Redemption aka A Conspiracy of Faith

29

With each hour that passed, her strength diminished. She had screamed at the top of her voice when the sound of the car died away, but each time she emptied her lungs, it became more difficult to fill them again. The weight of the boxes was simply too great. Gradually her breathing became more shallow.

She wriggled her right hand forward and scratched at the box in front of her face. The sound of her fingernails against the cardboard was enough to raise her spirits. She was not entirely helpless.

After some hours, the strength to scream was unequivocally gone. Now all she could do was try to stay alive.

Perhaps he would show mercy.

She recalled the feeling of suffocation all too vividly. The sense of panic and impotence, and in a way also relief. The experience was familiar to her-she had been through it a dozen times at least. The times her thoughtless giant of a father had pinned her to the floor when she was small and squeezed the air from her lungs.

“Try getting away now!” he used to say, laughing. To him it was just a game, yet she was always so frightened.

But she loved her father, and so she said nothing.

Then one day, he was gone. The game was over, though she felt no sense of relief. “He’s run off with some cow,” her mother told her. Her wonderful father had found another woman. Now he would cavort and frolic with other children.

When she first met her husband, she told everyone he reminded her of her father.

“That’s the last thing you want, Mia,” her mother had replied.

That was what she had said.

Now she had been trapped under the packing cases for some twenty-four hours, and she knew she was going to die.

She had heard his footsteps outside the door. He had stood listening and then gone away again.

You should have groaned, she thought to herself. Perhaps he would have come in and put an end to her misery.

Her left shoulder had stopped hurting. All feeling had gone from it, her arm, too. But her hip, which absorbed much of the weight, pained her dreadfully. She had sweated profusely during the first hours in this claustrophobic embrace, but even that had stopped. The only secretion of which she was now aware was the occasional seep of urine against her thigh.

And there she lay, in her own pee, trying to turn her body just an inch or so in order that the pressure against her right knee, on which the weight of the boxes had settled, could be shared by her thigh. In this she failed, and the sensation remained, like the time she broke her arm and could only scratch against the outside of her cast when it itched.

She thought of the days and the weeks when she and her husband had been happy together. In the beginning, when he had fallen at her feet and treated her just the way she wanted.

And now he was killing her, without feeling or hesitation.

How many times had he done this before? She didn’t know.

She knew nothing.

She was nothing.

Who will remember me when I am dead? she thought, and extended her fingers against her right arm, as though caressing her child. Benjamin won’t. He’s so small. My mother, of course. But in ten years, when she’s no longer with us? Who will remember me then? Besides the man who took my life? No one but him and perhaps Kenneth.

That was the worst thing, apart from having to die. It was what made her try to swallow in spite of the dryness inside her mouth. And it was what made her abdomen convulse with grief, though no tears came to her eyes.

In a few years she would be forgotten.

Her mobile rang a few times. Its vibrations in her back pocket gave her hope.

After the ringtone died away, she would lie for an hour or two listening for sounds outside the house. What if Kenneth was there? Had he sensed something was wrong? He must have done, surely? He had seen with his own eyes the state she had been in the last time they saw each other.

She slept for a short while, only to wake with a start, unable to feel her body. Her face was all that remained. She was reduced to a face. Dry nostrils, a recurring itch around the eyes blinking in the dim light. This was all that was left.

Then she realized that something had woken her. Was it Kenneth or something in a dream? She closed her eyes and listened intently. There was someone there.

She held her breath and listened again. It was Kenneth. She opened her mouth in a gasp. He was standing below the window at the front door, calling her name so the whole neighborhood could hear it. She felt a smile spread across her face and mustered all her strength for the final cry that would now save her. The cry for help that would prompt the soldier at her door into action.

She opened her mouth and screamed as loud as she could.

So silently that not even she could hear it.