The Image of Her by Sonia Velton

Author:Sonia Velton [Velton, Sonia]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2021-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

Sixteen

STELLA

It’s funny, but I don’t recall Tom ever calling me ‘lady’ before.

Yet ‘Hey, lady!’ is all I can hear, over and over. Tom must be shouting up at me from the front drive, then banging on the door, shouting again. I should go and let him in, but my body doesn’t work any more, doesn’t do anything I tell it to. I just lie here, and the only people with me are the ones in my head.

I haven’t thought about Tom in years. Not really. I couldn’t, not with what was happening to my mother, then happening to me. But he’s with me now. It’s like my mind is cleaving from my fretful, feverish body, taking with it only my memories. I’m leaving the real world and travelling to the hinterlands of my mind. They’re all there waiting for me, all the people I’ve ever known. All the people I try not to think about.

Ahead of me is a corridor. It stretches out into the distance, disappearing into a white light that burns as brightly as a furnace. This can’t be flu. I feel like I’m dying again, but this time there is no peace, no soothing oblivion. I’m haunted by my mistakes and bad decisions. A man is walking towards me, indistinct and fuzzy round the edges. My heart is beating fast in my chest. I cling to its galloping rhythm because that’s how I know I’m still alive. At first I think he must be God, or whoever comes to take us from this world, but as his form resolves out of the light, I see it’s Tom. Not Tom from pottery class, but another, older, Tom. The Tom I might have been with now, had things been different.

Is he here to tell me something? Or is this my chance to ask him why he left me?

It’s like he knows what I’m thinking, all the questions I have. ‘You left me, Stella,’ he says, looking at me. His eyes are strangely light, as if I can see through them into the white infinity beyond. There is no emotion in them, no anger, no sadness even, just the endless emptiness of lost opportunity. And I can only stare into them, delirious with regret.

The end came a few weeks after that incident with the whisk and the Victoria sponge. Tom and I had arranged to go on a pottery weekend together. You know the kind of thing, a group of us in a nice cottage in the countryside, making pots all day, eating, chatting, drinking wine in the evening. I’ll admit I wasn’t particularly keen to begin with. I don’t usually enjoy spending time with people I don’t know, but Tom thought it would be good for us to get away for a few days, while developing our pottery skills.

We’d only been living together a few months by then and some of my clothes were still at Mum’s. I’m not sure why I hadn’t moved everything to Tom’s. He kept offering to drive me over there and load up the car, but I just made excuses.

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