Live With No Regrets

I called her an hour ago. In that time I had paced, sat, read and tapped my way around the seating area. I was nervous, yet I already knew what the outcome would be. There are some places on the human body where injuries just really shouldn’t happen. Two housemates of Katherine’s were sat in silence. They looked awkward and out of place. I could tell they’d rather be anywhere else but here. My sister’s housemates were of no concern to me, especially as they weren’t friends. I guess they were there out of moral obligation.

“You can leave, you know.” My pacing had guided me in front of them. I looked down at them with my face distorted with disgust. They both, despite not being related, had the same face. Rounded fat cheeks, pale skin, and though one was a few shades darker, brown short hair. Their eyes had not wept, but they were ready to. The penetrating light from the ceiling above shone and reflected from the water gathered and lined along their lower eyelids. It felt like I was looking at Puss in boots and his doppelganger. Lefty opened her mouth slightly to speak, but gave in and shut it again. Righty looked at the double doors passed me, where Katherine had disappeared behind and looked back at me. Her eyes shifted and she stroked the laminated floor with her flats.

“We’ll wait.” Her eyes locked onto mine as she’d said it. I was reminded of how eyes are the windows to the soul, as I could clearly recognise how much of an inconvenience all this was to her. Her friend, obviously noticing it too, snapped her attention to the nurses behind their semicircled desk. I exhaled deep and closed my eyes.

“Did you have to call the police?”

I opened my eyes and focused on righty.

“What?”

“The police, you know red, blue lights, arresting people and stuff. Why’d you call them?” There was a poisonous sting to her words that shocked me.

“Why? When someone stabs someone you call the police, that’s why. She’s a criminal, and…most possibly a murderer.” Those last words I spoke were spoken with a reel of memories flashing through my mind.

 Kat is two and wedged naked into the top of the red slide, her baby butt cheeks are so squished together they’re red with suffocation. Five year old me becomes impatient with her struggles to slide free and shoves her chubby back. Her butt rubs against the plastic as she loosens and swoops down. Mum is sat in a garden chair watching us. Kat soars off the end, lands and skids to a stop at the edge of the paddling pool. There’s a paused moment as I climb up the rest of the stairs, before she breaks out in tears.

“Nathaniel don’t push her.”

 “Nat.”

Ellie stood drenched in rain, the smell of petrichor following her into the area. She didn’t move any closer, as if doing so would seal Kat’s fate.

“Is she okay?”

“I don’t know.” I found it hard to look her in the eyes. She was the epitome of pathetic fallacy. Disaster had struck and she had travelled through pouring rain, her makeup melting down her face, her clothes drenched and now the ceiling light had started flickering. Its energy receding.

We sat at the other end of the room from lefty and righty, my palms pressed firmly into the top of my knees and my back hunched over. Ellie next to me was leant back into her seat, her legs were bent and her feet planted firmly on the floor. Her eyes were red from the few minutes of crying she had done shortly after her arrival. Her long hair was still wet and trailed along the wrinkles in her rain coat. Ellie was a friend I'd met at university. At first she was shy and kept to herself, but I figured out why. Those small glances, and facial expressions mimicked those that my friends and I made at women who walked passed in yoga pants or tight skinny jeans. She only decided to come out to me after the weekend my family had come to visit. Mum, dad and my sister Katherine.