Dearest potential reader,
Thanks for clicking on this. There's a long build up before any sexy scenes, so might not be for you if you're looking for something immediate. If you do stick with it, see if you can spot which Literotica stories inspired me to write this.
Trigger warning: Eating disorders and self-harm feature.
Many thanks to Mykymyk2, and to
Nellymcboatface
for her feedback and suggestions (go and read her stories). All remaining flaws and errors are entirely my own fault.
All characters involved in sex scenes are over 18.
Happy reading.
T x
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April 2007
Memory is tricky.
Scrabbling back in my mind, I cannot find a time when she wasn't there. But there must have been a first time we met. There must have. Was it the first day of primary school? Or did we already know each other from some playgroup, or the park?
There's nobody I can ask. My father wouldn't have a clue. My mother would have known, probably, but although I speak to her occasionally, she never replies. My memories of her are even less trustworthy anyhow.
But in the fading photographs of my memory MarĂa is always there. Not Maria, but MarĂa.
"No," she said (When did she say this? Was it even to me?), "not Mah-reah. Mah-REE-ah."
"Mah-REE-ah."
"SĂ, yes, asĂ."
She was bold. She was old. September 2nd, to my August 29th. Nearly a whole year older than me.
Did we always sit next to each other? Did the teacher - Miss Woods? Or was it Miss Price? - engineer it: oldest and youngest, tallest and shortest, black and blonde, native speaker and non-native speaker? Or was it an accident? Or did we not always sit next to each other until much later?
Regardless of their motives, in my memory she was always there. Always. Until she wasn't.
MarĂa. My dusky-skinned negative. My best friend. My sister.
She was there in the playground, singing "children of the sun, know your time has just begun", playing at being Esteban and his companions, mangling and inventing the half-heard lyrics. She was there throughout the hideous hatefulness of Tamsin Green, all spit and spite, MarĂa my shield and defender. She was there at break times, sharing the delicious food her mother made for her merienda.
She was there for me when my mother was sick. Her mother picking us both up and taking us to my house, where her mother would cook and clean, both my parents at the hospital. Sleepovers at her tiny flat, dinner always served so decadently late, the two of us cramming into her bed afterwards.
She was there at the wedding and there at the graveside, holding my hand both times.
(I know I'm wrong, I know it can't have been this way around, but in my head the wedding always comes before the funeral, chronologically speaking. Like me, my memory is messed up.
But it wasn't that way round. The cancer took my mother 14 months before my father married MarĂa's mother. I finally found those records: my mother Jude Michaels died on April 21st 1985. That was the year she was thirty. On Saturday 20th June, 1986, the year he was thirty-one, Richard Smith married MarĂa Teresa Matero OrtĂz.
That was a shock, finding that. I'd only ever heard my father call my stepmum Maite, and my stepsister MarĂa's name at school was MarĂa GarcĂa. All those years I'd been searching for MarĂa GarcĂa and Maite GarcĂa. It turns out my stepmother had never been called that at all: it never dawned on me that Maite was a contraction of MarĂa Teresa. How little we truly know about those closest to us.)
She was there in the other bed in the room us girls shared, even as teens, or sometimes my bed when the nightmares came, or just because we felt like sharing. She was there, tussling in the waves on family holidays at Camber Sands. She was there by my side on our two trips to Madrid, clutching my hand with glee as the aeroplane landed, gawping, mouths open wide as the Chulapas danced at San Isidro, giggling as we smeared our fingers and faces with the thick chocolate we dunked our churros in.
She was there to brush the tangles out of my hair. She was there every Christmas, smiling alongside me as we ripped open presents from Father Christmas and Los Reyes Magos, nibbling on crumbly polvorones and home-made mince pies. She was there every Easter, searching for eggs in the garden and cramming our mouths with rosquillas.
She was there on that first day at secondary school, standing straight and letting me clutch her arm. She was there, bored, whispering the answers to me in Spanish lessons. She was there to help me fight my way through the maze of Maths, with fractions my most implacable foe.
(And was I there for her? Did I ever help her in the same way? When I started searching for her in earnest it gnawed at me that maybe I wasn't, that I wasn't as giving, wasn't as generous with my time, my affection. My therapists have always told me to be kinder to myself, but if MarĂa is my yardstick, I've never measured up well. Measuring up has always been a problem for me.)
She was there, looking on with fierce disapproval, when Jamie Bradfield asked me out. She was there to wrap her arms around me as I sobbed when he dumped me three weeks later for being frigid. He swapped me for Jenny Owens, who rumour had it has already lost her virginity by twelve.
She was there in the mornings. She was there in the evenings. She was my kind constant.
And she was there the time in 1991 she shouldn't have been.
With the shock of it all, I can't remember why she was there at my dad's office that afternoon. Did I ever know? Did she ever tell me?
Regardless, she was there. She caught my dad
in flagrante delicto
, as they say, with his secretary. Oh the cliché.
I wonder now if she'd thought it through, what happened next. Had she considered the consequences? Had she weighed up what it would mean for me, for her, for us? She was always impulsive, always going too quickly on her bike, always sporting some graze or bruise, her words as fast as her feet.
I begged her not to tell her mum. Then I begged her mum not to leave. Then I begged to go with them.
But Maite's mother was ill. So they moved to Madrid and I was marooned in Marylebone, the heart of me ripped out.
My memory is fuzzy, but not where I'd welcome it. Not where softened edges and uncertainty would be a blessing. I remember every word rage ripped from me as they left, every name I called them, every false accusation of not-loving me, not-caring about me, of selfishness, thoughtlessness that I levelled at them.
"I hate you! You bitch! ÂĄPuta! You ruined everything!" I can remember screaming that, at both of them. But my eyes were on MarĂa. I remember knowing it to be false, unfair, untrue, but screaming it nonetheless. When I am feeling kinder towards myself, I tell myself that the red-face I saw in the front hall mirror that day was due to shame rather than anger.
Of course the true target of my anger wasn't there. Coward that he was, my father was out when they left. So he wasn't there to pick me up and comfort me when my wild wrath turned to grief as keen as a knife. He wasn't there, and neither were they, when I pleaded for them to come back, when I pleaded for them to forgive me, when I pleaded for her to make me whole again.
He never heard. They never heard. She never heard.
I tore up all her photos. Didn't feel too clever. Spent the whole of the following Sunday sticking them together.
I had an address for her, a phone number even, but I was too angry, too ashamed, too hurt to use it.
Without MarĂa there, I became a shell, a ghost, my core hollowed out. My new step-mother, that same slutty-secretary, never really tried. I was packed off to boarding school to make room for my new half-siblings that could never and would never take MarĂa's place.
I sharpened the blade of my pain against my soul, and, naturally, I ended up cutting myself.
Without my stronger, older, better half, I fell prey to any who would show me fleeting affection. I opened my mouth, opened my legs and welcomed the pain the brief fucks brought: anything to fill the gaping chasm inside me. Anything to just feel something. Being the school bike was marginally more socially acceptable than self-harm.
Seeking a salve for my splintered soul, I enslaved myself to Tabitha Warrington and her acolytes. In their toxic pursuit of heroin chic they taught me the purest way of self-harming. I was their guinea pig, their test balloon. At their urging, I tried all the tricks for avoiding and voiding meals, tried every emetic, every laxative, learned how to sew weights into my pyjamas and drink pints of water when the matron weighed me.
Anything that seemed to work, they adopted: anything that damaged me too much, they skipped, like so many meals. We complimented our xylophone rib cages, and helped fake each other's periods when they stopped coming completely.
Only when listening to music could I find some escape, some semblance of feeling. I Played Dead. I was Doll Parts. I Stretched On Your Grave. I was a very, very Stupid Girl.
My dad divorced and moved to the Gulf. I never even met stepmother number three.
It was my grandmother, my mother's mother, who finally spotted my spiralling weight and intervened. I was living with her at half-terms at that point, rather than just visiting occasionally. She saw, she realised, she acted.
It was my first therapist, Grace, that found the jagged edges of the hole MarĂa's loss had torn in me hiding beneath the layers of self-harm and self-loathing. It was Grace who first encouraged me to try to find her.
"But what if she doesn't want to see me?" I'd sobbed during our fifth session.
"With everything you've told me about her, I doubt that's the case." Grace had been kind, patient, but hadn't been able to quell my fears. "Besides, I bet she's missed you."
"Then why has she never tried to contact me?"
"Maybe, she's worried about the same thing? Maybe she's worried you're still angry?"
And I was. I was still furious. But that didn't mean Grace wasn't right.
So I tried.
Lo siento, este nĂșmero no existe.
There was no reply to my letters either.
As a fragile, anorexic seventeen year old, there wasn't a lot I could do. My dad was no help. He couldn't find or remember the address of MarĂa's grandparents, whom we'd visited twice. GarcĂa is the most popular surname in Spain. The solicitor who'd handled their divorce had retired and moved to, of all places, Spain, and couldn't be contacted. It was 1996: the internet was in its infancy.
