madeleine

When Madeleine Smiles

          We''ve only ever seen that smile once before.
          As you sit reading the letter we can see by the way the light hits the paper that it bears the council logo. You're as pale as a cabbage white; your eyes are two dark smudges of charcoal either side of your nose. They're so cold and hollow, your eyes, like burnt out cinders ready to crumble. You're reading the letter over again but this time there's a curious detachment, not the hurried skimming of disbelief. This time, instead of tipping it into the drawer, where you hastily confined its brothers, you mechanically tear the letter to tiny fluttering pieces and there's a smile bruising your lips.
          That smile. The dead one.

          It's not the smile you wore as a child, a child with straw-blonde pig tails. The silence you wear now, straight-jacket tight, is not the flowing chatter you once used. Telling us your thoughts and dreams, your fears and adorations. And that's where your story truly begins, isn't it? With your adorations.
          Of course you adored Mother. To you she was so beautiful. Like a god: all seeing, all knowing. But to us, Madeleine, you held the truest beauty, with your air of purity, and that uncorrupted sensitivity which, in the end, proved so fatally attractive.
          One passion both you and Mother shared were butterflies. Remember how delighted she was when you were old enough to take part in her "expeditions"? At first, you said, it had been a game. The flush of victory had been intoxicating as the nylon web captured Orange Tip and Peacock Blue. Swallow Tail was a rare prize. And the waltzer of the wind, you boasted, was no match for you. But then came The Jar and it wasn't a game any more.
          The murder of innocence was hard on you, wasn't it? Mother's smile became less wonderful, her eyes held a grey coolness you had never noticed before. And her lips were somehow sharper, thinner. Conscience emerged from the adolescent pupa and you, the daughter, the accomplice, felt betrayed, the betrayer. You began to smile less often. Eventually you wouldn't even look at us - but we knew you well. Hadn't we shared your horror, your virgin pain, the first time you tightened the lid over white cyanide cotton?
          In macabre fascination you would watch as the butterflies beat a furious mosaic against the thick glass of the killing jar. What, we wonder, drove you in your attempt to destroy the jar? Was it anger, pity? Guilt? Not that it matters - your effort had not even caused a crack, had only resulted in the whiplash of Mother's angry tongue.
"Don't you know how costly these jars are?" Mother had hissed.
          Oh yes - you knew well the cost of the killing jar.
          And, ultimately, years later on a soft summer afternoon, so would Mother.

          As you stared into the jar that day we remember your eyes. LIke water beneath an old bridge, dark and secret. Perhaps if Mother had not come into the kitchen at that particular moment then we wouldn't be speaking to you like this now. But she did, hardly noticing the atmosphere though it thrummed with all the danger of a cornered lion. Mother picked up the jar containing the Painted Lady, seeing the wings tremble slightly.
"This should be dead by now," she said icily. We watched your feet shuffle, the tide of blood ebb and flow through your cheeks. You rested your hand on your stomach in that unconscious way you do when your guts twist with shame, with fear. Only a god could be so cruel. "How many times do I have to tell you to put enough drops in and screw the damn lid on tight!" Mother frowned as she saw you suddenly fighting back the tears. She never could stand weakness, could she? Not in any form - and certainly not in her only child. "You're such a prat, Madeleine!" she proclaimed in that tone, the one that always reminded you of another day. One that was surely the bleakest of your life. The day that Father left you.

          He stole away in the middle of the night, didn't he? Took away his slurred,
          drunken words of poetry, his bellyache laugh, his conspiratorial eyes. Left
          you only with his cold, rigid flesh, his grey silence. "Took him long enough..."             Mother muttered, twitching a blanket over his face. She stood for several
          moments, staring down at him, and then turned quickly, too quickly to mask
          the distaste clearly written across her perfect face. "Oh do stop snivelling,
          Madeleine, don't be so pathetic..."

"I've told you they don't feel anything," Mother continued. "They're just insects for chrissakes, Madeleine. Don't be so pathetic - " She stopped. Did she sense the lion? She backed into the kitchen doorway, one foot seeking the garden path. "Anyway," she continued, "I've got a few more jobs to do in the greenhouse. Make sure you finish that properly," she said, indicating the jar. "And then bring it out, I've already got a frame set up." She disappeared up the garden path but you still caught her final words. "God that house is so dark and pokey. I'm definitely going to do something about it..."
                                                                                                             continued...

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