[ Wood and Nails ]

AUTHOR: Isabelle Kennedy

FEEDBACK: [email protected]

WEBPAGE: http://www.geocities.com/retroeighties

CATEGORY: Sam POV

SPOILERS: General

RATING: R (Language)

DISCLAIMER: All characters are the property of the BBC, Brown & related companies. No copyright infringement intended. Summary courtesy of Tori Amos. Archive anywhere; just drop me a line first.

SUMMARY: “Looking for a saviour/Beneath these dirty sheets/I've been raising up my hands/Drive another nail in/Just what god needs/One more victim.”

Her world is made up of letters and words and sentences that, together, form the story of her life.

After all these years, she still writes to her father. Scribbled notes on envelope backs, old scraps of paper that she's careful not to let anyone else see.

He was the one who first introduced her to the intricacies of language, in all its forms. Instead of reading bedtime stories, he read to her from novels, newspapers and even dictionaries. She wonders if her mother knew that, rather than Beatrix Potter, she learnt about politics, about Nixon and strikes, about censorship and Solzhenitsyn.

He talked to her like an adult, even when she wasn't, and taught her about words, about life. When she was three, he read to her about government and Thatcher, when she was eight, about religion and Iran and when she was ten, he read to her about war and the Falklands.

He taught her how to write, how to shape words, how to articulate her thoughts and, most importantly, how to convince.

From the age of eleven, she wrote to him. At first, they were short notes in an uncertain hand, but as she grew up, they became letters, longer and more elegant. When she was fifteen, he taught her how to argue (unintentionally, in the beginning) and then, how to debate, the art of rhetoric. He showed her the power of words and, even now, she remembers them.

When she was eighteen, she went to university and (because of him, she thinks) she studied law.

The hardest thing about his illness, she reflects now, was the deterioration. He couldn't talk to her like before, wasn't able to teach her anything. Instead, she sat by his bedside and read to him. She spoke about politics and the death of a good man, about hope and South Africa, then later about bleakness and murder.

He was the one who taught her that words can move the earth.

But, after he died, they lost their meaning.

So, instead, she became a medical student. Now she moves the earth with her hands, rather than her words. The results are physical, tangible, but (and it sounds bad) saving someone's life doesn't give her the overwhelming satisfaction that she gets from crafting eloquent phrases, from the words magically falling into place. And now, because she doesn't bother with the niceties of language, can't afford to waste time composing the most elegant sentence, she sounds cold and hard. She knows that people think she's a bitch and, most of the time, she agrees.

Instead of using words to reveal the truth, she uses them to conceal the lies. She says: I'm sorry, they didn't suffer, when she wants to scream, to tell them that they died in blood and agony. At first, she thought she could construct a graceful death-notice, but now she knows that you can't disguise bad news with rhetoric and oratory.

She found that, at night, underneath someone, words don't matter. In the darkness, with someone's hands on her stomach, between her thighs, it's what she does, not what she says, that counts. And, when it does matter, she doesn't know what to say. She was taught that words were truth, but, eventually (like work) she says what they expect because it's easier than cutting them down with a well-turned phrase.

Now, she says I love you when she means fuck you.

Then, she thinks about him.

They've never been very good at saying the words. She fell into bed with him the first time (people think that she's a whore, but it's not like that) and he barely knew her name. But she didn't care, it was better that way, she wasn't ever going to see him again. Except it wasn't and she did. The New Year led her into this unending thing, into a swirling eddy of despair (then she laughs at her pretentiousness, at the twenty-year-old law student inside her).

She knew she was wrong, but for the first time since her father died, she was afraid of losing someone.

But she realised that, ultimately, she would. Yet, in the beginning, she couldn't tell him the truth. Instead, she crafted clichéd words of comfort and ambiguous phrases (not lies) to conceal it. And she lived with it, with her guilt and fear, until she had no choice but to tell him. When she did, it wasn't carefully constructed, but blurted, ugly and destructive.

It was the first time that she truly thought that a lie was preferable to the truth.

She doesn't want to talk, to shape words anymore, for everything to hinge upon what he says or she says. It's too much. But words are part of her, part of her life and she can't imagine not having the power to move the earth.

Because, after all these years, she still writes to her father.

End.