The Agreement by Jacqueline Ward

Author:Jacqueline Ward [Ward, Jacqueline]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Bloodhound Books

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

I watch as the police car leaves, followed by Rebekah Bradley and her sidekick. I want to feel numb, like she is right, and I am wrong. That Jake has left and has, for reasons unknown, broken into Veronica’s house. Because that would mean I am safe. And he is safe.

But this isn’t the case. It can’t be. The agreement looms above me. If I hadn’t been so wedded to carrying out its every word, I would have spoken to Jake before all this blew up. I would have made him tell me what was wrong. I would have argued with him about coming home late and demanded to know what was going on.

I didn’t want to crowd him, though. I didn’t want him to think I was clingy. All the while I was deluding myself because deep inside I was as angry as I am now. I had crushed the anger and frustration down so I wouldn’t break our agreement. And all the while he was lying. It’s just more and more confusing the more I think about it. But one thing is clear, Jake, my husband Jake, is a serial liar. And perhaps that is how he got into this trouble he’s in. By lying.

Anyway, it doesn’t matter now. The fire is lit inside me. I can still see DS Bradley’s car at the corner of the avenue. The indicator is blinking right, and its slow metronome calms the surface of me but I can feel the rage building. The injustice and the ‘here we go again’ and the hollow feeling of less than that comes from not being believed.

The car turns the corner and I feel the scream escape before I hear it. I lash out and I am suddenly back in a place buried so deep that it is blurry and fuzzy in my mind’s eye. But I can feel it. Oh yes, I can feel her. The loudness and the deafening shrieks that made us cover our ears. The hidey-hole under the stairs where she kept her high heels and her faux fur coats. We would squeeze in and cocoon ourselves against what was about to happen.

Then the destruction. I sat at the front. Front row and centre of my brothers to block the view of the horror show. The door closed with a latch on the outside and I had to pull it shut on the inside. It never closed fully, and I would see flashes of her pass and the crashes around her. Plates, cups, cutlery. Family photographs in second-hand frames smashing onto the terracotta tiles of the kitchen floor.

Her screaming obscenities at life and tearing at her hair and her clothes. I may have only glimpsed it but I felt it. Another lesson in how not to be, even if I felt like it myself sometimes. My brothers’ faces told me the price of it.

But they are not here now, and I feel myself stretched to the farthest limit of control. I know tears will diffuse it, but they won’t come.

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