Opal was impatient for this part of the showcase to be over and done with.
Johan had decided to frame both photos ornately. It was a good choice aesthetically. The contrast of the dark backgrounds against Opal’s almost ghostly pale skin seemed further enhanced by the garish yellow gold. The framing also had the effect of rendering the images with a sense of biblical timelessness. In the first, she was a Madonna, bereft without her child.
In the second, Opal was looking up at the camera, her eyes shining with a mixture of awe and sorrow. She was witness to the resurrection. With her hands outstretched before her, palms to the sky. Opal saw herself as Johan must have intended; beside the first portrait she seemed like a woman awaiting the rapture, wild-eyed but ecstatic.
Opal didn’t notice she was crying until Adam placed a tentative hand on her shoulder.
‘They’re magnificent, Johan,’ Heather said quietly, as though reluctant to admit it.
‘Thank you, Heather,’ Johan responded as graciously as he could. Only the merest hint of smugness crept into his voice.
‘So why didn’t you want to show the first photo?’ Ruby asked.
Opal swiped the tears from her face roughly. ‘It was me. I asked Johan if we could keep that photo between us. I wasn’t quite ready to …’
Opal’s voice cracked, and Ruby jumped in, before she could struggle on. ‘You don’t need to explain.’
Opal gulped down a sob and nodded.
For Ruby’s reading, the group made their way back to the orangery and settled around the table. Noah sat down beside Opal and offered her a kind smile, although he didn’t reach out or make any physical contact, Opal noticed. She tried to steady herself with a few deep breaths.
‘This is called, “I wish you were dead”.’ Ruby’s tone was flat and unemotional as she stood before them. It was uncanny to watch Ruby transform into her stage persona; even the smallest giveaways of her unease suddenly vanished. Ruby was suddenly impenetrably calm.
‘Or maybe something wankier, like “The wishful requiem”; anyway, whatever, here it is.’
Ruby straightened, and fixed her gaze at some invisible point just beyond the backs of their heads.
‘I wish you were dead,
and resting not in peace,
but in a state of unrelenting violence.
The kind you meted out,
or, hopefully even worse than that,
you feel the same crush of pain you caused
as unremitting remorse
I wish you the worst.
Many unhappy returns.
You made me in your own image of cruelty,
and it is my burden
To try and resist that legacy
of being the child born not of love,
but conceived in deepest fear.
I wish you weren’t here.
Don’t cross the sea to see
