Boon's Bookcase

Dark Chapter

by

Winnie M Li

Extract

They say events like this change your life forever. That your

life will never be the same as it was the day before it happened.

Or even two hours before it happened, when I stood waiting

for that bus out of Belfast, along the Falls Road to the west

of the city.

Is it melodramatic to think of life like that? Of a clean split

struck straight down the breadth of your existence, severing

your first twenty-nine years from all the years that come

after? I look across that gap now, an unexpected rift in the

contour of my life, and I long to shout across that ravine to

the younger me who stands on the opposite edge, oblivious to

what lies ahead. She is a distant speck. She seems lost from

my perspective, but in her mind she thinks she knows where

she’s going. There is a hiking guidebook in her hand and a

path that she is following: it will lead here, up this slope, and

then along the edge of a plateau to gain the higher ground

merging with the hills above the city. She does not know who

follows her. She is only thinking of the path ahead. But some

things she cannot anticipate.

I stand now on this side of the ravine, desperate to warn

my earlier self of the person trailing her, skulking from bush

to tree in her wake. Stop! I want to shout. It’s not worth it!

Just give up the trail and go home. But she wouldn’t listen

anyway. She’s too stubborn, too determined to hike this trail

on a day this crisp and clear. And now, it’s too late. She is

in isolated country, and even if she were to turn back, she

would inevitably encounter him, because he is behind her.

Watching her.

By now, she has traversed the slope and found the trail

that runs between a sunlit pasture and the steep incline of the

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glen. She pauses for a moment, breathing in the beauty of this

green track, the tree branches arching over the path, the bright

field that stretches to her left. She has escaped the city. This is

where the countryside really begins. It seems like a little bit

of heaven, for one last, peaceful moment. But she is perched

on the edge, and to her right, the ground plunges sharply into

the ravine.

The river below is a distant roar. The air up here smells of

manure and sun and warm grass, and lazy insects drift in the

filtered light beneath the trees. And then, glancing down the

wooded chasm to her right, she sees a figure coming up the

slope, trying to hide in the brush of the forest. Something skips

unnaturally in the beat of her heart. Only then, does she realize

she is being followed.

Now, years later, it is as if I am the one following my

earlier self. Haunting her every step, like some guardian

angel arrived too late. She parts the branches in front of her,

and I do it too, invisibly. She quickens her pace to lengthen

the distance between them, and I fall in step. She instinctively

knows she must reach the open ground before he catches her,

so she tries to cover the last few yards of the path as it clears

a ridge. With an invisible hand, I want to hold back the little

bastard, lock him into position like a rugby player, while

shouting to her to keep on going, to reach the meadow and

then abandon the trail, forget about the hike, just head straight

to the busy road and go home. But I am powerless to stop it.

Events must unfold as they already have.

The past is our past. So I am stranded here on this side

of the ravine, watching as he catches up to her. I don’t want

to see the rest of it. I have replayed it enough times already.

If I could just freeze it there – in that final moment, perched

between the sunlit pasture and the plunging abyss – then

everything would still be fine. Only then, it would not be

my life. It would be someone else’s pleasant stroll through

the Irish countryside on a spring afternoon. But my journey

turned out to be a little different.