymore, so the sun’s come out. Which means it’s bloody hot, and - strangely for out here -muggy as hell. They’re all caked in red mud and everything smells of dirt and damp and rot.
It’s hard work. Physically hard, that is. It’s an endless grind of muscle and sweat. The bags are heavy when full. But at the same time, there’s a rhythm to it. It’s repetitive and strangely calming. Steve finds himself slipping into a reverie…
…“I’m not doing this anymore.” He was sitting in the Union café, and he meant what he’d said. He was quitting.
“Dammit Steve! Why?”
“Because it’s stupid! I hate it.”
Ash’d started talking, trying to convince him to stay. He tried to pay attention, really he did, but then he noticed the woman. He saw her hair first, long, almost silverblond, and then she turned, and he saw her face.
She was beautiful.
She was hideous.
A gutjerk reaction, as her appearance shattered every preconception he’d ever had about beauty.
Because the left half of the woman’s face was covered with a port wine birthmark. The skin was lumpy and red and ugly. The rest of her could have been designed by Botticelli. She’d seen him staring, given him a cocky grin and winked with her right eye.
“God, Steve.” Ash’s voice was disgusted now, and he realised she had seen the exchange, “you are a wanker.”
And Ash walked away…
…It’s Steve’s turn to rest. He and five of the others are curled in improvised beds on the lounge room floor. They’re all stuffed, but Steve can’t sleep.
If he’s worked harder in the past two days than he ever has before, he also thinks it’s fair to say he’s thought more. First time in near two decades, actually, that he’s allowed himself to think of his past, of his family.
Where had the past eighteen years gone? Where had his life gone? He was thirty- six years old and his entire world was a backpack of patched clothing and a jar of shiny rocks…
…“You did what?” His father only ever sounded that calm when he was incredibly angry.
“I quit Uni.”
And the yelling had started. In the end he’d stormed into his room and packed a bag. He’d meant to go stay with his uncle for a few days, but somehow, once he’d started driving in the rusty old station wagon he’d bought only two weeks before, he couldn’t stop.
He drove west. West and west and west and west. For hours, days, weeks. In a bit less than a month, he’d fetched up in a shanty town called Diamond…
…And suddenly Steve is being woken to take his share of the night shift. He groans, and stumbles into the kitchen for coffee with the rest of his ‘team’.
Outside, they move to the western edge of their fort. Steve is on top of the wall this time, packing the bags down. It’s quieter at night. No one speaks.
Up on the wall, the view is good. Except for the house, all he can see is water. Water stretches out to the horizon. It is brackish, stained red from sand and clay, but it’s flat and still and smooth.
Hard to believe that a week ago, this was dry paddocks of dead grass, the occasional patch of green. One week ago, they were stuck in the longest, driest drought the country had ever seen. He wonders how Alice’s family coped. So many didn’t. They left the land, got hard… mean… bitter.
It broke some of them. They hadn’t been able to settle anywhere. They’d drifted. Floated around this red dusty landscape. Forgotten home and comfort, lost some of the trappings of humanity. Like him…
…Diamond wasn’t a proper town. Officially, it didn’t exist. Unofficially, it was a cluster of caravans and tents and rusty cars, with people selling home brew out of barrels and food off the backs of trucks.
It sat amongst dirt and swill and muck, the land around it puckered with claims and small mines. Steve won a claim in a game of darts, and even though he’d been only passing through, he’d kept it. He might make some money after all. It’d only be temporary.
After three years, word had reached him through a new arrival that Steve Gardens was listed as a missing person. He’d sent his family a letter saying he was fine and asking them to please piss off. He thought he’d been in Diamond too long, so he decided to leave. Maybe next week, after he got things settled.
But next week became the next, then the next, and the days seemed to disappear, time swallowed by the claims. And as his hands got rougher, more calloused, he cared less and less. Until one day he woke up to find he had been in Diamond longer than anyone, and fifteen years had just disappeared.
And then the mines had closed, and the town dissolved...
…Steve blinks as a glare on the water alerts him of dawn. The light throws the world into sharp relief, and he notices a solid muddy smear above the water line on the sandbags below.
“It’s going down!” He doesn’t think he’s spoken that loudly, but he must have, because suddenly everyone is spilling out of the house, hoisting themselves onto the wall. A cheer goes up. It’s true; the water’s receding. Now they’ll just have to wait until it goes down, and keep an eye out for leaks.
Now it’s just waiting…
…When the town dissolved, Steve did what he’d done eighteen years ago. He got into his car, and started to drive. He stayed in the dry country, not daring to head east. East was a life he was still trying to forget. He lived strictly in the present.
He’d been driving for three days when one of his tyres popped. The long stretch of road was empty, but Steve had been stubbornly independent for eighteen years, and knew he could cope. Changing a tyre was easy.
He didn’t even see the snake, which had been sunning itself on the road, until he’d stepped onto it. And then there was a sharp pain below his knee, and his leg was on fire, and he’d yelled and grabbed the jack and swung at the bastard, smashing it, crushing it.
It was only when it lay dead on the road that Steve realised how much trouble he was in. He couldn’t drive on the flat, couldn’t change the tyre like this. He used rags from the glove box as a makeshift bandage, then sat down, outside, waiting to die.
He’d barely been there five minutes when he heard the car.
Not daring to believe, he’d flagged it down, and it had stopped. He was saved. The driver, a dusty looking woman, helped him bandage his leg, then drove him thirty miles to the nearest doctor…
…At breakfast, the food disappears quickly. After, everyone wanders outside. Now that the constant pace of work is done they’re all feeling a bit claustrophobic. Steve finds himself a seat and starts bandaging his hands…
…“Alice Lambert.” She had said, finally introducing herself.
“You saved my life.”
The doctor, after telling him how lucky he was, went on to explain that while he could leave, he’d have to take it easy for a while, two weeks recuperating.
Alice volunteered her place.
“You do the Good Samaritan often?” He’d asked, in the car, bumping along the road.
“Just being a decent human being,” she’d said.
And he’d stayed with her for two weeks…
… Floodwaters recede much more slowly than they rise. Eventually, the power will come back on, the phone will be reconnected. They’ll start dismantling the wall, start the mop up. But they can’t leave, not yet…
… The rain started the day before he was due to leave. The skies just opened. Next morning they heard the road had been washed out. There was going to be a flood.
A helicopter was coming to evacuate anyone who would go. Alice and her husband decided to stay. Save the house, if they could. They told Steve he should go, get out while he could. It wasn’t his house. It wasn’t his problem.
Steve agreed, which is why he was as surprised as anyone when he stayed.
“I’ll help.”
“You do the Good Samaritan often?” Alice had asked.
“Just being a decent human being.”…
…The floodwaters recede. Steve’s leaving. He has two phone calls to make before he goes. The first is to directory assistance. The second is harder.
It rings seven times before it is answered, and Steve takes a deep breath.
“Amanda? Hello.”
~
“That can’t be real. It’s not fair!” Steve cries before realising what he has said.
Anguish smiles, “It usually isn’t.” It looks at Amanda, “And you?”
The girl glares at Steve, “Show me mine, when we do the right thing.”
“As you wish.”
~
It’s funny how life works. Really odd. Random chance can change the shape of your future. If she hadn’t turned down that street, if she’d been standing two metres to the left, or to the right… For whatever reason, she’d ended up in exactly the right place. Cate had been about to be hit by a car. Amanda had saved her.
So had Steve, of course.
She barely noticed that, because she, Amanda, had saved someone’s life. For one brief, tiny incandescent moment, she’d held someone’s life in her hands. For that moment she’d had complete control over someone’s fate.
She’d loved it.
Part of her whispered, more…
But how to get more?
This was a riddle it didn’t take long to answer. She enrolled in a course in social work, and joined a Shelter as a volunteer. They assigned her a mentor, of course. Started her slow. Still, by the time she’d finished her studies, she knew the streets. Knew them intimately, and knew the ragged scraps of humanity who dwelt there.
They came in three groups. There were the Fallen Angels whose lives had gone wrong; they were born to this, or couldn’t help it. They did what they had to in order to survive. They had a made one mistake and were trapped. Then there were the Sinners, the wilful addicts, the thieves, the sluts, the dealers. The people who’d chosen this, who could change, but wouldn’t. The third group were the Prophets, broken people who drank Metho, and claimed that every day was Armageddon. Perhaps for them it was.
You couldn’t help the Prophets, save to give them a bed and a decent feed, but both Fallen Angels and Sinners could be saved. More satisfying to save the Sinners, but rewarding to help the Fallen Angels, too.
After five years she was the Shelter’s Golden Girl. She hadn’t failed yet. Not one of her cases had died. She’d held their lives in her hands, and saved them. For enthralling hours, days, weeks, she’d controlled their lives.
And she loved it, needed it, wanted it, always, more…
No one, least of all Amanda, realised she was just as much an addict as the people who spent every last cent pushing heroin into their veins. No one, least of all Amanda, suspected that her addiction could be just as destructive. No one realised that the more she worked, the more she needed to work, one more case, one more save, one more rush, just one more.
She had worked so hard the rest of her life disappeared. She’d had no distractions from her life at the Shelter. People whispered about her in awed voices. They used words like ‘altruistic’ and ‘dedicated’.
Altruism was dead to Amanda. She was dedicated only to herself.
Is saving lives a virtue when you do it for a hit?
***
When Eva quit, she was replaced as nominal boss by Gabe. Gabe was a rare thing, a believer, who meant the mouthed platitudes of the social worker, who could say he only wanted to help with absolute sincerity. Gabe, who was thin, his body eaten by a cruel illness, kept at bay through a daily cocktail of pills.
Eva’s case files were distributed between the other workers. Amanda only received one.
Leah and Rachel.
An off- again- on- again user, and her six- year old daughter. Leah, who was coping just enough to prevent Welfare taking the child. It wasn’t a case which required a lot of work. Most of the time, Leah was fine. Periodically, however, (maybe once in two years, maybe less), she’d go on a binge and get kicked out of wherever she was renting.
Usually, when that happened, she ended up at the shelter overnight, then went to her sister’s. Amanda met her once of course, (Leah, not the sister). Just to introduce herself, say she was taking over from Eva. She added, like she usually did, that she was always ready to listen. Leah was, Amanda decided, a Fallen Angel. She tried, but she just kept falling.
It was two months later when Amanda got to work to find that Leah had showed up at the Shelter just before midnight and been turned away. She was furious. She should have been called. She read the case file, listed all Leah’s usual haunts, and set out to find her. Leah hadn’t been gone long enough to warrant police involvement, and anyway, Amanda was chasing another save, another rush, one more hit.
When control is your drug of choice, and you work with the unpredictable, you set yourself up for disaster.
Leah was in the third place she looked. She was lying on her side, vomit down her front and pooling around her face. Her eyes were open. There was a tourniquet around her upper arm, a syringe still protruding from her vein. Rachel was sitting beside her, holding her hand, telling her to wake up. The six year old hadn’t realised her mother was dead.
She shoved her phone into the girl’s hand, told her to call an ambulance, to tell them the address and to say her mummy had had an OD.
And when she was sure the girl knew what to do, and was gone, Amanda walked over to Leah, (still warm), rolled on her back, wiped vomit from her face, cleared her mouth, and started CPR.
She knew it was pointless, but she was beyond feeling. Numb. Dispassionate. Mechanical.
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15
breathe… breathe…
The ambulance arrived after eight minutes, and took Leah away.
Amanda went back to the Shelter, with Rachel. Filled in the requisite forms, called the child’s aunt.
She’d seen death before, of course, at the Shelter, but it was never one of hers, she’d never failed before. Her control had shattered. Her illusory equilibrium - shattered. She was aching and numb and bitterly, bitterly empty.
Rachel’s aunt arrived.
Amanda stared.
Apart from the pale yellow eyes they shared, Rachel and this woman had nothing in common. Rachel was cute. This woman was beautiful. Her hair was long, pale blond, her skin almost translucent. But the entire left side of her face was covered in a horrible ruby red stain. If Amanda hadn’t been so carefully numb, the
contrast would have shocked her.
She went home, only the third time in five years she’d left work sick. She walked in the door, and started to shake. It hadn’t gone right. This wasn’t supposed to happen. She was shivering, nearly hyperventilating.
She wanted to cry.
She hadn’t since she was ten, had vowed not to, ever again. And now when she needed to, she couldn’t.
It was an inevitable progression for Amanda to kneel in front of the toilet and stick her fingers down her throat.
Control.
Ah, sweet release.
This was a much more efficient way to get the rush.
It was her secret for a long, long time. Until its frequency increased and she started losing weight, plummeting through thin and skinny and skeletal until she looked like one of the people she was supposed to be helping.
But she was fine. She was in control.
One day she fainted.
Gabe caught her, took her home. Bullied her into eating, and watched her for a long time. He told her to let it go, let it out. Cry.
But Amanda couldn’t cry.
Gabe left, and Amanda ran to usual spot in front of the toilet bowl. When she’d finished she felt better and worse then before. Gabe returned, handed her a notepad and a packet of pens. Told her if she wouldn’t talk, she could write. The stationery sat on the table between them. Shakily, she picked up a pen, and scratched words onto the paper.
Then she lost control. Completely.
Willingly.
The writing consumed her.
She wrote and wrote and wrote and wrote.
When food was put beside her, she ate.
The words took away her compulsion to vomit.
Her weight went up.
She got healthier.
She wrote and wrote and wrote and wrote, until the words stopped.
She felt raw.
She felt like all her emotional plugs had been ripped out of her with pliers and no anaesthetic. She didn’t
feel numb though, just quiet, and calm. Better than she had for ages.
She sat and started to edit her words, carefully rebuilding her control over herself.
She hadn’t lost her addiction, just found a new way to express it.
When she feels the need to scream and purge, she lets all go of control and writes. When the fit stops, she edits and rebuilds herself.
After a year, she sent her first manuscript to a publisher. They sent her back a contract and a request for more.
***
It was simple, really. Working in a bookshop wasn’t glamorous, but it payed the rent. The royalties she earned allowed for a bit of fun. The books received decent reviews. Not excellent, but decent. Occasionally someone recognised her as the person who wrote them.
Occasionally, but not often.
It was a quiet life.
And Amanda loved it.
~
“But…” Amanda sounds confused, “we get rewarded for saving her?”
“Who said that?” asks Anguish, looking quite delighted by her despair.
“Show me if we don’t save her then!”
~
Minus 9 months
She wakes up tangled in sweaty bedclothes, a dull feeling of nausea settling over her. Not regret exactly, but a bitter sense of self betrayal. She managed last night, to pretend that this was absolution. To pretend that they were shaping a meaning for themselves. That life was something other than watching Cate disappear under the wheels of a car when they could have - hadn’t - saved her.
In the soft light of morning, her virginity replaced by a dull ache between her thighs, she forces herself to face the truth. For her this was grasping at straws, sex to find meaning. For Steve it was convenient. She rises from the bed, dresses and sneaks from the room.
And two weeks later, when a line appears in the plastic window of a plastic stick, she laughs and cries until tears and breath are gone.
***
Minus 6 months
She’s finally given up. Left. Her mother’s sharp words and sharper silences have cut too deep this time. She’s tired and heartsick and three months pregnant with a child Steve doesn’t want.
That conversation didn’t go the way she’d planned. Her blurted confession sat bloated between them, souring the air. Then he’d given her money to ‘fix it.’ And she’d screamed, because she was keeping it. It was hers. Her atonement. He’d flung the money at her. Told her to go.
So here she is. Outside her cousin’s ex-boyfriend’s flat, hoping he is home. Hoping he will answer. Just as she reaches up to knock again, the door opens.
-Manda?
-Micky, hi… she trails off, not sure what to say, how to ask. Suddenly coming here seems so pathetically school- girl, so stupid.
-Well, come in.
Amanda walks in, hunching slightly, flinching away from the unasked questions in the air. The flat is saturated with them. It’s suddenly hard to breathe.
-I can’t… I just… I had to leave. Oh God. A wave of dizziness, ill timed. She presses a hand into her belly.
Micky looks at her.
-Sit.
Grateful she sinks into a chair while Micky disappears into the kitchen. She can hear him making tea.
Micky returns, and places the tea in front of her. She curls her hands around the cup, ignoring the scalding heat. It hurts. It feels good.
-You’re pregnant aren’t you?
Grateful, Amanda sips her tea. He knows. So she doesn’t have to say it after all. Her silence is answer enough.
Micky looks at her and smiles.
-You’ll have to pay rent you know.
That easy after all.
***
0 months Birth
They ask her if she’s sure about this. She’s checked into hospital, contractions have started. What can she do now to stop it?
But deep down, somewhere, inside, she knows they’re right. Keeping the baby to atone for not saving Cate is the wrong reason to keep it. But she let someone die. The child is her payment.
She thinks about this until the world dissolves and it is only pain and burning and pain and she’s tearing apart and in the gasps where she can think the nurses are asking does she want an epi… an epi…no she doesn’t the pain is hers, her payment, but it is ripping and tearing and maybe she’s dying in one last push - it hurts… and then it is over.
A girl.
***
2 months Smiling
Amanda Rederth, Uni Student. The title still seems surreal, like something from someone else’s story. But she’s enrolled, she’s going. Two month old Lily has a place in the crèche. Micky pulled some strings.
In three years, if all goes well, she will be Amanda Rederth BA, with a major in English Literature. She feels happy and light and free for the first time in ages as she places Lily in the cot at the crèche. The child smiles up at her. Her first.
And Amanda almost skips to her first class.
***
6 months Sitting
The only light in the apartment comes from the flickering computer screen, which is almost ready to give up the ghost. Amanda leans back, stretching and reflexively takes a gulp of coffee, grimacing to find it cold.
She’s struggling, and towards what she can’t say. Sighing, she looks at the words on the screen.
… the essence of the post-structuralists’ argument revolves around symbols. They argue that since words are symbols and symbols have different meanings depending on who views them, the meaning of words will change, and this change will be dependent not on the author, as was believed by the Leavisites, but on the responder. This shift from writerly to readerly texts led to Barthes’ most famous statement: that the author is dead…
God she hates this course. The whole thing feels like self- important bullshit. She’s always thought that postmodern academics sounded like wankers and now she seems to be becoming one herself. If she ever meets the fool who decided Postmodernism was part of English Literature, she’s going to stick something sharp in a Very Painful Place.
She casts a spare look at the child in the corner, and freezes. Lily is straining, face reddened in effort - and as Amanda watches in stunned silence, she sits. By herself.
And just like that, Amanda knows what to say. Lily sat for sitting’s sake. The point of postmodernism is that there is no point. Well. It might not be right, but it sounds good.
***
7 months Teething
August is cold and Amanda is so bloody tired. Lily has been grizzling, hasn’t been sleeping. Crèche is complaining that the child cries and Amanda has nobloodymoney anymore.
She cries in the night when Lily is asleep. Wipes away the tears with cold-numb fingers. She can’t afford a heater. She wants to give up.
The only thing stopping her is the jagged edge of a slowly emerging pride she didn’t realise was buried in her. But this pride is cutting through the softer parts of her personality like the teeth erupting from
Lily’s gums.
***
13 months First Word
Amanda, in her second year of Uni, feels a little stronger, a touch more confident. Sitting in her first class and noticing how many have dropped out, her confidence rises yet further. She hasn’t quit.
She lets the lecturer’s words waft past her. Something about the postmodern condition in contemporary society… and then realises he has just asked for an example - and he’s looking right at her!
Instead of lowering her eyes the way she usually does, she blurts, wildly, the first thing that crosses her mind.
- Baudrillard’s Simulacra in creation of celebrities.
And straight away, she knows she has said the wrong thing. Knows it in the way the lecturer hesitates before replying. Knows it in the sideways glances her classmates are giving her. She feels her face heat up.
At home, later, she is still blushing at the memory, when Micky dashes in, clutching Lily.
- Manda! She spoke.
- What did she say?
- She… and Mickey’s voice is sombre now… -she called me dad.
And Amanda laughs, bitterly, a sour sound which spills into the air. Looks like they both got it wrong today. Better not to speak at all.
***
21 months The Silent Child
Lily has stopped speaking. Overnight, she just… stopped. On the first day, Amanda didn’t really notice. She had exams, after all. On the second day, she started to worry. On the third day, her first exam, she sat there and the words wouldn’t come.
After, she went home, picked Lily up and walked to the doctor. He told her it was normal. Amanda knew better. And how bitter, after two weeks of exams in which her pen scratched across the paper leaving barely anything at all, how bitter to be proved right.
***
24 months Wonder
It has been three months since Lily spoke. Three months since she made any sound at all. She’s two now, a toddler. She toddles along beside Amanda, clutching at her leg with one pudgy hand.
Because she doesn’t speak, Lily observes, and points, and waits for Amanda to explain. She’s embarrassed Amanda before like that, and no doubt will do it again.
Only weeks ago, Amanda had experienced a moment of absolute panic, when Lily had momentarily vanished.
Only to be found not two seconds later, having followed the most beautiful woman Amanda had ever seen. Bar none. Very few people are so beautiful you cannot feel jealous of them. This woman was.
Then she turned to fully face Amanda, and Lily’s mother couldn’t stop a gasp escaping her lips. The entire left side of the woman’s face was a deep plum red. The skin raised and puckered.
And, yet, strangely, what should have been grotesque was not. The woman’s choice to keep her Mark in defiance of modern medicine gave her a sort of savage beauty. Humanised her. She wore the port- wine stain as a sort of half mask that revealed far more than it hid.
The disappearance had precipitated an epiphany of sorts in Amanda. Lily was more than atonement for Cate’s death.
Lily was (is) HERS.
***
32 Months Words
Her final thesis, 10,000 words is due in 2 months, and she hasn’t started it. Doesn’t know what to write. The umbrella topic is “Applications of Postmodernism to the Real” and words have failed her.
Lily is sitting at her feet, making her pink hippopotamus repeatedly crush a fire engine. And Amanda sits at her desk, staring at a blank page.
-Mum.
Amanda drops her pen.
-Mum.
Lily is pointing to her.
-Mum.
Lily has spoken.
-Yes, Lil
-Mum. Then she points to herself.-Lily.
And Amanda begins to scratch words onto her page.
***
34 months The Child Speaks
“Applications of Postmodern to the Real”
Postmodern Constructions in Contemporary Political Systems.
Amanda is sitting at a desk, words flowing from brain to pen to page. Something’s changed. She understands. She can do it. Even after two days of steady work, that realisation makes her giddy.
But as Lily sits at her feet, chattering steadily, she thinks maybe it shouldn’t.
She’s found her voice.
They both have.
~
“That’s not right!” Amanda sounds hysterical. “My life sucks either way!”
Anguish shrugs. “That is not my concern.”
“Then there’s no right choice!”
“Exactly.”
They both look at It.
“But then,” says Steve, looking confused. “What’s the point?”
“There isn’t one,” says Anguish, sounding quite bored. “You humans, always wanting ‘points’, always crying for ‘meaning’, always looking for ‘purpose’. Well none of that exists. The world is. Enjoy it.”
Steve is shaking. “Show me mine, then. If we do save her.”
~
The play is called Poisoned Apple an ominous title for something which promises to be ‘a meditation of life, love and marriage’. It is his and Cate’s anniversary, and his boss gave him the tickets. He tried to palm them off, but Cate decided she wanted to go.
He has a bad feeling about this: bad enough to pierce the apathy that surrounds him these days, what with work, a restless six month old and a two year old who still rises at five am.
Turns out he’s good at business. He’s worked hard to get where he is, youngest Senior Partner in the firm, money rolling in. He has a wife, two kids and a big house on the beach, just outside the city. He should be happy; he supposes he is, underneath the apathy. Tells himself it’s only normal for someone working sixteen hour days, with two young kids, to feel numb.
Sometimes he almost believes it.
Looking for a place to park he’s glad he remembered to congratulate Cate on how she looked. She, at least, seems happy, hosting cocktail parties and lunches, arguing with the young girl who looks after the kids, God… what’s her name? And he can tell this life suits her. This is what she wants, what everyone wants.
His bad feeling intensifies as he and Cate walk into the theatre and are taken to their seats. He is hit by a flood of nausea and as the lights go down, one thought hits him…
This isn’t going to end well.
And as the lights go up on stage, every person in the theatre gasps. Because the woman on stage is the single most confronting figure any of them have ever seen. She is dressed simply, in black, and this only serves to highlight her pale beauty. Her skin is translucent, hair almost white blonde. Her lips are softly pink. Every line of her face is perfect.
Which makes the puckered red skin disfiguring the left side of her face all the more confronting. And yet something in her expression defies them to pity her. She bears what should be tragic with a fierce pride.
And that is why so many recoiled, of course.
The woman lights a cigarette and takes a drag. She begins to speak.
“My marriage was, of course, a marriage of convenience. All marriages are. Anyone who says otherwise is lying, because love itself is a lie.”
The woman on the stage takes a drag, and points her cigarette at the audience. For one uneasy moment Steve imagines it is pointed at him, but then she moves it.
“I can see a few of you don’t agree with me. How have I arrived at this conclusion, you wonder.”
She gestures with the hand holding the smoke. It is a grand curling gesture, arrogant and impatient; leaving a drifting grey spiral behind it.
“It is quite simply a matter of logic. We do live in the age of consumerism, do we not? The hard part is realising that love is just another generic brand name. Once you’ve realised that, the rest is easier. But if love is a brand name, what is the product? That, too, is easy - love is just a pretty package and the product it is trying to sell is sex.”
The woman has been pacing animatedly, but on this last word, she sits on the lone chair, downstage.
“Love has become just another way for the squeamish to justify something WHICH DOES NOT NEED JUSTIFICATION! Sex doesn’t need pretty disguises - it is the very point of our existence.”
There is a startled, indignant noise from the man in the third row, and the woman points her cigarette at him.
“No? Well it is - reproduction. The whole point of human existence is to create more humans, just like the whole point of equine existence is to create more horses.”
She smiles somewhat sardonically.
“A rather bleak world view, perhaps, but at least it removes all those awkward questions like who am I?”
At this point the man in the third row stands up and walks out.
The woman on the stage smiles triumphantly and mimics another drag.
“I hate the way this society tries to sugar- coat life, and pretend it’s a fairytale.
“It’s not. In fact, the only part of any fairytale that shows any semblance to real life is Snow White’s poisoned apple. Life is a poisoned apple, so innocent looking, glossy and red. Fresh smelling, it sits like a cool weight in your hand. So you take a bite and it’s good. Crisp and tart and sweet all at once. And then your stomach cramps and burns, and your heart clenches - and you realise you’re screwed, you’re dying. That’s life. A poisoned fucking apple.”
The woman pauses, and Steve risks a look at Cate. Her face is pale with anger, but he himself is feeling a sick swelling in his stomach.
“But I’m getting off the topic. I apologise. My marriage was, of course, a marriage of convenience…”
Steve lets the woman’s words wash over him, and at the end of the performance, when the crowd doesn’t know whether to cheer or hiss, he lets Cate lead him back to the car. He nods, and makes soothing noises as Cate rants, reading the numb expression on his face as a similar sense of outrage, when all he feels is a stunned sense of recognition and a nauseating certainty that the woman’s words are true.
“Am I too late?” He has rushed into Maternity, ridiculously, holding a bunch of roses. He is assured he is not.
Cate is still capable of talking.
“I got promoted!”
She’s glad. Loves him…
*
The play has shaken him. He’s afraid to admit it, but it has. Was it true? Has he been living a lie for the past eleven years? Is sex ALL? Surely not. This has to be real.
*
He’s sitting in Bali with his one- year- old son, and his pregnant wife. He desires nothing. He ignores the shadows flickering. Time off is hard to get. He’s going to enjoy this holiday.
*
“I’m ringing about The Poisoned Apple? Yes can you tell me who…”
He slams down the phone as Cate wanders in, holding the baby. Better not to worry her.
*
Even seven months pregnant, Cate can host a party. He’s just been promoted. Everyone’s here. Life’s good. He loves his wife. Nothing can spoil this.
*
His wife is superficial. He’s never noticed before. But she is. She’s so shallow. Is he? All she cares about is the trivial. The minutiae. But that play can’t be right, can it?
*
Cate has been sick. He’s worried. She’s never sick. The reason comes out in a rush.
“I’m pregnant.”
He lets out a wild whoop, picks her up, and spins her around. He cannot stop smiling. He’s never been happier.
*
“Can you tell me who did The Poisoned Apple? Right, thanks.”
He hangs up just as Cate comes in.
“Who was that?”
He doesn’t answer.
She makes a rude noise and walks out.
*
“I found it!” Cate sounds giddy.
“Found what?”
“You’ll see.”
And she blindfolds him, takes him for a drive, stops and tells him to take off the blindfold. It’s a house. She’s right. It’s perfect.
*
They’ve never fought like this before. Not with Cate hysterical and throwing crockery. Not with him defensive and edgy and unsure. He’s still tossing up whether or not to ask about the play.
*
His palms are sweating. Everyone always says the tie feels like a noose, but he’s not feeling it. His palms are sweaty though. Then Cate is walking down the aisle and she’s never looked so beautiful.
*
He sees her in the street. She’s hard to miss. He accosts her. Asks her.
“Was it true? The Poisoned Apple?”
She stares at him.
“It’s from a book,” she says, “Whispers.”
*
He brings flowers with the good news. He has a job. A good, respectable, well- paying job. They can marry. They can afford it. She flings her arms around his neck.
*
He loses his nerve for a while. Doesn’t want to know. Avoids Cate, who barely speaks to him anyway. Works late. Sneaks into a bookshop, finds Whispers, and laughs to see Amanda’s name on the cover.
*
He loves her. He didn’t think it was possible, but he does. He loves her. So at the restaurant, he bends on one knee.
“Marry me?”
“Yes!” And she’s squealing.
Happiness, bliss.
*
He rings Amanda’s mother. Asks for Amanda’s number. He rings from a payphone. Can’t risk it from home. This is crazy. This is stupid. He has a good life. He’s giving it up on a whim.
*
A tangle of bed sheets. Noises which are only appealing while doing this. Six months seeing each other, and only just coming to this. They fit so well together. And it’s good.
*
They fight again. No crockery flung this time. Just words.
“You’re never around!”
And questions.
“Are you having an affair?”
Steve stares at the woman who maybe he loved, if love ever existed. Then he walks out.
*
First date. They go for coffee. They talk, they get on well. He likes her, she likes him. They exchange numbers.
*
Amanda answers on his third call. He hasn’t spoken to her since they saved Cate together.
“Poisoned Apple,” he says, “is it true?”
“They’re only true if you make them,” she says. “When I wrote them, I was depressed.”
The phone clicks. He’s out of money.
*
“Steve!” He’s late to the party and can hear Ash calling him. “Steve!”
Ash is talking to a first year, a girl who looks familiar.
“This is Cate,” she says.
“I know you,” says Cate, “you saved my life!”
*
He packs his bags. He knows what to do.
Cate is standing by the front door, her face a mask.
“Goodbye,” he says. “You can keep the house.”
And he turns, and walks into the sunset. The glare is terrible. He squints.
~
Steve sinks to his knees.
“You can’t do this to us! You can’t make us make this choice.”
“I can,” says Anguish. “I must. It is what I was created to do. You must choose. Does Cate live or die?”
Steve and Amanda huddle together. They talk in whispers, I cannot hear what they say, so neither can you.
They are my characters, yes, but even my control goes only so far. In the end, they make their own choice, as do we all.
“You will not remember this,” says Anguish. “When you choose, you will think it was a spontaneous choice, not considered.”
Steve and Amanda look at Anguish.
“What is your answer?” It asks, at last showing some interest.
And they choose.
There are supposed to be different fonts, but I don't know if it worked. I need to learn formatting.
ETA: It worked! Hooray.