C. Williams - Flowers for the Dead

She knows because she has had it in her mouth. Tasted its sweet, deadly berries, nineteen years ago. Nineteen years ago, on a night just as dark as this one. The night when she opened the door to her parents’ house and let in her worst nightmare. The torn sheets. The shards of glass, the smell of lavender, the blood between her legs. Her raw throat and the taste of leather in her mouth.

The woman slides down the wall, silently, eyes fixed on the table. All you can hear is a soft swoosh as the dressing gown slithers along the wallpaper. The low noise of the telly. The occasional car driving by. Her finger, tapping on the floor.

It is only in the woman’s memory that another sound can be heard. And this is a new memory. Something she had burnt out of her mind as utterly as possible. Something she has not remembered until this very moment.

It is a doorbell.

And it is ringing.

Ding, ding, ding.

I am the reason girls are told not to trust a stranger. In the small town in the Yorkshire Dales where I grew up, the homes as lonely as the mountains, what happened to me is every parent’s cautionary tale. They tell it to their daughters, their precious little girls, their nieces, cousins, sisters, mothers. Don’t open the door to strangers. Don’t walk home too late at night. Don’t wear that skirt.

It has been nineteen years, and I’ve never been back there. It has been nineteen years, and I’ve never told anyone this story. That is why what I’m about to do is so utterly, breathtakingly stupid. Or brave. Maybe that’s one and the same thing, anyway.

I am in our bedroom, packing the rest of what I will need. Listening carefully for any sounds from outside the bedroom, I’m stuffing my things into an inconspicuous shopping bag from Tesco. In a hurry, I put the parcel that I received last night into the bag, making sure it is stowed away safely. The dried flower of deadly nightshade now sits in my pocket. My movements are harried. Frantic. Energetic. As they have not been in many, many years.

I’m about to go back there. Drive from our London flat onto the motorway and ever further north into the dark autumn night. To the lonely house where I grew up and the High Street in the village where I played knock, knock, ginger as a child with my friends under the red boughs of the rowans. Where we always used the same code when we rang the doorbell, until all of the village knew it:

Ding, ding, ding.

I take the book I’m reading from my nightstand and throw it into the bag next to the parcel. Quickly, I tie the bag closed and hide it under the bed, covering it with the extra bedding we keep there. I can feel the pulse in my palms, my heart beating frantically.

For nineteen years, I believed the official story. The police said it, and I believed it. At seventeen years of age, still living with my parents in Yorkshire, one night I opened the door of our house to a stranger. My parents were not at home, gone to see a show in Manchester. By the time they came back, the police were already there. Their daughter had already been raped, and could not recall anything except the pain splitting her open, blood running down between her legs. She could not remember how she had got there, or who had done it.

I couldn’t remember.

I straighten. Close my eyes. Listen to my heartbeat, trying to calm myself down. I am thirty-six now. For nineteen years, that is the story I believed.

But it is not the true story.

I turn to the dressing table, looking into the mirror, putting my hair back in order, strands that have come undone in my hurry. My face looks just the same as yesterday, but everything else is changed: when I looked at the dried flower in the parcel, a memory came back to me. Like a titan arum suddenly coming to bloom after years of nothing, the deadly nightshade made me remember.

It made me remember how the doorbell rang that night.

Ding, ding, ding.

That was why I opened the door in the middle of the night. Because I thought it was someone I knew.

I stare at my face in the mirror. The lines around my mouth and my eyes, on my forehead. For nineteen years, I believed it had been someone I didn’t know, a stranger who’d made the most of their opportunity and had been long gone before I was found.

But no stranger would have rung the doorbell like that. Everybody in the village knew that that was my code. Our code.

It was someone I knew.

Even in the mirror, I can see that my shoulders are shaking, my chest, my hands. With fear, and with fury. That is why I am going back to Yorkshire. Back to the one place where I swore to myself I would never return. Back to where it all happened.

I am going to find out who did this to me.

Turning away from the mirror, I let my eyes sweep through the bedroom once more. There is nothing else I need to pack. My suitcase is already downstairs in the boot of the car. I am ready. All I need is for Oliver to leave.

I can hear him puttering around in the kitchen, just beyond the bedroom door. He is setting the table for our farewell dinner. He is leaving for a conference tonight.

Taking a deep breath, I look into the mirror once more. I put on a smile, watching the corners of my mouth lift. Then I leave the bedroom.

Oliver smiles at me when I emerge, as kind as absent-minded. He whistles as he sets the table. If it can be called that. My husband pushes out air through his lips while he hums and calls it whistling. It would be infuriating if it weren’t so utterly, thoroughly him – sweet and funny and a little bit awkward. His woollen sweater is orange and blue. I gave it to him.

I try and pretend that everything’s normal. Water my begonias on the windowsill, however hopeless a case it might be, making sure they have enough to drink. I try not to look at Oliver, because the truth is, while he’s here and doing that silly whistle, I will never bring myself to leave. Suddenly, I feel the need to tell him. Tell him everything. It’s like a pull, or more like a push, like he’s pushing me against the wall. I will tell and then stay here and keep living this life that we have got used to, but which can’t give him what he wants.

Determined, I walk into the kitchen and turn off the stove where the mash has been simmering. Dinner’s ready, nothing fancy, just mashed potatoes and pork pies from the supermarket down the street. Oliver doesn’t mind that I’m not a world-class cook, and I like to think my baking makes up for it. I love baking. Made our wedding cake myself. That was also because money was a little tight – when isn’t it, really, with the rent you have to pay these days? – but still. It was a feast of chocolate, almonds, vanilla and marzipan, decorated with edible flowers.

While I serve the mashed potatoes in small bowls on our plates with the pies next to them, Oliver reaches for the remote. ‘You want me to turn off the TV, Linnsweet?’ he asks.

‘Thanks, Sweet-O.’ The name jolts through me as I say it out loud. That’s what I call him, Sweet-O. Have always called him that. It was a joke at first, because of what his mum used to call him. My sweet Oliver. Sweet-O , I used to tease him. He came up with Linnsweet in return. They stuck.

He’s set the table nicely, I realise as I sit, with a candle and the cloth napkins his mother gave us for Christmas five years ago. After we had just moved here. It is our third flat. We’ve been together ever since we were seventeen. Went to school together. People sigh wistfully when they find out. Those are the most romantic stories, aren’t they, they say, where you marry your childhood sweethearts.

Except the story that’s told about me isn’t one of romance. Except that I’m not good for him. I have always known this, known that he could have done so much better for himself than a traumatised high-school girlfriend who did not even manage to feed the fish regularly. That he deserves so much better. A real family, a proper partner. But I was never brave enough. Never brave enough to go, not even for his sake. When you love someone, you let them go, they say. But how could I let him go?