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TWENTY-SIX
There are kids in my neighbour’s garden.
‘Help,’ they scream.
The screams of a game. Screams of fear sound different. Lower pitched.
I wonder if the women Matty killed screamed; the women they say he killed. What they thought in those last moments, the prayers and final regrets that tumbled through their heads.
Did they plead? Beg for mercy? Or did fear rip out their tongues?
My brain’s a one-way train today, the date circled on my calendar, the signal master. I rub a palm across my eyes, inhale deeply. In for five, out for five, the way Janice has taught me.
‘Be fully present in the moment. Let your breathing ground you.’
I wander over to the window in need of distraction, look out over next-door’s garden, cradling my coffee mug, the steam rising warm against my face.
There are two of them playing out there, a boy and a girl. Can’t be more than eight, the age I was when I first met Matty.
My neighbour’s grandchildren. Blonde hair, chubby cheeks. Coats flapping open, gloves dangling from string poking out of their sleeves. Chasing each other between the trees. Laughing.
‘They’re angelic,’ I told her once, snared by the unspoilt innocence of their youth. ‘So cute.’
She chuckled.
‘I love them to bits but don’t be fooled, Sophie. Looks can be deceptive.’
No need to tell me that, not that she meant anything by it. I’ve never spoken publicly about my relationship with Matty. Never let journalists take my photo or shared my story with anyone other than Janice. Even then there are parts she doesn’t know. Parts I’m too ashamed to reveal.
‘Survivor’s guilt,’ she calls it.
She’s wrong though, it’s not that. I don’t feel guilty he didn’t kill me. I feel guilty about what I did. And for not doing it sooner. You see why I’m so messed up.
In the early days, when we were getting to know each other, Janice suggested I give myself a voice. Publish my own account of what happened. She thought it would be freeing, ‘therapeutic’, to let people hear my perspective, to express myself.
I never have done though, never felt I deserved to have a voice.
How could I not have known? Why didn’t I see what was happening? What if I’d acted sooner?
I take another sip of coffee, attempting to wash away last night’s excesses, to soothe my thumping head.
Tuesday. Four thirty.
Tomorrow and tomorrow creeps in this petty pace.
‘Remember that drive?’ I ask my mother.
‘You thought Matty tried to kill you. Refused to get in a car with him ever again.’
‘Can you blame me?’
‘I blame myself, for not seeing things as they really were.’
‘What is the way they really were?’
‘I don’t know,’ she says, voice coffin heavy.
I hear the rattle of cubes in her glass. By the afternoon, she never bothered with ice.
