Emilie finds her lover, Tamara, face down and unconscious near her Jeep. It soon becomes apparent that a violent blow to the head is the cause. Beyond the fear of possible complications not yet ruled out by Tamara’s doctor, Emilie and the police need more clues than they have regarding the attacker’s identity and motive.
Dreams emerge, deep from inside Tamara’s disturbed and fragmented, drug induced sleep. Triggered by past vignettes in Tamara’s life, some of these dreams retain the sensual quality of the moment: lust, love, and tenderness in the vineyards of Bordeaux while others morph into nightmares.
Jagged Dreams is about the disturbing reality that becomes Tamara’s during the time she spends in the ward, inside her bed, inside her head, while her thoughts go on, sliding and slithering away from her.
Jagged Dreams is about sexual tension as it comes against the age-old dilemma of monogamy.
Jagged Dreams is about two lovers on different sides of a considerable age gap. “My very point. Some are growing up, Alex, while some of us are growing old. A lover on each side is what the age-gap is about.” (Emilie)
The slow scraping sound below the door awoke Tamara. Her first eyes-open thought had been that she had dreamt the sound and she had rolled over pulling the eiderdown more tightly around her shoulders. But she heard it again, a very quiet type of scraping, the way one would scrape if not intending to be heard. Not meant to disturb. Tamara sat up, squinting into the darkness.
Scrape … … Scrape.
The scraping stopped but in its stead a softly metallic sound set Tamara’s heart in a frantic beat. Insecure little clicks seemed to be coming from inside the lock to her front door.
“What the hell?” she whispered, suddenly uncomfortable with the weight of the eiderdown on her body. It made her feel trapped. She had locked the door, of that she was sure, just as she was sure that it was being slid backwards.
Rooted to the spot, her mind revving but in neutral, Tamara let mad thoughts race around in tune with the erratic beat of her heart. Dufour was on to her. His honour and reputation were at stake. He wants to silence me. In a parallel groove, Tamara had Madame Dufour, on the other side of that door. She was loveable but ineffectual as a wife, deficient as a mother. She had known of her husband’s gross crime but had failed to move heaven and earth to stop him abusing their only child. And she had come to protect her man.
“Awh, for fuck’s sake,” Tamara said out loud as the door swung ever so slowly, ever so quietly on its hinges. Eyes tight, eyes squinting into the cold darkness that slipped in from outside, she threw the édredon off her legs and held her breath as the door clicked shut. The bolt was being wound clockwise, back to its original position.
“Marielle?” she whispered at the slight shape that moved towards her.
“Oh,” was all she heard. A little ‘Oh’ of surprise mitigated by a little ‘Oh’ of disappointment.
“J’ voulais pas t’ réveiller,” was all Marielle said. I didn’t want to wake you.
Perplexed, heart still thumping, adrenaline still coursing through her stomach and solar plexus, Tamara watched warily as Marielle moved closer to the bed. And now what? she thought.
“Mais … why are you here?”
“Chut, ne dis rien, je t’en prie. Ne me demandes rien.” Shush, be quiet, please. Don’t ask me anything. “J’ai froid.” Marielle was cold.
Now that her eyes had adjusted to the darkness Tamara watched as Marielle quickly pulled off, first her cardigan, then a long-sleeve T-shirt. She watched the loose cotton skirt flutter to the threadbare mat by the bed. Marielle stepped out of her plastic boots. They had been scraped free of mud and cow dung. As a reluctant spectator at a happening, as the one, in the front row, who ends up being picked by the performer who needs someone to toy with, Tamara watched.
Marielle held up the corner of the quilted édredon, slipped her slight frame along side Tamara’s and pulled the eiderdown back over the two of them. Tamara winced as Marielle’s cold hand came to rest on the bed-warm skin of her stomach. Marielle wiggled and snuggled herself into a position so that Tamara’s arms and legs ended up enfolding her in a stiff but warm cocoon. Then, she moved her cheek against Tamara’s collarbone and stayed still.
Tamara realised that she was ramrod stiff and holding on to her breath. Why is she here? Why now? Why not last night? What does she want from me? Thoughts whirled around faster than the wings on a bumblebee. She made herself breathe in deeply and exhale slowly. She made herself relax her shoulders and arms, her hands and thigh muscles. She allowed them to hold Marielle in a loose embrace and she focused on the woman, a mere girl, who had crept out into the night to snuggle inside her bed.
Marielle’s body had been so tightly wound and so cold that Tamara was able to tell almost to the second when she, too, let the tautness of her muscles soften, when Marielle’s breathing became freer. Tamara eased herself into a more comfortable position, careful not to disturb Marielle and she sighed an odd sort of a sigh, almost a sigh of wellbeing. Her face nuzzled Marielle’s hair. It had the clean fragrance of lemon, of wood fire and lemon. Soon, both were asleep.
The tapping on her shoulder is annoying her.
“Wake up, Tamara.”
She shrugs the hand away. A tight ball of pain skittles to the other side of her brain. She blinks into the face.
“Time for your medication.”
Too close. Too fucking close. She blinks again. The face reshapes itself.
“No, no need to move your head for that. You’ll be back to sleep before you know it. But for now, young lady, I need to make sure all your vitals tally up to something reasonable.”
“You’re not Fiona.”
“I’m not Fiona, no. She’s been working over time, Fiona has. Come … drink a little more of that. You need to hydrate.”
“Can’t.” Shakily, Tamara hands the paper cup back to the nurse.
“Je sais qu’ tu sais,” Marielle had said. I know that you know. “Je savais que tu m’ suivrais.”
She had anticipated that Tamara would follow her to the tower. Someone had to find out, she said when, some time after midnight, they had woken up.
Tamara, her cheek resting against Marielle’s chestnut curls, had asked in simplified English, “Why you think I follow you?”
“Because I … because I go on the trail without saying goodbye to you.”
And so they whispered a little to each other, both careful to avoid the words: father, abuse, incest and sex (though three of these words were pretty much the same in both languages) as these would have led to other words that would have pinpointed the evening’s event too clearly. More specific words would have made it and every other preceding russet-moon encounter too horrifyingly palpable. And so, the common memory of earlier lay between them like a sawn off body part on a pathologist’s slab. Only covered, only made decent by the thin sheet of their combined silences.
Marielle had shifted into Tamara’s arms, in between her legs, but she had remained there, her right side against Tamara’s left.
How young had she been when it all began, Tamara wondered. Did her mother know? How could she not know? Why hadn’t Marielle found a way to stop him? I mean like, how long has it been going on? Did Christian know? Why hadn’t she told him? What fucking use is he to her if she won’t even tell him that? How much longer will she just hang in there and keep on enduring his hands, her father’s hands on her? Didn’t she know there probably were organizations in Bordeaux that could help her out of Sainte–Thérèse?
And so the only question Tamara whispered in the dark was, “And why you … Pourquoi tu restes ici?”
“Many time I think … I must leave. But I stay because I live ‘ere. This is my land, tu comprends? I love Sainte–Thérèse. I can never go away. It is in my…” She had looked for the right word, a word not so commonly used in high school French.
“Blood. It’s in your blood, yes?”
“Ah oui, in my blood. Inside…‘ere…” She pinched the skin of her arm. “In my skin. Oui … je l’ai dans la peau. I hate ‘im but ‘e is my father. She is my mother. She does not know. It kill ‘er if she know.”
Intellectually, Tamara understood what Marielle was saying about her love for the land, her countryside, for the vineyard but at an another level, lacking a strong sense of her own roots, she could not accept that enduring a father’s twisted sexual urges was the right price to pay for living near her beloved vines. She already knew that if anything like that had ever happened to her she would either have told someone, early, very early on, or would have left home, never to return. Screw the vines, screw him. Close the door on that frigging nightmare and move on, she wanted to tell Marielle but she didn’t.
And Marielle shifted inside Tamara’s embrace. She snuggled up closer and briefly looked into Tamara’s eyes. Unexpectedly, she ran her thumb over and over again the silver bolt that pierced her eyebrow and, like a sleepy child, dropped her head back against Tamara’s cheek. When Tamara shifted to peer into Marielle’s face, Marielle’s lips covered hers and melted all of her. And the mad rush of desire coursed again through Tamara’s limbs, through her sex, through her ribcage and, for the second time that day, almost short-circuited her brain. Almost but not quite.
Though Tamara’s hand had been resting on Marielle’s naked skin, on her hip, she had encased her resolve in concrete; she wouldn’t let that hand stir. She wouldn’t let it caress Marielle’s thigh. She wouldn’t let that hand move across the flat plane of Marielle’s stomach and down, down to the chestnut curls that she knew she could reach so easily, even from her position.
Marielle’s face was nestled against Tamara’s cheek but her hand had begun a slow sleepwalk wander under Tamara’s pajama top, electrifying all the nerve endings along the path it travelled.
Tamara did not attempt to stop Marielle’s flat-handed, dreamy exploration. It was just too marvelously sensual. It was transporting her to a place she had never known, only comparable, she thought, to the erotic arousal one might feel if bound. Bound, as in hands and ankles loosely tied to the bedposts. Bound, as she was by the silent promise to not take advantage of Marielle’s need for warmth and love, for non-sexual love, no matter how Marielle chose to express that need.
So Tamara lay, exposed, vulnerable, hardly able to contain the deep-seated arousal, thankful for the obscurity of darkness, unable to touch back, unable to slow down her arousal by a shift of focus while long and beckoning stabs of desire spread and spiralled down her thighs. Unrelenting, as gentle as the ebb and flow of the sea, Marielle, hand flat on Tamara, lit trails of desire, hot and white and shimmery, radiating from her very core. The memory of Marielle’s father, of his two hands pulling Marielle’s buttocks against him, of him rubbing his penis against her until he came on the thin cloth of her pale blue knickers, that vision jumped into the darkness of the room but Tamara squeezed her eyes shut against it. And she held Marielle even more loosely, so determined she was to not let her lust…
But she came. She came in a syncopated, muffled groan. Led by Marielle’s dream-inspired slow glide over the soft cloth of her pajamas, over her thigh, over her stomach, over her sex, over one breast and the other, her hand flat against her ribs and down her thigh again and against her sex again, the wave, a wave, laid up by the combined power of the preceding ones, crashed and broke in a million jagged iridescent tongues.
Tamara came, almost in spite of herself. She had sucked in her breath through clenched teeth, and she tried to slow down the manic beats of her heart. And she tried to not let herself be totally swept away, submerged by the delicious swarm that rippled and swirled deep, deep inside her. Her priority had been to spare Marielle yet another ‘ejaculation’ – orgasms, squirting sperm, sexual release, even her own, less messy, less graphic, yes, but still the same primitive animal release. That night, for Tamara, all were one and the same: affronts to Marielle’s raw feelings.
So she tightened her embrace around Marielle, and pressed her cheek into the woman’s lemon and wood-fire scented hair and tried to stifle her moan when the wave of ecstasy broke then spread away from her clitoris. And in the darkness, she blushed when she felt Marielle’s hand cup her sex, no longer in a sleepwalking meander but purposefully, knowingly, to ease away what sparks of frustrated desire might have remained trapped. Tamara exhaled forcefully and cupped the back of Marielle’s hand with her own in a tacit acknowledgement.
Neither woman spoke but, immobile, each clung to the other. Finally, Marielle tucked one leg over Tamara’s thigh and draped one arm across her chest, her hand resting over Tamara’s collarbone. Tamara didn’t dare move. She did not dare touch Marielle, as a lover. She didn’t think Marielle really wanted that to happen, not even then. She wanted to leave her with a sense of power, with the power of pleasuring another, freely. At her choosing. Soon, they fell asleep together, a second time that night.
When Tamara woke, she was alone in her bed. There was sunlight in her converted side of the barn though the curtains were still pulled. She hadn’t heard the roosters’ crow. No sign attested to Marielle’s presence in her bed. None beside the unalterable memory of Marielle’s touch, and the weight of Marielle’s head against her shoulder.
She sighed, looking at the whitewashed ceiling, as if for the first time. She scrutinised the heavy beams that clung to it. She had never lain in bed so long, not since she had arrived at the Dufours’. There had always been the grapes waiting, the harvest to bring in. And Marielle to wake her up. But the harvest was in, the vendanges were over. Before the morning ended she would be on the road, retracing the steps that had brought her to Sainte-Thérèse, inland from the Dordogne River.
Aware of a vague ache, she brushed her hand over her sex. She squinted. She crossed her legs then curled up on her left side. She began planning the trek back to St Emilion. And where to find Marielle. And how to say goodbye.
****
Excerpt beginning p. 215
Sexual violence. Emotional violence. For most of the thirty-odd hours since she collapsed on the ground of the parking lot, her thoughts have been a shaken and stirred cocktail of patches, stretched and distorted by the warped, time-controlled, reality of nightmares. Father to daughter, uncle to nephew, woman to woman, the violence she has intellectualised only makes her restless in her sleep. Other moments that her psyche has yet not processed successfully, no matter how dated, are brought back distorted by thoughts that slip away from her.
Jodie’s left upper arm is scarred by a neatly criss-crossed arrangement of healed skin. “That was last year,” Jodie explains, disconnected from whatever pain these cuts would have occasioned her. “Messy. A lot of blood.”
“I bet.”
Tamara is new to the business of working in the Child Abuse Division of the Services. She had operated a switch to that division, upon her return from Europe, thinking that she would be more empathetic towards these victims than towards the women who come to grief at the hands of an abusive partner they have, after all, chosen.
So far, due to bureaucratic quirks, the only ‘cases’ she’s been involved with are those of older victims, women who, for the most part, are considering pressing belated charges against an abusive uncle, a friend of their parents’, a brother, a father, or a baby-sitter. Not yet against a grandfather. Not yet against a mother.
It is after she met Jodie that Tamara understood that it would be almost impossible to distance herself enough from her cases’ personal stories of child abuse not to burn out early. It is then she understood that her estimation of her effectiveness in her first job, with the Domestic Violence Division, had been all wrong, that there was indeed more she could do for women in crisis besides move their files from one department to the next.
And with this insight, she had decided to do what she could, back in her original area of training, for the survivors of domestic violence. For women. Grown up women. Victims all the same but less likely to choose suicide as their escape route.
Jodie is Tamara’s first child victim, the first child victim to whom she was not personally connected. Not like Jamie. Not like Marielle. While Tamara was recording the girl’s personal details, information that starts off all interviews, it dawned on her that she had never found out how many red moons could be expected to grace the Sainte-Thérèse sky in any given year. Moments later, Tamara had found a reasonably unobtrusive way to bring Jodie around to the reason behind her visit. In lieu of a verbal answer, the girl had lifted her sweatshirt to show Tamara her upper arm. She said it hadn’t hurt much.
“Well, I’m glad to hear you say that, Jodie, but surely like, all these lines would have caused you considerable pain. Who else has seen these sca–”
“That’s the point! It has to hurt.”
Tamara keeps her voice steady. “Jodie, who did that to you?”
The Tic Tac Toe grid cut into Jodie’s matchstick thin arm, near the shoulder, has taken Tamara by surprise but Jodie only shrugs and pulls the sweatshirt back down over her blue singlet. Over the square Band-Aid that is glued to her wasting biceps, a couple of inches lower.
“Jodie, you need to be patient with me here, like I’m not quite following. Why does anything have to hurt?”
Jodie shrugs again and the fingers of one hand return to teasing the remnants of her cuff.
A while later, Jodie finally opens up a little more under Tamara’s careful prodding. She explains that the cuts are self-inflicted, that the cuts make her feel better.
Tamara has read a little about victims of abuse who find release through various aspects of self-mutilation but she has never come across any such person. She had only come across bored teens who thought it cool the scratch at the skin of their arms and ‘tattoo’ in a little cross, a swastika, or a couple of initials inside a wobbly heart.
“OK, I can understand that,” replies Tamara, looking concerned but not going ballistic like the girl thought she would. “But what is that other pain? You know, the one the cuts make you feel better about? Tell me about your other pain, Jodie.”
Reluctantly, fingers tugging and pulling at various loose threads of her cuff, Jodie finally gives Tamara a new piece of information. “Terry. He gives me that other pain.”
Who’s Terry, thinks Tamara? Her little brother’s Peter. There’s no stepfather. What, a neighbour? A relative? A friend of the family? “Jodie, tell me about Terry?”
Jodie slides one short fingernail over a couple of horizontal threads on her frayed cuff. To the right, to the left and back.
Tamara waits for her to add more on her own but, before the silence in the room becomes a barrier to the communication she needs to have with the girl, she asks, “Why does Terry give you that pain? Jodie?”
Tamara is leaning forward on her chair but when Jodie peers at her from under her lashes, Jodie finds her pretty. Not intimidating like Mrs Noel, last year’s German teacher who demanded that Jodie explain how she could be so clumsy with a hammer as to turn up, yet again, with a bruised thumb and blackened nail.
Jodie didn’t bother telling Mrs Noel that she wasn’t clumsy at all. It was her thumb she had aimed the hammer at. What a lame thing to think, Jodie had thought at the time of Mrs Noel’s questioning. But Tamara, she looks cool and nice, but she knows she shouldn’t trust her to keep her secret secret because Jodie knows that Tamara and people like teachers and Guidance Officers at school cannot keep her kind of secret secret. They have to tell other people. And because Jodie is thirteen, she understands why it is so.
But Jodie knows that she has come to this building in the city, today, on her own, to have someone make her secret not so secret anymore. Before that can happen, though, she understands she has to tell someone. And Tamara looks like a good one to tell.
“It was the fourth time I cut myself, you know, the criss-cross. Before that, I was scared so I didn’t cut well at all. But one day, I was not afraid anymore. I just knew I had to do it slowly and well. Not like messy and all over the place.”
Tamara nods.
“But if it’s gonna work, it’s like it needs to be different each time.”
“Each time?”
Jodie nods. Her leprechaun eyes hold Tamara’s. “It’s like each time I have to plan it. The way to cut. Can’t have people know about it. So I have to plan what I’ll do.”
And Tamara asks Jodie how she plans the cuts she makes on herself and Jodie explains calmly that it’s really about deciding where to cut so it won’t show. And how deep to cut so she won’t require medical help and how long the cut needs to be to deliver her the kind of pain that she needs to override that other. Jodie says that she has to be very careful not to bring attention to herself. That’s partly why hitting her fingers with a hammer or catching them in doors couldn’t do anymore. It hadn’t been a good idea.
“Jodie, where else have you cut yourself? Would you mind, like, showing me?”
Jodie considers showing Tamara her arm again because obviously she hasn’t seen the Band-Aid there that covers three other cuts, all close together, each close to one inch long. But instead she lifts up the loose leg of her shorts.
On the front of her thigh, a row of Band-Aids, each one next to the other, side by side. No gaps in between the five Band-Aids. A little higher up, another little grid already well into its healing process. I guess, being so young, she heals pretty quickly, Tamara thinks, preferring to think about the healing than the cutting.
“OK, Jodie,” she says gently but without a pretend smile. “You’ve got plenty of guts, that’s for sure. And it’s like that other pain of yours must be real big if you, like, need that many cuts to make up for it. I understand that. But I’m not guessing well, am I?”
Jodie turns away from Tamara and away from the moth-eaten cuff that drips curly threads over her bony wrist. She looks out of the window. There’s nothing to see out of the window. It’s too high up in this old building. Too high to see the trees, she thinks quietly. And they don’t have any neighbours. Only the sky. It’s not sunny out there. Not today.
“Jodie? The thing is that, in fact, I’m not allowed to guess at all, you understand?” Tamara leans closer to Jodie but stops at the boundary of the girl’s personal space. “If you want us to help,” she says slowly, looking at Jodie’s unravelled cuff, “If you’d like me to try and do what I can about that other thing, you need to tell me what it is.”
Jodie does not look up. “Being ugly. That’s what did it.”
“Uh huh,” Tamara says, sounding unfazed.
“It’s when I made myself ugly that he stopped. Before that he didn’t, did he?”
So, Tamara toils away with Jodie to help her clear more of the bramble that clutters the slight opening she’s worked out for herself. It, then, becomes clear that Jodie thinks that her brother had stopped interfering with her a short while after she had started making herself ugly.
She had begun by chopping at her hair because he said it was very pretty. “He’d go, ’Not like mine.’ His is a rusty colour that he’s always said he didn’t like much at all because it comes with all those freckles. And he’d go, ‘You know how girls are.’ Like, they wanted to know if he had them, the freckles, even on … his … Down there,” says Jodie looking away, out the window.
Then she’d not eat. If she ate, she’d throw up. Jodie thinks that it’s been her decision to throw up everyday, sometimes more than once. Tamara thinks that maybe, by the time the throwing up began, Jodie’s body had decided to help her along in her silent fight and anorexia had set in. And then Tamara asks Jodie about her monthly cycles. They had begun, too, around the time she had started making herself ugly. A little over a year ago.
“Did Terry know you had reached puberty, like you know, your menstrua–”
“I know what puberty means,” Jodie says, eyes wide on Tamara’s face. The two little creases that run as an underline from the inner corner of her eyes give her face a natural smile that her lips didn’t have. She probably doesn’t smile much, anymore, Tamara thinks. What frigging thing would she have to smile about?
Tamara feels a sort of resentful anger rise inside her. It is not so much a rush of blood or a building heat that she feels. It’s more like a tightness that first settles in her jaws. Then in her shoulders. In a tight, cold slab, inside her gut. That anger is there because of what Jodie has already said. It is also for what she hasn’t yet said but that Tamara knows is a part of the girl’s reality. Then she realises her anger is also for Jamie. And it is for Marielle.
“How did Terry know you’d started your periods?”
Jodie sighs a little. Her fingers move to return to her cuff but instead she turns to Tamara and her fingers remain idle, dangling between her knees. Tamara notices the girl’s elbows angled towards the inside of her legs are clear of the cut on her thigh.
“That one night I was on the rag, he came to my room. So … like, that’s how he knows.”
“So … what did Terry do then?”
“Nothing. I could tell he was so pissed off but for the first time he … well, he just went away.”
“For the first time since…”
Jodie’s eyes and fingers have yielded to the magnetic pull of the shredded cuff.
“Jodie?”
Jodie answers but she does not look up. “Since kindie.”
Tamara doesn’t need to ask for more precision. Past a certain point, precision becomes irrelevant. Since kindergarten is precision enough.
“Jodie, tell me about Terry. Who is he?”
Tamara doesn’t need to know precisely how Terry abuses the girl. At this stage, though, she needs to know who he is.
“He’s my … brother. That’s why he got the red hair. Like my father. I’m more like my mother.”
“Who’s Peter then? You only mentioned one–”
“He’s my little brother.” Jodie swallows hard. “He’s not a redhead or anything. He’s blonde just like me, like my mother.” Jodie eyes stay insistent on Tamara’s, almost expectant. “My parents say he looks just like me only smaller. That’s because he’s only seven years old. I’m thirteen.” She stops and she glances at the window. “Terry … he’s twenty-two. He’s shacked up with his girlfriend.”
Tamara would like to ask Jodie what kind of parents she has who are so unaware not to have noticed that their oldest son has been a chronic abuser of his little sister and that their daughter is turning herself into a Lotto grid because the only friend she can trust with her pain is a razor blade. But she won’t ask that question. The moment has to remain focused on Jodie and Terry.
And at some point Tamara uses the word abuse for the first time. Jodie needs to begin internalising the word. Jodie nods hesitantly. She looks out of the window. There’s a cloud there now. She can see the cloud because the sky behind has more blue in it than before so the grey cloud stands out more. Maybe it was there all along and she hadn’t seen it because the sky had been the wrong colo–
“Jodie? Will you tell me a little more about Peter? Your little brother.”
Jodie’s lets go of her breath. She lets go of the grey cloud on its new blue background. Wide eyes fly to Tamara’s face. She blinks and she bites her bottom lip. And she picks at the stitches that hem the right leg of her baggy shorts, right above her knee. And she looks up again. She looks at Tamara.
“That’s why I cut myself.”
“What is?” asks Tamara though she feels she might already have an answer.
She looks away, out of the window. “It’s because of him.” The cloud is not out there anymore. Or maybe it still is, but she can’t see it because the sky is grey again.
“Who? You mean your little brother?”
“Because of what Terry does to him. That’s why I need to cut myself. I can’t stand it otherwise.”
“Jodie, are you saying that now Terry has stopped abusing you, he’s on to your little brother?”
Jodie nods eyes welling up with tears. “It’s all my fault.”
Tamara sits and waits.
“It’s all because … because I made myself ugly. But … Peter, he was only five and a half. I was already twelve. I should’ve let him go on–”
Tamara’s fingers rake back her hair in frustration. “Awh … for fuck’s sake,” she exclaims, no longer able to exert the professional detachment that is supposed to go with the job. She squints at Jodie. Because Jodie is sitting, head bowed, the big round tears fall directly on the cloth of her shorts.
“It’s all my fault,” Jodie repeats in a watery voice.
Tamara goes to the desk for a box of tissues that’s there for just such occasions. She kneels near Jodie’s chair. Jodie accepts the proffered tissue without looking up. She blows her nose noisily and runs her frayed cuff across her eyes careful, to avoid Tamara’s. So Tamara chooses to disregard another rule. Gently, she taps her forefinger on the girl’s knee. Twice, just twice, just hoping she will look up.
Leprechaun eyes magnified by more welling tears, Jodie does look up.
“Jodie? It’s like I need a hug just now,” says Tamara very gently. “You?”
Inside her bed, hampered in her movements by the sheet that has wound itself more tightly around her hips and legs, Tamara feels the anger rise red. She is too hot now. She wants to kick off the top sheet but her hands do not find any part of it to pull. Her heartbeat picks up.
Jodie’s voice is distorted, muffled and hoarse like she is all screamed-out. And from deep inside the side pocket of her shorts she retrieves a broken piece of razor blade. And Tamara watches as the girl makes a fist of her left hand.
Mesmerised, though her heart is pounding, Tamara watches as Jodie slides the broken razor blade across the smooth back of her hand. She watches as the tight skin yields to the sharpness of the blade. She watches as the angled tip of the blade disappears below the skin.
Tamara thinks there should first be a white line across the back of Jodie’s hand, a line of fatty tissue perhaps. But there isn’t. The thin red line gets wider and wider. The red line overflows its banks and spills on the back of Jodie’s hand, to run in between her fingers.
Tamara watches as the big red drops fall on the linoleum. They are dark red and plump when they fall in slow motion towards the linoleum. Tamara has to blink. When she looks again, the big red drops of dark blood are thin, flat, and frayed on the linoleum.
Tamara can’t breathe. She wants to grab Jodie’s hand. She wants to apply pressure to it, to stem the blood that goes on oozing and oozing out. She wants to call for help. She wants … she wants … She doesn’t want Jodie to die.
Tamara’s nightmare wants her to feel the thick stickiness of Jodie’s blood between her own fingers, under her palm as she presses Jodie’s hand under her own. Her nightmare needs to feed off her helplessness, off her adrenaline before it releases her.
The cannula had busted its way out of her vein. Nightmare celluloid blood had become one with real blood. White cloth. Dark red. Deep dark red. Black. Shut down. Some time later the oxymetre had alarmed.
The nurse had found Tamara semi-conscious on the floor, head jammed against the base of the bed, the saline solution dribbling out of the tubing, making a proper mess of the healthy red blood that was still oozing out of Tamara’s vein.
By the time Tamara reconnected to the here and now, the nurse was already applying pressure to the back of her hand as she had applied it to the back of Jodie’s hand, feeling her blood thick and sticky between her fingers. She had been laid back against the pillows. And a lot of red still stuck to her nightie, to her, and to the nurse’s uniform. But on the linoleum, the red was not so red. It was more like pink, more like a diluted red. Like rosé, she thought. It looked far less sticky out there than against her nightie. Less sticky than against her skin. Less sticky than in between her fingers.
“No, you don’t need to be looking at it.” Deep dark red soaking white. Dark pink. “It’s a bit of a mess, that’s for sure but we’ll get you cleaned up soon as we get a dressing on that vein,” the nurse had said, fingers of one hand tight against the gauze pressed against Tamara’s hand, the fingers of the other on the bedside buzzer. “Looks a lot worse than it is.” The nurse had prattled on as she tended to the back of Tamara’s hand.
“A shower and you won’t even know it’s happened.”
*****
Excerpt
Sexual violence. Emotional violence. For most of the thirty-odd hours since she collapsed on the ground of the parking lot, her thoughts have been a shaken and stirred cocktail of patches, stretched and distorted by the warped, time-controlled, reality of nightmares. Father to daughter, uncle to nephew, woman to woman, the violence she has intellectualised only makes her restless in her sleep. Other moments that her psyche has yet not processed successfully, no matter how dated, are brought back distorted by thoughts that slip away from her.
Professional Reviews
Saint-Clair: True To Her Own Style
“Once again, Saint-Clair has successfully woven links between her latest and earliest plots.
She achieves these connections in a most intriguing manner.
Jagged Dreams is a strong, somewhat unsettling, and totally compelling read.” Madeleine Sorrento
During the 1960's a young soldier struggles with basic training, a bully sergeant and his own inner demons. A tale of struggle, redemption and survival.
During the 1960's a young soldier struggles with basic training, a bully sergeant and his own inner demons. A tale of struggle, redemption and survival.
Martin Powers wanted an ironing board for Christmas. Instead, he got . . . Matthew Kieler, a non-returnable gift, but a gift that kept on giving. A powerful tale of survival, compassion and unapologetic love in the time of AIDS.
