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SIXTY-SEVEN
The liar told the truth.
DNA analysis, unheard of back when Cindy Bowman died, confirmed that the blood on the polka-dot fabric was hers. While trace fibres and adhesive residue showed it had indeed been stuck into a notebook; a notebook which I now have every reason to believe once contained the perverted fantasies of a disturbed mind.
After my visit with Matty, I struggled to reconcile the woman I thought I knew with the woman I now know she was. My ability to hold it together came in fits and starts. I tried not to drink, tried to pray. Failed on both counts.
To begin with I felt myself falling back into the abyss, but it was a different sort of darkness to the chasm I inhabited after Matty’s arrest. Back then, I had to accept my hero might be a killer, along with the fact I’d betrayed him. It was my fault he was locked up and I had no way of knowing whether I’d acted justly or not.
The uncertainty was a poison that slowly killed me.
The netball team, friends, grades– none of it mattered any more. From the moment he was escorted into custody, I didn’t so much live as move through life. A robot going through the motions. A person without purpose. Soul-sick. Lost.
I needed to know for sure whether he was innocent or guilty. I needed to admit to him what I’d done. And I needed to know I’d made the right decision rather than being a hothead who had destroyed everything good.
The day I visited Matty, I finally got the closure I’d waited twenty years to achieve. I knew what he was. He knew he was in jail because of me. And I knew he belonged there.
I’d found out the truth about my mother too. And now I’m clawing my way out of the depths as more and more memories start to click into place. A picture slowly taking shape like the jigsaw puzzles Nanna G used to send on my birthday.
How my mother reacted when I told her Matty took me on that terrible drive, for instance. She didn’t try to persuade me I was overreacting. Instead, she took me at my word, believed me instantly.
Only one explanation fits. She knew what he was capable of because she was capable of it too. And because she knew all about his deadly urges, because they were in it together.
There’s also the way she kept saying it was her fault he was in jail. How she pooh-poohed my pleas for her to take a safer route home and change her hairstyle. How closely she fitted the police profile; a loner, socially awkward– even a history of cruelty to animals if that little box of bones in her nightstand is anything to go by.
I’ve been thinking a lot about her little sayings too. Put yourself in someone’s shoes. Don’t let anyone else define you. It’s what’s in a person’s heart that counts.
I hate to admit it, but Matty has a point. The lessons she taught me were largely off the back of a Post-it note. He said, only those with no morals have to borrow the morality of others. A mask of decency. He should know.
As hard as it all is to accept, being in no doubt about who she was makes this journey easier than the pot-holed path I stumbled along after Matty’s arrest. The truth will set you free is a cliché, the sort of gem I might have found stuck up around the flat. But the truth has set me free. I no longer blame myself for the past. Now I’m just trying to come to terms with it.
I recently learned the truth about Des too. Hannah, the woman who lives in the apartment downstairs, was doing some gardening the other day. She wanted to plant an olive tree, had to dig deep.
‘You’ll never guess what I found,’ she said, brandishing an urn, Mum painted in faded letters on the side.
She showed me where she’d unearthed it and, as she did, I saw Des in the dark holding a shovel, patting the soil down. He hadn’t been burying bodies that night, he’d been burying his mother’s ashes. He must have already been planning his own departure and wanted to lay her to rest first.
The old me would have gone straight to my room, masked my emotional hurt with physical pain. Not any more. I’ve been in recovery for over a month. I’ve joined a fellowship, say the Serenity Prayer. The blade still calls to me; particularly at night when the ghosts start crowding in. But in a strange way, I’ve found it’s easier to deal with my grief when I’m not trying to block it out with a knife.
‘It’s a process,’ Janice says. ‘A tunnel. You have to go through it to get to the light on the other side.’
My sponsor tells me cutting doesn’t help, that it only gives you more things to be remorseful about.
Both of them are right. I have my bad days when I struggle to get out of bed, when I have to remind myself to breathe. But I’m moving in the right direction. Owning my past. Recognising that whilst I may be a victim, I’m a survivor too.
Today, I’m taking Janice’s advice and writing a letter to my childhood self. For so long, I’ve yearned to go back in time and warn girl Sophie what was coming. I want to tell the child I was that fear is the brain’s early warning system. That my mother lied, I should have been afraid.
I sit at the kitchen table, sucking the end of my pen while my coffee goes cold. Buster is curled up in his bed, snout resting on his front paws.
‘I don’t know where to start,’ I say.
He raises his big head, points his nose at the window. With Buster, the answer to every question is, ‘Walkies’. Why be indoors when you could be outside?
Outside. . .
I take the pen out of my mouth and write.
Sophie—
