Authors: Carys Jones
‘Of course I am pleased to see you,’ Laurie smiled. ‘I’m just tired.’ The façade of interest had only been there for a second but it was enough to tantalise Charles.
‘Well, as I said, my contact called,’ he began, blushing profusely.
‘And?’ Laurie prompted, her patience already beginning to run out.
‘You were right to be suspicious. Lorna’s case file was tampered with.’
‘Tampered with? How?’
‘There were files removed. Most importantly, the vehicle assessment is gone.’
‘What does that mean?’ Laurie asked, her eyes wide and desperate as she wanted so much to believe that this was the tiny ray of hope which she had been searching for.
‘It could mean nothing,’ Charles admitted sadly. ‘But then it could mean everything. If, say, Lorna’s car had been tampered with, that would be on the vehicle assessment.’
‘But who would take it?’ Laurie pleaded, knowing already that Charles would not be able to offer her an explanation.
‘I’ve no idea I’m afraid. I need to look into this further.’
‘So that’s it? Some missing files?’
‘It’s something,’ Charles said softly, wanted to dispel the disappointment in Laurie’s voice.
‘But it could just be an admin error?’ she challenged, crossing her arms across her chest defiantly.
‘Possibly. Until I look into this further I won’t know.’
‘So what am I supposed to do until then?’
‘Keep working here.’
‘No, no way!’ Laurie cried angrily, rising up from her chair. ‘I am done with this charade. I just want all this to be dealt with.’
Even though Laurie’s face was locked in a defiant expression, her lip quivered, belying the sadness which was welling up inside her.
‘You need to be patient for just a little while longer.’ Charles rose to his feet and walked over to where the young girl was standing, anticipating that she would again seek solace in his arms and weep against his shoulders.
But when Charles grew close Laurie physically pushed him away.
‘Just figure this out,’ she spat angrily before turning and walking out of the office, leaving a bemused Charles standing in the middle of the room. He regarded his empty arms as though it had only been a dream when Laurie had been wrapped up in them. His confusion quickly evaporated, leaving him feeling angry at the apparent rejection. But there had been a moment between them, he was certain of it.
Elaine Lloyd paced the lower level of her luxurious home. Charles would soon be there, and she refused to tolerate any excuses he could muster of fatigue from working late. She was going to tell him just how angry his absentee behaviour had made her. She was currently trying to find the words, wanting there to be no confusion over how much he had hurt her.
The soft whir of an engine carried across from the driveway, following by the mechanical unlocking of the front door. Elaine braced herself, puffing her chest out like a bird before a territorial display.
Charles entered his home, his face pale and downcast, but this didn’t deter Elaine. She immediately set upon him.
‘I have had enough!’ she declared angrily. Charles glanced up at her with disinterest.
‘I am sick and tired of you not being around. You are my husband for Christ’s sake and it’s about time you started acting like it!’
‘I’m also the Deputy Prime Minister of this country,’ Charles replied wearily, venturing deeper into the house and beginning to ascend the stairs, longing for the moderate release which sleep would bring.
‘Do not walk away from me!’ Elaine scolded, following her husband up the stairs with the helpless devotion of a lost puppy.
‘Elaine, please, I am very tired,’ Charles pleaded.
Having entered his bedroom, Charles began to undress but even this private act did not deter the militant tirade from his wife.
‘Well I am tired too! Tired of attending function after function alone! Charles it is important for your profile that you attend these things.’
Sighing, Charles sat down on the bed, his shirt almost completely unbuttoned, resigned to the fact that until his wife’s temper was appeased he would get no peace. Elaine immediately sat down beside him and took to completing the task he had begun; releasing the tie from his neck and taking off his shirt. Exhausted and still mentally bruised by his meeting with Laurie, Charles sat there like a giant doll and let his wife prepare him for bed.
‘You see, you need me,’ Elaine declared happily. ‘So stop pretending like you don’t.’
Charles was too tired to find the words and so merely sat there. He wanted to point out that needing someone was not akin to loving someone, but he decided against it. Any love that had once existed within his marriage was long gone, but to discuss its absence had become a taboo topic. Elaine needed the pretence of a happy union for her own sanity, and so Charles willingly gave her that.
‘Just tell me that it won’t happen again. That in future, we will attend engagements together.’ Charles looked into Elaine’s eyes, trying to find his wife, but all he saw was a vacuous stranger.
‘I don’t plan on attending any more galas or benefits,’ he admitted, watching how Elaine’s face instantly darkened at this.
‘Don’t be so ridiculous, Charles! You have to attend these events, especially with the public vote less than twelve months away.’
‘I don’t care anymore. I’m too tired. I’m happy to let someone else hold the reigns for a while.’
‘How can you say that?’ Elaine screamed, rising to her feet. ‘This is what we have worked for our entire life, and now you just want to throw it away?’
‘I’m not throwing anything away!’ Charles reasoned. ‘We achieved what we set out to do, we don’t need to keep holding on to it.’
The reality was that Charles longed for a life with some degree of anonymity. He didn’t enjoy his every move being scrutinized and he yearned for the freedom to be able to do as pleased. Elaine felt quite differently. Being the Deputy Prime Minister’s wife gave her life a much-needed purpose. Without that security, that title, she feared that she would inevitably flounder.
‘I don’t even know you are anymore,’ Elaine said bitterly. ‘You were ambitious once.’
‘I still am!’ Charles protested. ‘But there is nothing left. Can’t we just sit back and enjoy it all?’ Without realising, Charles had broken their unspoken rule and raised the taboo issue. His job, his career, allowed them to be together, as it gave their marriage distance – without that, all they had was a carcass of a relationship which had once been good but never great. The great relationships don’t decay, only the good ones.
‘What’s to enjoy? Our children? Our grandchildren?’ Tears began to streak the make-up Elaine had so carefully put on earlier that day.
‘Shhh, Elaine, don’t cry.’ Charles let his wife fall in to his arms, and unlike Laurie, she was grateful to release her tears upon his strong chest. Charles had to admit that it felt good to be needed, even though it was a hollow sensation as the feeling wasn’t reciprocated.
‘What about all those cruise ships you wanted to go on?’ he said as he tried to raise her mood.
‘But you hate the ocean!’ Elaine wailed, her voice muffled.
‘Yes, but you always go on about how you barely notice that you are at sea as the ships are like floating cities, so I’m sure I would be fine.’
Elaine pulled herself free from her husband’s embrace and looked him straight in the eye. She now resembled a sad clown, as her make-up had run and left great black streaks down her face.
‘I’ll never be enough for you though, will I?’ Charles thought he heard something accusatory in Elaine’s tone but he dismissed it.
‘Of course you will,’ he lied, when the truth was that Elaine had never been enough.
Charles kissed his wife on the forehead and she smiled at him but there was no warmth in her smile.
‘Everything will be okay,’ he reassured her.
‘I know, I’ll make sure it is.’
Waiting for the resurrection
It was the midnight hour and the city of London still throbbed with life. Cars meandered through the neon metropolis of the city-centre, drunken revellers began to embark on their staggered journey home and theatre-goers exited auditoriums zealously adulating about their brush with culture. As they walked along the streets, people turned a blind eye to the less fortunate, cowered in shop doorways and huddling down into cardboard boxes which would be their bed for the night.
In the midst of this contrast between the sordid, the sublime and the suffering, Laurie Thomas lay awake on the bed in the apartment she would never regard as home. The apartment which had once belonged to her sister. She felt Lorna’s ghost in every corner of the place.
Sleep was, as ever, evading her. Her mind was a tangled web of a thousand questions which refused to weave together and form any sort of coherence.
The main topic of her thoughts was Lorna. Whilst her twin was no longer a physical entity, to Laurie she continued to exist in part in the memories she had carefully logged over their two decades together. Laurie replayed these memories as often as she could in an attempt to preserve them. She knew that if she stopped, if she let them fall to the back of her mind, then in time she would forget. Currently, it was easy to remember Lorna as she was, Laurie need only look in the mirror. But time would inevitably distort her beauty and Lorna would fade away completely, remaining only in the memories.
One of Laurie’s fondest memories was when the two girls would camp outside in the garden, much to their mother’s disapproval who found the whole thing ‘dangerous and unnecessary’. It was Laurie who pushed for these mini-adventures, longing to go camping far beyond the realms of their own property, but settling, for now, with the landscape of their ample back garden. Lorna was originally reluctant to participate.
‘I don’t want to go outside,’ an eight-year-old Lorna had protested, hands placed firmly on hips, chin jutting out in defiance.
‘It will be fun! I promise.’ Laurie had smiled and then listed all the wonderful things they could do outside which they couldn’t do indoors. It was a testament to the trust which existed between the twins even then that Lorna eventually agreed. She didn’t like the thought of camping one bit, but Laurie insisting it would be fun was all the convincing she required.
After their first initial night out in the tent, snuggled up in sleeping bags like little worms, the twins had so much fun that it soon became a weekly ritual. The camping game fell away as they entered into their awkward teenage years and found more enthralling ways to occupy a Friday night. But looking back, those few years when they would lie side by side, a thin sheet of plastic separating them from the stars, were a magical time. A time which Laurie cherished.
‘Did you hear that?’ Lorna turned, wide-eyed, to her twin sister who she could barely make out in the failing light.
‘It’s only the dog next door,’ Laurie replied sleepily.
‘Are you sure? What if it’s a murderer?’ Lorna asked. Cocooned within her bright pink polka-dot sleeping bag, she awkwardly shifted closer to her sister.
‘It won’t be a murderer,’ Laurie stated authoritively, although she sounded more awake as if the notion of a killer stalking them amongst the hydrangeas had troubled her also.
‘But it could be.’
‘No. Killers don’t come to places like this. They attack people in big cities, not houses out in the country.’
‘That’s not true,’ Lorna answered after a moment’s pause.
‘Yes it is.’
‘How is it?’
‘More people are murdered in cities, everyone knows that.’
‘But that’s just because there are more people, it doesn’t mean that killers aren’t in other places too,’ Lorna answered, surprising Laurie with her uncharacteristically insightful response.
‘Well, whatever, it was the dog you heard.’ Laurie said, wanting to get off the topic of crazed serial killers and go to sleep.
For a while the tent fell silent as both twins internally contemplated what they had just discussed.
‘It would be just awful though, to be killed by someone,’ Lorna said, as much to herself as to Laurie.
‘Well, yeah,’ Laurie agreed with a slightly sarcastic tone, as though Lorna had just pointed out how the sky was blue.
‘It’s scary to think that someone could come along and kill just one or both of us,’ Lorna continued, despair rather than fear creeping in to her voice.
‘But they won’t.’ Laurie said flatly; weary from the day’s earlier excursions at school and the current conversation.
‘But if they did,’ Lorna chose to ignore her sister’s tone. ‘I’d rather they killed us both.’
‘Oh?’
‘Like, I know it would suck for Mom and Dad, but I wouldn’t want to be without you or you without me.’
‘Well, since there is no killer in the garden, I think it’s okay to say that we will always be together, but not if you keep stopping me from going to sleep!’
‘Y you get so grumpy when you are tired!’ Lorna teased.
‘Aren’t you tired?’
‘A little … I guess.’
Lorna curled herself into a ball, bunching her sleeping bag up around her pre-pubescent limbs. She could hear Laurie’s breathing begin to slow as her sister began to drift off to sleep.
‘I love you, Lolly,’ she said fondly, releasing one arm from her nest to drape it over her sister’s cushioned form. It had been a long time since she had used the nickname, arguably not since the twins entered into double digits just over a year before. Perhaps it was the fear of separation which had rekindled the affectionate label, Lorna wasn’t even sure herself, but it had slipped out and it had felt natural.
‘Mmm,’ Laurie gave a contented, sleepy mumble in response and Lorna felt her own eyelids growing heavy.
‘I’ll never leave you,’ she pledged to her sister, before falling away to sleep, the talk of murderers soon forgotten.
A million miles away from the tent, Laurie at last fell asleep upon the double bed which she inhabited alone. Her eyes closed and darkness overwhelmed her mind, drowning out her thoughts, and granting her the respite she so dearly needed. For the first time in a long time, she felt safe. Her muscles relaxed and she sprawled herself out, rather than sleeping in the frightened huddle which had become her default position.