Unforgiven

CW: Mental health, Substance abuse

Jez Turner saw a woman stumbling along the moor’s edge, just as it breached the road. She was limping heavily on both feet, it seemed, and was poorly dressed for the weather conditions. It had turned full dark an hour before and there were no city lights in this part of the world. The stars, occluded by scudding clouds, were brilliant when they did appear, yet they offered no guidance. She had no torch, and the lights from his vehicle made her cringe as he passed.

And he did pass, when once he would have stopped. When once he had been a better man, a man who would help a woman in distress, before life had dulled his armour and diminished his credentials. He was meeting a woman in a snug cottage on the coast, a woman whose husband was away - and this other woman, this waif-like figure of disturbing qualities - was best forgotten in pursuit of fleeting happiness.

Had there been a passenger in his vehicle, he would have stopped. He considered this as he took the turn towards the cottage and the woman; that this must ultimately be the measure of a man: what he would or would not do without witness.

She had made no attempt to flag the driver down, and as the first spit of rain touched her cheeks, she resolved to find somewhere to stay the night so she could continue her punishment tomorrow. A thousand crippling steps later she came to a turn which led to a village on the coast, but she had somewhere forgotten how high the moors were and how long the winding descent would inevitably be. It would be another two thousand crippling steps before the thin lights of the village came into view, and in all that tormented time, the rain drew down heavier until there was not a part of her thin body that was not drenched through. She recalled a time when she had been young and vibrant, a conversation in a pub about the most egregious lies the world gets away with telling. Others spoke of politics, certain laundry capsules, and stuff your parents came out with, but when it came to her turn she said: never believe anyone who tells you that something is waterproof.

Still, those days were gone.

It was nothing more than a hamlet with a rocky, treacherous beach and perhaps twenty stone-built cottages clustered around an inn called The Moon and Sixpence. The old pub sign swung in the breeze from the sea, and although the lights seemed dim, she could see the shadows of people within.

Her mother used to say that the end of the ordeal was the worst part, and it had taken her many years to understand what that meant. Her feet, so blistered that the agony was intense, now screamed further as she approached the entrance. That she could take another step was debatable. But she pushed through the worn wooden door and savoured the absence of rain and the candle-lit sconces, kinder to her eyes after all the darkness of the night. She spied a couple of ladies sat in a snug, but the main body was populated by men. Their clothes were extraordinary; rusty scarves, flat caps, waistcoats, woollen trousers, yellowing shirts and braces. The women, such as there were, wore Victorian fashions which, strange though it was, seemed perfectly ordinary in a place such as this. They had, perhaps, had one of those festivals countryfolk often held to celebrate their past.

She would not ask about it. It was the nadir of low-season, but the locals must tire of endless visitors and their inquisitions. She asked for a room if they had one, Please!, Please! Have one!, and a large brandy. The landlady, a flat-faced woman of meaty proportion, immediately brought a key to the counter. Room 5. She then poured the brandy.

‘You will want my name,’ she said. ‘And could I pay with card?’

‘I will take your name for pleasantries sake,’ said the other woman, ‘but you can pay when you leave.’

‘Meghan Brock,’ she said.

‘Well, Meghan, would you like something to eat?’

‘No! No, just the brandy.’

The woman leaned her forearms on the wet bar in a confiding, very female way. ‘If you don’t mind my saying, you look like you need to eat. You don’t weigh much more than a herring gull dripping wet.’

Meghan slid onto a bar stool, and with her feet dangling from the ground, the throbbing pain in her feet intensified. She drank the brandy in incremental steps, from a small sip where the burn punched her stomach, to larger ones, when her mouth and gums became infused with the vapour.

‘I will have another,’ she said, aware that in such a short passage of time her words seemed slurred to her ears. But the lady, to her credit, made no hint of censure. A woman who understood, perhaps, the momentary solace of the grape.

And then it too was gone, and Meghan thought she should retire to her room.

‘Shall I show you?’ the woman asked.

‘It can’t be too hard to find,’ she replied. ‘Could I take another with me?’

The woman poured it, and Meghan took the long walk up the narrow stairs, steadying her drink and the weight of her rucksack as her blisters clawed into her sanity with each riser.

The smell of damp was pervasive. The strip of carpet along the corridor was a utilitarian green and the walls were not smoothly rendered but bore the rough shape of the stone it was built with. Dark cobwebs nestled in the painted crevices. At the end of the corridor was a fan-light window which gave out on a view of the sea, some ways distant at that hour. The thought of a sea view would once have excited her, but then it seemed rather obvious that the place was empty of guests and so why should she not have been offered it? She had passed a single bathroom on her way, but there appeared to be no shower, just a grubby looking bath tub on legs.

No matter. She had grown used to the smell of her unwashed body and had no desire to dip her feet into water. To be unclean, and drunk, and weary and lonely was to be punished.

It was an old-fashioned key of the type where you never knew whether to turn left or right. And the room, when it was revealed, filled her with a kind of dread. There was no electric light, but a low burning gas lamp between two tired single beds. On a desk by the central window was a box of candles, an old box of matches, and an antique holder, distorted with wax. She had once had a burning imagination, and believed that she must have slipped into some coastal Brigadoon, but she was too pained and too drunk to think beyond taking her walking boots off, (Oh yes! These are 100% waterproof, madam, guaranteed!), and so she sank onto the low bed and began to untie the sodden laces. There was the problem, she thought. Laces need eyelets, and eyelets are holes, so how could they possible be waterproof?

And walking boots, she considered, are not pliant. They are kind to the stubbed toe but cruel to the heels. And all the while she was thinking of these inconsequential matters, she became aware that she would not be able to take those boots off without removing all the skin from her feet, and so she left them on and led on the strange bed, sipping the brandy and looking at a ghastly photograph on the far wall.

It was of a Victorian girl, with the white aproned dress and the Alice band through her hair. Her hair was long and dark and her eyes were partially closed, as if in a reverie. Her stance was awkward, as though she were pinned to a board. Of course, processing times were long and tedious in those days. It was hard to keep your eyes open or a smile on your face at the exact moment it decided to take, and yet it remained to Meghan’s acute eyesight that the girl looked quite dead.

And the girl looked just like Florence.

The brandy, the feet, the fatigue and the hunger led her to another place which was nowhere at all.

*****

‘Ms Brock? Ms Brock?’

Meghan opened her eyes and the stringent light forced them closed again.

‘Good,’ she heard a disembodied voice tell. And then back into the nowhere until at some point when the light was waning, she opened her eyes again. There was a woman there with the apple cheeks of a do-gooding type. She bolted up as if an epiphany had bugled up her arse. ‘Ms Brock?’

‘That’s me,’ she whispered. ‘Where am I?’

‘Hospital. My name is Margaret.’

‘Hmm.’

‘You’ve been here for almost two weeks.’

Meghan opened her eyes fully. ‘I was in a terrible place.’

‘You certainly were. You were found on the moors in the pouring rain. A man was driving by and saw you on the side of the road. He nearly ran over you, in fact.' She leaned forward, putting too little distance between her face and Meghan's. 'Between you and me, I think he’d been up to no good. He wouldn’t leave a name. Just a bit shifty, you know? The morning after the night before,’ she snorted.

‘The morning? No. I was in a guesthouse, an inn, called the Moon and Sixpence.’

‘No, dear. You weren’t. That closed years ago.’

‘It didn’t!’ she protested, trying to rise on her thin, dry elbows. ‘I saw a photograph on the wall of a dead girl, and when I woke up in the morning, she, the girl, was lying in the other bed in my room. Her hair was draping over the edge. The same girl in the photograph. She was dead. I tried to help her but ..’

'That is not what happened, dear. All your imagination, I'm afraid.'

'No! She was in the photograph and then she came into the bed and I remember screaming.'

Margaret slapped her hands on her thighs. ‘You had a fever brought on by sepsis. The man who found you said that you screamed like a banshee when he prodded you. They say your feet were the worst they’d ever seen. They have saved your legs,’ she said, ‘but you won’t be able to walk for weeks! And you were emaciated! You still are!’

There was something ghoulish and vicarious about this woman that Meghan found repugnant. ’Who are you?’ she asked.

‘The staff psychiatrist,’ she said, puffed with self-esteem. ‘Your mother’s downstairs in the cafe. She and I get along.’

‘I’m sure you do.’

Margaret riffled through a file and produced a pamphlet from a museum. ‘You walked for miles,’ she said. ‘Somewhere along the way you visited this little place.’ She pointed at it with a scrubbed finger. ‘They have an exhibit of memento mori. On the back page here is a photograph of a teenage Victorian girl who was propped up and photographed after she died. Your mother tells me that she looks just like your daughter, Florence. She was the daughter of the landlady of the Moon and Sixpence in the 1870s. And here is a photograph of that lady,' she said, pointing at a flat-faced woman of meaty proportion. 'The girl died of a seizure when she was eighteen. It says it all on the back, look!’ She pointed again at the pamphlet.

‘You look familiar,’ Meghan said.

‘I have been in and out of your room for days,’ she said.

‘You look exactly like the landlady.’

‘As I said, dear. You have been feverish. Close to death.’

Margaret leant forward and kissed her cheek. It felt inappropriate, and Meghan was sure she could smell brandy on her breath.

Later her mother came. She had aged since Meghan had last seen her, and in that it had not occurred to her that she had lost both her granddaughter and almost her own daughter, she felt a regret so steep it made her sick. Her mother offered the cardboard bowl and smoothed the sheets.

‘It was not your fault, darling,’ she said.

‘But it was. I was sad and lonely and teenagers are so difficult, I .. I’

‘I know. You started drinking brandy and on the morning she died you were fast asleep on the settee and didn’t hear her seizure. Dear God, child, I understand how you feel, but you might have just been entirely sober and popped to the shops, or you might have been at work. She might have been staying over at a friend’s ….’

‘I did hear her.’

Her mother’s pale, rinsed out eyes looked at her.

‘I heard her, at least in a part of my waking mind. But every seizure she had didn’t make me stronger but made me weaker. After the first one, I feared every sound that came from her room. It ate me, like acid, until I could hardly function. Every shot of adrenaline since her diagnosis, all that deep breathing when I realised she’d just dropped something, listening at the toilet door, all that worry hollowed me out until there was nothing decent left of me. And so I started drinking because to be honest, mum, sweet tea just wasn’t making it. And I wanted her to leave, to go to university or somewhere, anywhere, where I didn’t have to see her dead in the morning.’

Margaret’s flushed face appeared through the glass, gesturing Do you need my help?

‘Don’t let her in, mum. She’s a twat.’

‘She is that,’ said her mother, smiling. ‘Listen, sweetheart, there isn’t a parent on this earth who hasn’t felt what you felt. There is a coward in all of us when it comes to those we love the most. An unwillingness to see or hear. None of it alters the fact that she wasn’t taking her tablets regularly and it could have happened at any time, whether you were there or not. I can’t tell you not to punish yourself. All I can do is to tell you that I love you. And that there have been times, sat in that terrible cafe downstairs, when I have also wished that you might pass so I don’t have to worry about you anymore, and that’s the raw and honest truth.’

They settled into silence. Her mother was watching something on her screen and Meghan drifted in and out. Margaret barged in, after an hour or so.

‘Have we had a little chat?’ she said, all breezy and insincere.

Meghan’s mother swotted her away.

‘You know the man who stayed with me and called the ambulance ..’

‘I know of him, but no idea who he is. Why do you ask?’

‘Because I think he was the same man who drove by me the night before.’

‘Dear girl,’ she said. ‘If everyone was a hero there would be no need at all to invent the word.’