Sometimes when she opened her mouth to speak she felt a hypocrite. Not one born of necessity, but one with such deep self loathing that she quite often made herself sick. Shutting herself away in her room for days at a time; she had that luxury.
There was her perspective, you see, saving face, hiding her truth to project those glowing rays of white lies. Then there was his. What was his perspective? The succulent flesh of mangoes, piled in a box, in a faded photograph taken of him on the Indian subcontinent? The enjoyment of life? Slaving away at the rotting flesh of others? Restoring ill-health to wellbeing? Catching frogs and watching them slip away from his fingers and scatter away on the rippling waters of Thomas Pond, like skipping stones.
She never knew. Never would know.
Seasons would spin her head this way and that until she was quite dizzy with the falling of leaves on new green grass under a blanket of the softest, pinkest blossom she ever set her eyes on.
And so the years passed by, and each one was a ticking sound on the old grandfather clock in the great hall, and with each passing click of a second she was more and more of a hypocrite and a liar, her beaming smile wider and wider, her eyes increasingly lifeless as her life appeared to ebb away from her grasp.
‘Come for a walk with me,’ he would say, approaching her in the twilight evenings when he was home, as though he expected nobody else to solicit her attention, as though he knew she was waiting for him, as though she would wait forever until her skin was wizened and her hair was in fluffy white piles by her gnarled old feet. She never, ever replied. She would simply follow. Quiet at first, and then their chatter would flow as it always did, up towards the stars; they were witness to the truth.
Never a question, always an expectation. Year on year. Six years through his tumultuous studies. Three years after, in between his travels around the globe, whispers of his ‘interests’ flitting through the wind. Others. Lovers. In letters to family members, a sentence thrown carelessly in a word to her, a sentence she would read and read and read over until it was seared in her mind, re-living itself in a myriad of devastating scenarios, all meaning and context stripped from its being, taking the form of barbed wire and raging storm.
She said no to several suitors, and when they breathlessly, falteringly, woundedly enquired of the existence of someone else she would lie. Blatant and brazen, stars twinkling above their heads. No. Certainly not. Hypocrisy sounds harsh in the cold night air. It stings. It reverberates. It snatches joy and comes right back at you and gives you a sharp slap on the cheek.
On the final day he came in the twilight to where she sat on the bottom step, cheeks in her palms, observing the way the sky changed from explosive red to faded, gentle pink, she looked up at him. Tall, silhouetted, devilishly handsome, eerie, sad eyes, which were brilliantly green in the darkening world, and to which she could never, would never, say no.
‘Come for a walk with me,’ he murmured, turning to look at the spectacle before them.
‘Not tonight.’ was her response.
She felt, rather than saw, him turn sharply to her.
‘Alright, I shall sit here with you then,’
‘No, Tom. Not today. Today I would like to be left alone.’
To pine, she thought. To pine.
He didn’t say anything. She looked at him then, caught herself in the full brilliant path of his gaze. Almost faltered, almost stood up, almost gave him her hand. He looked at her, really looked. She felt stripped to her bone. She felt her brain hung between them, her heart dangling from it by a single, pulsing artery. Her soul laid bare.
He can’t. He could never. He doesn’t know! She reassured herself. He was the first to look down, lost for words.
‘Tomorrow, then.’ he said, finally, and smiled.
Her shoulders dropped. Relief poured from her fingertips.
‘Tomorrow,’ she agreed. Smiled back. Brilliantly. Saw his response to it, smiled more. Some power there. Hypocrite. Smiled wide. Beautiful.
There would be no tomorrow.
Ocean Bream 