A Memory of a Place You’ve Never Been
by Rhiannon Jones
The knots and kicks of Arabella’s handwriting tightened my heart. Familiar as my own throbbing pulse.
The postcard showed a city I recognised as Hong Kong, though I’d never been: junks with sails like open fans; skyscrapers; sunset glow.
The morning was barely light.
I read without breathing.
On the welcome mat lay also the promise of hell-fire if I didn’t repent in Christ. There was a list of items the recipient could request, and squares to tick: A Bible; Assorted Literature; Further Spiritual Guidance. As a child I’d posted homemade pamphlets through letterboxes. My dad and I would spend entire Saturdays walking up and down suburban roads and I’d feel holy.
Arabella had written, “Sorry to hear about your dad.”
My dad was a preacher with a special interest in women’s necklines and the moral purity of girls. On the fingers of his right hand were tattooed the letters L-O-V-E, on his left H-A-T-E, from before he found God. Fury could grip him for days, sometimes weeks.
Arabella came to stay with us a couple of times. I hurried her past my father’s plywood bookcase stuffed with his pamphlets, and his sandwich board, worn in the town centre to remind passers-by that hell was near but so was heaven if they could only repent. I didn’t invite many people over.
She made jokes about my father in the quiet of my attic room. Then she fucked me for the first time. My bed creaked.
“Shhh, we need to be quiet.” I couldn’t stop smiling.
“It’s like being a teenager again,” she hissed, though we can’t have been more than twenty.
The morning after, I said, “I was so drunk last night, I don’t remember a thing.”
Arabella rolled her eyes.
I wonder what I remembered two years ago that I don’t now; what I remembered four years ago; six. How long does it take to leave your body, the memory of how well your shoulders and necks fit together?
Though we lived in the same halls-of-residence for the same unimpressive university, we hadn’t really spoken until I saw her on the edge of a train platform. She looked forlorn and I thought she might jump.
I passed her each morning: her leaving for lectures, me stumbling upstairs with odd shoes and bruised legs, trying to hold in vomit until I reached the sink beside my bed. She was considered something of a joke among the people I hung out with despite not particularly liking.
“Are you, like… okay?” I asked.
Arabella said she was going home for the weekend. She’d been dumped by her girlfriend and hoped she could change her mind. I said I was sorry.
“You fall in love,” said Arabella, “you have it coming.”
I made a sympathetic face and said I hoped she had a nice weekend.
In January everyone returned from satellite towns and I was surprised when Arabella knocked at my door. She was grateful for the chat we’d had, she said.
“That’s okay,” I said sheepishly. My popularity had waned, and eager to use anything in my depleted arsenal to win it back for a few gleaming minutes, I’d passed on the scant details of Arabella’s break-up to other people in the halls. “Did you… get back together?”
”No.” Her face darkened. “She’s with someone else now.”
I realised she was waiting for me to step back and invite her into my room. Did she think my politeness at the station was an invitation to come to my room, tell me her problems and maybe cry? Did she think — I was indignant and hopeful — she could have sex with me as a replacement?
I’d stopped being invited on nights out. It had been some time since I’d washed vomit from the sink. The bruises had faded from my legs. “Come in,” I said.
⦿
Arabella, do you remember when we lay by the river? We held our hands up to shield our faces from the sun. We bought ice creams from a van. Our skin browned.
People say the house there is haunted. They say there is a ghostly smell of roses. Do you remember we talked about how we’d owned the same book of ghost stories when we were children? On the cover was a stony-eyed ghost with chains around his wrists.
You rolled over to face me. You squinted in the sun.
“I just can’t believe you’re going to fucking marry him,” you said. “Is that even what you want?”
⦿
In a fake-baroque bathroom, Arabella yanked the zip of my dress. Flutes of champagne balanced precariously on the edge of the sink. My mother, who’d told my father she wanted a divorce and had since lived in the caravan squatted on their drive, said, “Doesn’t she look beautiful?”, and Arabella looked at me like Jesus willing Judas to get it over and done with.
Arabella in a pale dress, clutching a bouquet. Smiling for the camera, sunlight illuminating tiny bleached hairs on her upper lip. My husband fidgeting on the other side of me: he never coped well with the heat. And my new mother-in-law, already drunk, her grass-stained heels hooked on one manicured finger. My husband’s sisters avoiding her; my parents avoiding each other. And smile!
I didn’t think Arabella would actually go.
⦿
“Your dad’s dead,” said Arabella. “You don’t need to be afraid of him anymore.”
“I was never afraid of him,” I snorted.
We walked across the common where a travelling fair was being packed away into trucks.
“Yes you were. It was so bloody obvious. You and your mother too.”
“My mum divorced him,” I said, but what I wanted to say was, “It’s easy for you: you can tell your mum anything, she doesn’t listen unless you’re agreeing with her that your dad’s a narcissist.”
“How’s the husband?”
I didn’t answer, though I felt her eyes on me.
“He’ll cope, you know. If you leave. You think he won’t but he will.”
“I don’t know, Bells. I’m not going to leave him. Not now.”
“Are you pregnant?”
My face tightened as if there were a taste of lemons on my tongue. “No.”
“Are you going to?” she asked. “Have a baby, I mean?”
“I don’t know.” I felt suddenly tired. The weak sun hurt my eyes.
“You don’t know many things.”
“I hate you sometimes,” I said.
Her teeth gleamed in a smile. “But you love me the rest of the time.”
I did not know yet this was the last time I’d see her. This would only become apparent in hastening years, when we only spoke if news travelled of life events: congrats I heard you had a baby, I’m sorry about your mum. Then it dwindled to impersonal birthday messages, before that, too, ended. But still in dreams she walks towards me. She tells me I can stop running, I can breathe, nobody will find us here. The sun shines and there is a ghostly smell of roses. Her face hasn’t changed.
Rhiannon Jones has work published in Hobart, Maudlin House, Reflex Press and others.
