and we discovered that Dominic’s sperm was rather lazy and lackadaisical, lacking ‘get up and go’.
But things had been done, plastic tubes had been inserted, and then we were told there was a life growing inside me. I’m sorry to say that I can’t remember that moment either, but Dominic used to describe it to me. He used to do it so well, exaggerating the significance of that fateful moment every time he told it, until there was a star hovering above the ultrasound machine, and three wise men waiting in the hospital’s Costa Coffee.
Then he started to sound like he didn’t want to describe it any more, and so I stopped asking.
I had come up to the roof to get the car, to drive it down to Dominic who was buying a newspaper in the hospital shop. The morning was very busy, and we had to park on the top floor. I reached the roof of the hospital, up the steps, coming out into the morning daylight. I must have looked at the skyline of London, this view, the one I’m looking at again, which I guess would have been the last thing I would have seen as a woman without pain. Then someone found me at the bottom of the stairwell, and I couldn’t move, and there was something sticking in the small of my back: my stiletto heel. Lying there, wounded and helpless, about forty feet above the Casualty department.
How ironic.
Two lives had been extinguished that day; the tiny blob of orange growing inside me, and the life of Monica Wood, agent, sister, wife, prospective mother.
And no matter how much of a blur my life has become, no matter how many chunks of my memory float away, I remember the flat of the hand against my back. The hand that propelled me into the stairwell.
They all say that I imagined it.
I didn’t.
Because that hand pushed me, and the owner of that hand left me for dead.
Monica
I’ve not come up here since…
Well, not since the accident.
I mean, why would I? What would be the point? To investigate the scene of the crime, find some hitherto undiscovered vital piece of evidence that would be left miraculously intact after five years exposed to the elements?
Evidence that would lead me to the door of my mystery assailant?
Even as I’m laughing at myself for even thinking about the idea, I find myself looking around, looking for footprints, or patches of blood, or bits of cloth torn from my attacker’s clothes, fluttering in the breeze.
Nothing. ( Of course not. Stupid, stupid woman )
Maybe that’s why I’m obsessing about my suicide letter. It just
feels
like a piece of evidence, an item discovered in the first act of a creaky old whodunnit play, or placed in a bag in the first minutes of a TV thriller.
Perhaps the letter is exactly what it seems to be; a letter written by a woman in pain who wanted to die. Perhaps it’s just me, trying to find some drama in the discovery. Perhaps I’ve worked in the entertainment industry for far too long.
As my head swivels from right to left and back again, shapes appear on the edge of my peripheral vision, fat black blobs appear in front of me, floating around like airborne slugs. I’m used to these things; they appear from time to time when I’m exhausted by the pain.
But these weren’t slugs. They were three figures, floating, hovering over the edge of the concrete wall and the black metal fence. Three smiling, elderly figures: my parents and Dominic’s mother. Sometimes, in my head, in my muffled, fuzzy, drug-soaked brain, reality leaks into my dreams; visions of pain and torture that are carried into my slumber as a hangover from the day’s suffering.
And sometimes, even more frighteningly, dreams leak into my reality.
Shit!
I can’t stay up here, not this far off the ground!
I can see myself happily walking off the edge of the building trying to shake hands with the dead.
I walk back to the steps, shielding my head from the visions that float on the horizon, fearing that they, like sirens, will lure me to my doom. I go to the
But things had been done, plastic tubes had been inserted, and then we were told there was a life growing inside me. I’m sorry to say that I can’t remember that moment either, but Dominic used to describe it to me. He used to do it so well, exaggerating the significance of that fateful moment every time he told it, until there was a star hovering above the ultrasound machine, and three wise men waiting in the hospital’s Costa Coffee.
Then he started to sound like he didn’t want to describe it any more, and so I stopped asking.
I had come up to the roof to get the car, to drive it down to Dominic who was buying a newspaper in the hospital shop. The morning was very busy, and we had to park on the top floor. I reached the roof of the hospital, up the steps, coming out into the morning daylight. I must have looked at the skyline of London, this view, the one I’m looking at again, which I guess would have been the last thing I would have seen as a woman without pain. Then someone found me at the bottom of the stairwell, and I couldn’t move, and there was something sticking in the small of my back: my stiletto heel. Lying there, wounded and helpless, about forty feet above the Casualty department.
How ironic.
Two lives had been extinguished that day; the tiny blob of orange growing inside me, and the life of Monica Wood, agent, sister, wife, prospective mother.
And no matter how much of a blur my life has become, no matter how many chunks of my memory float away, I remember the flat of the hand against my back. The hand that propelled me into the stairwell.
They all say that I imagined it.
I didn’t.
Because that hand pushed me, and the owner of that hand left me for dead.
Monica
I’ve not come up here since…
Well, not since the accident.
I mean, why would I? What would be the point? To investigate the scene of the crime, find some hitherto undiscovered vital piece of evidence that would be left miraculously intact after five years exposed to the elements?
Evidence that would lead me to the door of my mystery assailant?
Even as I’m laughing at myself for even thinking about the idea, I find myself looking around, looking for footprints, or patches of blood, or bits of cloth torn from my attacker’s clothes, fluttering in the breeze.
Nothing. ( Of course not. Stupid, stupid woman )
Maybe that’s why I’m obsessing about my suicide letter. It just
feels
like a piece of evidence, an item discovered in the first act of a creaky old whodunnit play, or placed in a bag in the first minutes of a TV thriller.
Perhaps the letter is exactly what it seems to be; a letter written by a woman in pain who wanted to die. Perhaps it’s just me, trying to find some drama in the discovery. Perhaps I’ve worked in the entertainment industry for far too long.
As my head swivels from right to left and back again, shapes appear on the edge of my peripheral vision, fat black blobs appear in front of me, floating around like airborne slugs. I’m used to these things; they appear from time to time when I’m exhausted by the pain.
But these weren’t slugs. They were three figures, floating, hovering over the edge of the concrete wall and the black metal fence. Three smiling, elderly figures: my parents and Dominic’s mother. Sometimes, in my head, in my muffled, fuzzy, drug-soaked brain, reality leaks into my dreams; visions of pain and torture that are carried into my slumber as a hangover from the day’s suffering.
And sometimes, even more frighteningly, dreams leak into my reality.
Shit!
I can’t stay up here, not this far off the ground!
I can see myself happily walking off the edge of the building trying to shake hands with the dead.
I walk back to the steps, shielding my head from the visions that float on the horizon, fearing that they, like sirens, will lure me to my doom. I go to the
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