The Video Diaries of a Slave Girl Part One (I)
an excerpt

He could remember the joyful summers spent in that hammock. He could remember oh so vividly the moment Beatrice went into labour, tumbling to the ground and screaming for him, her alpha male husband their to protect, honour and obey at all times. He could remember coming home from work to find Beatrice lying in the hammock, their tiny son next to her, his lips puckered and his fists clenched as both slept on, somehow incomplete without him there too. He could remember watching Charlie take his first steps down the lawn as both lay together in that precious hammock, laughing at something Beatrice had said and cuddling each other, kissing occasionally. He could remember dozy summer afternoons spent reading a book or his latest case notes in the hammock as Beatrice hung out the washing – the billowing sheets and tiny socks – Charlie playing underneath him, digging up stones and snail shells and caterpillars, old bits of pottery that daddy HAD to see. He could remember lying in the now sun faded, worn at the edges hammock, Charlie in his arms, reading him a bed time story as the world slowly faded around them, quietening and slowing imperceptibly. He could remember lying with Beatrice in his arms, making love in that hammock because Charlie had got into the habit of interrupting them whenever they tried in the house, walking slowly into the room, tears adorning his frail cheeks, begging his parents not to let the evil bed monster who was groaning and creaking away get him. He could remember coming out one night to find Beatrice in the hammock, snow falling around her, as she sobbed her heart out because she’d just suffered a miscarriage. He could remember the numb agony of holding her quietly in his arms, neither wearing more than a thin and revealing layer of pyjamas cloth, both as lost from the world as they were from each other. He could remember going there to cry when Beatrice died, could remember how he had spent several days just on that bloody hammock, clinging desperately to the material, as if somehow it would bring Beatrice back, until he could only ever remember her smelling of two things – the outdoor smells missed so much in modern life; freshly cut grass, bonfire smoke, pollen; and her special perfume, a mixture of musk and sickly sweet vanilla that followed her in a crowd and used to wrap itself so familiarly around Sean’s skin when he kissed her. He could remember, most vividly of all, the accident, when Beatrice screamed from the kitchen and he came running, to discover that she had sent Charlie out to the hammock to calm down, a familiar punishment when he became over excited and hurt himself somehow, and had been watching him when the hammock swung him over, so that he fell a sickening distance for a young chap like him. Sean could remember the blood staining its way through the brown soil which looked so innocent, as if it could never have killed his child, around Charlie’s head, which was so limp, his eyes shut peacefully, his body not responding to any of Sean’s desperate pleas for him to wake up.