Friend Request
Description
Vocal Characteristics
Language
EnglishVoice Age
Middle Aged (35-54)Accents
British (General)Transcript
Note: Transcripts are generated using speech recognition software and may contain errors.
coffee, gaining comfort from the ritual of putting the smooth shining poured into the machine, pressing the tip of my finger onto the button in the precise way I always do and warming the milk in the froth. Er, I sit there amidst the trappings of my very comfortable, very middle class, nearly middle aged life. The kitchen gadgets on the photo on the fancy fridge of me and Henry on our first holiday alone last summer, a selfie taken by the pool, our skin salty and some kissed a shadow around Henry's mouth, where the dust has stuck to the remnants of his daily ice cream. Outside the French windows my tiny courtyard garden is wearing. It's bleak. Late autumn clothes paving stones slipped with the earlier freezing rain. Chipped plant pots trail the dead brown remains of my doomed summer attempt at growing my own herbs. On the darkening afternoon sky is a dial sheet of slate grey. I can just see one of the tower blocks that loom here and there, like malevolent giants over the rows of Victorian terraces, all turned into flats like mine that make up this part of south east London. This room this home, this life that I have built up so carefully, this little family with only two members. If one of us falls, then what is left is not a family at all. What would it take to tear it all down to bring it tumbling and crashing to the ground? Perhaps not as much as I thought. Maybe just a nudge in the back, a tiny push so slight that I would hardly feel it. The kitchen, with its muted dove grey walls and bleached woodwork tops, is warm uncomfortably so as the coffee machine hums its everyday tune. I half listened to the news on the radio, which chatters all day, every day in my kitchen, a sporting victory, a Cabinet reshuffle. A 15 year old girl who was killed herself after her boyfriend posted naked pictures of her online. I flinch at the thought of it. Sympathy for her mixed with a shameful gratitude that there were no camera phones around. When I was that age, I move over and open one of the French windows, feeling the need for fresh air, but an icy blast slams it Shut again. My coffee is ready, and I have no alternative but to sit back down at the laptop where Maria has been waiting for me. Steadily Impenetrable. E. I forced myself to meet her eyes, searching futilely for any hint of what was to happen to her. I try to see the photo was a casual observer. Might an ordinary schoolgirl, an old photo that's been sitting on some mother's sideboard for years, dusted and replaced weekly? It doesn't work. I can't see her like that, Knowing her fate as I do. Maria Western wants to be friends with me. Maybe that was the problem all along. Maria Western wanted to be friends with me, but I let her down. She's been hovering at the edge of my consciousness for all of my adult life, although I've been good at keeping her out. Just a blurred shadow in the corner of my eye, almost but not quite out of sight. Maria Western wants to be friends, but Maria Western has been dead for more than 25 years. Chapter two 1989 I've been awake all night in an attempt to maintain some kind of hold on what has happened on what I have done. My eyes are red and prickling with tiredness, but I don't go to sleep. If I sleep when I wake up, I'll have one blissful, terrible second when I'm unaware. And then it will all come crashing in on me. Its power multiplied indefinitely by that one unknowing second, I think of the last time I saw the dawn in lying in Sophie's bed. This time it's a more tempestuous and Bleeker affair. A ceaseless summer rain has been falling all night on the branch of a nearby tree is thwacking intermittently against my windowpane. It's not just the chemicals keeping me awake, although I can still feel them coursing unwanted around my veins. I've been sitting here on the floor for four hours as my bedroom turns gradually from darkness to a dull grey half light. I'm surrounded by the debris of my elaborate preparations for the evening that 12 hours ago stretched out invitingly bright with the promise of acceptance and approval. There are three dresses strewn on the bed with the accompanying pair of shoes for Reed