Justify This - Chapter One

Bailey



-ONE-



The noise dragged on. Each razor-sharp beat like a knife puncturing holes in my head. I rolled my eyes as the music, or using more precise terminology, ear pollution, went on and on…

To the left of where I sat, my mother was silent and shaking, giant tears rolling down her cheeks. To my right, my sister was sobbing, holding her boyfriend’s hand sternly. I sat in silence, biting absentmindedly on my lip, hoping and praying that the next chorus would be the last of this torture. As the harmony ricocheted off the walls, I bit back a laugh. This choice of song was ridiculously ironic. I was positive that my aunt had chosen this song to be purposely satirical, either that or she was out of her mind drunk when she made the decision.

Then again, that would be in accordance with family traditions. Drinking problems ran in my family along with insanity, depression and social ineptitude. An unhealthy dose of each is what killed my father. When my aunt had introduced this song to the congregation a good decade or so back, her precise words were, ‘it reminds me of my dear brother, I will play this on my piano in remembrance of the great man and father that he was.’ I had to disguise a rather hysterical laugh for a cough when she attributed to him ‘great man and father’ status. Saying that my father was a great man practically made a mockery out of the people out there who genuinely deserved the compliment.

With all the songs ever written out there at your fingertips, it was confusing to me as to why my aunt had chosen this particular one to remind her of her brother. This song was, admittedly ear-piercingly high and twittering, but all the same sweet and simple, consistently in a major key. My father was almost the complete opposite. He was dangerously schizophrenic, uncomprehendingly complex and usually depressed, apart from when he was knee-deep in alcohol. The only apparent connections I could determine between the song and my father was that both were incredibly annoying and lasted far longer than they should.

They had been shocked, all of them had - the group of duplicitous, incredulous relatives I was embarrassed and, at times, ashamed to acknowledge were my family - at my seemingly cavalier response to the news of my father’s death, a mere week ago. I expressed no signs of grief, and my attitude seemed blasé to the point of adulterated insanity.

They saw my situation as any normal, level-headed onlooker would. I was seventeen years old, and was now a poor defenceless child, left to grow up in a cruel world without my daddy to protect me. Even as these thoughts flooded my head, fiery bile rose in my throat.

I could have forgiven such an assumption from an innocent, unknowing bystander. A suggestion from one of my inner relatives, however, that I must be falling apart inside if not showing signs of deterioration externally, elicited a powerful surge of anger from the pit of my stomach. It angered me that such a thought could enter the mind of my sister, my brother, my aunt, my mother, because they knew the man my father was. They knew him as well as I did. I could not forgive them for presuming that I was crying a river on the inside because my father had died, because they knew how much I hated him. They hated him just as much.

It perplexed me that these people were mourning for a man they had been wishing was dead for ten years. Surely, they should be happy in the knowledge that the unrelenting, hovering plague that had been a suffocating presence since the day of his transformation into an alcoholic monster was gone. Forever.

But as I observed the people around me, heard their sniffling, witnessed their crying, I saw that none of them expressed even an iota of happiness. They were sufficiently miserable and drowning in sorrow for a death that I obdurately refused to acknowledge as a loss.

I had convinced myself that I was truly the only sane one left among them, as I was the only one not to be swept off my feet by an unexplainable anguish. My actions did not emblazon an emotion resembling a forever-inextinguishable fire of grief, as theirs did. Their pain was genuine. The grief they expressed at the funeral through their tears and their sniffles and their strained-with-some-fearsome-emotion speeches was real. It was bewildering to me, that they could be so merciful, so humane, as to forgive a man who had done nothing but torment them for a decade. How strange that they were still able to mourn his departure from this plane of existence.

They had forgiven him as a moneylender might forgive the outstanding debts of a client who has fallen to death with no next of kin. Wholly and mercifully. What differentiated me from the rest of my relatives was that I could not grieve my father’s death, because I could not forgive him for ruining the first vital seventeen years of my life. It was impossible for me, as I knew it would always be.

I refused to succumb to weakness by letting him off that easily. I refused to draw the same clumsy conclusion as the rest of my tear-blinded family that because he was dead now, he deserved to be missed, as all corpses do. Just because he was dead, it certainly didn’t mean he was sorry. You had to earn forgiveness, it wasn’t something that should be awarded to you just because you happened to have died. It shouldn’t work like that. It angered me that it worked that way for my family. They should have been indifferent, but they truly cared. How strange.

I could not love my father alive.

I sure as hell could not love him when he was dead.

I breathed an emphatic sigh of relief when the music finally ended; the concluding note was oddly disconcerting: it was dully melancholic, in contrast to the rest of the chirping notes.

The remainder of the service passed by in a monotonous blur of speeches, hymns and readings. When at last it was over, and people began rising from their seats and making their way towards the tall double doors, I stood up abruptly, ensuring I was out of the stuffy building before I got caught up in the mob of tearful, sobbing relatives. When I was a foot from the exit, and I could taste the fresh air, a hand gripped my shoulder tightly.

A voice spoke quietly from behind my shoulder, ‘Bailey, dear, if you ever need someone to chat to, I’ll always be willing to lend an ear.’ The voice was frail and shook somewhat, though whether that was because its owner was ancient or because it was tense with sadness, I could not determine.

I didn’t know how to answer without seeming rude, so I shook my head lightly, rolled my shoulder and flew to the open door, not looking back to see who had spoken to me. I thought it would make me uncomfortable if I had to endure looking into her eyes and pretending to be thankful for her offer.

When at last I made it outside, the icy air was bitingly refreshing. I floated discreetly around the back of the church and half-crawled through the overgrown grass until I found the bench that I had been coming to for the past six years when I wanted to skip services every Sunday. Trees surrounded the spot from every side; the grass around the bench was unkempt to the point of rendering me invisible among the swirling blades of green and yellow, blemished with a faint dusting of snow.

I wiped the thin layer of sleet off the bench with my sleeve. I sat on the rotting piece of wood, sitting on my hands and blowing the hair out of my eyes. The sky was white, a monochromatic haze of cloud and snow, blended into one.

I looked to my right and witnessed a swarm of rigid black skirts, suits and hats march solemnly to a point in the distance. I whipped my head away, and buried it between my knees. I rocked my body slowly back and forth to create enough friction to warm myself up.

My family would be too busy mourning to realise that I wasn’t there when they buried my father. They would presume I was in the horde of black somewhere, among aunts, uncles, cousins, friends and other various strangers that until this day I had not known existed. Nobody would come looking for me, and that fact comforted me. So I sat for a long time by myself, snow dripping off the trees all around me and falling to my shoulders, my hair thrashing around my face in the violent breeze, my eyelashes sticking to the top of my eyelids from the combined effects of the wind and cold.

Then I shut my heavy eyes.

When I opened them again, the sky was black. I was lying on the bench, my legs crunched up awkwardly to accommodate the lack of space. I was drenched in water, my head and my eyes stung stridently and my back felt crippled. I slowly untangled my alien-looking limbs, stood up and took several deep, painful breaths, each gasp of frozen air a gunshot to my lungs. I gazed up into the night.

As a child, I had nightmares of dragons breathing smoke coming out of the darkness and smothering me as I slept. The saner father of my childhood, the not yet alcoholic one, a very different father to the one my family had just buried without me, had taught me to dispel the dreams. He took me camping once a month at the age of seven, forced me in gentle lovingness to confront all that I feared, until I no longer saw dragons in the dark. I had gotten used to the ebony night skies so that now, the simple essence of black nothingness soothed me rather than perturbed me.

As I stretched and felt my aching back crack, I reached for my phone in the back pocket of my trousers. I turned it on; the time read three minutes past ten. I checked to see if I had any missed calls, which I did not. Then I sat back down on the dry rotting bench, to decide what my next move would be.

My head throbbed uncomfortably, though I was used to the pain now that I was seventeen years old. Throughout my childhood and early teenage years, I had been plagued with intensive headaches. They were sometimes brutal, close to migraine status, but, as I grew older, they became less frequent and much less painful.

Even when I was suffering from a callous headache, I had always been a decisive thinker. I could make decisions easily. I very rarely faced repercussions from bad decisions I made, because I very rarely made bad decisions. Now, however, as I sat on the decrepit bench that was in reality merely a few planks of deteriorating wood, I struggled to fabricate a decent plan of action that would not have alarming or dangerous ramifications either for me or for whoever else might be concerned.

I could walk the twenty-minute journey home. However, in that case I would be forced to walk along the main road, passing several pubs on my way through the centre of town. The thought of drunk men hauling sexually slanderous, derogatory idioms at me as I walked past did not fill me with any great enthusiasm or encouragement. So for the time being, I dismissed that plan, and moved on to my next option.

I could call my mum, explaining where I was but giving as little detail as possible, enough not to give her cause for serious concern, but not so much detail that she questioned my every word. Not so much detail that she began to irritate me with her flowing, unbroken stream of whys and hows.

But even as I picked up my phone to dial the number, an incongruous thought pulsed through my head, a thought that my conscience produced, and with which my better half could not expostulate. I allowed a very recent memory from a few hours before to take form behind my eyes, as I sat with only the swirling black and the winnowing wind as my companions. In the image that my mind procured pristinely, I saw my mother silent and weeping into my brother’s shoulder. I blinked heavily, and the image was gone.

My mother, although I thought it was unnecessary and inexplicable, was deep in grief. Though I did not understand her willingness to pardon the wrongdoings of her phantom late ex-husband, I did not want to cause her any inconvenience. I did not want to accentuate the pain she was feeling, by bothering her and asking her to come and collect me at ten at night, when she was probably neck-deep in scorching bathwater perfumed with tears that my father did not deserve.

I craned my neck up to look at the blinking stars, and thought how much I would love to join them, if not for a little while, as an experimental holiday. An observer of the world from the heavens above, twinkling in grand majesty, never fading away. Then I caught myself thinking this, such a ridiculous notion, and scolded myself, as I often found myself doing when I allowed nonsense to enter my mind.

Nonsensical thoughts belonged to people of very restricted intelligence. My subconscious irritated me greatly sometimes. I had disciplined my conscious mind against such utter twaddle but I was less in control of the thoughts that lingered at the back of my head, that I did not fully realise were there sometimes.

Besides, I could not afford to waste time; I had more pressing concerns to deal with, such as how I was to get back home safely without either being stabbed or raped or something equally as horrific.

I thought of other people I could phone, my friends, but I could not face their endless accusations and wonderings as to how I was coping without falling to pieces. They would never understand that I just didn’t care that much that my father was dead now. To understand such a thing required the acceptance that I was an unforgiving, possibly inhumane bitch – a simple fact I could live with, as long as I still had my pride – but my good friends refused to see me in such a derogatory light. They thought too much of me. Perhaps someone like me didn’t deserve friends.

But then again, I was only a heartless bitch to people who really deserved it – my father being an example that easily sprung to mind- not those I loved, never people I cared about. If I could help it.

I got up suddenly, shaking off the cold vehemently, due to my growing frustration at my body’s constant shivering, which distracted me from coming up with a realistic plan.

I blinked through the enveloping night, and as I did so, I came to a quick realisation, a stroke of ingenuity. I would phone Josie, one of my closest friends, and ask her to plead with her sister to come and pick me up. Maria didn’t know me that well, and Josie wasn’t that annoying variety of friend who divulged personal information about you to their family members, such as news of a recent death, and so Maria would have no reason to ask me any questions or comment on how amazing I was for being so strong. She would not feel obligated to apologise to me, a random acquaintance, for losing someone she did not realise I hated, even in death.

Sure, it might have been selfish of me to ask, but it was just the kind of thing a best friend could get off with, a thing the bonds of friendship could easily forgive. I grabbed for my phone, dialled the number impatiently and waited as I let it ring, once, thrice, five times… my heart sank a little after the seventh ring, when I realised in solemnity that Josie was not at home. I tried her mobile, but it was off. I cursed her for not being available to do my selfish bidding. How dare she not be waiting by the phone, basing her whole life around the possibility that I could ring her at any moment with a necessary command that was mandatory she obey? I mean, jeez, my father had just died.

I was digressing, and more specifically joking. In part, anyway.

I was running low on viable options, and becoming increasingly impatient with myself for creating such a ridiculously random and potentially dangerous situation as this. I looked around me into the surrounding field, panic not rising yet, panic not settling in, and realised that I would have to suck it up and deal with my own stupidity by walking home, even if that did put me in peril. I probably deserved a few stab wounds for falling asleep anyway. Who falls asleep on a bench in the snow in the middle of a churchyard?

Me, apparently. Just stupid old me.

I began to march my way through the night, speeding over invisible carpets of wet grass, the moon and stars beating down on me, illuminating fractionally my path ahead, as if I merited assistance to get out of this self-induced calamity. My back still ached faintly, but I did not have time to listen to my body’s protests. I only ever listened to reason, that is when I agreed with the logic behind the reasoning. I couldn’t tolerate complaining, not even from myself, and so I kept soldiering on, upping my pace when I tripped up and fell. Falling down was degrading for me, even without witnesses, I still felt embarrassed, as if it automatically brought me down a notch on the pride-scale. Whether or not people were present, I would still know, and the memory of it would pain me until it faded into nothingness with age.

The wind was like a relentless whip as I trudged on. Countless minutes later I arrived, all limbs still intact, at the entrance of the churchyard, marked by an old-fashioned kissing-gate. It creaked painfully as I shoved it open by applying my brutish strength that you rarely embarked upon in a teenage girl. The noise the gate made reminded me somewhat of what I could only presume the singing voice of a dying hairy rodent would resemble. Perhaps my father had similarly sounded like that when he had finally admitted defeat and collapsed on the floor, moving little, breathing not at all. I chastised myself for allowing yet another illogical notion to possess my conscious thought, stupid girl, I thought viciously.

The church car park was directly in sight, and beyond I could see the road, bordered with a sprinkling of a few tall lampposts, caressing the road with orange light.

I quickened my pace, longing now to be home in bed, as my head pulsated steadily and my eyes burnt ferociously from encroaching exhaustion.

I reached the empty car park, tripping up now and again on the gravel underfoot, and cursing at myself when I did. I locked my arms in a brace across my chest as I shivered - with ever-increasing velocity – my way to the junction, which, when I took a left, would grant me access to the main road. It was a simple journey home; one I had made countless times with my family after myriad mind-numbing Sunday church services. The difference this time being that I was walking home all alone, through the progressing night.

I almost felt scared.

But then I sighed deeply, hauling my heavy, sleeping limbs forward, ignoring their griping screams of exasperation at my persistence. I was used to pushing myself to go further, to work harder, and to be better, until my body had utterly convinced me that if I did not stop, I faced either death or a mental meltdown. At that point, common sense kicked in hard and fast, fuelled usually by a lack of oxygen or a lack of sleep.

As I did not yet face death or a meltdown, I pushed my limbs to work harder and faster, to carry me home to my bed where I would be safe and warm, wrapped up in satin sheets. With my arms wrapped around my chest, I trudged on into the night.