“Here you go,” says Julie, handing him her phone. “That’s the piece she wrote for us. Violet, I mean. It might be useful. Very powerful.”
Rowan looks at the screen. Raises his bandages to hide the smile.
Creative Writing Assignment
Recollections
By Violet Sheehan
I have a decent memory. I’m good with faces, better with names. If we’ve arranged to meet next Tuesday at 6pm and I don’t turn up by quarter past, call the police or question whether I actually like you, because I promise, I won’t have forgotten. I know the star signs of all of my friends. I never get home to find I’ve run out of bread or milk. I send in the meter reading as soon as the electricity people ask for it and I can tell you where I was and what I was doing at pretty much any time in my life going back to three-years-old. But there’s a gap. You all know the gap I’m talking about. Or at least, it feels like you all do. There’s a black hole, snipped out of my brain like a photograph pulled from an album. It feels like somebody has reached into my brain and sheared a piece away.
If you don’t know what I’m talking about, then sorry for wasting your time. I can be a little paranoid sometimes. Maybe that’s why I’m single. I’ve had my share of company over the years but I’m not very good at letting people get too close. I always wonder what they’re really after. I can’t imagine that there’s anything about me they’re eager to get close to. I suppose look okay and I can’t argue with the teachers and the shrinks and the bosses who have all told me I’m too clever for my own good, but I’m not really very nice. I was a horrible cow at school and I still don’t know why. I never really knew how to act. It always felt as though I’d missed a class when everybody else had reality explained to them. People seemed better at living than me. They still do, I think.
Sorry, I’m waffling on. I was trying to explain. Some of you will know that when I was a teenager, I went missing for a few days. I met somebody who played the guitar and sang in a lovely voice, and he got me and my friends stoned and drunk and we spent a couple of nights partying in the woods while people went a bit nuts trying to find us. You might even be sitting there now, wishing you could ask me about it. What would I tell you if you did? For a long time I would tell you the same thing I told everybody else. I don’t remember. Whatever happened, it’s gone. I don’t think it’s some sort of suppressed memory – a way of protecting myself from trauma. I think it’s because I was so unbelievably out of it that I couldn’t make memories at all. So whatever happened, it’s not a memory to be retrieved, because it was never made in the first place. That’s what Catherine says when I dare to bring it up. She’s the same as me. It’s just a gap in her head, and maybe that’s for the best.
Is it, though? That’s what I’ve been asking for a while now. Maybe coming to this group has helped. I like writing. I used to be good at it when I was young. I liked poetry when I was a teenager. I liked a lot of things that were a bit of an acquired taste. Catherine despairs of me, but after 30 years of friendship I doubt she’s about to ditch me now. I don’t tell her often enough what she means to me. I hope to goodness she doesn’t cry like a toddler if this is the piece that’s picked out for a reading.
I think I’ve been a bit harsher than usual with Catherine recently. I’m sorry for that, I think. She doesn’t seem troubled by it the way I am. She accepts it all. It was her act of rebellion, a little interlude of partying and acting up and giving the vicar a reason to go out of his mind. I don’t think I can leave it at that. You see, bits have been coming back. You know that feeling when you see something random and it reminds you of a dream you had when you were a child? It’s like that. Suddenly, I’m asking questions of myself. I have a memory of a dark, wet, sparkling place. I can taste the taste you get after you’ve had a filling – like iron filings and chemicals. More than anything else, I can see the girl I haven’t let myself think about in three decades. Freya. Red hair. White lines on her arms. Older than us. She was there, I know she was. She never said goodbye. Left, like she’d left all the other schools. I’ve started looking for her, Catherine. I know I said I wouldn’t, but I have. I’ve started looking into myself as well. There are pictures there. Not memories, but echoes. Something that comes to me when I sleep. Do you remember the old caretaker? The man in the woods who used to talk to us about oneness and vibrations and journeys between different planes of reality? I’ve been thinking of him a lot. You tell me I shouldn’t hang around with my friends at the farm but they’re good listeners, and they help me find the frequency I lost that day. I know it will come back to me. Eve is worrying about me too. She’s been worrying for 30 years. Do you remember that day I called her Mum by accident? Oh my God I’m still so embarrassed.
So, that’s where I’m at. I’m the girl with the gap in her memory – a story with a missing page at its heart. Freya’s the answer, I’m sure. Freya, and the hippy man with the weird name. I’ve asked the girls to try and remember. They don’t owe me any favours, but maybe they will. And Freya, if you somehow hear that I’m looking for you, please get in touch. I know you’re the glue that would put me back together. I need to know if I’m remembering the truth, or what they’ve told me to. And I know you’re the one with the answers.
11
Wednesday, October 20, 1988
Yem How Wood, Wasdale
8.03pm
The woods that close around Arthur Sixpence reach out for him with black talons. They grab at his feet as he stumbles; whip at his face like a flail. It feels as if the forest is trying to claim him.
He hears his breath coming in ragged bursts and tries, desperately, to hold onto his sanity. He glances around, trying to get a sense of where he is, but he cannot make sense of forward and back, up and down, inside and out. He feels like a fly in a tangled mass of spider-silk. The forest around him is a terrifying a black mass; all whistles and trills and shuddering branches. He hears sticks snapping beneath his feet with the gunshot crack of snapping femurs. Sees the darkness disassemble; to pixilate and disintegrate into a million falling leaves.
He is lost now. Lost in the darkness.
“I tried to help you,” he hisses, into the darkness. “I tried to heal you!”
He reaches out his hand and feels the knobbled bark of a tree trunk. He realises his feet are wet, that water has soaked past the lip of his boots. He splashes backwards, onto soft ground. His right boot slips and his knee hits the wet ground, hard. His teeth bang together and he mashes the side of his tongue. He can taste blood. He spits on the forest floor, raising a gloved finger to his mouth. Even through the leather he can feel the wetness.
Just breathe, he tolls himself. He’ll come back. Just breathe. You’re fit – you’re not done yet….
His cheeks feel raw as the wind slices against the tears and he wipes his face dry with the back of a glove. He screws up his eyes, peering again into the gloom. There are vague shapes, but nothing more. He takes a tentative step and realises his boots are now on soft leaves, rather than the hardness of the path. He shuffles forward again and strikes something firm. He curses and stops again.