Nikki Owen - Spider in the Corner of the Room

Today, Patricia returns dangling a white envelope.

I look up. ‘I have informed you already I do not want a pen pal.’

‘This isn’t a pen pal, Doc.’ She holds out the letter. An unmistakable blue embossment is stamped on the underside.

Patricia thrusts it to me. ‘It’s from-’

‘My mother.’

I take the envelope and immediately my hands betray me, wobbling, slippery. I steady myself as much as I can and study the paper. Green ink. Mont Blanc fountain pen. Only the best for Mother. My pulse speeds up. It is a long time since I have heard any word from home, since I have spoken to Mama, to my brother, my prison sentence breaking them, rendering them mute, the two of them blinking in the sunlight, shielding their eyes, knowing with me there is a storm on its way and that the clouds will always be black.

My pulse keeps racing and I need to calm down, so I look to Patricia. Numbers. Figures. ‘What is the sum of all the positive integers?’ I answer before she can reply. ‘You would assume infinite, would you not?’

‘Er-’

‘Well, you would be wrong. It is not infinite.’ I stand up, pace, turning the envelope over in my fingers over and over. Stopping, I slip one finger under the flap and rip it open. Its contents spill into my palm. ‘Only numbers are infinite,’ I babble. ‘Nothing else can continue forever.’ I blink at the letter, at the ivy-green ink.

‘Doc? You okay?’

I begin to read. The words-they swirl around my head like leaves caught in a crosswind.

‘Doc, you’re crying.’

I touch my eyes. They are moist, but how? I do not cry. Not me, not in front of people. It’s as if prison has changed me.

I read on. My mother says she is disappointed in me, upset for me, that she has prayed for me, begged the Lord for forgiveness on my behalf. She has attended mass at the cathedral in Salamanca, knelt in the pews, stooped at the foot of Jesus and asked him why this has happened. I wipe my eyes, the tears clouding my sight, my throat tight, raw. There is more. Ramon, she claims, has calmed the neighbours, friends, but, oh the worry. What will happen to me, she says. Hard to make sense of the world when your daughter has been convicted of murder. When your daughter is guilty of murder.

‘What is it?’ Patricia says, but I barely register her voice.

My heart rate accelerates. I do not move. I read the word. Then read it again. Guilty. G.U.I.L.T.Y.

‘Doc, you’re worrying me now.’

But my oesophagus is too taut to speak. I give the letter to Patricia. She reads it. I concentrate on breathing, on trying to push aside the words: disappointed, guilty, emotions I experience but cannot display. Emotions my mother feels and, in her distress, has told to me, in black and white.

Patricia scans the page. Her eyes go wide, then she looks to me. ‘Jesus, Doc, that’s…I’m so sorry.’ She looks again at the letter. ‘It says here she wants you to call her, wants to know how you are.’

I sniff, wipe my nose with my sleeve. ‘It does?’

Patricia hands me the letter.

‘She never attended my trial,’ I say after a moment. ‘She was ill for a while.’ I read the letter, the part where my mother requests I contact her. She was never close to me, Mama, but she was always there, looked after me day to day, checked I was where I needed to be. When I was with Papa, Mother hovered by the sides, like a bird on a window ledge, who, at any given moment, could lift her wings and fly away.

‘Why don’t you sit down?’ Patricia says.

I shake my head. ‘My mother is a defence lawyer, did you know that?’

‘No, I didn’t.’

I nod. ‘She is a politician. She was voted last year into el Congreso, the Spanish congress. She is a Parlimentaria for the centre-right.’ I look at the green ink. ‘The Church backed her all the way. Decades after they joined leagues with Franco, the Catholic Church is still trying to keep control of Spain, of people’s lives.’ Then I laugh, but I don’t know why. The absurdity of it? The sickening truth?

‘Fecking religion,’ Patricia says, shaking her head. ‘Causes more bleedin’ problems than it solves. A heap of the Catholic priests in Ireland were found up to all sorts. And when people were poor and starving on the streets long back, there were the priests, fat and warm in their rectories.’

I rub my thumbs on the envelope, the paper.

‘I remember when I was nine,’ I say. ‘I had to accompany my mother to a meeting at Salamanca Cathedral. Our au pair was away. My mother told me to sit and wait in the seat outside Father Reznik’s office, but I could not. I walked into the vestry and that is when I saw them. My mother and the priest…kissing.’ My mother’s writing swims on the page. ‘She handed the Father a sealed package. I stood, watched, could not look away. For some reason, I knew something was not right. Before they could see me, I ran back to my seat. I never told anyone.’ A tear escapes. Hurt, bewilderment. ‘Why is it no one is who they seem?’

Patricia shrugs. ‘God knows.’

An anger rushes to my cheeks. ‘God does not know. If he did know, if he did exist even, he wouldn’t allow it all to happen.’

I hold the letter and rub the paper. My mother kissed Father Reznik. A priest. A Catholic priest. I saw it, I am so sure. And now I can’t find him, don’t even know who he is, who he really works for or why-if he even existed at all. Just a made-up persona, a name, a being, plucked out of the air like an apple from a tree. Forbidden. Wrong. And now the convent priest who helped me is dead. Dead. And I am incarcerated, a man who pretended for years to be my friend, to be a man of God emerging before me instead as a snake. Because that’s what happened, didn’t it? That’s what we discovered, what the priest found out? That Father Reznik was a liar? I drag my nails over my scalp and look at the letter, at the creeping ink, and without thinking any more, without wondering what I am doing or why, I rip.

I rip it, the letter, straight down the middle. Rip, rip, rip. Patricia steps back. I tear the letter again. And again. And again. My teeth are clenched, tears tumble down my cheeks, but I do not wipe them, do not let myself calm down. Because I can’t, not now, not on hearing from my mother, from someone I should trust unconditionally and who says she is disappointed in me. I choke at the thought, hear my throat sound a yell, a cry, my chest crumbling under the weight of the reality that is ahead of me. That I am here. And I can’t get out…

Rip, rip, rip.

When the paper is torn into confetti-sized pieces, I stop. My chest heaves. My eyes sting.

‘Doc, you need to breathe.’

I stare at the pieces in my palm. Ink lies smeared on creamy paper, words bleeding, torn apart, dying.

‘Why don’t you sit? Maybe write it all down?’

I feel raw, ravaged, as if everything that has happened since my arrest has come out now, in one earthquake of emotion. My eyes blink, batting back the tears. I coerce my concentration towards Patricia, to her mouth, her words and what she is advising me to do. And I think: I should confess. I should admit what I discovered, what really happened, what the priest knew-and why he couldn’t go on with knowing it. Maybe that way I can truly start to decipher who is doing this to me-and why. Yes, that is it. It has to be.

I turn, flop to the bed, the letter confetti still in my fist, sinking into the mattress as I sit. And it occurs to me that more than anything I would like to keep sinking-to plummet so far that no one could possibly find me, hidden, as I would be, in the bowels of the bed, digested, absorbed. Gone.

‘I helped that priest,’ I say after a while. Patricia sits, listens. ‘I helped out there, at his convent. I did the fixing, carpentry, small electrics. My father taught me a lot of it…before he died. Papa said women are not the maids of men. He said I was equal. No different to anyone else.’