17. A CHANGE OF SCENE

THE FANCY DRESS BALL (17)

It was as if I was in a maze, a myriad cloudy passages meandering everywhere, taking me, struggling, along with them, and ever so occasionally a strobing shaft of sunlight reaching down and illuminating a world I couldn’t begin to comprehend, and then withdrew, casting me once again into the mysterious shadows of nowhere. This was my world when I was aware of understanding it, and when I wasn’t I knew, how I can’t begin to understand, of the closeness of almost total darkness.

And then the lights were switched on. They hurt my eyes and I had to squeeze them shut, but the lights stayed on. My head throbbed.

“So there you are,” said a voice, a beautiful voice crafted by fair skin and rosy lips, blue eyes and fragrant hair, crisp white linen, everything pure and lovely.

An angel, maybe?

No. A nurse.

“Where am I?” Those were the words I tried to say, a complex sentence that I could only just get my tongue around, and I could hear the way she smiled as she translated it into her own sweet English inside that smile.

Then there was a long paragraph of comforting words and although they barely reached audible focus in my head I got the comforting bit. And all the time experimented with the light, opening my eyes and then shutting them until, after a while, I could tolerate the brilliance of the day without blinking.

“Where…?” I dragged the word out, needing it to be understood.

“Where are you?” asked the nurse, smiling with those cherry lips, and I’m one who doesn’t appreciate too much lipstick on a beautiful mouth. But now I don’t, didn’t, couldn’t notice.

So I nodded.

“You were injured,” her lovely voice song, “and we’ve mended you...”

Then there was a sudden cascade of memories, of night time on the Manor House lawn, of Jessica pointing that evil gun at me, hatred in her eyes, and why that? There was Dakota shouting No, sis! And then the eruption of sound as the gun’s trigger was squeezed and sudden pain twisted my senses, blacked them out, sent be tumbling through the maze until I couldn’t stop.

And all the while something in my head was asking why, Jessica? Why, why why?

“Yes, you’re better now,” the nurse said, smiling, and her red lips grew bigger and bigger, the fragments of white teeth between them flashed like gemstones, and my world collapsed onto itself again.

It was the next day that I awoke properly, and the nurse was different, older, sharp witted and just as comforting. And her lips lacked the scarlet of artificial colouring.

Then I was checked over briefly, and Millie came in.

She was in handcuffs and joined to a police woman in uniform.

Millie in handcuffs? What in the name of? What was going on?

“Why?” I asked.

“I hope you’re all right,” she said, and her voice was right there, not the thousand miles away it might have been.

“What?” I asked.

“We never meant it to go like this, darling,” she said, and she called me that, darling, in the presence of a crisp white nurse as if that’s exactly what I was to her. “But things got out of control and you rode off into the gloom with that awful woman on a blasted horse, of all things, and she was naked...”

I knew, then, that I had done just that, on a horse. With Cynthia, mother of the twins and young as they were, or so she always seemed. Or was it Lady Godiva with her lovely breasts and long, long cascades of wonderful hair?

“Say something...” she said, begging for forgiveness, but for what I didn’t know, but I could guess.

I closed my eyes and as night returned I muttered “You’re a b***h...”

Her voice continued but it was only a meaningless mumble, the sort of thing I didn’t want to listen to because I’d heard all she needed to say.

Instead, in my imagination I returned to my home, the one I shared with Millie, the one where we had sworn together we would share a life of happiness, of love, of closeness, touching, breathing… And the memory was smashed into smithereens because I opened my eyes again and she was still there, her mouth still mumbling the same old platitudes about how there’s nothing so bad that it can’t be mended…

I’d heard them before.

“But I was shot!” I told her, and I think I must have been more proud of the clarity with which I uttered those four words than the pain they contained at their heart.

“Not by me!” she protested, “but by Tiffany...”

“Jessica. It was Jessica. I saw her, remember? I wasn’t stupid then and I’m not stupid now...” It was a long sentence for me to come out with but I did, just like that, and Millie heard it.

“Come on, then,” said the police woman, “that’s enough. He knows you’re not dead and that’s all you need to tell him.”

“Jessica’s dead...” That was the goodbye shot from Millie, not that I cared any more whether Jessica lived or died because she’d shot me and put me in this place in the care of crisp white nurses.

Then I was alone.

“Who’s Jessica?” asked the nurse, smoothing my pillow and stroking my cheek with a casual hand.

“A girl with a gun,” I said, “a very silly girl who should have known a great deal better than to shoot people.”

“Was she your fancy girl?”

Fancy girl? Who calls people things like that these days?

“No,” I replied, “she’s only a student. There are twins. Jessica and Dakota. I thought they were lovely, but…?”

The conversation might have continued, not that I wanted it to, but a policeman in plain clothes found his way to my bedside and the nurse clicked her tongue and went away.

“I see you’re on the mend,” he said, “if I may have a few words I’d be grateful, but don’t overtax yourself.”

“It’s okay,” I said, quite brightly bearing in mind the state of my head.

“They say that Tiffany’s dead,” he said, looking at me eagerly, and that few words hurt me like few words could because, forgetting the fact that Tiffany was a face I’d put on an evil conspiracy a decade ago, Tiffany was the poor, sweet, helpless, beautiful girl I’d watched grow old so very quickly, and die so dreadfully young, never knowing a world without pain, never being whole.

And you know what?

I cried. I Wept. I Couldn’t help it.

Because that Tiffany, my Tiffany, really was dead and suddenly more than I can tell I’d willingly have changed place with her.

I could have slaughtered myself for having used her wonderful name in the hope of giving a shape to criminals I was keen to expose, and covering her beauty with the ugliness of Jessica.

© Peter Rogerson 03.08.20