‘Martha’ by Sarah White
TW: This story contains themes of domestic abuse and coercive control.
They say that two men can keep a secret if one of them is dead. The same is not true of women.
When Martha first moved to the tiny village of Boswhidden, she was lonely. Isolation, she supposed, was the point.
It took a long while before she made any connections at all. There were infrequent trips to the post office, even fewer visits to the GP surgery, and twice-daily walks with Bessie on the common.
But it was a village, and people talk – whether you want them to or not. Martha went from ‘that woman who walks her dog’, to ‘Martha Ennis with the spaniel’, to ‘Martha and Bessie’.
It took months, but she made inroads. She said ‘hello’ to the GP receptionist, made small talk with the woman behind the post office counter and even asked the woman who drove the mobile fish and chip shop where she got her fish from.
The inroads were enough for people to notice when she lost a bit more weight, when she hurt her ankle, when she ducked her head without making eye contact for a week at a time. Nobody asked, but there was sympathy in their eyes and comfort delivered through a pat on her arm.
This was enough for the connections to start to take root, like poppies threading through paving stones to find the sun.
Martha’s home was the site of all the spite and bile that He had to offer. Outside, He mostly kept a lid on it, but it did occasionally leak out into the world.
A restraining hand on her wrist, held too tight for too long. A vicious comment about her body passed off as a joke. The obsession with time-keeping that kept her looking at her watch throughout any unscheduled conversation. Martha’s shame ran deep and wide.
Boswhidden folk started to notice.
‘If you ever need to talk…’ Joan the receptionist said one morning, after watching Martha check her watch for the third time.
Martha had needed to talk since the day after she got married. By the time she found the words, her voice was no longer hers and everything had shrunk to the size of a semi-detached suburban prison.
The internet had proved to be a marvellous thing if you could get access to it. Her trips to the library and the infinite source of information she found there had begun to show in her mild and infrequent rebellions. That was when the time-keeping rules were instigated and Martha had to stop browsing.
‘I need time to choose the book,’ she had protested. But he made her choose from a list of books that he’d approved. In and out now – lickety-split.
Martha did want to talk, but she’d kept all her words in for so long that when they came out they were sticky and slow. Delivered over time, separated by space.
Beth was on the common walking her dog, near Martha but not with her. Obviously. She was on the phone telling her friend how her cousin had taken too much insulin and had nearly died. Apparently, alcohol had masked the symptoms until it was nearly too late.
The queue in the post office took a while on Tuesday. Enough time for Emily to explain to her elderly mother exactly how easy insulin injections were.
‘Yes, mum – straight into the skin. You just pinch a bit of fat and stab it in, easy peasy.’
And there was that film that Alison had seen about a coroner. He was so overworked that he made mistakes, missed things. Nobody asked difficult questions and everyone held their nerve. The bus turned up before Martha heard how the film ended.
A few weeks later, a package arrived for Martha at the post office. Inside was an insulin pen. No note.
She had questions, of course. But a real prison could not be significantly worse than the one she was already in.
Three days later, Martha saw Beth on the common. Beth fussed Bessie and complained about the weather. She didn’t ask Martha anything else.
It took a while for it all to be over. On the other side there were good things. Bessie could take as long as she liked on the common. Martha chose her own books. And there were friendships, real ones that lasted and meant something.
There were things that were never said and things that were never asked. Some things just aren’t meant to be talked about.
Sarah White wrote this story in response to the prompt The Things They Couldn’t Know, as part of September’s Just Write! short story competition.
