Independence Day
Sarah stared at her face in the mirror, the imprint of her mother's hand already beginning to fade away. The mark was just imperceptibly redder than her other cheek but as she touched it gingerly with her fingers, it felt hot and angry, like it had been branded into her skin with a white-hot hand-shaped stamp.
She dropped the mirror and turned, her mind racing. She couldn't live with a mother who could turn around at any time and hit her at the slightest provocation. It was time to go. Sarah looked around her room, mentally deciding which things she could not bear to leave behind and which she could live without. She marched downstairs and opened the drawer where her mother kept used plastic bags and pulled out a handful, stuffing them into her trouser pockets before returning to her room, slamming the door shut behind her.
Before long there were piles of clothes, toys and books on the floor. Sarah immediately disregarded any clothes she could not pull on top of her thin t-shirt and added an extra long-sleeved top and two jumpers for good measure. Reaching under her bed, she pulled out a jumbled pile of shoes and seeing a pair of pink sandals with flowers on the side paused for a moment, unsure what to do. The sandals had been bought for her by her mother on a happier day, despite being "not suitable for school" and "bad for your feet". Torn with indecision, she remembered opening the surprise gift and hugging her mother like she could never stop. Her face hardened. The shoes could go. She found her sturdiest pair of little black boots and put them on, lacing them tightly. Into one of the bags went several handfuls of books. Another was filled with a selection of stuffed toys and a small, old pillowcase Sarah refused to leave the house without. A third bag was stuffed with a selection of miscellaneous items - a hair brush, some paper and drawing pencils and the hand mirror, retrieved from the bed where she had dropped it.
Sarah knew if she spent too long thinking about it she would change her mind so she put on her coat and fastened its stiff, black toggles before picking up her bags with some difficulty and heading out of the door for what she planned would be the last time. She took the stairs with more speed than care, her bags chipping away at the peeling paint on the walls. She did not look behind her as the door slammed shut, plunging Sarah into the crisp summer evening.
Marjorie didn’t notice, at first, that Sarah was missing. It wasn’t until it was time for her daughter’s favourite television programme that she decided it was time to have a word with her youngest, most turbulent child.
She knocked gently on Sarah’s bedroom door.
“Sarah?” she said.
Then again, louder.
“Sarah? I hope you’re not sulking in there. You know you’re not supposed to touch the oven when the red light is on.”
She paused – still no answer.
“Okay, I’m coming in.”
She was greeted by the site of Sarah’s room, uncharacteristically messy, heaps of her belongings strewn all over the floor.
About to raise her voice and scold the nine-year-old, she realized that Sarah was nowhere to be seen. And started to panic.
It was starting to get cold in the woods at the end of Hawthorn Avenue. Sarah had initially planned to go further but decided she would spend her first night in what she and her sister, Hannah, had christened the Goblin Forest by the murky pool.
It had been a struggle getting the bags even this far, and Sarah’s little fingers were sore where the bag handles had pressed down on her hands. The woods were almost silent, as the moon began to rise in the sky, but not quite. She started as she heard a rustle behind her – the wind blowing through the trees.
“I’m not afraid,” she said aloud but the tremulous timbre of her small voice, echoing in the dark, suggested otherwise. She decided to read, fishing through her bags for her current favourite book, the Magic Faraway Tree, but when she got it out it was too dark to make out the words. Her torch was still on top of the cupboard in the bedroom, where she had left it.
“Never mind,” she continued talking to herself, “I’ll sing instead. Mum always tells me I talk and sing too much. But I like it.”
But she remained silent. It was as if the trees, moving and sighing gently with the breeze, were singing to her. She remembered Hannah telling her about the Ents from The Lord of the Rings, trees who were really people. She looked up at the towering oaks and firs above her. Would these be good, friendly Ents? Or the ones who had gone a bit “wild”?
Marjorie had looked in all the bedrooms, the music room, the tree house at the bottom of the garden, even Jim’s locked tool shed but there was no sign.
“Should I call the police?” she fretted to her husband, “What if she’s been taken by a stranger? Or been hit by a car? Or..”
Jim interrupted: “Sarah knows not to talk to strangers. And I’m sure if she’d been hit by a car they would have contacted us. She’s probably just sulking somewhere.”
Marjorie paced back and forth.
“But I’ve looked everywhere. And she’s not there.”
A pause.
“I’m calling the police. It’s been over two hours now, from when I last talked to her.”
Marjorie walked over to the window, pulling back the curtain, and was just about to pick up the receiver when she saw something.
“Oh my God,” she exclaimed.
Sarah trudged across the lawn, her little black boots soaked through and the bottom of her trousers dripping with dew. She did not look up to meet her mother’s eyes, even as her parents enveloped her in a hug, not scolding, not saying anything, just holding her.
“I was cold,” she whispered.
“I know,” said her mum just as quietly, pressing her ever tighter to her bosom.
That was Sarah’s first bid for independence. Her second lasted rather more than two hours.
She was 14 at the time and constantly pushing for more freedom and had learned how to spin lies to her parents which would last just long enough for her to get her way. And there was a party she wanted to go to. A party in a nightclub in London, to which she had been invited by her “friend” James, who was much older than she was. A party which she knew she would not be allowed to attend.
“Goodbye,” she shouted blithely after her parents as she got into Stewart’s car, “I’ll see you later.”
She was expected back at 10pm after spending an evening with her friends but she usually stretched those curfews a little so it wasn’t until about 11.30pm that Marjorie and Jim started to get angry.
But it wasn’t until there was no answer on her mobile, and Stewart told Marjorie that he had parted company with Sarah at 2pm – nine and a half hours previously – that they began to worry.
Hannah, who was sitting upstairs with her nose in a book, could not shed any light on her sister’s whereabouts.
“I don’t know, Mum,” she said, “She’s probably with that James guy, you know, who you said she wasn’t allowed to spend time with on her own, and that’s why she hasn’t called.”
But Hannah didn’t have James’s number.
Marjorie and Jim ransacked their daughter’s room. And in it they found a small box containing some tiny white pills.
Marjorie burst back into Hannah’s room, brandishing the box.
“Do you know what these are?” she demanded.
“Back off, Mum, they’re not mine!”
Marjorie’s voice softened, “I know, darling. But…are they…Ecstasy? I mean, do you know? Would you recognize them?”
Hannah, who had never seen an illegal drug in her life but wasn’t about to admit it to her mother, blustered, saying she did not think they were drugs.
Time passed. Sarah still didn’t answer her mobile. At 1am, Marjorie and Jim called the police.
At around midday the following day, Sarah returned – in the company of two uniformed police officers, crying hot tears of rage, swearing furiously at her parents.
“All I did wrong was forget to phone you,” she choked, tears running down her cheeks, her face so red it looked like it would explode.
“Thanks to you, I’ve lost a friend forever. James will never speak to me again and I don’t blame him – how would you like it if police barged down your door looking for someone.”
Her voice cracked with emotion, her eyes were bloodshot, her hair a mess. But she was home – and safe.
Marjorie’s eyes filled with tears as she looked at her daughter’s tall, elegant, white silhouette. In her sleek white wedding dress, Sarah looked exquisite. But also, to Marjorie, fragile, like a wedding figure on a cake made out of spun sugar, she could be snapped in half with barely any effort.
Sarah was just 18. But when Marjorie was about to raise concerns about her age, she was reminded that she had been even younger when she had first walked down the aisle. Sarah was now an adult. But every bit as impetuous, emotional and rebellious as ever. Even if the life she had chosen was one of stability and fidelity, one look at her firey eyes belied the suggestion that she was “settling down”.
“I feel sick,” Sarah announced.
Marjorie snapped out of her reverie, remembering her role.
“That’s because I’ve laced you within an inch of your life in that corset,” she said.
“Here, eat this banana.”
Sarah accepted the fruit, slowly breaking it into pieces in her hands before eating each tiny piece slowly, contemplatively.
“Mum,” she whispered, “I’m scared.”
“Of what, dear?” Marjorie asked.
Sarah looked at the ceiling. Where to begin?
“That we’ll have babies and I’ll get fat and he won’t love me any more. That we won’t be able to have babies and he won’t love me any more. That my friends won’t talk to me because I’ll be an old married woman. That everything is going to change.”
“Well, you are right about one thing. Everything will change,” said Marjorie, “But that doesn’t have to be a bad thing. He fell in love with who you are – and that’s not going to change. And as for your friends abandoning you, don’t be ridiculous.”
She drew aside the curtain which separated mother and daughter from the rest of the chapel and beckoned Sarah to look through the gap.
”They’re all here for you. They love you. No one small thing is going to change that, not with real friends. And they’ll change, too, in different ways.”
Marjorie glanced at the clock.
“I think it’s nearly time,” she said.
Sarah took in a deep breath and closed her perfectly mascara-ed eyes for a moment.
“Are you ready?”
She nodded.
The familiar strains of the wedding march began in what seemed like a far off corner of the chapel. Marjorie took her daughter’s arm and led her towards the altar. To a new life. To independence.
She dropped the mirror and turned, her mind racing. She couldn't live with a mother who could turn around at any time and hit her at the slightest provocation. It was time to go. Sarah looked around her room, mentally deciding which things she could not bear to leave behind and which she could live without. She marched downstairs and opened the drawer where her mother kept used plastic bags and pulled out a handful, stuffing them into her trouser pockets before returning to her room, slamming the door shut behind her.
Before long there were piles of clothes, toys and books on the floor. Sarah immediately disregarded any clothes she could not pull on top of her thin t-shirt and added an extra long-sleeved top and two jumpers for good measure. Reaching under her bed, she pulled out a jumbled pile of shoes and seeing a pair of pink sandals with flowers on the side paused for a moment, unsure what to do. The sandals had been bought for her by her mother on a happier day, despite being "not suitable for school" and "bad for your feet". Torn with indecision, she remembered opening the surprise gift and hugging her mother like she could never stop. Her face hardened. The shoes could go. She found her sturdiest pair of little black boots and put them on, lacing them tightly. Into one of the bags went several handfuls of books. Another was filled with a selection of stuffed toys and a small, old pillowcase Sarah refused to leave the house without. A third bag was stuffed with a selection of miscellaneous items - a hair brush, some paper and drawing pencils and the hand mirror, retrieved from the bed where she had dropped it.
Sarah knew if she spent too long thinking about it she would change her mind so she put on her coat and fastened its stiff, black toggles before picking up her bags with some difficulty and heading out of the door for what she planned would be the last time. She took the stairs with more speed than care, her bags chipping away at the peeling paint on the walls. She did not look behind her as the door slammed shut, plunging Sarah into the crisp summer evening.
Marjorie didn’t notice, at first, that Sarah was missing. It wasn’t until it was time for her daughter’s favourite television programme that she decided it was time to have a word with her youngest, most turbulent child.
She knocked gently on Sarah’s bedroom door.
“Sarah?” she said.
Then again, louder.
“Sarah? I hope you’re not sulking in there. You know you’re not supposed to touch the oven when the red light is on.”
She paused – still no answer.
“Okay, I’m coming in.”
She was greeted by the site of Sarah’s room, uncharacteristically messy, heaps of her belongings strewn all over the floor.
About to raise her voice and scold the nine-year-old, she realized that Sarah was nowhere to be seen. And started to panic.
It was starting to get cold in the woods at the end of Hawthorn Avenue. Sarah had initially planned to go further but decided she would spend her first night in what she and her sister, Hannah, had christened the Goblin Forest by the murky pool.
It had been a struggle getting the bags even this far, and Sarah’s little fingers were sore where the bag handles had pressed down on her hands. The woods were almost silent, as the moon began to rise in the sky, but not quite. She started as she heard a rustle behind her – the wind blowing through the trees.
“I’m not afraid,” she said aloud but the tremulous timbre of her small voice, echoing in the dark, suggested otherwise. She decided to read, fishing through her bags for her current favourite book, the Magic Faraway Tree, but when she got it out it was too dark to make out the words. Her torch was still on top of the cupboard in the bedroom, where she had left it.
“Never mind,” she continued talking to herself, “I’ll sing instead. Mum always tells me I talk and sing too much. But I like it.”
But she remained silent. It was as if the trees, moving and sighing gently with the breeze, were singing to her. She remembered Hannah telling her about the Ents from The Lord of the Rings, trees who were really people. She looked up at the towering oaks and firs above her. Would these be good, friendly Ents? Or the ones who had gone a bit “wild”?
Marjorie had looked in all the bedrooms, the music room, the tree house at the bottom of the garden, even Jim’s locked tool shed but there was no sign.
“Should I call the police?” she fretted to her husband, “What if she’s been taken by a stranger? Or been hit by a car? Or..”
Jim interrupted: “Sarah knows not to talk to strangers. And I’m sure if she’d been hit by a car they would have contacted us. She’s probably just sulking somewhere.”
Marjorie paced back and forth.
“But I’ve looked everywhere. And she’s not there.”
A pause.
“I’m calling the police. It’s been over two hours now, from when I last talked to her.”
Marjorie walked over to the window, pulling back the curtain, and was just about to pick up the receiver when she saw something.
“Oh my God,” she exclaimed.
Sarah trudged across the lawn, her little black boots soaked through and the bottom of her trousers dripping with dew. She did not look up to meet her mother’s eyes, even as her parents enveloped her in a hug, not scolding, not saying anything, just holding her.
“I was cold,” she whispered.
“I know,” said her mum just as quietly, pressing her ever tighter to her bosom.
That was Sarah’s first bid for independence. Her second lasted rather more than two hours.
She was 14 at the time and constantly pushing for more freedom and had learned how to spin lies to her parents which would last just long enough for her to get her way. And there was a party she wanted to go to. A party in a nightclub in London, to which she had been invited by her “friend” James, who was much older than she was. A party which she knew she would not be allowed to attend.
“Goodbye,” she shouted blithely after her parents as she got into Stewart’s car, “I’ll see you later.”
She was expected back at 10pm after spending an evening with her friends but she usually stretched those curfews a little so it wasn’t until about 11.30pm that Marjorie and Jim started to get angry.
But it wasn’t until there was no answer on her mobile, and Stewart told Marjorie that he had parted company with Sarah at 2pm – nine and a half hours previously – that they began to worry.
Hannah, who was sitting upstairs with her nose in a book, could not shed any light on her sister’s whereabouts.
“I don’t know, Mum,” she said, “She’s probably with that James guy, you know, who you said she wasn’t allowed to spend time with on her own, and that’s why she hasn’t called.”
But Hannah didn’t have James’s number.
Marjorie and Jim ransacked their daughter’s room. And in it they found a small box containing some tiny white pills.
Marjorie burst back into Hannah’s room, brandishing the box.
“Do you know what these are?” she demanded.
“Back off, Mum, they’re not mine!”
Marjorie’s voice softened, “I know, darling. But…are they…Ecstasy? I mean, do you know? Would you recognize them?”
Hannah, who had never seen an illegal drug in her life but wasn’t about to admit it to her mother, blustered, saying she did not think they were drugs.
Time passed. Sarah still didn’t answer her mobile. At 1am, Marjorie and Jim called the police.
At around midday the following day, Sarah returned – in the company of two uniformed police officers, crying hot tears of rage, swearing furiously at her parents.
“All I did wrong was forget to phone you,” she choked, tears running down her cheeks, her face so red it looked like it would explode.
“Thanks to you, I’ve lost a friend forever. James will never speak to me again and I don’t blame him – how would you like it if police barged down your door looking for someone.”
Her voice cracked with emotion, her eyes were bloodshot, her hair a mess. But she was home – and safe.
Marjorie’s eyes filled with tears as she looked at her daughter’s tall, elegant, white silhouette. In her sleek white wedding dress, Sarah looked exquisite. But also, to Marjorie, fragile, like a wedding figure on a cake made out of spun sugar, she could be snapped in half with barely any effort.
Sarah was just 18. But when Marjorie was about to raise concerns about her age, she was reminded that she had been even younger when she had first walked down the aisle. Sarah was now an adult. But every bit as impetuous, emotional and rebellious as ever. Even if the life she had chosen was one of stability and fidelity, one look at her firey eyes belied the suggestion that she was “settling down”.
“I feel sick,” Sarah announced.
Marjorie snapped out of her reverie, remembering her role.
“That’s because I’ve laced you within an inch of your life in that corset,” she said.
“Here, eat this banana.”
Sarah accepted the fruit, slowly breaking it into pieces in her hands before eating each tiny piece slowly, contemplatively.
“Mum,” she whispered, “I’m scared.”
“Of what, dear?” Marjorie asked.
Sarah looked at the ceiling. Where to begin?
“That we’ll have babies and I’ll get fat and he won’t love me any more. That we won’t be able to have babies and he won’t love me any more. That my friends won’t talk to me because I’ll be an old married woman. That everything is going to change.”
“Well, you are right about one thing. Everything will change,” said Marjorie, “But that doesn’t have to be a bad thing. He fell in love with who you are – and that’s not going to change. And as for your friends abandoning you, don’t be ridiculous.”
She drew aside the curtain which separated mother and daughter from the rest of the chapel and beckoned Sarah to look through the gap.
”They’re all here for you. They love you. No one small thing is going to change that, not with real friends. And they’ll change, too, in different ways.”
Marjorie glanced at the clock.
“I think it’s nearly time,” she said.
Sarah took in a deep breath and closed her perfectly mascara-ed eyes for a moment.
“Are you ready?”
She nodded.
The familiar strains of the wedding march began in what seemed like a far off corner of the chapel. Marjorie took her daughter’s arm and led her towards the altar. To a new life. To independence.
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