Claustrophobia Read Online Free Page A

You are afraid to face those feelings, and you are making excuses – as if I would ever expose you, ever put you at risk.
    It went on and on like that, for pages, out of control, as if it were some kind of brainstorming exercise, or an elaborate note he’d written to himself. Pen had never seen anything like it – certainly Derrick had never spoken or written to her that way. It didn’t even sound particularly like him – it sounded like play-acting, poetic posturing.
    Brightness and bane … If it were not in his own handwriting, nothing would have convinced her that Derrick had composed it. Let alone actually sent it. It embarrassed her.
    Then she saw her own name, spread out in full on the fourth page.
    I told you I had met a girl my own age, Penelope, now you know her name. You must either answer me or I will go ahead and marry her – yes, despite you, because you show no compassion, no guilt – and then you will pay, you will come to regret what you have given up, what we could have had – it will be too late, do you understand?
    If I don’t hear from you by the end of the month, I will go ahead. Yes, this is an ultimatum.
    Pen dropped the letter to the floor as if it were on fire, or toxic, contaminated. She stood up and stared down at it. All those years sitting there on some shelf – and he had kept it! – waiting to pounce at her with that long name only her mother used, to ridicule everything she had counted upon.
    Eavesdroppers never hear good of themselves . Her mother as a set of accusatory phrases, a voice in her ear. Derrick as a letter, a poison pen, cancelling in one stroke the entire story Pen had written, in her head, of their life together.
    Had Pen been nothing to him then but a way of forcing the issue? I will go ahead and marry her … and then you will pay .
    She walked across to the study window, sliding back the rickety glass pane to get some cold air on her face, her fingers dampened by powdery black mould that had settled in the groove where the frame met the sill. Pen shuddered. The brilliant pink of the bougainvillea outside hurt her eyes. It was almost blocking the view now, and she’d have to cut it back.
    Pen laughed suddenly at the absurdity – as if everything could go on in its mundane way. Garden jobs and renovations, dinner, washing-up – all part of a practised routine that held her together, in the same way that necessity had held both Pen and her mother together, after her father had left.
    If she confronted Derrick – and he would be home soon, so she must decide either way – where would it lead? What could he possibly have to say?
    â€˜I’m sorry, our entire life together has been based on a lie …’?
    A showdown. An ultimatum – that was what he had written. Pen could hardly impose one herself, a whole decade later. But the enormity of it. The vital piece of information she hadn’t even known was missing. The staff at school had a phrase – ‘La-La Land’, they said, for anyone who wasn’t with it . Pen had been living in La-La Land.
    She put on a thick jacket, went outside to the shed, and found the secateurs. That wasn’t hard – Derrick always put things back where they belonged. Good, reliable Derrick. Surely not the weak-minded author of that pleading letter?He kept the shed almost orderly enough to live in, a kind of shadow of the main house.
    Pen headed for the bougainvillea. She waded through clumps of grass and plumbago to hack at the papery pink-and-green monster all afternoon, cutting it back till the window was clear and the immodest plant finally reduced to reasonable proportions. It was always easier to process things if your hands were busy.
    But there really weren’t that many options to process. Whatever Derrick might say to cover it up – if she showed him the letter, if she screamed at him, if she hammered him with her fists, if she lost it ,