Coffee and Sugar - C. Sean McGee (mystery books to read .TXT) 📗

resting her head against his chest, weeping lightly as she felt the tips of his giving hands, press nervously against her back.

Joao held her until long after she had given into to her exhaustion and fallen asleep, gently pulling at and stroking her hair, twisting it like strands of spaghetti around his finger.

He laid her down gently on his mattress and undressed her without any predatory appetite, folding her clothes neatly on a chair beside the bed before tucking her into the blankets, clasping his eyes out of shameful respect.

As he pulled the blankets over her sleeping body with his eyes stapled shut, he couldn’t have seen the long line of bruises that ran all twistingly down her arm, all black and purple and yellow and brown and he wouldn’t have seen the scrapes and cuts and etches and scratches on and around her knees and he surely wouldn’t have felt or seen what had been done between her thighs and as she rolled over onto her side; with his eyes still shut and his senses aborted, he most certainly didn’t see the small tattoo on her back; just above the line where pink, frilly, lace panties touched her soft skin.

“I don’t feel useless when I am with you. You’re the only thing that matters. I’m glad I found you. I love you Charity” he whispered to her unconscious ear before lying himself on the floor, below her fallen breath.

TWENTY THREE

Joao slept well that night, smiling good thoughts inside his head and stirring only once or twice to shake off the sleep in his arm so that he could scratch at the mosquito bite in the middle of his back. He had laid his head for the first time feeling useful and not used and for the first time in days, he had managed to unhinge himself from the feeling of small purveying eyes watching him at every corner and stalking upon his every thought. It felt good to have someone to care for and it felt good to matter.

When he woke, his arm was numb again and he dragged himself up quietly so as not to disturb Charity who was asleep on the mattress above his head. He tip toed out into the kitchen and turned on the stove to boil some water.

The church was in a horrid state, how they had left it after Charity had fallen asleep lying across his lap. He thought about her head propped on top of him and he, petting her like an injured puppy, but of course thinking nothing of the sort.

Outside he could hear the racket of drunks and junkies stumbling about, kicking cans and picking fights, no greater threat to their own shadow than they were to anybody else but they shouted and they groaned, begging for loose change and sex and half smoked cigarettes as the sun cast shadows over the desert of their dawning sobriety.

Joao paid no mind in his childish glare for if he could not see them then they were not there. Instead; without any sense of creeping or dread, he gathered his things around the kitchen sink to prepare a coffee for Charity; one sweetened with courage that would tell her exactly how he felt about her.

He closed his eyes and took a long deep breath, holding it in his lungs a swilling it in his mind, saying Charity’s name over and over while his heart beat three times singing; I, love, you.

His mind felt light and his consciousness dizzy, as if he were a mere thought away from turning on his end and spiralling out of control, beyond approach and beyond repair. He felt unsteady and uncertain, saying her name over and over in his head, wondering what he might see as her bitter struggle, wondering if he wanted to and if it was right for him to see something that she could not see herself to show him; the scars etched in her soul.

Finally he imagined her face and the currents of his delusion settled. They stopped their violent spin until the ocean of uncertainty settled into a waking calm, like a universe spilling out from the still end of a black hole. Joao bathed in her stare as Charity; in his conscious theatre, stared back at him; neither daring to blink in case the other should not be there when they returned again.

The breath he had taken had given him the time needed and nothing more, for his fingers to gently find their way into the fine dark grains of coffee and for his mind, to find a way into the woman he loved; a portal that would take him to the most profound depths of her repressions, into the thick grimy culture of her personality, of her heart and of her soul.

The breath of air burst out of his chest and he followed with it; in his conscious theatre, into the sea of the open void in Charity’s eyes, from where her universe spilled out and shone life; into the very black of her eye.

And when he gasped for air, he opened his eyes and there she stood; triste, in attendance of her own reflection.

Her breath was like the spit of a hot spring as the cold morning shivered against her bones, her sadness expelling from the pit of her belly, clouding out the image staring down at her; her true complexion, looking less than she had ever convinced herself to imagine.

And there, though her skin was white and soft and washed and scented and though there was not a mark on her entire body, her eyes welted, for in her reflection, her skin was bruised, her knees were cut and sore, her wrists were scarred with long bulbous lines of regret and recovery that ran the length of her arms; some clean and straight running from her wrist to the elbow, some angled and abutting; from one side of the street to the other and many, in their frantic scores, jagged and frenzied; along her arms, on the inside of her thighs and on the virginal skin, hidden beneath her supple breasts, away from perverting hands.

Then, as she wept, her reflection lifted its hand out of the mirror and took hers. She felt its fingers crease gently around hers and its long nails scratch against the palm of her hand and it tickled more than it irritated her.

Charity smiled.

Her reflection lifted its other arm out from its bind and took Charity’s other hand and slowly stepped out of the mirror and into the cold morning air, shaking her body briskly as she shook off the shiver that courted the fine hairs on her body and brought her wounded skin to a thousand small bumps.

The two girls stood side by side, Charity on the left and her reflection beside her, their hands locked as they stared silently into the mirror, their eyes casting on nothing but an empty pane of reflecting glass.

The reflection turned its head slowly and whispered in Charity’s ear; no words, just the secretive telling of murmurs and sounds, spoken so that the accent of its innocent tenure, snuck into her hardened skin and attached itself to her abjured and insentient nerves.

As their breaths left their bodies and touched upon the glass, strange shapes upon the mirror; haloed by the ghostly fog of their warm breath, came into light. They were the imprints of hands and fingers, each coming more clear than the last before disappearing into every next clouded breath that fell upon the pane and with every print, Charity’s reflection would shiver and quiver and clutch at her hand, digging its nails into her palms, crying out like child, wise enough to sense a wrong but muted into a frightened and educated silence.

Each print confessed of a hand that had touched her skin; that had dug deep into the fibres of her being and undid the small ties that kept her ligated to her soul so that the fine threads of her emotional tapestry frayed and snapped, separating her from her reflection and the tremor of warning in its touch and in its shrill and sagacious infantile verse so that; addressed in disconnection, it jingled about silently within her being, like a sailboat, cut from its moorings and drifting unattended in the open sea, eventually, shipwrecked by the rising swell of her conscious dispassion.

As another of her breaths fell upon the mirror, Charity’s reflection began to speak so quietly as if in song.

“And remember when I moved in you? And the holy dove was moving too? And every breath we drew was hallelujah.”

In the mirror, both Charity and her reflection preyed their eyes upon something they had both wished to have forgotten and to never need to address but in her culture; the thick sediment of her struggle in the pith of her depression, played an act that she and her reflection must accept as both having played an integral yet unfortunate part.

The act started with Charity and her repressing reflection first as a child, laying discreetly in the shadowy confines of a dank midnight cellar. Her breath was light and her eyes, transfixed on an infinitesimal fracture in the darkness, where the cellar door met the neighbouring stairs. The unbroken light was a temporary figure of surety meaning there was no-one above the stairs, that there should be no more visitors in the coming seconds and her eyes dared not flinch, should she miss what could have been a warning, dressed in the shadow of her father’s footsteps.

Staring into the mirror, Charity grasped firmly at her reflection’s hand and her reflection the same as before them, the young girl in which they had both once been was stifled and quilled as transient light was eclipsed by the epitome of unforgivable love.

The girl whimpered lightly, fearful to make any sound which would celebrate the inevitable. So accustomed was she to these nightly visits from her father that she knew any unworldly gesture would only see this misplaced affection prolonged.

She remained completely still and unemotional.

The darkness that once attained her bedside had now given way to the light she wished she were blind to. The cellar door opened, peeling back the darkness above the stairs and an imperious figure appeared, completely blackened in the wake of the daylight pursuing.

It was a man, her father.

His musky scent was unmistakable.

It was her father, appearing anything but vestal, making his way down the stair case on another of his nightly conquests to relinquish her innocence and trust. Love was what he called it, a duty he commanded of her that he said was her obligation to the only man who loved her in the way that only god understands.

“You remind me so much of your mother” he would say, “You have her eyes, her gentle touch and her forgiving heart. She would be so proud of you.”

He would say these things as if they should offer some reassurance for what would become another torturous memory, another emotional scar; another black spot on her subconscious; as if she should somehow be comforted into accepting that this sacred violation was normal.

“I love you” he whispered as he removed his belt and laid a cruel hand on the girl’s trembling thigh.

Charity and her reflection; gazing into their repression, cast an itinerant sigh that seemed to travel neither here nor there. Instead it lingered before them, echoing their discontent to none but themselves and as the image of the young girl vanished with one of her escaping tears, the two stood with their arms locked and their fingers entwined, closer than they had ever been; knowing that it was at this moment, such a long time ago, when they had first stopped speaking to one another.

Charity and her reflection took a moment to brave one another before an image in the mirror had that moment adjourned and in the second act, the girl appeared once more, though older; in adolescence, but still far too young for these factitious definitions.

She was in a room that could only be described as squalid, with men twice her age, six men to be exact, all with emaciated appearance. Her half naked body was