Mate revealed

Ester's voice

The voice had started when Ester was seven. 

Colourful music had bubbled from the car radio, the sun was setting fire to the horizon before it fizzled out, and Air Con scrawled coolness over Ester’s skin.

Ester could still feel the sand between her toes, salt drying on the bottom of her jeans. 

The coast fell away as skyscrapers slowly rose ahead. 

Her mum looked over at her, her eyes soft, her smile gentle as she reached out a hand to smooth against Ester’s rosy cheeks. 

Everything about the gesture, the expression, told Ester that mother loved her, and that that was the thought Ester’s mum held in her head at that very moment.

And then as if someone had clicked their fingers. The world changed forever. 

Her mum’s eyes widened. 

She screamed. 

Glass smashed.

Colours and sounds tangled together like a Kaleidoscope. 

Ester’s neck jolted. Her chest hurt. 

The car was spinning, their limbs being flailing around like clothes in a washing machine. A song of smashes, crunches and thuds sounded as the car rolled over and over and over and over again. 

Ester’s head struggled to stay in place. 

The motion slowed. 

Darkness swept over her.

                                                                 *                     *                      *          

Suddenly Ester’s daze was perforated by a shriek. Her eyes struggled to open. A shriek again. Goosebumps peppered Ester’s arms. 

Get up. Someone commanded quietly. Now. Ester looked around for the voice and stopped.  Her mother in the seat next to her…

Eyes closed. Head hung forwards.

Still. 

Peaceful. 

The necklace at her throat was the only thing moving. The pendant hung forwards, slowly rocking back and forth. 

“Mum?” Her voice was small and frail.

Ester watched and it gradually slowed and suspended still. 

Silence.

“Mum?” Ester’s chest heaved. Panic began to blister her insides.

Breath Ester. The voice murmured again. Ester put her hands over her ears. You need to get up and get out of here. 

It was no use. She could still hear it. The panic was crawling up her throat now.

“Mum!” Smoke rolled over the bonnet. 

Her mother’s skin was dappled in red. Her eyelids purple. Silver streaks laced through her chocolate curls. The glow of the fire made it shine lightly. 

In a moment, she would crack open her eyes and everything would be ok, Ester thought. 

“Please mum, wake up!”

Cries and screams littered the world outside the car. Ester wretched. 

Leave Ester. Now!

A wail of a siren in the distance punctuated Ester’s own despair. 

The panic was rising again. White spots dappled Ester’s vision. 

Get out of here now. Unclip your belt. Slip through the door window. 

But before she could get her limbs to listen, she was being dragged through the door backwards. 

Her mother was being left behind. Cloaked in smoke, almost invisible.

She was being held against a warm chest. Ester buried herself into the woman’s jumper. The smell of lavender replacing the smell of fire. Ester would never be able to stomach the smell of lavender again. 

The lady had hummed a tune Ester didn’t know. The notes vibrating against her face as

she’d tucked her head under the woman’s chin. She squeezed her eyes closed, but the image of her mother was there, waiting, branded onto her insides of her eyelids. This too would haunt Ester for the rest of her life. 

The sky was cobwedded, and drizzle began to fall indolently.

Hours later, when Ester was taken away from the woman who’d rescued her, Ester would look at woman’s jumper which, once grey, was now mottled in blood and tears. The woman’s blue eyes gleamed back at her, lips spread in an agonised smile. She brushed Ester’s rosy cheek. Something her mother had done just hours before. 

By the time her father got there, puddles lined the road, blue lights dancing across their surfaces. 

His face was red, drawn tight and aged since she’d seen him that morning. He’d spun her in a circle before they’d left, her delighted squeal echoing in her head. Those happy moments now felt foreign, like a language she would forget how to use, or wouldn’t need anymore. 

Fresh tears burst from her as he picked her up now. She felt his tears on her own cheeks. 

The months that stretch on from this piece of her life were grey and hollow. The house was silence. The people in it were trying to abate the sadness but realising that was never going to happen. Instead their resilience would have to stretch around their sadness and hold it for them. 

Slowly they stitched each other back together, just. But Ester was changed forever. 

About 6 months later, Ester told her father about the voice. The doctor had said it was Schizophrenia, which had been brought on as a form of PTSD. 

The tablets they’d given her hadn’t worked. And after the fourth different pill, she’d stopped telling them they weren’t stopping her. 

Penny began building her walls around Ester slowly, and helping Ester build walls within herself, to block herout, to block out the voice. Penny was the only one who knew that Ester still heard the voice. 

But there were things that Ester hadn’t even told Penny. 

Once she’d spilt a pan of boiling water down her leg. Her cry had split the silence into two. Her leg erupted in agony. Tears rolled down her face. 

Her pyjama bottoms had suck to her like a second skin. She’d peeled them off, but with it, came the top layer of skin. 

Ester had dragged herself upstairs on her bottom, to the bathroom. Plug in, she filled it with cold water as quickly as she could. But before she submerged herself, she realised the pain had stopped. She’d looked down, and her leg was unmarked, if a little pink like freshly healed skin. Gingerly, she’d run her hand over it. Nothing. 

But when she got downstairs, her pyjama bottoms were still there, with what looked like her skin stuff to the inside. Ester threw them in the bin, telling self it was all just in her head. Ignoring the part of her brain trying to argue against it. 

Another time it had been different. 

Ester had just lost her first patient on her ward: Mrs McEvoy, an elderly lady. Her middle-aged daughter, Kate, brought cakes to the ward every other day. Mrs McEvoy had been so tenacious through her treatment, and kindness was sewn into her being just as her sensory receptors were. She’d held Kate whilst she cried on her that evening. It was late by the time she left work, she’d missed her last bus home. It began to rain, and Ester realise she’d forgotten her umbellar. And just as her resolve was wearing thin, trembling at just trying to stay intact, a car had sped past, hurling a wave of water over Ester. 

Her resolve snapped. 

She screamed and kicked the closest thing to her: a bench. Pain exploded in her foot.

“f**k” she howled. 

She flexed her toes and shuffled backward. The colour drained from her face. 

The bench now sat sideways. 

Disbelief riddled through her. She couldn’t have done that! Checking the street around her was dead, she hobbled home as fast as she could. Ester had chanted to herself that it wasn’t her fault, that it hadn’t happened, that it was like that before. Some part of this was not true, her mind had once again fabricated it. That was the only explanation. It was her disorder. 

For the next two weeks she’d gone passed the bench on her way to work, everyday averting her eyes from the bench – not baring to look at her own mind’s fallacy. 

But sometimes, some months Ester would go a whole month, maybe even two, without something odd or unexplained happening. Well, it wasn’t unexplainable, it was her mind struggling with the past. In those months when that part of her couldn’t get through, she almost felt normal. Almost felt like one of the family.

Yet, it still would seep through the cracks in her wall, reminding her that she wasn't. Reminding her she was alone. Reminding her she was stuck this way, forever.