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TWENTY-THREE
I push my toast away, unable to swallow a bite. It sticks in my throat, chokes me. I sip my coffee, the scalding liquid washing it down.
‘Tuesday. Four thirty.’
I say the words out loud. The sound beating a rhythm in my mouth, a death march.
‘I have to go, don’t I?’ I asked Janice yesterday, the solidity of the phone comforting in my hand. Grounding.
She gave me her personal phone number a while back. For emergencies. I know what that means. The scars on my wrist are hieroglyphics. A language even my mother never learned to write.
The day I went too far. Step away from the edge. Mind the gap.
The abyss hasn’t been calling to me, but I’m pretty sure the prospect of seeing Matty counts as an emergency. ‘A trigger’, Janice might say.
‘I have to go, don’t I?’
‘What do you think?’ she asked, her voice always so even and measured.
She has an annoying way of responding with questions rather than answers.
‘I know I don’t want to go.’
‘What we want and what we need are often different things.’
I rubbed my lips together, didn’t reply.
‘Sophie, are you still there?’
‘Yes.’
I sounded like a child. Sulky, the sort of tone my mother used to tell me off for using. No one likes a Moody Martha. She liked alliteration. Moody Martha. Nervous Ninny. Worry Wart. . .
‘I know you think it’ll be good for me,’ I said. ‘Healing or whatever. But it could just as well have the opposite effect. All these years. Seeing him again might be the final nail.’
‘We’ve talked about this. The only way to deal with a trauma is to face up to it. And what happened to you was a trauma, Sophie. Matty’s conviction. Your mother’s. . .’
I squeezed my eyes shut, inhaled deeply through my nose.
‘What I’m saying is you’re a victim too.’
‘Not like those women.’
‘No. But still a victim. You need to confront the man, move past your guilt.’
I scoffed in a way Nanna G would certainly have called ‘unlady-like’.
‘He’s hardly going to admit to everything after so long.’
I imagined Janice shrugging, saw in my mind’s eye the trademark downturn at the corners of her mouth that always accompanies it.
‘You don’t know what he might admit now he’s dying.’
‘That’s assuming he really did those things.’ Still I can’t put Matty’s name and ‘murder’ aloud in the same sentence. ‘What if he really is innocent? What if I believe him? That’s not going to help me move past my guilt, is it?’
Janice sighed down the line.
‘No. But at least once you know the truth you can start to deal with it head-on. Stop with the “What ifs”.’
