Bitterness of a Lifetime

She remembers the noon when she broke.

Fans swooped languorously above the uncleaned, musky classroom, where she sat, unstoppable and studious, working on the set sums. Her teacher, Mrs Rowe, peered admirably at her slender figure through colossal tortoiseshell spectacles, tapping her fountain pen on the stained rich wood of the desk. The other classroom captives wrote and studied quietly, for once not slyly passing flirty notes for inquisitive eyes to scan. But the student’s mind was occupied by deathly, contaminated thoughts: her little sister, once so alert, so sparky, confined to a grotty hospital bed, where condescending nurses only ominously sighed. A shorn and twisted head, bare of the abundant ebony curls that she used to adore winding, over and over like a priceless wedding ring, around her plumped fingers. The salt-imbued tear that had slipped soundlessly down her ashen and misshapen cheeks, which only her grieved sister had noticed. Minuscule things, like that, fretted the holes in life, like an army of rampaging termites, and destroyed it.

Far away on another isolated desk covered in greyed speckles, lit by the mellow golden sunshine, a bully murmured to her blindly reverent friend. A classic mean girl. While the student impeccably dusted her smoothed desk with an air of finality, a poisonous web of gossip spread across the innocuous classroom like smoke.

’Did you hear she’s got a stupid younger sister who’s in hospital because she can’t take care of herself?’

’Yeah, she should’ve protected her sister better. I wouldn’t trust her if she promised me a measly one dollar.’

’She’s such an annoying clever clogs. Let’s see how stuck up she will now, when her beloved sister dies.’

The last blow, dealt with aggravation, was undoubtedly the harshest. The bully, with the crazed and cannibalistic expression of a mental health patient, grinned like a Halloween pumpkin. Her home life was less than joyous, filled with arguments and unrest. Her only source of closure was her exquisite landscape artworks and portrait caricatures, which convulsed her many submissive friends-and torturing other classmates with spite and contempt. The birdlike girl continued to write her calculations immaculately on a blackboard, the subject of all their malice.

The student stood, armed with an array of books. ‘Miss, I’ve finished my sums.’

’Very well,’ Mrs Rowe replied. ‘You may go to lunch.’

’Hey, clever clogs, where’s your idiotic moron of your younger sister going?’ jeered an anonymous voice from the back of the room. But when, stricken, she turned, everyone looked as remarkably hospitable as could be. The words jabbed like decorated spears at her rapidly vanishing peace of mind; her sister’s cancer was eating her happiness like poison ivy. Mrs Rowe, moving slightly in a creaking chair, hoped fervently that this phase of bitterness and teasing would pass. Without a trace.

But the trouble was just beginning.

*

‘No, thank you,’ murmured the slight young woman, sinking onto a battered stool. ‘I don’t want any more tarts.’

She succumbed to the venomous twist of jealousy once more, with the guests at the celebratory party leaking away like an invisible current was pulling them. She couldn’t believe she was invited to one of the most prestigious parties of the year, but apparently the famous artist, she thought with increasing disgust, still remembered the lowly classmate whose life had been made hellish. And she was envious. Of the colour and brightness and extravagance of this celebration, as her former caustic bully became successful and praised for her artistic abilities, while her self-esteem was damaged irrevocably. In her dingy apartment, she mourned over her departed sister in sorrowful elegies of mind-the recollections still lasted, as haunting as a wolf howl’s dirge-and managed to just pick up the pieces of her ravaged life. Her sister had been sweet, poised, and intelligent, with beauty that could challenge Helen of Troy’s: intense and exotic. With one rattle of breath that sounded like a grinding lawnmower, she had luxuriated in her frigid hospital bed, breathed her final goodbyes. The funeral had been an imposing event, though still with simplicity: fresh flowers and dolls, the signs of everlasting affection, friendship and most importantly love, were laid over the gleaming coffin.

Her mother and father had been shattered. Broken into a thousand microscopic pieces that couldn’t ever be repaired. Our darling was our everything, our love, our precious. We will never stop grieving. Uncontrollable grief and insomnia sometimes awoke the dead girl’s bereft sibling at night, too, unable to feel the calming touch of a younger child’s fingers. They were so chubby, so fluffed-like her fairy-themed pillows, and which never let her older sister’s go; until when, in the last throes of cancer, they had been slippery and flapping like a raucous chicken’s, then fallen immensely still. A wordless statue of herself.

Ironic, since she had always loved the work of sculptors and sculptoresses.

During that tumultuous period, the bully had taunted her mourning older sister, made her feel as worthless as a discarded rubbish bag. She gazed woefully at the starved apparition in the mirror who had been forced to self-examine, tortured by insulting and a self-esteem fallen into unrecognisable disrepair. And all mixed with the mourning that followed her pallidly like a phantom.

She wondered if the former bully even recognised her, with the heavy burdens of resentment and envy placed like a sacrifice on her sloping shoulders. Her appearance, the schoolyard bully had mocked, too: mousy chestnut-brown hair, tanned and flushed skin, eyes that looked like pieces of coal. Everything she was insecure about was resurrected in her former bully’s looks: an angular and confident appearance; hair like woven gold in the magnificent sunlight; brilliant eyes that shone and glittered alluringly, blue diamonds.

Did they still hide the same corrupt, unmerciful soul, beneath?

Who knew what had changed, over the unrecognisable sweep of decades?

With an abrupt start, the woman noticed the former bully, an apparition warily standing behind her, with a softened and freshened expression on her face, which had been stretched as tautly as a battered tightrope the whole mesmerising party, celebrating her artistic triumphs. Yet, in melancholy, the woman was determined not to promise forgiveness to the living persona of one of the primary tragedies of her life.

‘Hey, let me help you,’ warmly offered the woman. She swept up the rubbish with practiced ease and unbelievable grace. With accelerating bitterness, the other noticed how she could make the most mundane of tasks ethereal.

’I can’t ever forgive you for what you said about me-and my sister,’ the other woman finally choked. ‘She is dead now, you know, and my parents are sick and old. They’ll never forget the greatest loss of their lives.’

They had become weakened invalids. No life to be lived, no happiness.

’How could I make it up to you?’ the bully finally asked. But the victim was resigned, the vivid and lurid image of her sister’s expression, being tarnished and mutilated as her outraged sibling repeated the bully’s unmistakeable words, was scalding in her mind.

’You can’t,’ she finally responded, and her voice was baked with scorn and iciness, like a perfected ice-cream cake. ‘There’s no way to make the past better.’

They could never turn back time.

In the same way that the grieving, unforgiving woman would nurse a crystallised image of the twin hurts of her misfortune-laden life, up until her eventual death and beyond.