For Those Who Wait
Across the river, blinded windows stared their dull indifference
over the water. The old asylum, derelict now of course, its facade of red brick
faded to the colour of spent leaves. In the past she had scanned the river from
a ribboned skylight in the roof, every day seeking out the herons who
faithfully returned each year, their nests shocking like bizarre haircuts among
the shallows. This, always, her fragile connection to the world outside. Now,
the pulse of the river’s ebb and flow acknowledged her return as its wetness
seeped through the soles of her shoes and the urgency of its current urged her
on towards her former home.
In the early
morning all was quiet along the towpath and no one disturbed her short walk
from the bus stop to the bridge. Somewhere distant towards the innards of the
town a car horn sounded, but the only other noise she could hear was a sad
whispering from hospital bricks. She stepped across the wooden slats of the
bridge to the other side, careful suddenly of her footing, for her legs had
never really become accustomed to walking more length than that of a grey
corridor.
The track leading
to the building was steeper than she remembered and loose shale threatened to
stab her ankles which showed white in the gap between trousers and shoes.
Eventually she reached an entrance where interlopers had discarded their human
detritus onto the gravel. An empty aerosol can, its nozzle oozing like a bad
nose bleed, lay where it was flung, and the tip of a syringe needle spiked up
from the ground as though groping for its next hit. Planks of wood, designed to
prevent entry to the building, had long ago been vandalized offering easy
access to anyone who might risk crossing the threshold. Turning, she glanced
back in the direction from which she had come, taking in the steep bank to the
river; a river where once she had witnessed a woman, younger even than herself,
drown inside a hug of swirling water.
She shuttered her eyes for a second but carried on
inside the building’s shell where the atmosphere, although sinister and
oppressive, did not intimidate her. Every passageway’s turn, every unevenness
of flooring were as familiar to her as if they were a map tattooed upon her
skin. Gaps in the boarded windows allowed only enough light to see where the
taggers had been busy killing the already dying walls with their graffiti.
Underneath a light switch someone had randomly scrawled a name Richard, and above, still in bold, even
letters, a sign read ‘Clinic of the
Insane’. She carried on into the growing gloom of rooms where no brightness
had dared to challenge, until she met the beginnings of a central
staircase. From there she would be able
to follow a path to the landing above, and above that, and then above that
again, until she arrived at the attic rooms. But she knew that her legs, even
now throbbing like some ancient and failing contraption, would never see her
reach beyond the first floor.
Standing alone in the vast reception space that would
have been her first encounter there as a teenage girl, she listened to the
continuing soft murmur of the bricks. And then ahead, a different yet familiar
sort of sound. A rasping, like the breath of some garroted and dying animal,
and she was suddenly vigilant. In small steps she made her way forward, her
hands unexpectedly reaching for the flaked walls as she inadvertently dislodged
a broken relic of Saint Teresa whose smile, even now, held its cruel capacity
to mock. The rasping up ahead had stopped, but its following silence brought
with it something else - an emotion that she thought had been buried and
finally put to rest - longing.
His old office was not difficult to find, for its
location remained at the bottom of the west wing corridor where windows had
once looked out, not upon the river, but on the town. The grated breathing had
started up again followed by a silence, the rhythm of both like a song to her
now with every beat matching her closing footfall. Him.
He was seated, straight-backed on a lonely chair in the
middle of the room as if he had been expecting her for a long time. His eyes
were hard to make out but she knew that they would never have lost their blue,
almost purple edging, and inward towards the pupil, those sparks of yellow
among the darkness of the iris. Details. Details would always be her accomplice.
Mostly about him. And others. But also, about herself. They were the spaces
between words in a sentence, the specks of dust drifting in stagnant air, the
taste of her lip on her tongue before she fell asleep.
“Cora.”
It was the same rough breathlessness of her name that
she knew so well. Speech was suddenly alien in her own mouth and her body would
permit only a curt movement of the head in affirmation. For a moment in the
gathered dimness of the decaying office their familiarity felt like a kiss; a
parted mouth stroking the paleness of her throat; a swift lick of tongue across
her now creping neck. She barely believed that he could still have that hold
upon her.
“Here,” he was saying, as his chair scraped from beneath
him, “Take this. Sit.”
She did as she was told and waited as he searched for
something else, and finding an old stool slid it across the floor in front of
her with his foot. He sat down with care, the lowness of the stool making a
contortion of his legs and forcing his eyes to look upwards into hers. He will
not be comfortable with that, she thought, and allowed herself a small smile.
From outside, seeping through the window boards, came the sound of children
probably making their way to school, the harsh obscenities spattered amongst
their speech the only discernible words. Cora was dismayed by it, the fact that
the worst culprit was undeniably female. But as the voices passed, leaving
behind their residue of distaste, she finally spoke.
“You seemed to be expecting me.”
He hesitated before answering, another practice he had
seemingly retained. “I have been expecting you back forever.”
“And how long is
that?”
“About a week.”
It was impossible not to, so she laughed. “You can still
make a girl smile,” she said.
“I thought you might have been intrigued and come
because of the anniversary,” he said, choosing to ignore the irony of her
remark, although she knew that he had noted it. Nothing ever had or ever would,
go unnoticed.
“And besides,” he continued, “I know you miss me.”
His sudden use of
the present tense was deliberate, and this time it was she who chose to do the
ignoring, but he took her silence as acknowledgement and carried on.
“A decade since
they boarded the place up and they couldn’t even demolish it. Instead, they
marked their dirty past with that brand new hospital next door. They invited me
back as a dignitary for the opening ceremony.”
“They?”
“They.” She wouldn’t get any more out of him than that.
“So,” he went on, “after all that farce I thought about
coming here just in case you’d show up.
I’m leaving tonight and this was my last gamble.”
The exchange between them had taken no longer than a few
minutes, but now that she was seated and calm Cora had been able to survey him
better as he talked. He had aged well. She could see that. There had been no
thinning of the hair that accompanied the maturing of most men, no greying
either, although it was a harder condition to detect when he had always had
hair the colour of raw thatch. Only his hands showed much signs of change;
hands that once owned the softness of a man unaccustomed to physical labour and
could express a complex emotion in a single movement were now pleached tightly
together on his lap. The knuckles peaked as white as small icebergs between his
fingers as he squeezed and released them subconsciously.
“You actually thought I’d willingly come back to this?”
She made a sweeping motion with her arms. “Really?”
“You did though, didn’t you, Cora. So why?”
Her reply had for a long time grown like a seed inside
her head. How her voice would be strong. How that half of her that did not long
for him would show the raw hatred behind her eyes. But instead, the words came
out of her mouth as weakly as the trickle from a dripping tap. “I came back to
find what was taken from me. My soul. My soul and also my child whose life you
stole from me.”
“The world was different then. Surely you know that.” It
was said with such little feeling that Cora could almost laugh again, but this
time at herself for being naïve enough to believe he might have changed.
“I know that we no longer live in a world where
vulnerable people are incarcerated for nothing, if that’s what you mean?”
“Nothing? You were hardly incarcerated for nothing.” She
could detect the hardness skulking around the edges of his voice, the
disillusionment still encased within the warped shell of his psyche. “And
remember that I protected and looked after you,” he continued, “when I didn’t
have to. For all those years.”
“Twenty years was a long time to be beholden to
someone,” she said, the sarcasm stinging like raw bile at the back of her
throat. “Are you saying that I owe you a debt of gratitude?”
Now that her eyes had become fully accustomed to the darkness,
she could see better any inflections in his facial expression. The mouth, so
much like her own with its reluctant and involuntary smile, the small white
teeth, partially showing between his parted lips, the careless indifference
flaunted in the hollow of his sucked-in cheeks. His shoulders rose briefly in a
shrug. “If the cap fits,” he said. He rose from the discomfort of the stool and
stood before her, reaching out a hand as though to touch her cheek.
“Where is she?”
Cora’s own voice sounded foreign to her now, but this was the reason she had
come after all, and it needed to be finished.
“Our daughter, you
mean? They buried her in a grave out there somewhere.” At this, he signalled
towards the window, “It was unmarked. You’ll not find it.”
She got up,
standing almost eye to eye with him, the brother who had shaped her sin of
pregnancy into his own deceit. An aspiring young doctor destined for greatness,
he had been the germ of her abandonment when their family’s shame ensured that
no one else would claim her as their own. Those years of interminable hardship
had endured from the moment of her eventual release, leeching from her bones
both day and night. But she had been patient. She had known, of course, of his
visit there, for she had seen his name emblazoned across the front of all the
papers, ‘Eminent psychiatrist returns for
opening of new hospital.’
He had been right about their daughter’s lost remains,
but that would not prevent her, even now, from salvaging both their souls. She
waited for the familiar flicker of his eyelids as he bent to kiss her mouth, a
momentary lack of concentration that would always prove to be his undoing, and
slid the blade easily into the beauty of his throat. For in the end, it would
always come down to this. And, of
course, the details.
This story always mesmerises me. Superb. Creepy. And beautifully chilling.
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