Chapter 3 3 - Posy - His Little Flower

Posy

Monday, 14 September

I peeled the wet shirt over my head, tugging it free where the cotton clung to my arms, then hooked my thumbs beneath the waistband of my shorts and pushed them down. The fabric landed in a dark heap near the drain. I nudged it aside with my foot and stepped fully beneath the water, tilting my head back until the spray struck my face.

One of my therapists had once told me to imagine washing the bad away so there would be room for something good to reach me. Her name had been Michelle. She wore wooden earrings shaped like leaves and kept a small tabletop fountain in the corner of her consulting room because she believed the sound of running water was calming. I had never told her that it made me want to claw through the wallpaper.

“Let the water take what you don’t need into the day,” she had said, her voice gentle as she pushed a box of tissues a little closer across the low table. “Wash off the bad, Posy. Make yourself ready for the good.”

I had been thirteen and far too suspicious of optimism to believe her. Even now, the phrase felt too neat. Nightmares did not rinse away with sweat and shampoo. Grief did not disappear into a drain because hot water touched it. Trauma was not dirt. It lived beneath the skin, threaded through muscle and memory, settling into places no sponge or soap could reach.

Still, I lifted my face to the spray and let the water run over my closed eyes. The droplets striking the tiles were softer than the drip of the kitchen tap. They merged into one continuous rush rather than arriving individually, leaving no silence in which my mind could anticipate the next one. I concentrated on that difference. The broad pressure across my shoulders. The warmth gathering around my feet. The coconut scent of the shampoo when I squeezed it into my palm. The slight sting where I had worried a patch of dry skin beside my thumbnail.

I worked the shampoo through my hair slowly, pressing my fingertips against my scalp until the tension there began to loosen. I watched the pale bubbles spiral towards the drain around the crumpled clothing near my feet. Wash off the bad. Prepare for the good.

I opened my eyes. The words still sounded ridiculous, but perhaps that was because good things had never been especially well organised. Bad things arrived with precision. They happened at exact times, in specific places, to people whose lives could be divided cleanly into before and after. Good things were less dramatic. They were small enough to miss if I remained too busy looking for danger.

I poured body wash onto a flannel and moved it across my arms, chest and stomach, taking a little more care than usual, as though I could convince my body that it belonged entirely to the present. My pulse had finally slowed to something close to normal. The trembling in my hands had eased. When I lifted one foot onto the low tiled ledge to wash my leg, the muscles in my calf stretched beneath the warmth, and I became aware of how tightly I had been holding myself since waking.

I rolled one shoulder, then the other, letting the joints shift beneath the skin. The back of my neck ached from sleep, and my jaw felt tender where I must have clenched my teeth. I massaged the hinge beneath one ear until a dull pressure released, then stood with both palms against the wall while the water struck between my shoulder blades.

The building groaned around me as pipes woke in neighbouring apartments. Somewhere above, a toilet flushed. A cupboard closed through the wall, followed by muffled footsteps and the low murmur of a radio. Ordinary sounds. People waking for work, making coffee, searching for clean socks, standing beneath their own showers while thinking about school lunches and traffic and whether they had remembered to pay the electricity bill.

I envied them with a bitterness so faint I almost mistook it for fatigue. Not because I believed their lives were perfect. I had worked in criminal law long enough to understand that almost every ordinary front door concealed some kind of private damage. I envied the possibility that they might wake without immediately having to remind themselves where they were.

I turned off the water. The sudden quiet pressed close for a moment, but it didn’t carry me backwards.

The mirror had disappeared behind a sheet of fog. I wiped a broad circle clear with the side of my hand and leaned closer, checking the redness in my eyes. They were hazel in most light, although Beth insisted they became green when I was angry and brown when I was tired. This morning they looked colourless, framed by lashes clumped together from steam.

I opened the cabinet and took out moisturiser, deodorant and the small bottle of serum I kept buying because the woman at the chemist had assured me it would brighten dull skin. It had not performed any miracles, but the ritual of pressing it across my cheeks and forehead gave my hands something calm and familiar to do. I brushed my teeth, rinsed the mint from my mouth and used the edge of the towel to clear another widening patch of mirror.

My clothes were arranged by purpose rather than colour, which meant the left side contained court clothes, the middle office clothes and the small section at the end everything else. Everything else had remained suspiciously small for years. Beth once held up three nearly identical black dresses and accused me of dressing as though I might be summoned before a magistrate at brunch.

I chose a charcoal pencil skirt, a cream blouse with a high gathered neckline and the dark green cardigan from the chair. The skirt had a narrow slit at the back and a waistband that always pressed a little too firmly after lunch, but it made me look more senior than I was. Ethan had once described it as “appropriately sober”, which told me more about him than the skirt.

I fastened a thin gold chain around my neck, then paused with my fingers at the clasp. A tiny pressed-flower pendant rested against the hollow of my throat, its petals faded almost white beneath the glass. It had belonged to Mum. Most mornings I wore it without thinking. After the dream, its weight felt more noticeable.

I tucked it beneath the collar of my blouse.

The alarm clock read 5:27 am. Too early to leave, although Ethan would probably consider arriving before sunrise evidence of a promising attitude. By the time I entered the kitchen, the nightmare had retreated enough to feel like memory again rather than a room I had only just escaped. I filled the kettle at the sink and turned the tap off firmly, watching until the final bead of water gathered at the spout and remained there.

Only then did I reach for the coffee.