“Can you imagine a world without crippling insecurity, pain and bladesmith memories that sharpen their knives upon the bone?”

Dear Mum,

I love you.

“No planned, well devised, bordering meticulous schemes to destroy oneself?”

Dear Mum,

I hate you.

“No questions, no answers, rose petals in the place of blood?”

Dear Mum,

I’m sorry

“A world without ME?”

Dear Mum,

I love you.

“Do you think it would be a better place?”

“So we should all just be miserable. For the sake of the so-called spider?”

He approaches and crouches down before her – his long fingers entwine around the tip of his cane as his dark eyes gleam within the hollow shadows of his face.

“It depends on how you look at it,” he answers. There’s an undertone of mocking in the forlorn resonance of his words, in his voice coated in silk and sugar. With the tranquil stillness of a lily pond, he smiles the lazy, slow smile of a prince, of the insatiable wolf, of the devil courting.

They sit in silence for a while. She keeps her head down, he bores into her. She is thick, she is sloppy, she is a viscous blob of distilled meaning.

“You want me to die,” she whispers. She feels her throat tighten and close over the word die – that serrated, final word that can mean one of a million different things while thought, definition and meaning flap about inside her skull like bats with broken wings.

“Do I? I don’t recall telling you to die. I recall you wanting to die and, as always, I have offered my unflinching support. But, don t confuse things, Penelope. Death at the hands of oneself is the purest choice a person can make and, contrary to consensus, is totally detached from one’s afflictions. I am what you make of me.”

“I hate you.”

“No, you don’t,” he calmly asserts. “I only want what is best for you. I want you to be who you are.” He shoots his hand out and pinches her chin between his fingers. Locked in a struggle of submission and fear and a cloying need, their hard indent forces her eyes up to meet his. “And I am a part of who you are.”

Her self-destruction, draped across a chair and holding an empty bottle close to her chest as if it contains a love letter from captain Morgan himself, snores a resonating grumble from the depths of her gullet. Depression sneers over at her with searing contempt and with one giant swoop of his cane, bonks her on the head shouting: “GET UP! We’re leaving.” Suddenly the room leaps awake with feigned alacrity as the insidious glitter in the eyes of his flock is replaced by an embarrassed submission that never fails to surprise Penelope, the fire breathing dragons now doe-eyed and wheezy.

“Are you going?” she asks.

“Must, I’m afraid, got a meeting with a chap in Canary Warf. You know, there’s nothing like the newly bankrupt to keep me feeling young.”

“But I’ll be back tomorrow,” he coos and smiles down at her. It’s a warm smile, a tender smile, but a smile written in cypher that speaks of the interspersing paradox hidden beneath. “You will always be special to me, Penelope.”

After he leaves, she sits listening for the tender tweeting of a wagtail outside her window, the one she sees every morning. It probably isn’t the same one every morning, but she likes to believe it is – and has named it James Brown for its funny little wiggle. But delicate little birds are not accustomed to singing in the dark and are often replaced by the lonesome cawing of a distant fox. Delicate little birds that can shit on the head of an unsuspecting child, replaced by the ruthless fox, howling like a banshee, that was also the charming and irreverent Basil Brush from her childhood and teacher to the lost little prince.

Dear Mum,

I suppose things are not always what they seem and the things we see are like clouds in the sky, lured by shifting currents of air. The trees are bare. They have given the last of their bounty to the earth and remind me of emaciated orphans, naked and waiting. I can’t see the clouds, but I know they are there for the sky is black – thick and heavy, its velvet veil seems so impenetrable even the wind can’t billow its weight. I don’t think I’ll ever see through that sky. But then, as I sit in quiet submission to the vast desolation above and the good in me labours to breathe, suddenly the sky reveals an imperfection. Blown by a distant wind like the metamorphosing wind that pursues the caterpillar – that thick, imposing curtain becomes merely a gossamer wisp of smoke, unfurling before a lone star- or is it Venus? Was it always there? I’m not sure, it doesn’t matter I suppose, it’s there regardless. Perhaps if I hadn’t looked closely at the sky just now, I wouldn’t have noticed it at all- a hopeful wink amidst the waves of shifting darkness, there incomparable merely waiting for a wind to shine its shoes.