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Lisa Swain has always been religious.
And this faith is a funny, fickle thing to inflict upon a child of four.
Because she knows nothing at all of the heaving of a stone, nor of iron nails beat through callused palms.
There is only one gospel she would ever heed or need; her mother’s voice.
She knows nothing at all of the Ten Commandments. Nor of Seven Deadly Sins. Nor of punishment, nor retribution, nor plague.
She has never in her life been hit. Rarely even been shouted at.
There are no commandments here, no covenance, no cross to hitch across her narrow shoulders.
Only her mother’s voice. Soft instruction, and a reward when she is good.
And she is so good.
(She is four years old. And she is the best little girl in the whole wide world.)
Because she does as she is told. Obedient and eager to please. Every single time.
She hangs from her mother’s every word as she had once hung about her skirts. Gripping, chubby little hands, wide blueish eyes blinking up at her mother in wonder.
(In worship.)
Lisa Swain is told that she is perfect. She is told that she is the cleverest, kindest, sweetest girl in the world.
She believes it.
(Lisa Swain is a desperate, pink, odd little thing. Neither child nor creature, within her there is something that squirms and ceases to even exist when wrenched from out from under her mother’s gaze.)
(So. She will bask in the glory of her mother’s adoring gaze for the rest of her life.)
Lisa Swain is religious.
And, today, her mother had told her, just once, to sit still.
So, obedient and eager, she does.
Back ramrod straight. Chin up.
Perfect.
Eyes fixed upon her own reflection in the mirror.
Little blue and white chequered dress. Pristine white socks tugged up to her mid-calf, topped with a tight frill. Unscuffed shoes, half a size too big, bought to-grow-in-to in the Clarks sale.
So, she sits perfectly still before the mirror on her mother’s dressing table, as her mother pulls her hair into a high ponytail. A little blue ribbon. To match her dress. Threading through her blonde curls. Brush through her hair, tugging gently. Early morning sunshine pressing, warm and soft against her round cheeks.
She loves going to school, and she loves her mother’s dressing table.
Loves the old bottle of perfume gathering dust against the polished wood. Loves the framed photograph of herself, when she was just a little baby. Loves the neatly organised drawers, full of old lipsticks and dried-up biros. It smells old, familiar and lovely and safe.
Loves being fussed over. As though she were still that little baby in the photograph, swaddled and surrounded by white frills in her cot.
But she isn’t a little baby anymore.
Now she is the most beautiful girl in the world. It's just a fact. Something she knows to be true. Because her mother tells her she is, every morning before school and every night, before bed. She is told that she is beautiful. That she is clever. That she is important and kind and that she is loved and loved and loved and loved and loved.
And her entire world revolves on the axis of her mother’s voice. Her heart only beats because her mother loves her.
Her only purpose is to be good.
“Too tight?” her mother asks as she ties her hair up, smoothing her palms against her daughter’s shoulders. Flattening out any little creases on her school uniform.
There, perfect.
And Lisa shakes her head silently, watching her long, blonde ponytail move in the mirror. Swishing prettily against her shoulders.
And then she tilts her chin down. Looks at her hands in her lap.
It’s a mistake, of course.
(And she must not make mistakes.)
(There is no room for anything less than this expected perfection under her mother’s roof.)
But the thumb on her left hand is red raw. The skin cracking, sore. Her mother follows her gaze, her face crinkling into a frown in the mirror.
A few red inches of skin. Her perfect flesh marred and angry.
Her mother doesn’t say anything. She doesn’t have to. Because Lisa can feel her gaze, can taste her disappointment.
Her mother’s distaste lies heavily upon her tongue.
It is palpable.
(It is crushing. To be seen like this.)
(She’s four years old. She’s never before quite felt a pain like it.)
Because she had stopped sucking her thumb. She even has a little soft toy and a constellation of sticky stars her mother had hung on a chart on the fridge to prove it. Her reward for stopping, but-
But-
Tears well in her eyes. Sudden. Frightening. Her chest tightens. She ducks her head lower, and lower still.
It is terrifying to be seen like this. For her god to see the secret, red-raw, writhing thing that lies under her perfect skin. For her veneer to crack apart like this-
But, just perhaps, her mother doesn’t see her tears.
(Perhaps she does.)
+
Lisa Swain has always been religious.
She is eight years old. And she is a very good girl.
It hurts so much.
The pressing, insistent pressure of perfection. A perfection that is neither rewarded nor recognised. It is expected. As though it had simply be pre-ordered, and installed straight into her mainframe.
But sometimes she thinks that it wasn’t installed quite right.
A glowing foreign object within her. A splinter she cannot suck out.
Because she feels it constantly.
Sometimes, it threatens to crush her. Sometimes, her right shoulder blade hurts as she trails home from school, because she’s had her hand stuck, quietly but insistently, up in the air all day.
(She’s a clever girl. She loves being a clever girl.)
(But. It hurts.)
She loves sitting on the carpet, getting question after question right, her back perfectly straight, her legs neatly crossed, while her classmates wriggle and chatter and giggle and-
She sometimes feels like a completely different kind of creature altogether.
She is certainly not like the other children.
So.
It doesn’t matter that it hurts.
Her pain doesn’t matter at all.
Because she is a good girl.
And she can do difficult, or painful things.
Because she is eight years old. And she is brave and she is clever and she is loved and loved and loved and loved and loved and loved by the only woman who would ever, really, matter.
Unconditional, endless love. Hinged around the unwavering belief that she is a good girl.
So. She is eight years old. And she keeps her faith.
Her mother’s voice.
Her entire world revolves around the glowing, endless praise she receives tri-annually at every single parent's evening. And she always gets an ice-cream on the way home.
The ice-cream is neither a reward nor a bribe.
The reward is the glowing pride splashed across her mother’s face, and the soft words of her parents from the front seat, as they discuss what her teachers had said on the drive home. Lisa not quite included in the conversion, but hears their words as they speak around her, as they speak about her.
(‘Pleasure to have in class’ and ’excelling’ and ’works well with others’ and ’a real delight’-)
The reward is knowing, without a doubt, that she is a good girl. The reinforcement of something she was already so sure of.
(Because her mother says so.)
(And she follows her mother’s doctrine without a doubt in her mind.)
(Being good is her entire identity.)
And she is good at everything.
There are ballet classes. Gymnastics on a Saturday morning. Flute lessons after school, and Brownies on Monday evenings and swimming on Thursdays and art groups in the school holidays and tea on the table when her mum picks her up.
They eat as a family, the three of them, almost every night. And then, as the opening notes of Coronation Street ring through the living room, she takes herself off to bed.
(She doesn’t need to be told.)
(Because she is a good girl.)
So she excels. And she makes it look easy. Makes it look natural.
Because, to a little girl like Lisa Swain, it is.
(It isn’t. It hurts.)
She sometimes wishes she could find it in herself to be like the other children in her class. Wriggling and giggling and chattering and bad.
But she simply cannot.
(Because she is the centre of her mother’s universe. The gravitational pull that keeps their little family spinning and spinning and spinning. She is her mother’s only child. She is her mother’s whole world.)
(And, sometimes, it’s a lot of pressure.)
But she is eight years old. She’s used to it now.
(The skin on her left thumb is still red-raw. But it’s okay. It has been for years.)
(She’s used to it now.)
++
Lisa keeps her faith.
She clings on to it. Too tightly. Her knuckles ache all day, every day. And, sometimes, she feels as though her grip might slip.
(But she cannot let go. Cannot let herself fall. There is something terrible below her that she must not allow herself to sink into.)
Because, at twelve years old, she already knows that there is something terribly wrong with her.
She doesn’t exactly know what it is yet.
But she feels very, very scared. All the time.
There is something about her that is not quite like the other girls. Something nervous and fluttering and cold and wrong.
She wears the same school uniform, her hair tied in the same pristine ponytail, she goes to the same birthday parties and the same sleepovers and she and her best friend have matching brand-new lunchboxes and-
And she cannot shake the feeling.
That she is twelve and already wrong.
She has no name for it. And that terrifies her.
And she doesn’t like not knowing. Because she knows a lot of things. Because she is a clever girl.
So.
She tries her very, very best.
(She has always worked hard)-
She tries her very, very best to keep her faith.
And then.
She does a bad thing.
Something that, for the first time in her life, her mother may not approve of.
(It is very hard to keep her faith, that summer before she turns thirteen.)
She kisses a boy. In a tent, in someone’s back garden.
And maybe she isn’t quite like the other girls. But he isn’t quite like the other boys either.
He has dark lashes and a soft, round, nice face. And his lips taste of coca-cola and fizzy pink and blue sweets and spit.
And she kisses him in the midst of moonlight and fairylights and the taste of her own pulse jumping against her teeth.
In lots and lots and lots of ways it’s beautiful. And she has enough beautifully illustrated fairytale books beside her bed to know that it is almost romantic.
(It’s almost frightening.)
A perfect, sticky kiss, for a perfect, sticky-handed girl.
(It frightens her.)
She thinks that she likes it.
And he tells her that he likes her likes her.
And she says ‘oh.’
And she is certain that there is something faulty within her chest, something that should, probably be investigated.
(She doesn’t dare.)
Because there are no investigations needed in the love stories she has been told as a child. There are only fireworks and more kisses and happily ever after and marriage.
(She certainly doesn’t want to marry him. And so she doesn’t want to kiss him again either.)
What she wants is for her mum to come and pick her up, and take her back to sleep in her own bed, under a sky full of glow-in-the-dark stars. And keep the love stories tucked neatly between beautifully illustrated pages. She is not quite thirteen, yet already she has had enough of the real thing. And, anyway, she feels as though she might, perhaps, have a tummy ache.
(She doesn’t call her mum.)
(But she doesn’t feel like a very brave little girl anymore either.)
+++
Lisa Swain is a virgin in every sense of the word.
(She is eighteen years old.)
(No boy has ever touched her like that.)
(She has never even touched herself like that.)
And everyone around her is having sex.
Not literally.
Because she is in a French lesson.
But-
Her friends have boyfriends. And her friends love their boyfriends.
(She doesn’t have a boyfriend. Instead, she has had a nagging, terrible feeling in her stomach for as long as she can remember.)
(It’s been there for so long that sometimes she forgets about it entirely, but today her best friend had flopped down beside her in the common room, brushing her beautiful, dark hair away from her shoulders, and leant in conspiratorially until Lisa could smell her skin and her cheap supermarket bodyspray. And she had told her of how some greasy-haired lad had fucked her-)
(And then that feeling had reared its dark, gnashing jaws. And bitten at her stomach.)
(She had gathered up her textbooks, and said something about her locker, and ran. Until she could balance her books against her knees in the dirty girls bathroom, close her eyes, and breathe again.)
But their free period is over.
And, now, she is in a French lesson.
Her head feels a little hazy, and she thinks that perhaps she is getting ill.
(She must not get ill. She is not allowed to get ill. She needs to concentrate. She needs to work. And she must not be distracted by boys.)
So she props her elbow against her desk, cups her chin in her palm, and listens to the teacher.
It’s a hot day, and her A-Levels start in a week and a half. And then the summer, and the rest of her life will stretch out before her, golden and lovely and filled to the brim with possiblity.
Lisa Swain is clever and beautiful and she can do absolutely anything she puts her mind to.
(But it better be fucking good.)
The surface tension at home is tight. Her mother snaps, and Lisa’s jaw is tense and her back is straight and she has been called ’frigid’ three times in her life.
(She isn’t frigid.)
(She certainly doesn’t feel cold.)
Because it’s not quite summer yet, but she already feels as though her skin could melt off her very bones.
(She feels strangely hot. In a sticky, spit-filled way that has almost nothing at all to do with the weather.)
Her body is different now. Her bones must surely be different too.
She certainly feels different.
And the girl sitting in front of her hasn’t been revising for her French test. Her name is Joanne but her friends call her Jo, which is such a pretty nickname. Lisa would probably like to call her Jo too, but they’re not really friends and Jo is the kind of girl Lisa has, inexplicably, always kept at arms length. And Jo been for two weeks in Greece, and there are little white lines criss-crossing over the golden skin of her back. Remnants, evidence of some strappy bikini top. Because, today, she is wearing some little white tank top, to show off her tan.
(In the common room earlier, her best friend had told her about the back seat of a blue Peugeot 205, and-)
And the little white lines run all over Jo’s skin.
And Lisa wants, inexplicably, to touch.
(A blue 205 in a dark corner of a Tesco car park, and the blue jeans he was wearing, and-)
There are no beautifully illustrated fairytale books beside her bed now.
But that doesn’t matter, because-
Because Jo scoops her dark hair over one shoulder, head bent over the worksheet before her. More skin. More tanned, golden-
(And how he had kissed at her tits, and-)
That’s what Lisa wants.
To trace the edge of her fingernails against those thin white lines.
To-
This terrible, gnashing feeling. It must, surely be jealousy.
Because she wants to-
To-
She wants to press. Wants to watch Jo’s skin bloom white beneath her fingertips.
Wants to collect this evidence. Wants to-
She doesn’t, exactly, know what she wants.
What she wants to do.
But.
She’s in the middle of a French lesson.
And her entire life stretches out before her, as golden and filled with possibility as the bronzed skin of Jo’s back, and-
And she feels foreign within her own body.
It’s distracting.
And she must not be distracted by boys.
She turns her eyes away from little white criss-crossing lines. Lowers her gaze to the worksheet before her.
And thinks that, perhaps, the heat is making her feel this way.
(There is certainly something wrong with her.)
++++
Lisa Swain is saved at the tender age of nineteen.
(She meets Becky.)
And Becky is just like her.
(She isn’t. She’s nothing at all like her.)
Becky is a better woman than she could ever hope to be.
Becky is brave, brash and confident and unashamed and funny and sharp. But perhaps bravery is easy when love is unconditional.
(And Becky’s parents do love her unconditionally. Despite what is wrong with her.)
Lisa is amazed and jealous in equal parts.
At first they are friends.
(No. At first she hates her. Because Becky is nothing at all like her and just like her, and, sometimes, just looking at Becky leaves Lisa feeling hot and afraid and a little bit sick.)
(So. At first she hates her.)
And then they are friends.
And then they are on Becky’s bed. Drunk on cheap supermarket red wine.
They’re giggling together. Water glass full of red wine passed between their hands.
And Becky’s pupils are blown wide, and her voice is slurred and high and disbelieving as she says ‘what do you mean you’ve never-’
‘I just…haven’t...’
‘Are you fucking waiting ‘till you get married, or something?’
‘No. I just-’
And Lisa wants to feel ashamed. But it’s very hard, when Becky’s lips are curving up into a beautiful, slow smile, and she’s tipping her head to one side, looking down at her through the tight semi-darkness, and murmuring ‘do you want to?’
(And, god help her, she does want to-)
Salvation is a terrible, funny thing.
But no girl of nineteen can possibly be saved.
But she finds that, tonight, under the low glow of a bedside lamp, half-drunk in a narrow single bed, that doesn’t really matter.
Because an entirely new religion is birthed between their bodies.
+++++
Lisa Swain dives into the confessional.
(A red phone box on the south side of the river.)
As though its metal body alone could save her.
And tells her parents in the only way she knows how.
(There is a pool of piss against her neatly polished shoes. And a postcard depicting a nearly naked woman taped right in her eyeline.)
(Which doesn’t exactly help but-)
Everything has gone to shit.
A fight and a slammed door and Her Becky, driven into another girl’s arms.
They are on and off, but sometimes they are off more than they are on, and Lisa doesn’t really even believe in hell, but she’s been there once or twice. Under bright lights, wanting a woman who wants her, but needs attention more.
It’s torturous.
The woman she loves more than god herself spun around a dancefloor by a fucking stranger. And then bestowing a distant kiss to Lisa’s turned cheek at the bus stop, as she is half-dragged away to fuck someone else, and-
(And it’s fucking exactly what someone like her deserves.)
And it is, probably, somehow, her own fucking fault.
(She breaks apart.)
Sobbing down the phone to a woman who was once her god, and now hardly knows her at all.
She doesn’t know exactly when her religion started to slip away from her. Or when she lost that little girl her mother still speaks to. But, somewhere, she had dropped that child’s hand, and-
‘Mum-’
The words escape her before she can stop them.
Because her little heart has been broken more times than she can count, and she needs her mother.
And she certainly needs god.
And then.
And then.
And then.
And then.
(It is, of course, a mistake.)
Because there is absolute silence.
On the other end of the line.
(She fills the miles between them to the brim with heaving sobs.)
She doesn’t know how to breathe anymore.
(Has never, ever, known how to breathe without her mother’s approval.)
It is the only thing she’s ever wanted.
And she’s never wanted it more.
Needs it.
She needs it to breathe. Needs it to keep her heart pumping.
(She will, almost certainly, die without it.)
She hears a long, slow exhale on the other end of the phone. She can hear her mother’s disapproving gaze. Can feel it still, two hundred miles apart.
(It is gutting. It is horrific. It is a moment she will certainly never, ever recover from.)
And she learns, very, very quickly, that acceptance cannot be earned.
That twenty-one years of perfection cannot buy a mother’s love.
(That none of it, really, mattered at all.)
(A dozen A-stars and a stellar daughter, top of her class and her first-ever-drink on her eighteenth birthday.)
Her back straight and her arm hurting.
So.
She slumps against graffitied glass.
And, simply, loses her religion.
And all that remains is-
++++
Lisa Swain still goes home for Christmas.
She buys a new dress. Nothing too gay. Curls her hair in the mirror of her childhood bedroom, and smooths her wet palms over her dress. There is no missed call lighting up their answerphone from Becky, but that’s okay.
She’s probably forgotten her parents’ landline number.
(She has, probably, forgotten all about her.)
So Lisa has no support, no backup, no backup plan.
She just flattens some barely-there wrinkles. Allows her blonde curls to fall prettily about her cheeks. Smudges concealer beneath her eyes, and breathes in her stomach. Practiced, painful perfection.
And then.
She plays pretend.
(She is perfect.)
(She plays the part well.)
(She’s had a lot of practice.)
(Still, her mother cannot look at her. Does not touch her.)
As though this thing that plagues her her might possibly be contagious.
(It might be.)
(Because it’s the mid-nineties. There is a plague in the streets, and some things are contagious, and-)
Lisa sits to the dinner table with her back perfectly straight, knees together. Pours her uncle another glass of wine. She nods, listens, and tells her mother’s best friend that she’d love for her to give her telephone number to the nice boy next door.
It’s a four hour train ride.
She cries almost all the way.
Back to a little shitty flat in a nasty, grey city centre.
Back to a job she hates and a life she hates and a city filled to the seams with memories of a girl who had never, really, wanted her at all.
(Just like her mother.)
+++++++
Lisa Swain doesn’t feel very good anymore.
She doesn’t really feel anything at all.
She joins the police.
It feels like some self-inflicted punishment, and feels nothing at all like passion.
(Some self-flagellation.)
(Her mother, cold and disapproving, had said ‘you could’ve done anything’, and yet-)
(And Lisa knows that she isn’t just talking about her job. She’s talking about her fucking lifestyle-)
But, god help her, this is what she has chosen.
She scrubs at dried-up spittle mixed with vomit on her uniform, on her shirt.
Her sleeves rolled up to the elbow. Bending over a sink.
And wonders at what has become of her life.
The funny thing is-
(Because it is funny-)
The funny thing is, that she is good at this too.
(She is good at everything. She is a very good, very clever girl.)
(She doesn’t exactly feel good, but that hardly matters now.)
+++++
Lisa Swain finds god at the tender age of twenty three.
Stares him straight in the face.
As she cracks apart.
Breaking at every seam. Broken tiles and her own reflection pale and terrible in the bathroom mirror.
Two lines of coke, and then three, and then…and then she can taste them still, lingering, burning against the back of her throat.
Chemical, vile, cut with something nasty.
(It almost hurts. And she loves it.)
And she loves it because she knows that she deserves this.
Deserves to feel bad. Deserves to be punished.
(Coke is the only thing she has ever really loved. And she keeps it in a little baggie in her bra, tucked right next to her racing heart.)
So one more line couldn’t possibly hurt her.
(It does.)
(All the things she loves hurt her.)
(She almost chokes on her own spit, which is funny really, because her mouth is almost entirely dry.)
(It feels, quite a lot, like some sort of punishment.)
(She knows, now, quite a lot about self-flagellation.)
She digs her nails into her own palms, until she is sure she will draw blood.
And leaves the bathroom, to watch Becky, the woman she had finally thought was her girlfriend, dance with some boy under bright, flashing lights.
And wonders at the sheer force of her anger.
At the speed of her heart.
(And knows that she deserves this.)
(It’s fine she’s fine it’s fine she will have a senseless two hour conversation with a stranger in the smoking area and then, when she can unclench her jaw, she will spit upon the shining face of god and ask him why-)
(She already knows why. She just wants to hear him say it.)
+++++++
Lisa Swain carves out her own faith.
It’s easy.
To invent a new religion. New rules and new lessons and new doctrine.
An all-new deity.
And Becky is an adulterer. But Lisa is certainly a sinner too.
So it’s fine.
And they’re young.
So it’s fine.
And it is so wonderful to be wanted.
(Sometimes, she is second, or perhaps even third choice. But it is wonderful to be wanted at all.)
She is grateful and gracious, and pretends that she understands things that she doesn’t.
She isn’t a clever, perfect girl anymore.
(‘Yeah, no, it’s okay, I know she didn’t mean anything, I know-’)
(She doesn’t know anything at all. And it certainly doesn’t feel okay, but-)
(But she has already lost her ancient religion. She cannot lose Becky too.)
So.
She clings on to this new faithless doctrine with her fucking teeth.
++++++
Lisa Swain cannot fall to her knees.
Because she has it all.
(None of it matters.)
(A stilted phone call had been the final straw. And perhaps Lisa had said the wrong thing, her voice fluttering anxiously about in her throat, phone lodged between her ear and shoulder as she wrung her hands together. Even now, desperate for any ounce of approval she surely will not receive.)
(‘We’re trying for a baby, mum.’)
(And her mother’s voice had been so hard, so terribly unyielding.)
(‘Well. How’s that going to work then?’.
(Her voice dripping with distaste. Poorly disguised disgust.)
(And-)
(It certainly wasn’t the worst thing she had ever said to her. Or the harshest.)
(But it was the last.)
(And Lisa, for once, hadn’t begged to be loved. Nor had she pleaded. She had not fought or screamed or cried or yelled. There was no more fight left within her. And she had long ago lost the little girl, grasping desperately onto her mother’s skirts.)
(Hanging her self-worth upon her every word-)
(She had simply hung up the phone, and blocked her own mother’s number.)
Lisa Swain has done many bad things. But that was the worst of them.
(So. Her mother will never meet her little granddaughter.)
(Her girlfriend has just given birth, almost ripped her perfect body apart, and-)
(And somehow, stupidly, selfishly, Lisa has never known pain like it.)
Their little pink, perfect baby, clutched to her beautiful, glowing, girlfriend’s chest.
She’s healthy and she’s crying and she’s theirs.
It is the best, and the worst, moment of her life.
She has never before in her life seen beauty like this.
(And she just wants to call her mother.)
She cries, as she wraps her arm so, so, carefully around her girlfriend’s bare shoulders. And Becky looks up at her, eyes shining, and breathes ‘happy tears?’
And Lisa nods.
(Because she is good at everything. Including lying.)
And looks down at baby Elizabe-
+++++++++
Lisa Swain has been religious all her life.
And she doesn’t get married in a church.
They get married on a Saturday in spring. As soon as it’s legal.
Their little flower girl, hugging at their knees.
A kiss, a bouquet. Vows she will keep.
(Vows they will, this time, both keep.)
She has it all.
She has it all, for ever and ever and ever and ever and ever and ever, until death do they part.
(This is all that matters.)
(She knows that this is all that matters.)
Yet it gnaws at her. Even now.
(It is the happiest day of her life, second only to-)
Becky’s mother crying in a spindly little garden chair. Lisa’s side of the makeshift aisle not exactly empty but-
(And she doesn’t feel exactly empty, but-)
Wine-drunk. Hollowed-out tin cans rattling behind a rented car. And the nicest hotel room they can afford.
Her chest cracking open.
It doesn’t matter.
Her bride, turning away from her. ‘Help me with my dress, darling’ murmured into the darkness.
Shaking fingertips against the newly bared skin of her back.
She feels as though this is the very first time.
They are just two teenagers giggling together atop a single bed.
She feels as though she had saved herself for marriage, after all.
Perfect, pious Lisa Swain.
Drops to her knees.
And she prays.
+++++
Sometimes, Lisa feels herself skulking like a dog back to her religion.
When times are tough, people often turn to god.
And times are tough, and-
And, just sometimes, Lisa thinks that her mother had been right.
That she could never be happy like this.
(She certainly isn’t happy now.)
(They shout, now, more than they speak.)
And little Betsy doesn’t deserve-
A home can be broken in more ways than one.
Lisa shuts down, and Becky slams a door.
They are both wrong, of course. They have both always been wrong.
(And just perhaps, her mother had been right.)
Opposite sides of the bed. Opposing armies right on the front line. And their beautiful little daughter, caught in the crossfire.
Secondary-school uniform a size and a half too big for her, bowl of cereal, no milk, elbows against the kitchen table. Silence between her two mothers, as they move around each other in the kitchen, her eyes following their every move. Quick and silent and clever-
In a house full of well-burried landmines.
(Betsy is of course the cleverest, kindest, sweetest, bravest, most beautiful girl-)
And Lisa had tried so hard to not make the same mistakes her mother had made-
(She thinks that she had fucked up worse-)
And she sometimes thinks that Becky is lying to her.
And she sometimes thinks that she’s lying to herself.
There is certainly something faulty between them.
And Lisa, who has always been so good at everything-
Doesn’t think she can roll up her sleeves and fix this.
So.
She rolls to the far side of the bed. Stiff cold cotton no-man’s land between them.
And thinks that perhaps her mother had been right.
(She had been right about so many things, and)
(The idea terrifies her.)
The thought alone betrays her very existence. Betrays the adoration she feels for her own daughter. Betrays the new doctrine she really, truly believes.
But.
To be human is to doubt. To question.
(And. When times are tough, people often turn to god.)
Lisa, restless and guilt-ridden and too-hot, turns to her side.
And stares at the curving spine of her wife, who is, almost certainly, only pretending to be asleep.
And wonders just how much more pretending she can do.
++++++++
Lisa Swain loses every last shred of her religion on a Tuesday morning.
And with it, she loses herself.
(She loses her wife.)
Head pounding.
Wine and whiskey against her tongue.
And her phone is ringing.
On and on and on and on and on and on and on and on through the darkness.
She feels as though it will never stop.
(Of course it stops. Everything stops.)
(And her world tips, terrifyingly, on its axis.)
(And her faith finally falls apart.)
And-
She does not scream. Does not cry.
She allows vomit to fill her throat.
And thinks.
(That she deserves this.)
That she.
Will die.
That there is no possible reason for her heart to still be beating.
When Becky’s has-
Stopped.
There is a fistful of rambling love letters she had written to her at the tender age of nineteen in the drawer beside her bed. Letters she had never, quite, had the courage to give to her.
And now.
She never will.
But.
There is a thirteen year old asleep in the next room.
Her little pink, screaming, baby girl.
A little girl who needs her mother.
(Well. That makes two of them.)
++++
Lisa Swain copes in the only way she knows how to.
She turns her dead wife into a deity.
And worships this grief.
It is a terrible thing to do to their daughter.
(Their daughter, who needs her.)
But she needs something to worship.
And there are no gods left for her here.
So.
She allows her grief to grow hard, and with it she builds her cross, and hoists it across her back, and carries it and carries it and carries it and carries it and carries it and carries it and carries it and doesn’t think she will ever learn to carry on.
(No crucifixion could possibly ever fix her.)
+++++++
Lisa Swain is a fucking heretic.
And a piece of shit.
A shit copper, a shit wife, a shit daughter, a shit mother.
No.
Not a shit wife.
A shit widow.
(She had been a shit wife too, of course. Lisa Swain is shit at everything.)
(It burns at her.)
Because she had forgotten-
(It burns at her.)
Straight whiskey. Shit whiskey.
(That burns too.)
Her daughter-
Their daughter.
Wishes she were fucking dead.
(Well. That makes two of them.)
+++++++
There are no gods left.
Nothing at all to worship.
Nothing at all worth worshipping.
Because their daughter had thrown her idols from the temple, and-
(The last of Becky’s things are in a skip in the rain, and-)
And a woman who almost certainly hates her, is sliding into her passenger seat.
Serpentine, smooth.
(Lisa would scoff, if her throat weren’t already full of three-year-old bile-)
Forbidden and forewarned and forceful.
A force of nature.
But.
Carla Connor is certainly not a woman worth worshipping.
++++++++++
Faith is a funny thing.
It rubs right against obsession. The two press together, and then entwine.
And Lisa Swain hates them both.
Those curling, terrible, twisting things.
Two heads, two sets of fangs. One monstrous creature. It bites at her belly, until she hurts.
But.
She allows herself to think about Carla quite a lot.
Probably more than she should.
Because Carla is straight. And doesn’t like her at all.
(And because temptation has teeth too.)
(And because it hurts-)
(And because she is allowed to hurt-)
So.
She thinks about Carla quite a lot.
While brushing her teeth before the messy bathroom sink. In her car. As her heels hit against the cobbles.
Carla, who has taken her daughter under her wing. Made mothering look easy and natural and beautiful. Who somehow seems to know what to do with a writhing, grieving teenager she barely knows.
Lisa would hate her, if she weren’t so-
So.
She covets Carla, silently. From a safe distance.
She is no longer four years old.
She knows everything there is to know of greed and envy and pride and sloth and gluttony and wrath and lust.
And now?
She wants to know Carla.
Everything about her.
(From a safe distance. Of course.)
+++++++
Lisa Swain finds faith somewhere quite unlikely.
(She has stared death in the face more times than she can count. Has thrown her heaving flesh before him and begged, but never, ever prayed-)
But this feels dangerous.
This is somewhere she shouldn’t be.
It’s another confessional. Of course.
Different, so different now.
A different confessional for a different woman entirely. No veil, no water glass full of red wine, no tiny baggie, no hundreds of miles of telephone cables wrapping between them.
Just a dimly lit living room, and two glasses of wine on the table before them. Her own fingers doing something uncomfortable about the rim of her glass. Fiddling, listless.
Carla, ‘I don’t judge’-
(She will she will she will she will she will she will-)
As she opens her mouth and confesses.
(That she wants to fucking die.)
And Carla-
Her eyes are dark and steady. There is no pious pity in her gaze. No disappointment nor distaste, no surprise as she watches perfect Lisa topple from her pedestal.
It’s almost as if she knows, as if she had always known, from that very first meeting. Mrs Barlow begging for salvation from a woman who could not even save herself.
(As though Carla has always known that she wants to fucking die.)
And Carla just tilts her head delicately to the side.
There’s something darker there. Right there, in her gaze.
As though, perhaps, they might follow the same religion.
(But Lisa lost her faith years ago, and yet-)
“Am I a bad person?”
There it is.
The question.
(The question has been so foul, rotting against her tongue for as long as she can remember. So. At last. She allows it to fall-)
“I think you sound lonely.”
And-
She so stands. Abrupt and sudden, all sharp edges once more.
(The look in Carla’s eyes scares her.)
(More than throwing her own flesh in front of a speeding car ever could.)
(Because-)
She’s making her excuses, voice quick and apologetic and just slightly slurred.
Shrugging both her coat and her homemade cross against her shoulders.
(It’s heavy. She’s been carrying this for as long as she can remember.)
And then.
Her earth, strangely, stops spinning. Tilts. Off-balance and terrible and terrifying.
She almost stumbles, because-
Because Carla looks at her.
Eyes soft, almost-
Almost adoring, and-
And fusses about with her hair.
Oh.
At last.
There are still puncture wounds in the very centre of each of her palms. Wine-red blood.
But.
As the moon peeks from beneath rolling cloud. A stone is heaved away, and-
Carla fusses, gently, with her hair.
And.
She remembers now.
That she loves being fussed over like this.
(There is something blue and something good and something ancient rebirthing itself within her.)
A new translation of an old book, or-
(Temptation scratches, scrambling, against her teeth.)
And Lisa?
Wants to bite down until her jaw aches.
So.
(She wants to sink her teeth in.)
But.
Her mother. A miniscule baggie. Becky. Her wife her wife her wife her wife her wife and her faith. And her own fucking mother-
Each and every deity she has ever worshipped has wounded her in return.
Faith is a funny, fickle thing.
Yet. She has spent her entire life on her knees.
So.
(There had, just once, been silence on the other end of a phone line. As she had, just once before, confessed.)
(It is something she will never recover from.)
So.
She apologises.
And then she runs.