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SIXTY-ONE
The line is dead, though I’m not sure what I was expecting. I put it back in the holder, smooth down my hair for the umpteenth time. Rebuke myself for caring how I look for the umpteenth time too.
Matty still hasn’t been brought in. I’m both pleased and disappointed. The sooner he’s here, the sooner this will be over. And yet, I’d do anything to put the moment off.
It’s as though I can feel the blood coursing through my veins, the charge of adrenaline. Every sinew is taut, every muscle flexed. I feel like I’m going to hurl.
In an hour this will all just be a memory, I tell myself. One of Janice’s little tricks to get through things that make you anxious.
This isn’t just anxiety though. It’s pure, petrifying dread.
‘Remember you’re in control,’ she coached me the other day. ‘If it gets too much, you can walk away. You’re not a little girl any more. He has no power over you.’
He does though. Twenty years after his conviction, and I still can’t go past the running track. I’m still living in the same flat. Still talking to my mother every day, the same circular conversation, the same recriminations and guilt.
I sit up a little straighter on the plastic chair. There’s no lumbar support. My back aches. But I won’t let him see I’m uncomfortable, that I’m scared. Damned if I’ll give him the satisfaction.
My eyes go back to the phone on the wall. There’s another one on the other side of the glass. I try to imagine him picking it up, what he’ll say. I can’t picture it though, which frightens me further. I have no idea what to expect.
In some ways, my whole life has been building to this moment. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say, it’s been frozen until this moment. Everything put on hold.
If we are our memories, what does that make me? A woman who doesn’t know what was real and what was a lie, who doesn’t know what or whom to believe. You can only move on from your mistakes if you know what those mistakes were. You can only grow if you have a place to grow from.
I’m a bicycle wheel stuck in the mud. Thirty-two years old and I’m still spinning in the dirt.
I said that to Janice once. She laughed, told me I might have come up with a more flattering metaphor. She writes self-help books, guides to managing trauma and the like. Language is important to her.
I pick at my nails, then sit on my hands so Matty won’t see me fidgeting when he comes in. Straight away I’m chewing at my lip, shifting about in my seat. Trying to seem strong is a losing battle.
What’s taking so long?
Just as I’m thinking about getting up and finding someone to ask, I hear the quick march of approaching footsteps. The sound echoes down the empty corridor, reverberates off the walls.
My heart is a battering ram. I feel it in my throat as my abdominals tighten. I’m absolutely sure now I’m going to puke.
Focus on your breathing, Janice would say, but I can’t. I can’t focus on anything apart from the drumbeat of those feet. A steel gate bangs shut, making me jump, the clanging resounding loudly in the hollow emptiness.
What am I doing here? What was I thinking?
You need closure, Janice told me, but I’m not going to get that here. Matty’s hardly going to change his tune now. And if he really is innocent, how will I know?
Looking into his eyes? What a crock.
The footsteps slow and stop on the other side of the door. I taste pennies, the sharp tang of copper. It’s a moment before I realise I’ve bitten my tongue, that it’s leaking blood.
On the other side of the glass, a door opens. Two men walk in, one of them uniformed, one of them cuffed.
The cuffed man holds out his wrists for the bracelets to be removed. As he does, he looks at me and smiles. His blonde hair is greying. He’s lost weight. There are lines on his face. But his smile is the same, his eyes too. The colour and shape a mirror image of mine.
He sits down without removing his gaze, raises the phone to his ear and gestures for me to do the same.
Hand shaking, I pick up the receiver.
‘Hello, Sophie,’ Matty says.
