Lily

25th November 2002

Nine days. That’s all it had been. Nine days since my world had come crashing down around me - like a cliff edge giving way and dragging me into the black below, pulling me deeper into its darkest depths, my lungs fill with water and the waves compressed me until I could no longer breathe – that was how each second of those nine days felt. I was alone. Drowning in conversation, repetitive, a broken record, jammed on the same tune. All I could hear was ‘sorry’. It tolled like a church bell, and splintered away. ‘Sorry’ was used as kindling to keep my light glowing, but all it did was fuel an already roaring fire.

The nights I had come to realise were the worst, the blackness choked me as the covers cobrad, squeezing out the last traces of human emotion I could muster at ten years old. But now as I stand looking at the marble tomb below, with the faint whir of the vicar echoing off the tombstones, I know that I have nothing. The only person in my entire life who had loved me wholeheartedly, without fear or virtue, was now six feet under, rotting from the inside out. The drum of her heart had forever been silenced - and what once harboured the soul of my outgoing, adventurous, and beautiful sister – was just a scarred shell. A reminder of a decision from a mind that had been clouded by the debris of depression, and all the monsters that thrived there.

A choked cry, spurted out from behind me, which only fuelled my rage further. She was so close I could taste the knock-off Chanel that she wore as religiously as a nun’s cross. She had chosen to wear a black pant suit, twenty years out of fashion, so heavily coated with the smell of moth balls, that even her copious amounts of ‘Chanel’ hadn’t completely masked it. The jacket was ripped under each arm-pit from her former heavier days, but it now hung lose on her feeble structure, like a lab jacket traced across a skeleton in a biology classroom. The pants were tattered and worn, we had been stopped twice in the procession so strangers could give the tramp some loose change, which now jingled every time a gust blew. But nothing was as worn as her emotions, between the Botox and rhinoplasty she had been able to shed a tear or two, for good measure of course. Holding up a handkerchief that was dirtier than a beggar’s pants, she dabbed at her fake tan soaked cheeks, continuously checking the crowd to make sure all eyes were on the ‘poor grieving mother’. Had I not been under five feet tall, I would have turned around and slapped her straight across the very cheeks she was once again dabbing. However, I remained facing forward, staring into the abyss of the darkness below that was my sisters new place of residence.

The pressure of her hands resting on my shoulders became unbearable, and burned as if she was attempting to solder herself to me. An Oscar-worthy performance as a truly loving mother, who would ‘do anything for HER kids’. Although my mother could act like the perfect house wife, it would never be enough to receive a standing ovation. The casual prostitution had enabled vicarious walks of men to play at being our ‘daddies’, and there were more sex toys and dildos, than dollies and teddies. But for appearances sake, my mother was an Avon representative - door to door sales of luxurious products and goods – the minor detail in this was that ‘she’ was the goods, and further away from the luxurious side than she liked to believed. As her grip relaxed on my shoulders, it became evident that she was tiring of pretending, the façade was beginning to crack. As her fingertips slackened and finally dropped to her sides, the burden of her emotions left my shoulders. It was evident to anyone who knew her, that the only struggle she was facing, was the payment and the inconvenience of the whole affair. Melody’s death had come at a time that hadn’t suited my mother, she was far too stressed from her latest sugar daddy’s departure, to be dealing with such a serious ordeal. That paralleled with the payment had left my mother in a whole other form of mourning.

She had always been selfish. Even from being too young to know better, I had always believed that the most important person in my mothers’ life was herself. Now that one of the annoyances that had consumed some of her time had, as she put it, ‘offed herself’, she could concentrate that lost time back toward HERself, and HER needs. I felt each pair of eyes at the procession, each judgement falling upon her, and I wouldn’t deter the blame, the ‘if only’s’ flowed through my brain as I scrambled for things I could have done, could have prevented, to save her from herself. The demons that had eaten away at her, I truly believed came from the exchange of my mother’s soul, to rid her of one annoyance and then later they would surely come for me. Just to irk her for the rest of her godforsaken life, I would cling on, fight the demons, and make her squirm under my own successes. I wouldn’t become Melody. I wouldn’t become my mother. I couldn’t.