Page 91 of The Flowers of Bay C
Jodie lifts her chin and I notice the blue tinge around her lips and the translucency of her skin and the dark shadows around her eyes. ‘I won’t have him back. Not after this.’
I pick at a loose thread on one of my gloves and think about what Kat said, about not having to become someone different, and wonder where I went wrong, and how I can find a better path. ‘So how do we? I mean, how do we get out of this… I don’t know, almost this like ticker-tape thing that keeps going round and round in my head. It’s like I can never escape from the words, like they just keep on squeezing me tighter and tighter. I don’t know how to get out.’
‘But you are getting out,’ Kat says.
I gaze at her, and wonder if she might be right.
‘I’ve heard it described as graffiti on the heart,’ she says. ‘When words get written on us for many years, and it’s really hard to scrub them off. I’ve often found it’s about forgiveness. Setting yourself free from bitterness.’
‘But I can’t ever forgive him,’ I say.
Violet leans forward. ‘I can never forgive my dad, neither. There’s some people you just can’t forgive.’
I think about my parents, too, and to a lesser extent, my sister. I think about what it might feel like to let go.
‘What happened with your dad?’ Kat says gently to Violet.
‘He thought all that mattered was appearances, see. So when I got pregnant, when I was just sixteen, he threw me out and said he never wanted to see me again.’ She looks at the floor, her mouth quivering. ‘My mother, she was always kind, and it broke her. She wanted me to stay, but in the end she did as she was told. They did, in those days, you know.’
Amina leans her head into Violet’s shoulder. ‘I am so sorry.’
‘He’s fifty now, my son, and my father never even met him. And it’s not even like I’m close to my son, either.’ She gazes atAmina. ‘I was so awful to you, but you know what? It’s because I was jealous. I was jealous of your family, how they love you. There. I said it.’
Silence hangs low in the shelter, and we mould ourselves into it.
‘Forgiving isn’t saying that it’s okay, what the other person did,’ Kat says. ‘It’s about letting yourself off the hook. About kind of climbing out of those bars and saying no, I’m not letting this person have any power over me anymore. I’m not going to live chained up to him just because I hold so much hate in my heart for him.’ She pauses, gazing up at the driving snow. ‘It’s sort of like saying, I matter too much to allow him to have any influence at all over me now, so I’m going to let that go.’
I look at her. The fine lines around her eyes are creased up and her mouth sits in a grim line. She knows of what she speaks.
Jodie stares at her, frowning, pulling at her gloves.
‘You let yourself off from the bonds of misery,’ she says.
‘I don’t know if I can,’ I say.
‘Sometimes it’s the words that are powerful. Sometimes just saying them breaks the chains. You might have to say them over and over, but after a while you realise that you are getting slowly free. When I had to do it, it took a long time. But it works. It works.’
Jodie shakes her head.
‘You have this kind of peace,’ I say to Kat. ‘How do you, all the time?’
‘Not all the time. Sometimes I’m crippled with anxiety, but I’ve found in my faith a stillness, like in the depths of the ocean in a storm if you swim down far enough there’s a warmth there, a stillness underneath the waves. It’s kind of like that, but it’s not this magical thing I can just snap my fingers and get. It has to be a choice, sometimes, for me it’s a choice to go on with it but thenpeace is there and it’s beautiful and it makes sense of stuff even when everything sucks. And it’s like that with forgiving, too.’
Even though the world is frozen around us, the silence is warm.
‘I think I know what it’s like. To be forgiven,’ Violet says softly, her eyes on the lip of the roof where snow settles and drips down, captured into tiny icicles, framing the shelter in a riot of frozen fairy lights that sparkle against the backdrop of slow-falling snowflakes. I think about how each one is a work of craftmanship, yet such an insubstantial puff of nothing on its own, how it’s only when the snowflakes come together that they build something: great dazzling mountains of beauty and power.
Amina says, ‘I also had to forgive a bad person. It was not my family, but somebody else who did something to me.’
Jodie moves closer to her.
‘It is okay. It is well. I agree with Kat. Maybe it is the time for all of you to move away from this sadness that is deep in you.’
Maybe it is. I think about Marcus and how he didn’t really love me at all, and wonder if I loved him or loved the idea of him, loved him out of duty and because he saved me, and somehow that sense of allegiance masqueraded as love in my messed-up mind. Maybe I really did love him, but never understood love in its fullness. Not in the essence of it I catch the edges of when I listen to Barbara talk about Bill or Nate whispering to Kat, or even as I watched Brian wait for Violet when she was taken away for a scan with an imprint of great anxiety on his face, and watch them together in their somewhat dysfunctional, disdainful us-against-the-whole-world kind of way. Maybe it’s because I never really knew what love was as a child, or if I did it was a clumsy kind of love, a love couched in terms and conditions. ‘I don’t think I’ve understood love,’ I say.
Kat says, ‘Look at Jake.’
I gaze out over the mist-clogged horizon as if I can conjure up his face out there, his grumpy teenage face, headphones clampedover his ears, eyes rolling so much they might disappear into the back of his head.
