doG Backwards by Johnson Guy A

Author:Johnson, Guy A [Johnson, Guy A]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Published: 2013-12-26T06:00:00+00:00

When she recalls this, Barbara realises something startling: he had loved her. Somehow that love had got twisted and hidden in all the bitterness he felt towards her mother’s leaving them. But he had loved her; Barbara knew that now.

* * *

Once she finally stops herself crying, the first thing she says to him is:

‘This was my prison.’

Eric stares back, taking in her tear-ravaged cheeks, his features puzzled.

Barbara repeats herself.

‘My prison. The prison they sent me too.’

When Eric speaks, his ignorance becomes apparent.

‘Sent you for what?’ he asks.

He doesn’t know. He doesn’t know. This hasn’t occurred to her; she has assumed he would know it all, that somehow he would have seen it all happen.

Suddenly, Barbara doesn’t know where to begin. What to start with, what to tell him, what to skip. She checks her watch: they have only a few minutes left. Eric’s ridiculous, habitual lateness has cost them something that cannot be quantified; something that is beyond what Barbara has paid. Her fury is back. She tries to calm herself, to remember why she came, what she has to ask him, but the urge to conform to their traditional roles and be at war is strong, instinctive. Did he realise what she had given up? Did he realise what his final request had cost her? Not only in terms of freedom, in terms of the years she lost, but now – today.

The money they’ve charged me, she wanted to rant. The loans I’ve had to take out.

Barbara feels sick at the thought of the loans. The collateral she had to put up – her flat, her share of the business – not to mention the repayments. It had crippled her; and all she had achieved in his absence she has now put into this one hour.

‘And you were this late,’ is all she utters.

‘Sorry?’

‘It doesn’t-.’ Barbara begins, but realises he hasn’t apologised. He just hasn’t heard or understood her and is still waiting for her explanation. ‘They sent me here because I killed you,’ she eventually tells him, clearly, plainly, bluntly.

The image of his grief, his tormented, disgusted face, would be the last image she had of him. It would be, in the main, what she got for her money. His grief over his own death; his anger that her last act of love for him had been so bitterly twisted by the law. There was self-hate in those features, too: he had destroyed her in life and he had destroyed her in death too.

‘I just couldn’t leave you be, could I?’ he says and Barbara’s lips part to answer, slowly, a thin layer of dried saliva sealing them.

‘No,’ she replies, softly, without a sense of malice, but she says it to thin air.

Eric has gone.

As quickly as he had come.

Their time was over.

An abrupt emptiness shocks Barbara’s senses like an appalling cruelty. She hadn’t finished, is all she can think. I haven’t finished, this isn’t over yet. But it is. Abruptly, like a heavy book falling unexpectedly and hitting a hard floor with an alarming smack.

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