Behind The Flock

No-one could tell her that life was going to continue. The hole that had always been inside her only deepened, like a dying star reaching from the root of her gut to consume everything else she was made of. There's nothing so bad as to lose the person who grounds you, the one for whom you do everything because doing it for yourself was never enough of a reason.

    When the news had arrived it was like someone switched the vacuum on inside her head. Not white noise, but grey - dusty, choking grey sounds swirled around her and filled her ears. Sentences interrupted by this tornado so she had to put the message together piecemeal on her own.

    She'd been able to see Alice, in the end. Lying on a flimsy hospital bed that looked like it could only support the weight of the body, so she kept her grief to herself. The hair that cascaded down from the pillow but then dangled limply to the side still had all the combinations of red and orange hair strands she'd spent years cultivating, a tapestry of natural and synthetic colouring. It didn't shine under fluorescent lighting the way the sunlight would catch on it in a pub garden. And her face had looked like a painter's palette, once all the colours have started to mix and set hard on the plastic. Shades of red and blue and purple and yellow, an ombré effect across the jawline and up into the temples.

    She thought about who this would hurt the most. Surely the most sensible answer was the mother - with her from before birth, now with her again. They met and said goodbye under the same settings. Larger than life, the mother had always had a propensity for filling all nearby space with loudness. Her voice couldn't be contained within walls, and so would carry on down the hallways until someone in reception could hear her so clearly it was like they were standing at the edge of the bed.

    Later, on the day of the funeral, black didn't feel dark enough. There was a sign at the entrance, with a name, some dates, and a picture. She stood to take in the image of her friend, feeling as though she could draw her out of the cardboard to live forever in 2D, experiencing the world from a sideways perspective. Eventually she would have to go in, people's eyes were on her - and how would they be expecting her to react? Maybe she'd have to cry, which didn't feel like a viable option since all the tears in her body had dried up to make sandstorms in her eyes. There was no chance of a meltdown, she wasn't even switched on at the plug socket. Since that day at the hospital, she'd been walking around like a ghost; she wasn't even sure she could see her own reflection. No, people would have to accept the fact that she had nothing to give them.

    The service went on, and on, and on, caught in a loop of speeches and tears and songs. The celebrant said an astonishing amount of words for a woman he knew so little about, but perhaps he'd been studying. Like an exam, only there was no pass/fail at the end. No grades you could go home with and put on the mantelpiece, no trophy you could put on display. She felt bad that he'd worked so hard to learn all he could about Alice, only for everyone to leave him behind in the end. He'd be left with an inorganically engineered memory, a concoction of thoughts boiled together in a laboratory constructed by other people's words.

    Naturally, the parents were a mess. The mother was in pieces, not that the jigsaw had been perfectly put together in the first place, and the father was done with caring. Sadness and anger sat next to each other holding hands, but they didn't really know one another anymore. The thing that had bound them together was gone and their withered rope was splintering with each second that passed. One day, they'll fall apart, she thought. Who knows if any of us will be there to see it.

    After the service, a wave of movement from one end of the church to the other sent her through the door and onto the lawn. People she'd never even known were spilling out of the entrance. All of them had their own experiences of Alice, they knew different versions of her. So many sides to one woman it was a wonder she could be contained within one form. The vacuum noises in her ears started again, and so she moved away, further from her friend. She'd brought with her one single cigarette, which she duly lit up and inhaled deeply, reaching for a sensation of filling herself up with air and smoke so that she might expand and float away into the horizon. Smoking was a hangover from an old chapter in her life that she rarely revisited these days, only a quick glance at the page to remember how it felt to be filled with poison. Someone was coming towards her, she noticed, and as soon as she knew who it was she had a desperate urge to run away. Or flick her cigarette into his eye so he'd have to stop. Or duck and hide behind the bench she was stood in front of that was covered with moss, designed to be sat on but nature stood its ground and said 'Not today'. But really, she couldn't do any of those things, so her heels sunk into the ground a little more and she was rooted.

    He was saying something to her, but she wasn't listening. His mouth moved to make sounds that she let wash over her as she kept her gaze on the dispersing crowd, all moving to go to the pub to 'celebrate' a life with a pint in one hand and a handkerchief in the other. Once she tuned into this conversation he'd been having by himself, it became obvious what he wanted. Amends.

“I just really want to know that we’re okay and that you don’t hate me, I really feel so bad about everything that happened, it’s just my head was fucked and I was in the middle of a breakdown, you didn’t deserve it, should have treated you better, just a friend, I just needed someone to listen to me, someone new, I just wanted, you weren’t there, better now, doing well, loads of money, happy, happy, happy”

Sentence structure broke down inside her head. There was no weight to any of it. Words as light as a feather that flew further away from her with every breath. Movie scenes played in her mind of past moments, all spoiled with mould and damp. Damp that had made its bed in her brain and she was still trying to replaster the walls to this day. The dark patches were spreading again and she knew she had to put a stop to it.

“No.”

A complete word. The only word right now that she felt had substance, its roundness fit neatly in the palm of her hand as she slapped him across the face with it.

“No?”

“No.”

They were echoing one another. Not unlike before, where once they’d been so close they were practically sewn-in, sharing space and thoughts and words.

“What do you mean, no?”

“Alice is dead. Dead. No more Alice. No Alice. And no you.”

Her words, like ice, had frozen him still so she thought about whether she could hit him hard enough he’d permanently shatter.

“I don’t think about you anymore. I don’t think anymore, period. She’s dead, and I might as well be dead, and you died a long time ago.”

His mouth was moving again, but nothing was coming out. The vacuum was gone and instead there were church bells; large, looming chimes that swept up her heels and she could feel the vibrations in her knees. As she walked away from him, gently following what was left of the mourners, she thought about sheep. And birds. And how, all through life, there are those who fall behind the flock. Sometimes they can catch up, and re-join the others, even if they’ll never feel like part of the herd again. Sometimes they don’t, but they keep trying anyway. And sometimes they stop altogether, and plant themselves into the earth. And if they were in the sky to begin with, stopping would mean falling to the earth with such force they’d be buried in it. She thought about how if she let herself fall, she may end up buried next to Alice, which is the only place she really wanted to be anyway.

    The straggling mourners grew smaller once she stopped walking, but the church bells got louder. She turned back around; thankfully he was gone, vanished into thin air like he’d never been there in the first place (which she had always hoped would happen). Her pace quickened, until she reached the headstone she’d been looking for.

Alice Evelyn Simmons.

Beloved daughter and friend.

    Beloved. She lay down next to her, and felt the hefty weight of her grief lift up and out above her. She could see it resting, in a liminal space where the air isn’t yet thin but the sun rays still penetrate through. Muddled like clouds about to burst into downpour, she felt both enveloped in it and yet separate at the same time. It was like looking into a mirror that shows only the inside of yourself, for she had long believed she was only made up of weather patterns instead of bones. Turning her head to look at her new bedfellow, she could have sworn she felt the ground move as Alice snuggled next to her within the dirt. This is where she belonged, she was at home. No-one could tell her that life was going to continue, because this is where she would stay, and there’s no life among the dead.