Here in the After by Marion Frith

Author:Marion Frith
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2021-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 21

‘You know what they were going to do, don’t you?’ Anna buried her face in her towel, disappearing into it, Nat straining to hear her abhorrent reveal. ‘They were going to decapitate me.’ No adjectival softening of the horrifying verb, no explanatory clauses.

Nat cradled his forehead in both hands, his fingers digging into his throbbing temples. ‘Anna . . . ?’

She eased the towel away, methodically rolling all the words she’d just spoken into it, holding it to her chest. ‘I saw . . . I saw . . . what do I do with that? Where do I put that image? Tell me. Where do I put it?’

‘There is nowhere,’ he said. ‘Nowhere.’

‘I hear myself tell it again like that . . . I think, yeah, it’s okay I’m not doing too well, that I’ve still got this giant rock of fear right here, right over my heart, that won’t dissolve. It’s a big story, isn’t it?’

He shook his head, now digging his fingers deep into his hair. ‘It sure is. As big as it gets.’

‘Too big for me.’ She’d pulled her knees up again and circled her arms around them. He reached out and put a tentative hand on her shoulder.

‘Do you think it’s too big to ever deal with?’ she asked into the towel. ‘Do you think I’ll ever make it small . . . small enough so it doesn’t hurt so much?’

‘No, I don’t.’ He spoke with a certainty untempered by buts, firming a grip on her shoulder. ‘I don’t think it will ever stop being big. And I don’t think it will ever stop hurting. It can’t. The sums for that just don’t add up.’

‘Well, what happens then?’ She searched his rugged face for an answer. ‘To me?’

‘You learn to live with the pain, if you’re lucky,’ he said, battling the fury that was unwinding within him, balling up his right fist and softly pummelling his chin. ‘Right now I guess it’s stabbing into you all over; eventually it won’t jab at you so full-on all the time. It will smooth out until it’s more like an all-over hurt, and then it will just pierce into you sometimes, still so hard you won’t think you’ll survive. But you will. You’ll learn to live with the pain, and the challenge will be learning to live well with it. What I mean is to learn to live a life as opposed to just living. But don’t expect to get to that point for a really, really long time, Anna. You know it already: one second by one second leads to one minute by one minute. It’s your only way out.’

She pulled her knees tighter. ‘They say I’ll have to give evidence at the inquest, next year or even the year after. I don’t want to. I don’t want to have to keep it alive till then. At first I did . . . the only witness . . . but now . . . now I want it to be gone out of my head.

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