Juliet
by Eleanor Downey
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Morosely yet with a powerful determination, I remember feverishly scrubbing the bathtub. At the time, it was not unusual for me to constantly immerse myself in meaningless yet intense cleaning rituals, but it was the bathtub I remembered forcefully washing on this second most ill-fated day. Perhaps my remembrance is related to the severe back pain that came with the task, and how I would welcome the potent aches and throbs with receiving arms; that is to say, physical pain had become a blissful haven which protected me from the inexorable daemon who was devouring me from the inside out. Without relent, this daemon was ridden with stifling apathy and cruel insomnia; it possessed both an irrepressible rage and immobilising despair, and worst of all, it used my infinite ocean of grief to quench its never-ending thirst. As the monster continued to suck away what was left of my humanity, I poured what little control I had left into one sole task: finding the key to my escape. With all my remaining strength, I scoured my deteriorating brain and desolate life for the solution that would guarantee my respite. My search had continued for an agonising two months and to no avail, when along came a single day in August which would grant me the escape I had so desperately pined for, and yet sealed my fate as a daemon in the flesh.
As I stood hunched over the expanse of porcelain, my mind at its most mellow, I revelled in the painful pulsing of my back. I was enjoying the temporary quieting of my mind to the extent that when the doorbell sounded, I instantly felt disgruntled and cheated that I should have to abandon my arduous scrubbing.
Resentfully, I put down my sponge and sulked all the way down the wide staircase and over to the towering tomb door, a door which I would later regret opening. But at that moment, with the day’s cruel events inevitably set out in stone, my only regret was that as the pain in my back died down, the monster awoke from his ephemeral slumber, returning diligently to wreak havoc upon my thoughts. Reluctantly, I pulled back the door and was confronted with a potent dread that seemed to equal only that of the thin, long-limbed boy standing before me. Shuffling nervously, the boy’s neck was slightly hunched over and his now pallid skin emphasised his gaunt face and joyless eyes, which were as riddled as grief as my own.
We stood without speaking for one long, agonising moment, and listened to the sound of our mutual suffering fill the void between us.
‘The gate was open,’ he said timidly. I quickly darted my eyes towards the open steel gate, feeling alarmed and deeply concerned that I had failed in the simplest of ways to keep people out.
‘It was never supposed to be’, I replied bluntly. Sensing my coolness towards him, the already wilting eighteen-year-old shrunk back even further into his scarecrow-like corpse. Surprisingly, his instant recoil left me feeling guilty to the point where I felt it necessary to try and make him feel as though he wasn’t completely unwanted.
‘I’m sorry, if that sounded curt, it’s just I never usually forget to close it.’
‘That’s okay,’ he answered, daring to meet my gaze.
‘Is there something I can do for you Oliver?’
I grew alarmed as the boy took one long, deep breath, before he spluttered the words, ‘I came for the necklace’.
I was genuinely perplexed. As if sensing my confusion, he began to elaborate further, resolving my bafflement but leaving me with overwhelming feelings of unease.
‘Rose’s golden locket. The one I gave her for Christmas.’ Instantaneously, I felt breath leave my body and manic adrenaline take its place. He had only spoken her name and yet that was all it took to send my body into disabling shock.
‘I didn’t mean to upset you Mrs Daniels –‘
‘Juliet’, I managed to murmur.
I’d just wondered if you’d found it in her things?’ He said gently.
‘No. We haven’t found it.’
‘Can I come in and look?’
An ardent expression of determination spread over the poor boy’s face like the most rancid of plagues, and looking back, I realise that it was this compelling yet earnest look of resolve that ultimately determined my response.
‘If you must.’
And so I tell myself that it was solely the sincerity in his features and not a lapse in my moral judgement that secured our sordid fate, or perhaps that’s the daemon talking.
An hour had passed, and in that time I had stripped my entire bathroom and kitchen down to sterility, but Oliver had not found the necklace. I tried in earnest to block out the sounds of him fumbling away next door in Rose’s bedroom, but both my guilt and the weight of the necklace in my pocket stood in the way of my success. As the sound of moving boxes continued, I feared that Oliver’s determination was indefatigable and that his search for the locket would never end. However, my fears were temporarily quelled by a sudden silence. But this silence soon gave way to even greater concerns as disconcerting sounds began emanating from the same room that I had barely entered since the death of my daughter.
Oliver’s intermittent sobs echoed hauntingly through first the house, before reaching my very core. I felt compelled to act; to try to ease the suffering of this young boy who I now realised was as empty and grievous as myself. He too had a monster trapped within him, a fiend who, similar to my own, was born the day our beloved Rose was snatched up by the ocean, and who was immortalised through our never-ending grief.
An electric current seemed to jolt me into action and I soon found that my hands had pulled back the door to reveal Oliver submerged beneath a fallen avalanche of Rose’s belongings. The harrowing sight painted the boy in a completely new light; I had watched him for months stand by the side of my daughter, both of them as joyful and hopeful as each other. But now that I was witnessing his despair and loneliness, I was unable to see him next to anyone’s side but my own. Alarmingly, the thought seemed neither obscene nor morally unjust at that one electric moment in time, and most importantly, the pining look in Oliver’s eyes suggested that it was far from impossible. Slumped against the bed and drowning in Rose’s belongings, it became obvious to me that the sacred escape that had so far eluded us could be found deep within each other. Through our union we could forever dull our pain by splitting the burden of our loss…and somehow hang onto the person we missed the most.
Adrenaline continued to pulse through my body as I plotted my escape from the deafening sound of my inner tumult. Of course, the hatching of this plan lasted mere seconds, and I realised that I had to act fast before my courage fled. Banishing all trepidation, I moved slowly over to where the boy had tentatively begun to stand up. At this one moment we seemed to possess an extraordinary connection through which we seemed to read each other’s crippled thoughts with startling clarity. His sobbing had stopped the moment he had seen me in the doorway, but his trembling remained, making him seem even more vulnerable. Eventually, we were stood before each other, the sound of our heavy breathing filled the entire room, and I knew then that we were unable to wait. In one single, sordid action I had pulled the boy into a tight embrace and instantly felt the electric current that coursed through my body amplify so that every sense and every nerve was heightened. As the young boy shook in my arms, I wondered if he was thinking of Rose, the girl whom he had loved. Did he shut his eyes so as to not see the lines that tainted my flesh? Did he pretend that the woman’s back he touched was in fact young and supple and not hardened by scrubbing bathtubs?
The answers to these questions will forever remain a mystery, but what I do know is that my grief drove me to do the unthinkable, for which I will always feel remorse. Before that day, I had dreamt of expelling the daemon from my body, leaving me finally able to rest. However, perpetual torment awaited me as I felt the boy’s soft, youthful lips press against my own; the daemon had indeed left my body, but the woman that remained was far more dangerous.
