GUILTY

By: Louise King



The moon makes a path in the ocean, it separates black from black
I have to go, I have to go.
Beyond the night my heart is burning.

Let me be, let me cry until the oceans have dried
Let me scream, let me dance with the devils
Let it forever and ever be night...

nice poem!

thanx... :D

1. DEAD

If I’d only known. When I look back I try to look for a bad sign. A sign that could have predicted what happened. Like a warning. But that the sun was shining brightly couldn’t have been a bad sign could it?
Or that the birds were singing beautifully from the branches of the trees, when we passed by on our bicycles.
Or that the breeze in that moment when we lay on the beach, became soft and warm instead of cold.
No. Everything that happened that day I’d interpreted as good signs.
As if the nature around us could predict happiness and love and not the opposite.

Chris and I had ridden down to the beach. We sat there, close to each other. For a very long time.
While the sun glittered in the black reflection of the ocean and a breeze swept by we’d sat there talking to each other. I don’t remember what we talked about. But I remember holding hands. My hand that that wanted his warmth. I remember how I leaned back against his shoulder. How his shirt felt against my skin. Everytime he moved or spoke his whole chest moved and it felt so safe. And his eyes.
His grey eyes that shined with tenderness everytime he looked at me.

Chris was nineteen and I was seventeen. With light curly hair and a confident, deep voice. But not even Chris could have protected me. Protect me from the thing that waited for me at school.
No, we didn’t feel anything, we sat there wrapped up in our love bubble. Outside there was nothing. We were in the centre of the universe. Nothing could change that. I could’ve sat there forever without knowing anything. Breathing him, listening to his words. If the breeze hadn’t turned cold we never would’ve moved.
I have thought about it. That I didn’t know, that I could sit there and be happy without knowing anything. Isn’t that strange? How complete my world could feel, when there were a million worlds around me. Happy worlds. Sad worlds. Worlds that all were at the centre. Am I more insensitive than others? Is it only me that don’t understand what is happening around me?
At last we let go of each other’s hands and began our ride back.

It was just the last hill and then we would be there. I could see the white building already. I stood up to get more strength. The wind was playing in my hair. Chris, who was faster, was already at the top. He turned his head and when he saw how far behind I was, he waited. When I was next to him I could see that he didn’t only wait for me. He had a question in his eyes and pointed at the wing where I had my room.
“Terri”, he said. “Can you see the ambulance?”
I looked. First I couldn’t understand what I was seeing. Why would an ambulance stand so close to our rooms?
The happiness I’d felt only seconds before was swept away. I began to realize what had happened. The horrible thing that had happened. ¨
Victoria.
When I reach the entrance I don’t know anymore. Did I ride my bicycle, or did I walk? But suddenly I just stood there. I parked my bicycle. Locked it. Isn’t it strange that I locked it? That I remembered to lock it. But I did.
As it was the most important thing. That it was locked.

It wasn’t just an ambulance that stood there. There were other cars as well. Strangers. Men in grey suits. Men in white coats. But no students, where were they? Was I all alone? I walked up the steps, the three steps that felt as high as a mountain, the three steps that turned the world around and dumped me into nothingness.
Right down into darkness without mattresses that would help me when I fell, without a ladder to climb.
When I came to the highest step of the stairs and reached to open the door, it opened from inside.
Was it Chris? Was he there with me? Next to me? Behind me? I just remember the men that opened the door. Their white coats. They said something to me. Four white arms coming towards me. Serious. Threatening. Accusing. Two mouths with deep black wholes.
Did they tell me that Victoria was dead or did I know that already?
I don’t know.
What I remember is the coolness of the doorway against my hands. The smooth surface when the hands slided down to the floor. And my body that followed.
Tears? No, no tears. At least I don’t think so.
Just that darkness that whirled around. Just those men.
And the stretcher.
The stretcher was so close when it passed me, no one seemed to notice me.
The stretcher with the white veil.
Under that was Victoria.

They tell me that Victoria is dead, but that’s not true.
They’re lying. She can’t be dead.
Because if it’s true then it’s my fault.
My fault.

Wow..powerful chapter. Keep writing!

Thanx...yeah I am! :D

who's victorica? ARGH, already hooked.

very nice...omg were they best friends......

This is really really good! I really liked the part about the bike being locked.. don't ask me why because I dont know.

Hehe...yeah I like when ppl are hooked...lol...they weren't best friends but you'll see!

This is really good... :D

Thanx! :)

Masterpiece... ;)

2. VICTORIA

The night. The steps that had clattered through the floor of the corridor had become silent. The men in grey and the men in white had driven away in their cars. I sat in my bed with the cover over my shoulders and the hands clenched so tightly that the knuckles turned white.
Next to me were my pen and diary.
In the other rooms students were sitting and whispering to each other.
But I wanted to be alone. I have to be alone. Alone with my thoughts.

Victoria.
With your short black hair and sad black eyes. You were the most alive person I’ve ever known. The words had recently flowed out of your mouth.

The first time I met Victoria was this autumn. Early this autumn. My mother had dropped off my suitcases on the courtyard before the white building. The institute for advanced studies. The courtyard was immense and the black windows of the main building stared at me.
I stood there like a little child who had lost its mom in a big department store.
But I wasn’t lost. I was going to start the line of journalism even though I was only sixteen. I had got exemption. Normally you have got to be eighteen to go here. But my mom had thought that it would be better for me to go here.
“Institute for advanced studies”, she’d said. “There’s no better way to become independent.”
And for once in my life I had agreed. But I didn’t feel independent, just lonely and abandoned. I bent down and took hold of the handles of the suitcases. With a groan I lifted them. Of course I’d taken too much clothes with me. The sound seemed to grow bigger and it seemed to fly around the whole place.
A path took me to the red two-storeyed house that was called the annex.
I stopped and in the same moment the door to the annex opened by a very dark girl. We looked at each other.

Silence. When I think back I’m sure that it only lasted for a second. But it felt like five minutes. At least.
Victoria stood there, with her hair so shiny.
“Are you new here?” she said, breaking the silence at the same time as the door closes.
“I’m starting the line of journalism”, I said not knowing if I should talk or not. Or what to I say if I’m going to talk…
“But I wanted to go the line of poetry, but there wasn’t one…so it was the line of journalism”.
I stopped, I always talked too much when I didn’t know what to say. Now she would think that I was crazy.
“I’m Victoria. Cool! I’m starting that line too”.
“Terri. My name is Terri”.
Victoria opened the door and made a gesture with her head that I should go inside.
“I got to go. See you”.
And then she was gone.
Right, so that was one of my class mates. How would the others be?
I stepped inside. The corridor was white and on both sides there were grey doors. The feeling of being abandoned came back. Victoria was the only person I’d seen. Where was everybody else? Why was it so still? I hadn’t bothered checking the watch. I gripped the suitcases tightly. I had moved out of my home. For good. I’m a grown-up. Independent.
I swallowed and walked down the corridor. There was a kitchen down the end. In the middle of the kitchen there was a table. On the wall someone had put up a paper.
Don’t leave the table before cleaning it! The strange thing with those kind of papers, the point is that somewhere they’re supposed to create a good feeling – if everyone does what is says on the paper everyone will be happy.
But instead the anger shines through from the person who wrote it. You can see how she’s sitting and writes her message in fury. The eyes flashes and she presses the pen a little too hard against the paper, the letters become ugly. And when you feel that anger from that person then it feels like everybody won’t be happy if you do as it says. It just feels like you have to obey. And that is not a good start for happiness.
Anyway. I took a deep breath. It had said number twelve in the letter they’d sent to me.
I went back to the corridor to look for my room. Soon, I found it. 12 it said on the door. Then my name, Terri Banks. Correct!
It was a small room with a high ceiling. From a window the sun was pouring in and lay like silk over the floor and the bed.
Underneath the window there was a writing-table and a chair. Then there was just a bureau. Nothing else. Not even a carpet on the floor.
I sat down on the bed. If it hadn’t been for the sun, this room would have looked more like a cell than a room. And I thought that it looked as if the walls were closing in on me. No, they weren’t closing in on me but they were bending. I got up and walked to the window. I could breathe again. The school lay on the top of a hill. I saw the ocean far away that reflected all the colours of the autumn. Behind it grey mountains were reaching towards eternity.
That feeling of being abandoned didn’t get me to miss my home, miss my mother and the safety. No, it got me to long to be far away. Far away towards the horizon, I had fantasized about how wonderful it would be to move away from home.
But I hadn’t thought that it would change into this. This silence.
Through the walls I could hear how the door to the entrance opened and closed.
Heels against the floor. Finally! Now I could hear voices.
Someone carefully knocked in my door. It was Victoria. It’s strange how you can be so happy to see someone you barely know. But when Victoria walked into my room it was as if the emptiness didn’t get room, it disappeared.
“I just wanted to know how it’s going.”
She pulled out a chair and sat down.
“People are starting to come.”
“It’s impossible to be outside, they’re just pouring in.”
“It makes me feel nervous.”
“Yeah. There’s an assembly in the great hall in fifteen minutes.”
“Is it like a roll-call when you have to stand up when they say your name?”
“And everyone turns their head and looks at you…I know”, Victoria nodded. “But we can go together.”

What is it that makes you feel more secure around certain people? Victoria wasn’t the kind of person you would feel secure with. There was something dark about her, something I couldn’t place. Something in her eyes that almost made me scared.
Still, I felt so safe with her.

Victoria. You saved me that day. But I still didn’t save you yesterday.
I sat in my bed when all the thoughts were whirling. I pulled my legs closer to me, and put my arms around them as if the chill would disappear that way.
Unbearable thoughts. Memories from a time that no longer existed. Wasn’t everything just a bad dream?

We were fifteen students who were starting the line of journalism. Everyone had different personalities and dreams. Victoria was the one who knew me best.
We were very different, but she was still a little like me. Especially when it came to the writing. That was where we had the same dreams.
Our classroom was in the main building.
I saw that the door was open when I hurried down the corridor on the first morning in school. Inside the classroom I could hear voices.
If I’m going to be honest, there is nothing I hate more than the first meeting with people. Meetings that are planned, anyway. What I would like most was if I could swallow a drink that made me invisible. So no one would see me.
The room was quite big, there were long rows of computers. I guess it was there we were supposed to write our articles. But there was also desks and chairs. Most of them were occupied.
I saw Victoria who was looking for something in her bag. There was an empty chair next to her. Relieved, I sat down.
“I thought you were going to shirk, since you weren’t here”, Victoria said.
I didn’t get a chance to say anything since Mark, our teacher had just arrived.
Everyone looked at him and the room fell into silence. He looked like that kind of teacher you became friends with. Still he seemed nice in strange way. He had his hands deep in his pockets while he looked at us.
Silence.
“I bet you expect that we’re going to do a lot of fun games so you all can get to know each other, before we start to work”, he said at last. “But that’s not what I had in mind. I want you to interview each other in twos and then write an article. Understood?”
I looked around. Everyone looked as if it was the easiest thing in the world. It seemed to me that it was just me who thought it was difficult. I turned to Victoria.
“Do you want…?”
“I never thought you’d ask”, she said brightly.
We went out of the classroom and sat down on a bench in the corridor. Victoria opened her note book.
“Well, ok”, she said. “My first question is: Why did you start here?”
I thought a while before I answered. Mostly it had been my mom that had pushed me. But she had said that I might be too young, but she had with all her will and energy – as always – convinced the principals that this education was something for me. I don’t think Victoria wanted that answer, though.
At last I said:
“I love to write. I’ve always written. But I don’t think I’m as mature as everybody else. I don’t know if it is articles that I want to write…”
The others in the classroom had seemed so sure. They’d probably never doubted that they would be great journalists. But I did. Doubted. Of course I wanted to be a journalist. But to become a journalist you had to be brave as well. I wasn’t. I didn’t like to ask questions that were private. I didn’t like to dig in the private life of a person. Not that I felt bad for them. It was more that I thought it as embarrassing.
“Actually I want to write about what I have inside of me”, I tried to explain.
“About my thoughts. About my life. But something like that can only be written in my diary, it can never be published…So the line of journalism it was. But if I had got in on a line of writing…”
“You know something?” Victoria said. “I don’t think it matters that it’s about journalism, writing or whatever. I think it matters which knowledge you choose to use.”
When she said that I didn’t know if she knew what I’d meant. But later in the afternoon, when we were going to show our articles, I understood.
Everyone of us had written nice articles about the person we had interviewed. We had described dreams and expectations. But not Victoria. When she didn’t read an article about me she read a novel. A novel about me and my lonely soul. And the strange thing was, I wasn’t embarrassed – even though it was all about me. Because it told as much about Victoria as it did about me.
Victoria had decided to become a writer at the age of five. From the start she had told everyone who had wanted to hear about her dreams, but when she noticed how her dad and everyone else laughed as if she had said something funny, she’d kept it to herself. That was why she was here.
“The most important thing is to write, isn’t it?” she said.
“If I go to an education about writing or journalism I will always write in my own way. No one can take that from me.”

Even though she seemed so confident, even though you seemed so mature you were just as unsure as me.
It’s just that Victoria doesn’t show how insecure she is. Not in the same way as I do anyway – with silence.
Yes, sometimes she became silent and closed. That sadness that was so clear was always in her eyes.
No! I can’t think about Victoria’s sadness. I have to think about her other side. That flowing side she has. I mean had…
She wrote her ideas with an amazing speed and she was like a crackling sparkler.
That was when she had the idea about the morning assembly.

Every Monday morning there was a morning assembly for the whole school. Every course got to have the responsibility for them, in turns. When Mark said that we were going to have the assembly next week, Victoria really shone.
“Count me in”, she said.
Oscar looked at her with a question in his eyes. Victoria wasn’t known for being religious and the morning assemblies used to be very religious.
“Me too”, he said.
“Ok”, Mark said and turned around. “Anyone else?”
“Terri!” Victoria said. “You can be with us.”
Morning assembly? Me?
“Ok.”

When the classes were over for the day, I followed Oscar and Victoria into her room.
Her room looked like mine.
“I know exactly what we’re going to do”, she said.
Victoria was sitting on her bed and looked at us.
“Oscar you’ve been a service man right?”
He nodded.
“Yeah but…that was then. I’m not anymore.”
Victoria put her hands around her knees.
“Good!” she said. “This institute is Christian, right?”
Oscar and I nodded. What did she mean?
“They’re always talking about some love message. “Still, no one questions the armed forces. No one questions the killing of a human being. We’re going to show them by using their own words.”
“How?”
Oscar gave her an excited look.
“Before you became a service man, did you have some sort of education?”
“Yeah, of course…”
“As a service man you have to get an education on how you kill, right? Is there any books or something?”
Sometimes Victoria just didn’t make any sense. Education on how you kill?
But Oscar seemed to understand what she meant
“Oh, yeah! I can get those books.”

On the day of the morning assembly I was nervous. We hadn’t told anyone what we were going to do. Most of the teachers thought that it would be a normal assembly.
Eight o’clock, when everybody came into the great hall, I sat with Victoria behind the curtain. Oscar and Victoria were going to take care of everything except the CD-player.
Oscar was already standing on the stage. He was standing in his uniform and he had one of his books in his hand.
“Is everybody here?” Victoria asked me, standing up.
I nodded.
“Good. Put the music on.”
The moment the song of Rage against The Machines came to life, about Commandant Marcos Oscar woke up.
He walked to the altar that stood on the stage and ignited the candles that were placed at either side of the altar. Then he bent down on his knees and turned his back to his audience.
I counted to ten. I counted to ten. Then I turned the music down.
Oscar stood up and now he was standing in the centre of the stage. With his hand behind his back he said:
“Hold the axe in your right hand. Lift your arm over your shoulder. Strike with all your power. Make sure that the edge hits the throat…”
Something swept through the great hall. I could see how the principal’s face turned red and he blinked. He looked around, not sure if it was a joke or not.
When Oscar was done I made a sign to Victoria. It was her turn to walk onto the stage. She walked onto the stage with easy steps and with grace.
She stood in front of the principal. I’ll never forget her when she stood there in her short red dress. She was silent for a few minutes with her head bent. Then her shoulders shook and she threw her head back and started to read the poem “Invulnerable”.
Her voice was powerful yet very fragile. At least I thought so.
I just listened to her. To her words.

Invulnerable, invulnerable
is the one who gets the message
There is no happiness and misfortune
There is no life and death
When you’ve learned that and stopped chasing the wind,
and you have learned that and stopped being afraid of the chill,
come back and teach me again
There is no happiness and misfortune
There is just life and death

The morning had been to honour life.
I think Victoria wanted to believe that life was the power.
And she wanted to live.


3. PAIN

The evening turned into night. But I couldn’t sleep. I didn’t want to sleep. Still, I didn’t want anything more than to just close my eyes and get rid of all the thoughts.
Window by window became black. But I sat there, alone.
The memories I had allowed myself to remember were just a part of the truth.
Beyond all the energy, behind Victoria’s sparkle there was darkness.
The blackness that wanted to eat her alive. The blackness she tried to run away from.

One weekend she showed me her pain, naked and deep. Most of the students had gone home, it was just me, Victoria and some others that stayed at the school.
Victoria and I had sat in the empty TV-room in the main building.
We were watching a movie that we both wanted to see. Then we started to talk and soon we had forgotten all about the movie.
Victoria was sitting with her legs under herself in the couch. Small and thin she’d been. I’d never noticed how small and thin she was. No ideas. Just a sad body with a sad face.
“I don’t know what to do”, she said quietly that I barely heard what she said.
“I don’t think I can take it anymore. Everytime it feels as if my life brightens, the shadows come…It hurts. Right here. She put a hand on her heart. It just hurts so much!”
I didn’t say anything. What could I say? I’m not even sure I knew what she meant.
“Do you know that I can’t love. And no one can love me. It’s like a curse. I just feel so very alone!”
“But you’re not alone, you’ve got a lot of friends.”
She gave me a look. It told me everything, that I would never understand. I could still se it before me, even though I didn’t want to.
She was like a different world to me…a world I wanted to understand better.
“Do you now that I’ve been engaged?” she asked.
I shook my head.
“It was last summer – in Washington. I was there with my cousins. His name was Billy. We became engaged one night in his car. It was raining outside. God, it was raining so much.”
She laughed quietly.
Then she sat and stared into the screen of the television and I thought that she had forgot our conversation and wanted to watch the movie.
“What happened?” I asked at last.
“He understood that it wasn’t a good idea. Because he understood that he wouldn’t dare to introduce me to his parents.”
“He didn’t dare?”
“He said that I wasn’t that kind of girl you introduce to your parents. No, I wasn’t that kind of girl you became engaged to at all. I was a girl you could play with. And it had been one hell of a time…he said. One hell of a time…”
She dried her tears with one hand.
I wanted to take her hand and tell her that she must have imagined that he had said that.
I felt so small compared to her.
But I wanted to be there for her, and even though it seemed stiff I put my arms around her and held her.
“Life is a big betrayal”, she continued into my shoulder. “That day was the first time I got really drunk. The only thing I remember is that I woke up on a hill outside the city with just my underwear on.”
“Oh my God”, I said taking a deep breath, letting go of her and looking into her eyes.
“I just can’t take the pain anymore”, she said at last. “I can’t! I’m going to commit suicide.”
“But there has to be something that is worth living for?”
I heard that it sounded so simple and wrong, but I had to say something.
“Worth living for? There is a point when you can’t take it anymore. You might reach that point one day…”

Victoria. How do you chase away a shadow so dark that it eats all the light?

Good chapter!