Ripples on a Pond Read Free Page B

bandaids covered it. A dressing-gown covering her, she walked out to her sitting room-cum-kitchen where she turned the heater to a lower setting. Her flat in total wasn’t as large as the old parlour at Amberley. Hot steam plus a three-bar heater had turned the small area into a sauna. She’d stopped shuddering.
    Her kitchenette window looked out to the street. She stood, her forehead pressed to cold glass, stared down. Where was he? Where had he gone when he’d left her? Found an all-night bar where he was drinking away his pain.
    What about my pain? What about me?
    And she wept again, because he’d left her to find her own way home, and because she loved him, and because she’d broken her engagement to Chris Marino and broken her mother’s heart so she could marry her brother – half-brother – and Myrtle had lost her big white wedding. For this?
    â€˜I put them away in England. Everything stopped over there, the dreams, the moving, the changing faces. I took my middle name when I went to university, determined to be who Mum and Pops wanted me to be. I called myself Morrison Langdon, became the son of an Englishman.’
    The window fogged by her heartbreak, she wiped it with her hand, then turned to the cupboard over her sink, seeking something to kill her tears. Only aspros – and Morrie’s bottle of Johnnie Walker in the refrigerator. She got the top off, tried a sip from the bottle and choked on it.
    When she could breathe again, she filled and plugged in her electric jug and made a coffee, which she diluted with a worthwhile splash of Morrie’s whisky. It ruined the taste of the coffee, but she drank it like medicine, washing aspros down with it, three of them.
    Perhaps the alcohol calmed her, or the aspros. At three fifteen she returned to her bed, where the scent of him remained on the pillow. Scent of the only man she’d ever wanted to go to bed with – brother or not. Loved making love with him, loved waking up beside him and reaching over to kiss his mouth while he was sleeping. Drunk enough not to care if it was right or wrong, she buried her face in the pillow and slept with the scent of him.
    Johnnie Walker and aspirin won’t cure the pain of a broken heart, but given half a chance they will wrap a cushion around guilt. At eight on Sunday morning, she repeated the dose then went back to bed. The phone woke her at two. She ran to answer it, knowing it was him.
    Only Cathy.
    Cara, unable to speak to her, not today, maybe not ever again, eased the phone plug from its wall socket, then crawled back into bed until Monday.
    A grey and dreary Monday, but the world still turning outside her window: trams rattling by in the distance, cars whizzing by, horns bleating, an ambulance siren letting the traffic know it was in a hurry. The world would continue to turn. The aged would die, their grandchildren would be born, countries would wipe other countries from the face of the earth, but in the cities of all the world, man would rise up from his bed and go to work to earn his daily bread. And she was supposed to go out there and earn her own.
    Couldn’t do it. Couldn’t.
    On Friday, when the world had been a perfect place, five teachers and half of her class had been away with colds and flu. No one would doubt that she’d caught their disease. Had to phone the school and let them know.
    Myrtle and Robert would have tried to call her last night. They always phoned on Sunday night, at seven. Maybe not. They hadn’t approved of her rushed wedding. Hadn’t driven down to wish her every happiness.
    â€˜Don’t rush into it, pet,’ Myrtle had warned.
    She’d never listened to their warnings. Years ago, when Robert had warned her not to go near Woody Creek, she hadn’t listened.
    Ring them up and tell them they were right again.
    Or ring and tell them that Morrie’s mother had been too sick, that the wedding had been delayed.
    If no