“My favourite is The Monk by Matthew Lewis.” I answer.
“That’s a spooky one isn’t it?”
“Yes, I got it from my school library back in the city.”
“Well we have a big library here in Chesterport, so I’m sure that will please you.”
I smile at Gran and ask, “Would you mind if I went to my room now? I’d like to unpack and maybe have a rest. It was a long drive here.”
“Of course love, your dad left your luggage in the hallway, your room is just up the stairs, the first door on the left.”
“Thank you Gran.” I say, swallowing my need to break down into tears. Nobody has ever been this kind to me.
Wow. My new room has a double bed and two whole windows. In my dad’s all I had was a very small single bed, in a little box of a room with the tiniest window you ever saw. All you could see out of that window was more buildings. But here the windows are large with plantation shutters, and they look out onto the forest just outside of Chesterport. Gran’s home town is medium sized, it’s not exactly the most modern of places but it does have a cinema and a Starbucks. I could get used to living here, a normal life in a normal middle of the road, middle class town.
I kneel down and breathe i
n the fresh laundry scent of the bed sheets. There’s a small chest of drawers with a reading lamp beside the bed and a wardrobe in the corner of the room. On the far left wall there are two small shelves. Shelves! I’m actually going to have shelves to put my books on.
Before I had to keep them hidden under my bed. Dad was the kind of man who didn’t like to see you were making an effort to better yourself. He wanted you kept down and ignorant. He used to say I was a “stupid bitch” whenever he found me reading, which isn’t a clever thing to say to the person who knows where you hide your illegal shotgun. Not that I’d ever had the nerve to use it. Of course, that doesn’t mean I didn’t like to fantasise about doing it. A lot. I pick up the bag that I packed my books in and up end it, pouring the twenty or so titles I own out onto the bed.
Shamefully, I’ll admit that a lot of my books are ones I stole or never returned to the library. But I rarely have much money to buy things, so it was out of desperation rather than any kind of deviancy. I’ve read The Monk three times already, that’s the latest addition to my collection. These books were the only escape I got when living with Dad. The life he dragged me through was so brutally real, a lot of the time I pretended I wasn’t there.
I try not to think about what my father is, that way I can ignore the guilt. I feel guilty for the actions he takes, and that just can’t be right. I know that even if he wasn’t doing what he does there would always be some other low life to take his place.
But still, I wish I could make him a better person. I wish that I could somehow cleanse the dirty, slimy, brown and grey aura that surrounds his body. But I can’t. I’m useless. What’s the point of being able to see the very core of a person and not have any kind of power to change it? I can’t change the fact that he’s left me here to return to Tribane, a city hours away, to continue his life as a small time drug dealer.
I gather my books and stack them onto my new shelves, and I try not to think of my dad. He more or less indicated that I wouldn’t be seeing him again. Here’s to wishful thinking. I don’t like to be selfish, but I do deserve a nice life, I have suffered enough. If he wants to kill himself slowly with heroin, well, that just isn’t my problem any longer.
I repeat to myself, You don’t care. You don’t care. You don’t care. You do NOT care what he does with the remnants of his fucked up existence. But it’s difficult to stop caring. Maybe I’m suffering from Stockholm syndrome, where the captive begins to feel for their captor. I cannot let it overwhelm me. I need to be emotionless when it comes to my father.
I sigh as I change into the grey tracksuit pants and old white t-shirt that I wear to bed. It’s only eight-thirty in the evening. Yet, I am going to do my best to sleep, perchance to dream.
I had a nice weekend with Gran. She baked cookies and fairy cakes and we sat out in the sun in her back garden to eat them, and drink tea, and look through my book list for school. Some of the books I already have from my school back home. Gran said she’d call her care assistant Diana, who I haven’t met yet, to go into town and buy the ones that I need. It’s a strange sensation having people give me help, but a good one all the same.
I did some exploring of the town over the weekend, but there wasn’t too much to see other than some shops, a church and various residential streets. So I spent most of my time getting to know Gran better. I learned that she is actually seventy-two, and has lived all her life in Chesterport. She retired four years ago from her job as a florist. That was when her sight had started to get bad. She told me that she’s not entirely blind, she can still see shapes and outlines.
She gave me a silver locket with some sort of dried flowery herbs inside as a welcoming gift. Her generosity made me feel like crying again. After breakfast on Monday morning I make a quick run up to my room to comb my hair and grab my school bag. I hope that all goes well. Maybe I’ll be lucky and I might even make a new friend or two. I only had one friend in my old school, her name was Casey and she wasn’t really much of a friend at all.
One day I caught her doing an impression of my stammer to some other girls in my class. It’s horrible when you discover that the person you thought was your friend really doesn’t care about you at all. I should have known though, Casey’s aura always had a hint of selfishness about it.
When I arrive at the school there are a couple of buses pulling into the car park with teenagers spilling out of them. Some of the older students have cars of their own. There are grassy areas on either side of the car park where students hang about, sitting on the grass and socialising since the weather is sunny today. I like the sun. It energises me. I like it in Gran’s because in my new room I can get up early and open the shutters and let the light flood in and nourish me. My dad slept most of the day you see, he’d never let me pull the curtains. Our apartment never knew the sun.
There seems to be a lot of students at this school, if I had to guess I’d say there are about one and a half to two thousand in all. This terrifies me. I go straight to the secretary’s office to collect my timetable, where I find several women standing around drinking cups of coffee and talking about their weekends. One of the secretaries makes her way toward me and takes a seat at the service window.
“How can I help you?” she asks.
“I – I’m a n-new student.”
She gives me a dirty look. “Name?”
“Florence V-v-vaine.”
She gives me another dirty look. Jesus. Some people just don’t get that my stammer isn’t my fault. They think I’m either retarded or taking the piss. She opens a drawer and flicks through several files, then whips out a sheet of white paper.
“Here’s your schedule Florence, and your locker number and code.” She hands them to me, and then says, with complete insincerity because her aura tells me so, “Good luck with your first day.”
I walk out of the office and take a look at my time table, first class is C.S.P.E? I have no clue what that is. We didn’t have that subject in my last school. I hope it isn’t anything difficult. My locker is number 356. I look on either side of me. The ones lining the hall I’m walking through are in the two hundreds, so if I keep going straight ahead I should eventually reach the three hundreds. The hall is loud and packed with students. I want to find my locker before I go to my first class because my bag is a dead weight.