Epiphany

Epiphany

The car slips between the sheets of rain that have been falling for
days now, a constant grey film emerging from the ashen January sky.
Warm and disconnected, Kate stares at the monochrome streets as they
gleam blackly oiled against the drab facades shutting up shop for the
evening. Everything seems colourless and bleak, as though she is
travelling through an old worn movie, the pedestrians with their
bedraggled outlines jerking through the scratches on the film. She
sinks further down into the bucket seat, grateful for the cushioning
warmth of the car protecting her from the hanging chill outside.

The streetlights begin to flicker into life smearing fluorescence
across the bleary windscreen, the bright coloured smudges pooling in
close-up. She flexes her feet and glances sideways at Pete. He smiles
tightly knowing she has been looking.

"Bloody rain, so bloody depressing eh?"

Managing a weak smile, she senses a twitch of embarrassment in her
stomach. She knows he's trying to inject some life into the car, to
ease the tense silence amplifying mile after mile but it doesn't work.
Tendrils of apprehension are flourishing in her stomach. They've crept
up inside her, strangling her voice day by day for the last week. The
picture of his face hovering over a delicate wineglass shadowed in
candlelight, and the crushed velvet box sitting accusingly on the linen
tablecloth, projects on the glove compartment from memory. She bats the
image away and concentrates on the windscreen wipers' steady
movement.

"You're quiet." A matter of fact statement, his tone flat and his eyes
focused on the road.

Staring at his capable hands guiding the wheel, she mutely nods her
head, her mind fretting over the unavoidable conversation at the end of
the journey. The car is moving out of the city now, leaving behind the
forlorn remnants of Christmas clutching at the corners of shop windows,
instead silent heavy trees flank the road, rising up from sodden
undergrowth, branches looming towards the windows. It's dark outside
and the beam of the headlights picks up copious green gloss and two
pitching channels of mist. It's sinister out there, Kate shudders
involuntarily.

"We'll talk when we get home," A flat monotone through the stale gloom,
his voice barely audible over the hissing rain. She knows he'll bully
an answer out of her tonight, and she feels suffocated by the
inevitability of her life. A surrender to an endless cycle of laundry,
weariness and resentment mapped out before her in the silvery lines of
motherhood. The other option was too frightening to contemplate.

"Can I open a window?"

"No."

Kate shoves herself further back in the bucket seat knowing the
futility of arguing with his absolute response and peers from the
window. The rain is different up here amongst the trees, thick, soft
and soporific, coating the windscreen. I'd love to dance in this rain,
she thought, I'd love to look at the stars and feel the rain rinsing my
body with its cold freshness, clarifying my bones and washing away my
frustration. She imagines telling him this and the car slowing to a
stop. The ultimatums forgotten whilst he takes her hand and joins her
in a dance of reckless liberation; but she knows this will never
happen. Spontaneity and exploration were alien concepts to Pete. She
had told him once she wanted to travel, to smell and touch some
history. He had laughed looking over the top of the morning newspaper,
shaking his head. "You'd get lost," he told her with exasperation in
his voice.

Kate peers at his collar, rising and falling against his papery throat.
Still in his suit, she thought, his middle-management suit, pressed and
ironed with his shiny cheap shoes. "Presentation is important," he
recites daily straightening his tie, and a smart suit equals a
promotion, which means the opportunity onto the property ladder and
then marriage and children, his aspiration.

She tried to convince him she wanted bigger things, she had dreams to
realise and opportunities to grasp; the freedom to live her life. He
stood there, his arms expansive and wrists upturned in the middle of
their small rented flat.

"What things Kate, what dreams do you have?"

She couldn't answer and squirmed into the threadbare beanbag. "You
don't know what you want do you?" He was angry and felt cheated.
"What has this been all about?"

Kate tried to explain she was scared of becoming used-up and bitter,
terrified of being trapped into a role watching her identity slip away.
She deserved more than that, more than vanishing underneath children
and mortgage repayments with nothing to look forward to but snatched
frozen dinners in front of the TV, her body racked with exhaustion. Why
was it so wrong to want more, a sense of achievement in her life, even
making her mark? He just looked at her in disbelief.

"That's what children are all about."

"But there is so much out there Pete."

Slipping into supplication already, she noted grimly. The years of
familiarity and love dissipating in the emerging knowledge of them
wanting different things, and then the ultimatum came.

"Kate."

She jumps back to reality, to the raindrops bleeding down the windows
and the rhythm of the car.

"Pass me my fags will you, I think they're in the glove
compartment."

He's fumbling around now as he drives, his breath coming in short
irritated spurts.

Please God, she whispers in her head as she eases herself forward, the
motion of the car sweeping through her head as it draws nearer and
nearer to her inevitable submission. Please God, change all this for
me.

The sharp earthen smell of the outdoors floods into the car as her body
is thrown back, metal screeching through her senses. A solid branch
punches through the windscreen in a victorious denouement trailing damp
foliage over the crumpled dashboard and her aching face. Before Kate
realises what has happened, the shock suffuses her body, dragging her
limbs and consciousness into a stiff, dark place edged with
rainwater.

She lies curled up around the broken dashboard, the gloss of the leaves
lacquering her face and her body numb from the unnatural silence
emanating from behind the wheel. She waits, dabbling with
consciousness, an image of Pete with his arms outspread before her
quick and hard in her mind. She waits, tasting the outside, her damaged
mind feeling eternity.

They are talking softly as they cut her from the wreckage, noises
washing over her as she lies numb and resolute. A tree in the
road&;#8230; the brakes failed&;#8230; such a tragedy&;#8230;
The words dance on her eyelids as they slowly prize her out. Despite
the gentle sympathetic tones and the hands fluttering over her like
falling leaves, Kate knows what has taken place behind her in the
tangle of raw burnished metal and branches. It's a miracle, she thinks,
walking awkwardly away from the crash site ignoring the surprise of the
paramedics. It's a miracle. She raises her weak eyes to the fretwork of
dawn glinting through the forest, inhales the freshness of the earth
and realises it has stopped raining.