Chapter 26 #3
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 at Amina. ‘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 then peace 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 clamped over his ears, eyes rolling so much they might disappear into the back of his head.
‘You know love because you try to love your son unconditionally,’ she says.
‘And that’s what love is, at its purest and best. It’s patient and kind, it’s not proud, it doesn’t dishonour others.
It’s not self-seeking and it keeps no record of wrongs.
It always protects and always trusts. It always hopes and it always perseveres. ’
I catch my breath as something like a wave of heat pounds through my body.
‘Very poetic,’ Violet says.
‘It’s from my favourite book.’
I think about all those attributes of love and think about how I feel about Jake and realise that’s what I’ve been missing all along, there in front of me as I strived and persevered and loved him through a life that hurt too much, as I protected him and tried not to fail him, though I often did.
And now, no more of this. Time to let go of the things that have caged me in for too long, of the words from my parents, from Marcus, from kids at school that wounded me in deep places. It’s time for me to be free.
‘Listen,’ Amina says, leaning forward slightly and tilting her head to the side.
I can’t hear anything through the heavy, muted silence of this kingdom of snow.
‘I hear something too,’ Jodie says.
And then I hear it. An engine. It shatters the dampened quietness, its throaty roar sounding pained and weary, a little bit like us. I suck a breath in, flinching as a stab of pain flashes through my chest, and drag myself off the seat. ‘It’s a car. We have to stop it.’
But it’s not a car.
‘I thought there were no buses on Saturdays,’ Jodie says, her eyes wide as she gazes at the stuttering vehicle limping over the foggy horizon and cutting slowly through the unrelenting snowstorm towards us.
‘It’s out of service,’ Kat says, peering out of the shelter and shaking her head. ‘It’s all dark.’
‘I don’t care,’ I say. ‘That bus has to stop. That bus is going to stop.’ I grab the picnic blanket and I drag myself out of the shelter and into the middle of the road, the snow soaking through my thin shoes and socks and sending icy shivers through my feet and up through my legs.
Nobody follows me. They sit pinned to the seat, steeped in pain or weariness or apathy or all three.
‘He won’t see you, Penny,’ Kat shouts dully. ‘You’ll get run down.’
But I don’t care. I take up the rug and I start waving it madly.
I feel like Bobby from The Railway Children, standing in the middle of the track waving massive red bloomers in the air, hoping against hope the train will stop before it hurtles into me.
Only I’m waving a dirty old candy-striped picnic rug and snow is driving down all around me, shrouding my body and my mind and icing up my bones.
As I wave it over my head, back and forth, my arms strain and pain rips through my body, and it’s almost like time stands still as the bus grows in size and its grumbling engine fills up the silence.
Suddenly I think about Jake, and what he will think if I die here now.
I think about how his life has been too full of sacrifice, how because of me he has missed out on a normal carefree childhood, how he has been catapulted into the role of carer a thousand times too many.
Will he miss me, I wonder, or will he finally be free to live his life without the great big burden that is me?
I catch a glimpse of the others in the edges of my vision, their weary huddled shapes blurring against the shadows of the shelter, and I grit my teeth as I wave the blanket. Back and forth. Back and forth.
The bus has to stop.