Part 05
Penelope's remorse
This is a short Part that follows events between Rachel and her Aunt Penny before that final evening of the holiday.
[ voyeurism - exhibitionism - mental illness - woman on woman ]
There was dead calm in the chalet after Alex's departure. Neither niece nor aunt spoke for some minutes. Penelope's eyes were wide open, but unseeing. She appeared not to understand what had taken place. She looked down at her splayed knees s and pulled them closed with a snap of flesh on flesh.
That noise prompted Rachel to get up and go to shower off Alex's semen from her chest. Her mind churned endlessly over the events of the past few minutes, in a constantly repeating loop.
She dried herself unthinkingly, like an automaton. Her mind only returned to the matter in hand when she had to search for her dressing gown. She went outside the chalet and collected Aunt Penny's discarded clothes from the pathway.
Rachel dressed herself in jeans and a warm top. She was in two minds, whether to stay and bear the frustration of her thwarted plans, or leave. But where could she go? She thought of Aurelia, but her new friend could not possibly comprehend Rachel's mental turmoil. She would get no succour there.
She poured herself a strong dose of vodka and sat on the bed quietly, sipping at it and questioning in her mind over and over again, the causes of her aunt's insensitivity.
Penelope was sobering up and soon became overwhelmed with grief for a situation that she did not understand but for which she felt an inherited guilt.
She had got up and was sitting naked on an easy chair by the chalet window, looking at her niece. Rachel had her back to her, and was drinking from a glass. Rachel's hunched body posture told a detailed story of her unhappiness. Had they argued? Penelope could not ever remember them falling out before. A small voice at the back of her mind, not an alter ego but from a pooled reservoir of wisdom, urged caution in case the cause of Rachel's upset was something she didn't know about, and could not bear to hear.
She felt cold and she put on some warm clothing, chiding Penny in her absence for leaving her naked.
She walked round the bed to face her niece.
"Rachel, dear, what is the matter? Has somebody upset you? You can tell me."
Rachel was astonished at that question. She knew that her aunt could be absent-minded, but surely she could not possibly have forgotten a succession of events over several days? The more she wrangled with that conundrum, the more isolated she felt. At that moment she felt friendless and helpless. Her anger welled up again and she leapt up, facing her aunt.
"How dare you even ask that? How can you pretend that you don't know what's upset me? You've interfered in my life, filling me with your scandalous ideas of sex before marriage. You knew I was worried about losing my virginity. I had this one opportunity to get it out of the way.
You
even helped me prepare myself for it. Then you went and spoiled it with your drunken attempt to seduce Alex. You should be ashamed of yourself."
The words were fair, but this was perhaps not the right time to voice them. Even as she shouted in her exasperation, she knew that her words would hurt her aunt.
Penelope had often had to cope with her own ambivalent behaviour. Her lapses of memory worried her, although she understood the cause. It was the unanticipated consequences that harrowed her mind. But Penelope was a sexual being, no matter what frame of mind she was in. She guessed that it was sex that had caused the problem, but it had never been an issue for her. She had lost her virginity almost casually. It had been no big deal.
"Whatever it was, dear, it can't have been that bad. You'll get over it. You have the rest of your life ahead of you."
Hat lack of comprehension for Rachel's present feelings overwhelmed her niece. Rachel leapt up and, with eyes ablaze shouted, "Get over it? Get over what, your rampant sexuality or my lost opportunity to have sex with the man I love?"
Penelope was taken aback. She sensed her mind wanting to shift. She fought it.
"How can you love anyone you've only just met? Holiday romances are notorious for being a distraction from real life. The romance is unreal. You'll get over it and forget all about it in a very short time, once you get back home."
Rachel's face looked horrified, but it was simply her astonishment at her aunt's lack of understanding. She felt impelled to retaliate; to tell her aunt what she really thought.
"Sex is nothing to you because you're a whore. Grandad told me that. He told me not to let you influence me. But you have! Instead of me feeling bad about being a virgin, you've turned it into a crime. I rushed into it because of your pressure. I hate you. I wish you'd stayed away from our family!"
Those words were a crushing blow to Penelope. She had never been emotionally close to anyone until she got to know Rachel. She had set out to inspire her niece and to protect her. She had wanted only to build Rachel's awareness of predatory men, to provide a defence based on knowledge, against them.
Rachel continued to scream hateful words at her. She no longer listened to them, her mind reeling from mental trauma. Her heart beat faster as she withdrew herself from her niece's verbal onslaught. She felt her body tensing up under the immense strain of this oral attack which was reduced in her senses to a wall of noise and hatred. With Rachel's bitterness, the last hope for her in this world was turning its back on her.
She collapsed on the carpet, weeping copious tears. The dam of her emotions had burst and she now felt only utter grief and self-hatred.
Her Aunt Penny's reaction made Rachel pause in her tirade, then slump onto the bed, defeated. And thus they remained for an hour, the one rocking her curled up body on the floor, the other devoid of any emotion on the bed.
The need for the toilet forced Rachel out of her mental hibernation. She walked like a confused witness to a natural disaster, shell shocked at the ferocity of her earlier outburst. She came to her senses sitting on the toilet seat. When she returned to the bedroom, she went to kneel beside her aunt, to console her. She pulled Penelope's powerful body up into her arms and held her close. Her aunt felt like a giant to her pygmy body, such was her present lack of self-esteem.
They sat like that on the floor for hours. Penelope mumbled occasionally, then her body would shake gently as she wept tears of remorse, or devastation. Rachel sensed that her aunt had undergone some sort of transformation. Whatever mental frailties she had exhibited before, this felt like a far more serious development.
Rachel went over in her mind all that had happened. She came in time to the realisation that this holiday had been a mistake. She knew how Penelope detested the very notion of a holiday camp. So she decided that she must get her aunt away from there. She laid her aunt's head down on the floor and left the chalet in search of a public call box. The nearest was in Reception. She dialled '999' and told the respondent that her aunt had suffered a complete mental collapse and could not be moved.
Then she asked the night porter on Reception for a piece of paper and wrote a message for Alex, which she slipped folded in two under the criss-crossed ribbons of the residents' message board. On the outside of the paper she wrote Alex's name in big letters. She wrote inside only that there had been an emergency and that they had left the camp.
Occupants of nearby chalets were later awoken by the sound of a heavy vehicle and flashing blue lights that illuminated the chalet interiors through the large picture windows.
