Reluctantly Home

by Imogen Clark

Pip had taken a life, and for that it was only right she should forfeit her own.

Twice

Guilt was her constant companion, never once leaving her side, so she couldn’t forget, even for a second, what she had done. And her life, destroyed by panic and guilt, seemed a fair price to pay. A life for a life.

When I forget to dance. This happens.

Jez was part of her past, and she didn’t need him in her present.

Lex

Pip was tired of being the cause of so much heartache, but she couldn’t summon the energy to change that, either.

So much heartache

She’d spent ten years trying to escape the place, had grabbed hold of her dreams and turned them into reality, and yet now she was right back where she’d started, helping out in a charity shop and having her breakfast burned by her mother.

Something in the lines of that

Pip bristled. Did she have no privacy, even with her mobile? It was like being a teenager and having to sit on the stairs to use the landline whilst her mother earwigged.

None at all. Intimacy that is

And when they did speak, she could feel him floating further away with every conversation. He seemed to struggle to find a connection with her when she wasn’t in London, as if a link in the chain that held them together had broken. He told her his news, but when she had almost nothing to say in return, the conversation fell flat.

Passports, planes, plans. None.

Have a Heart charity shop.

Give me 2. They tend to break on me.

She was entirely focused on getting herself from A to B without falling apart.

Every single day

it went no way to appease her guilt, but she hoped it might send a message to anyone who was watching that she was trying to atone.

I only watched the movie, Pippa

going to react made her more anxious still. The whole thing was a downward spiral that she couldn’t seem to crawl out of.

Yes

here I am, no longer an actress – no longer anything at all except a single mother.

Jonathan and being someone

That’s how J gets away with it. She knows that I’ve got nowhere else to go.

Yet

each time it passed her lips she seemed able to convince herself that this time it wouldn’t ruin her. It always did.

Always

Evelyn recognised the drawling voice of her agent, Julian,

Hi!

Julian was on the phone. Evelyn could hear him before she entered his room, his languid tones floating out along the corridor. ‘Yes, I see that, darling, but look at it from my point of view. She’s no spring chicken and she’s not getting any younger. If we don’t give her this then it might be last-chance saloon time.’

Lovely. Did I write this bit too?

They were both aware that time was ticking by.

I should go to bed, J

if only for a moment.

If only. Yes

same paintbrush had tinted them both. ‘Talk about cutting it fine,’ Evelyn whispered back. ‘Any later and you’d have been following her down the aisle, or whatever it’s called here.’

Whatever

‘And in the meantime, you’re not answering the door or opening any post?’ He winked at her and it made her smile. ‘Yep. That’s about the size of it,’ she said. ‘But less of me and my woes. How about you? What do you do?’

feel. But if she did that then she wouldn’t be able to put the whole episode in a box in her head and forget that it ever happened.

Avoiding thought was a skill she had perfected over recent months – keeping busy so nothing unwelcome could creep into her head.

Avoidance in it’s best shape. Avoiding thought.

It wasn’t that she missed him, exactly – she probably wouldn’t have spoken to him since his visit anyway as their contact had dwindled to almost nothing recently – but there was a sadness there that he was gone, that that part of her life was over. But it was like she was in a theatre watching someone playing her life out on the stage in front of her, rather than living through it herself.

Denial in it’s most pure form

She had been numb for so long that she had forgotten what it was like to have an emotional response.

I could bear to have to do this again.’ ‘And you’re going to let all that stop you from being where you’re supposed to be?’ Evelyn asked.

Oh.