Church

Church

 

She knelt down so as to pray in an empty church smelling of its familiar incense. The church clock was going to strike twelve announcements of the Sunday noon. She wore black and white because it made her feel chic and smart, and she did pray because she was brought up in a village by a strict religious family. Nevertheless, she had never believed a single word whispered from her mouth in that church and she had skipped many masses and many Sunday strolls towards its open doors.

She pretty much detested her name, Gabrielle, which she thought sounded a bit male and made her facial contours rough and masculine. She put down her slim waist and rather strong, broad shoulders to that name, too. As any other woman living in the 21^st century, she had become slightly obsessed with her appearance, especially after turning 20. But on that Sunday noon, she forgot for a while about her imperfections, which she had been striving to change.

Gabrielle left her home, the village called Ditchling, when she was 18 because it was high time she were educated at some of the famous London colleges. Her family had decided for her to be a dentist or a lawyer, for they had associated a comfortable life with a vault of money. The last time she prayed in the Saint Margaret´s church was before her studies commenced. 5 years passed like rainy streaks through a gutter, and she returned home with a piece of paper announcing that Dr Gabrielle Bloomberry was allowed to drill and fill, extract and any-other-way-the-teeth treat.

She exhaled a gloomy, hazy cloud of air, as she rested her head against her clasped hands, and her knees on a pew. Familiar silence encompassed her, except for the cracking of the wooden furniture or feet shuffling of veterans and suffragettes, still trembling with terror, fervour and ageing.

Just yesterday Gabrielle was having a bath and smoked her last cigarette when a squeaking voice of her mum was being recorded on an answering machine. She was going to throw it out of the window, but then had never done so. Her mum would go bonkers if she could not leave her routine messages. The one Gabrielle overheard while squelching in the bath like puddles in the shoe, was a bit alarming:

“Gabrielle, you must come home immediately. I have an announcement to make. I am elated, dad is... oh well, you know him. He is, how to put it, he has had a heart attack, almost. Hmm, almost, not really. Don´t worry. Everything´s fine, except one thing, which I want to tell you in person. It´s Sunday tomorrow, I´m sure you can make it tomorrow. See you soon. And call me back once you have finished your bath and your last cigarette”.

            “She surely knows where all my birth marks are”, Gabrielle spitted out a bit of water and a rising bubble propelled by a languorous smoke reached an invisible peak, and then slid down into the final airy burst. Even the lightest objects on Earth will always be forced downwards by the gravitational force, and to prove it, she tipped ash into an ashtray.

            She was swaying a bit to soothe herself, and to brace herself for whatever was going to take her by surprise. It had been five years during which she sporadically visited her parents. She saw them in a pattern of three months for the first 3 years of studying, but it was reduced into twice a year. Not that she did not love her parents, and the insular village, she just grew tired of village rumours of the retired. Being observed like the Big Brother, like the third-eye-God-like presence was nothing she would relish. Since she was an only child, she was overwhelmed with care, but a kind of care resembling dictatorship. She wished to release herself from the net of commandments that guided even a wing she made with her long, dark, dense eyelashes. Being back home entangled her and made her as diminutive as microscopic bacteria poisoning her feelings that chafed her mind, which she freed and healed by keeping herself at bay.

            Amen. She wetted two fingers in the holy water for the Father, the Son, the Holy Spirit, and drew a cross from her forehead down to the sternum, from the left shoulder to the right. Turning around, she spotted her mum, who had always possessed an exquisite taste for fashion, wearing black and white standing next to a hunched and somewhat dismal dad. Their faces lit up with smiles, and the two waved at her to come out and give them a well-deserved hug. A twinge of non-definable feeling coursed through her body as she was walking towards them. While they were heading home, in the rhythm of kitchen cluster, in the smell of Sunday roasts, they got small talk out of the way. Her parents exchanging furtive glances kept her in suspense throughout lunch. Gabrielle was suffocating on the tension which was at long last released, like a massaged muscle, when she was delivering a piece of home-made-heavenly cake into the mouth.

            “Your dad is not very happy about it, like I told you. I did not, we did not, expect that I would get pregnant being 49 years old. But �" “.

            “Did you say pregnant?” Gabriella froze in motion.

            “Yes” her mum looked down on her hands rubbing gently one another, interlacing fingers.  

            Good news after all.

            She crunched on bitterness though.

            She sensed that they were concealing something from her. Nevertheless, she took it in her stride, and came to terms with the news. Their conversation seemed to exhaust itself, and they saw Gabrielle off leaving a qualm hanging in the air.

            A baby boy was born seven months later, and Gabrielle lived in a blissful ignorance till her mother´s death untied her father´s tongue. Her little brother was conceived in her mum´s affair.

            Gabrielle almost chocked on bitterness.