This is the first time sharing part of a story here. I don’t know if It’ll become a thing because I’m basically shouting into the ether. I haven’t been active much on this blog for a very long time and I even (stupidly) deleted my email list, totally on a whim last year so who knows if this even gets seen by anyone other than my 7 year old daughter who takes great joy at being able to find her mum online via search engines.

I’m in the middle of studying for my Masters in Creative Writing and I realised that unless you lived in my house, you probably wouldn’t even know that writing is very dear to me. So if for no other reason than to mark my staff in the sand, I will share some tidbits here. Firstly by sharing part of this short story of Annie. I originally wrote this for an assignment in which we were supposed to submit 1,000 words of prose fiction. But I was concerned the references to violence might be triggering to some, so I went with something else. I’m in two minds about whether to make this into a short story or see where it goes as maybe a longer body of work.

Annie

TRIGGER WARNING – REFERENCES TO PHYSICAL ABUSE

Annie was going to have to kill him one day soon. It had become a case of kill or be killed now. This was the thought playing on repeat as she sat in the corner of the room, diagonal to the door with her back against the wall and her nerves shot. A bloodied tea towel was wrapped around her right arm and her baby slept soundly in the crook of the other thankfully unaware of what had transpired. The towel had been a hand printed, special edition that had once been multicoloured, but now it was brown and omitted an iron smell.

Sunlight crept through the open windows, the swaying silhouettes of the London plane trees creating monsters on the wall to her left. Although the pain made it hard to stay focussed, Annie was acutely aware of the birdsong and the sound of kids being shuffled gently along by tired caregivers on their way to the nursery located at the bottom of her road. The sounds made her aware of two things. One: that it was at least 8am and she’d been on the floor for at least the past three hours and two: life, as ever, was moving on with no thought to her own pain and suffering.

Would they believe her if she were to step out of her pristine, highly coveted mews home and tell them about how he’d pinned her down, his thick fingers tangled tightly in her hair? Him. This pillar of the community, loved by many and known by even more?
“I need help.” She whispered to the empty room. Lips barely moving, more a thought than a real utterance.

Ten years ago, he’d been the type of boy that all the girls swooned over. You’d see them rushing to the toilets at the beginning of lunch break to apply fresh gel and water to their baby hair in exaggerated swirls and swoops. Sickly, cloying body spray was applied, and skirts were rolled up so high that the excess fabric bulged at their waists. Then they’d leave the bathroom to take their perch next to the football pitch, hoping to catch his eye. The teens would strike their best nonchalant poses and hope the curve of their breasts or sight of their glistening cocoa butter skin would be enough to make him choose one of them.

Annie had never sat with the other girls to partake in these antiquated pubescent mating rituals. She didn’t swoon over him, at least not in such a public, shameless way. No. But, she was human and could understand what they all saw in him. With his perfectly broad, athletic shoulders sat on top an equally impressive frame. He had gone through puberty early and sported more chiselled abs than seemed reasonable for a teenaged boy. His deep brown eyes miraculously managed to look both surprised and aloof, simultaneously. But her focus was always on her studies, so she’d left the swooning to the other girls.

Years later, those girls had been green with envy when they arrived at their unofficial school reunion arm in arm, over two hours late, in true (b list) celebrity fashion. The reunion had been the idea of Alice, a somewhat eager to please character who had stayed in touch with 80% of the student body and had taken it upon herself to book out the top floor of a dimly lit nightclub so they could all “catch up with the people dem” as she’d put it in a strong North London lilt that Annie could’ve sworn hadn’t actually existed when they’d attended the notorious North London secondary. But who was she to judge? Her whole life revolved around her on pretending to be other people.

During the reunion, men patted him on the back and reminisced about old school pranks, whilst self-consciously over inflating the importance of their job roles, and sizes of their own bank balances.
The women cooed over baby photos, shared holiday snaps and compared engagement rings. If Annie had been particularly close to any of these women, they would have noticed the way her smile never made it to her eyes, the tenseness in her facial muscles or the way she grimaced when anyone moved in for a hug, making the course material of her designer dress rub against the raw skin of her back.

The pair stood in their separate social circles at different ends of the bar. But all the while their eyes never left each other. They stayed long enough to take selfies, post to their socials and tag their old school crowd. Then they ordered a black cab and said their goodbyes to people they probably wouldn’t see for another ten years, explaining they had to make it home and get their beauty sleep before a 4am wake up the next morning. He had a full day of filming ahead of him, hence the early start. And she, like the dutiful wife that she was, at his insistence, would be waking up at least sixty minutes before him to make sure his breakfast of choice, currently cornmeal porridge with honey and a side of freshly cut fruits, was ready and waiting for him. It was also her job to keep an eye out for his driver and meet him at the bottom of the steps with a fresh thermos of coffee.

The morning after the reunion, this very morning, where she found herself bloodied and shaking in the corner of the room, Annie had overslept. The baby, probably unsettled due having been left with a new babysitter, had woken up countless times throughout the night and she’d fallen asleep in the nursing chair in the nursery. He’d come into the room and wake her up in such a horrific way that pain raced through her limbs and she felt vomit rise up inside of her as she played back that moment in her head. For what wasn’t the first time in their relationship, she’d thought this might be the occasion he would actually succeed in bringing her to her maker.

She wasn’t ready to die. Which is why he had to.