Maya - Chapter One

August 2007

The midday sun is enjoying her effects. With arrogance, she burns brazenly from her lofty angle through the dust-sprinkled windscreen while I stifle on leather seats. They seemed sophisticated in the showroom. Now, beads of sweat form a light shimmer on my skin, creating pools of dew in which I simmer. My car, has been parked abruptly. It’s black, a Peugeot. I remember slamming my feet onto the brakes and feeling the engine halt with a lurch. The smell of burnt rubber floods my nose.

Towering in front of me, an abscess in the cloudless sky, is a grey, soulless building. It has the appearance of leaning slightly to one side, as though a heavy load were pushing it out of its roots. A black iron door is positioned straight ahead; it is bolted, secured, protected, as though it were proofed for battle.

He knows. He is keeping me locked out, shut away, out of sight. Just like her; just like before.

The door reminds me of images I’ve seen of sturdy navel war ships. Maybe this is a war; it has certainly become my own, personal war. I laugh out loud at the absurdity of that last thought. The idea of a war five minutes from a leafy suburb of South London seems insane. There are four famous private schools within ten minutes of each other and enough delicatessens on the high street to supply the armed forces with pastrami for a year.

My eyes begin to twitch uncontrollably. The women’s magazines that litter my coffee table might cite this to be a ‘sign of stress’. Stress? The word barely scratches it. My heart has been pushing further and further in an attempt to escape my chest for the last four years. Guilt will eat you up slowly, especially of the repressed kind, salivating over your insides until it spits you out, a mere, crumpled pathetic shell. He made sure I had enough guilt to render me incapable of ever recovering.

I catch a glimpse of myself in the mirror and meet wild, red tear stained eyes set back on crinkled skin. I look older than I am. Crazy in fact.

As I stare at the door ahead, I realise that I don’t remember how I got here. My memory does not welcome the journey that followed the sudden departure from my stinking bedroom where I had cawed desperately into the silence. I sit and wait for a sign, for something to push me to the final stage, for the final piece to fit.