Forgotten by Nicole Trope

Author:Nicole Trope
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Allen & Unwin
Published: 2017-04-20T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter Fourteen

The four walls of this room look like they’re getting closer together. I don’t think I’ve been here for very long, but the feeling that I won’t be able to stay here much longer is scratching at my skin. This room is starting to remind me of prison, of my cell. The noise he’s making isn’t helping.

At least my cell was quiet. I spent long hours there writing letters to Marcus, telling him that I was sorry and that I still loved him. I wrote about how wonderful it had been between the two of us at the beginning and about how much I wanted that again. I told him to wait for me and to hold me in his heart. Writing those letters kept me sane in those first few weeks I spent in prison.

It broke my heart when the letters came back unopened. I cried for hours, but I don’t think I will tell Marcus that. I know he was angry with me—and I understand it. I should have been more careful with her, but he’s had time to put things into perspective now and it won’t do any good to bring up the returned letters. It will be a clean start for both of us. For both of us, and Xander.

‘Shhh,’ I say now to Xander, but he ignores me and carries on crying. It’s a pity he won’t listen because it was all going so well.

After I left the park I lugged the bags back home—no, not home, back here. This is such a sad place to live that maybe prison is preferable. How anyone could regard it as home is beyond me. It smells of mould and piss.

I stood outside for a minute when I got here, feeling my heart rate increase and the muscles in my arms strain and pull because of the weight of the baby and the shopping. All I wanted to do was put everything down. I imagined the relief I would feel when I was finally free to move my arms again.

The baby wriggled and opened his mouth to cry. ‘Shush, shush, shush,’ I said and I bounced up and down the way I learned to do with her. He was quiet again as he studied me with his big blue eyes and I knew I had to get him inside, out of the heat and fed, or he would begin making a lot of noise.

I put the parcels down on the pavement and fished around in my bag for my keys. When I first moved in here the owner of the house, an odious, oily man named Robbie, handed me a key to the front door and a key to my room with a flourish, as though he were giving me the keys to a palace. He looked at me with a mixture of pity and suspicion. ‘We all get along well in this house,’ he told me, ‘and we’re all good Christians who believe that everyone deserves a chance to change their lives.

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