Why are you scared?
‘Because if he finds me then I’m in danger and he might hurt me and take Tilly.’ Again, the words sped out. They’d been dammed up in my subconscious for the whole of the last eighteen months; they were what lay behind everything I did. The image of David standing beside the bed in the night holding Tilly and telling her she would be safe with him, looking down on me as I surfaced from bleary, drugged sleep. That was the day I’d decided I had to run. The fear that he might kill me and take my daughter ran beneath my entire life.
When do you stop?
I stared at the paper. The words stood as stark and black as the crow had stood on the window and felt nearly as threatening. ‘Stop? Stop what?’
Behind me the diamonds thudded onto the silver tray and rolled with a noise like doom.
Stop running. What happens when your daughter needs to be in school? When she needs consistency? When she has friends she won’t leave and exams to take?
Isobel’s questions rode so close to my own thoughts last night about the wisdom of taking us away from our support network that a sudden flush of guilt made me heat up. ‘She has me,’ I said tightly.
She will need others. Everyone needs friends. We all need somebody at some point in our lives to help us see what we are becoming.
The kettle began to whistle.
‘You don’t,’ I said, my tone confrontational. ‘If you can hide yourself away in a shabby old house in the woods and expect to stay undisturbed, then why can’t I?’
She blinked, seemingly surprised, then turned to the business of pouring the boiling water onto teabags, fetching a carton of juice and some biscuits out of the rattling tin box on the floor and generally bustling. I got the feeling that she was doing some very fast thinking.
When she’d handed me a mug of tea and passed juice and a handful of crumbly oaty biscuits that looked expensively fragile over to Tilly, Isobel sat back and looked at me steadily. It was a very direct and almost unfriendly look and I noticed her right hand had grasped her pen and was making small movements as though she wanted to write something but hadn’t framed the words yet. I stayed quiet. I’d been rude and confrontational but I didn’t want to apologise.
Her hands came up in front of her mouth in what was almost a gesture of prayer, palms together and the pen jutting from between her fingers like an unsmoked cigarette. It looked as though she was trying to stop words from coming out but, as she didn’t speak anyway, it must have been a gesture of habit. Her eyes flicked to Tilly, now sprawled on her stomach on the floor, Brass waggling in one hand and the other absorbed in rolling diamonds like marbles across the silver tray.
‘Are they real?’ I asked suddenly. ‘The diamonds, I mean. Or are they jet or glass or something?’ I had to know whether the assumptions that Ross and I had made could be true and these might be cosmetic replacements so she could convince herself that she had keepsakes from her past.
Isobel hesitated and then wrote:
They are real.
The words looked shaky as though her hand had been trembling as she wrote them.
We stared at each other. Below us, on the floor, Tilly was chuntering the words of a song from one of her favourite Disney films. It felt incongruous, her bright unconcern in this room which seemed filled with dark threat. Every line of Isobel’s body seemed to have aged under the weight of that darkness and she bent forward, hunched beneath it.
Eventually Isobel wrote, her pen barely making contact with the paper so the words were faint and scrawled.
The diamonds bought my silence.
‘You said your father gave them to you,’ I said, almost accusatory, and then the implications slotted in behind the words. ‘Oh.’
Isobel wrote, slightly more assuredly this time.
It was in another life. But I know all about running from your past.
I looked at the diamonds that Tilly was rolling under her hand, mumbling misunderstood half-words and lying with her chin on her felt dragon. Innocent and happy. I wanted to snatch them away from her and throw them into the wood.‘They bought my silence’. Urgh.
Isobel was still looking at me; it seemed that she wanted me to understand without her having to write anything else, but she needn’t have worried. The power of imagination was filling in the gaps in the unsaid. ‘Oh, Isobel,’ was all I could manage.
If I had turned and fought, I might have had my freedom. But I could not. My childhood and my words were stolen from me and yet I stayed on in the silence. I left when I could and I have run ever since. So in some ways I envy you your liberty, and in others I know that you will never be free until you turn and fight.
She had to turn the paper over to finish, it was the longest passage I’d ever seen her write.
‘You couldn’t have fought,’ I said softly. ‘You were a child. It wasn’t your fault, Isobel. None of it was your fault.’
Those hooded eyes were suspiciously bright when they met mine again.
Thank you.
