Longlisted, Scottish Arts Club Short Story Competition
The book arrived in the post on Monday morning, and by nightfall I was submerged in an avalanche of memories, the mess of guilt and shame lying about me like discarded wrapping paper on Christmas morning.
Jo had chosen to send me a newly published collection of Laurie Lee’s writings – Village Christmas And Other Notes on the English Year – and she had neatly written an inscription for me inside the front cover. It was typically thoughtful of Jo.
‘To my best friend, Rosie,
– a harder life
– a simpler life
– beauty in abundance!
Much love, Jo’
Jo’s inscription was right. And it was wrong. Yes, we had had beauty in abundance; we were in our ascendancy, urged on by the billowing lines of our flexuous bodies into new empires of possibility. Boys were mesmerised, and like the provocative pain of pins and needles beneath our skin we felt the burgeoning force of the power we could yield in a glance, a word, a movement; we just didn’t understand how gently we ought to have held that power, how careful we should have been to avoid the haunting recollections of betrayal that now bloat my thoughts.
But Jo was wrong too because I don’t believe they were simpler times. The purple haze of hindsight has made Jo nostalgic, and the fog of deceit has shrouded her view of what really happened all those years ago. I know the truth because I was the deceiver, and I still am.
The complete story is published in Life on the Margins under the name Mark Chester.