My Friend Flora (My Friends...) by Duncan Jane

Author:Duncan, Jane [Duncan, Jane]
Language: eng
Format: azw
Publisher: Pan Macmillan
Published: 2015-08-26T16:00:00+00:00

‘Like one that on a lonesome road

Doth walk in fear and dread,

And having once turned round, walks on,

And turns no more his head;

Because he knows a frightful fiend

Doth close behind him tread.’

I looked up the hill ahead to where the Smithy stood just beyond the brow and fought down a panic urge to run. Then I thought of Reachfar and my grandmother and how my aunt would laugh, scathingly, at this exhibition of ‘herring guts’. Squaring my shoulders, I turned round and stared defiantly down the hill at the house which appeared from this angle as a blackish heap of stone against the grey winter sea.

I could now see all round it from above where, before, I had been seeing a silhouette against the darkling, angry sky, and as I looked panic drained out of me. At the front of the house stood two cars and one of them was Doctor Mackay’s; the two younger boys, Roddie and Hughie, stood in front of the door, and even in this poor light they looked strangely forlorn; and by the rain-water barrel at the end of the gable nearest me, Flora stood in an attitude of worn-down dejection, with Georgie beside her. Out of the past time, out of the fifteen years that I had known this house, out of the very ground on which it stood and like a miasma that hung in the air around it, came the feeling of another Bedamned tragedy. Without thought, I began to retrace my steps down the hill, back the way I had come.

I went to Flora, behind her, where she stood with her forearms on the water barrel, her head bowed down upon them, and laid my hand on her shoulder.

‘Flora,’ I said.

She looked up. She was not crying, but her face was stark with a dumb, dry despair.

‘Chorchie! Chorchie!’ snuffled the idiot girl, jumping up and down in excitement, jerking her arms and legs, pulling up her skirt to show me her bandaged thigh.

I turned on her furiously, with the intention of silencing her if that was possible, but as soon as I looked at her I stopped to stare. Her face looked exactly as it had done when she was approaching the stray dog with the red-hot wire, avidly greedy, with the eyes flashing, the mouth and nose slavering and drooling and the animal voice panting excitedly: ‘Chorchie! Chorchie!’ Even the movements of the body and limbs were similar, the tensely jerking arms and legs, the belly and hips writhing. Of a sudden the memory that had been haunting me so horribly became meaningless, as meaningless as Georgie herself, for I understood that all feeling and emotion were alike to her. It seemed that she herself felt nothing, but derived this excitement — this same excitement — from some dim awareness of feeling or emotion in another. It was as if there was of Georgie herself nothing but a small spark of latent sexual excitement; as if she had no mind

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