Oubliette: A Gothic Tale

Memory is persistent in its machinations

I waited for you.

On that fateful day, I waited where you had told me to meet you, in front of Charing Cross station. The sky had a sickly green pallor to it, the bitter wind biting at my ankles and ribs, as I stood in my too-thin rose dress and my best apple-green hat. My traveling attire perhaps pre-empted spring’s arrival by a week or two, but I wanted the symbolism of new beginnings. Clutching my valise, I waited.

I waited through a downpour of chill, spiky rain and out the other side, into wan sunshine. I had no umbrella or coat. You had bid me pack sparingly. I waited, watching the bright-eyed couples parade by, wrapped in their adoration for each other, oblivious to the spiteful wind. Alone, I waited for you.

You have walked the many corridors of my heart, lingered in the sun-filled stairwells of my mind. You had a home there, inside me; anywhere you wished to go, I would allow you, my love. Everywhere my thoughts ran, there you were, smiling. Waiting. For me.

Yet on that day, I wore all the sweetest parts of me, full of promise like the spring morning I willed to bloom, clear and fresh for our departure, you weren’t waiting. You didn’t arrive.

All my letters to you over the following months, asking why, begging for an explanation, for reconciliation, went unanswered.

For the first few weeks, I willed myself to dress my hair and don my prettiest day gown each morning. Wearing the garnet earrings you gave me for our first anniversary, I would seat myself in the parlor, embroidery in my lap, waiting for your knock at the door. I imagined your voice, a gush of apologies, as you recounted some fantastically inconceivable, but ultimately forgivable, reason for your disappearance. Under the warmth of your entreaties, I could allow the frost of my hurt to thaw. The reconciliation would be so tender, your kisses, when I finally allowed them, heated with such fervor of sincerity.

But your knock never came. As the clock ticked on, I would stitch, sitting straight and neat as my needle, thinking when I’ve finished this border, or that rose, I’ll hear you arrive. The tips of my fingers would be quite pricked all over until sister would beg me to stop and take a little lunch with her.

I would swallow without tasting, staring absently at my blood on the white linen of my embroidery.

Slowly, through those long, hollow days, I withered. Your presence, once so vivid in my mind, became ghostlike, growing more insubstantial day by day, haunting me. Even as your image faded, your power over me grew. I could not carry your ghost inside me, and remain upright; drinking tea, putting on my gloves, exchanging pleasantries at the shops with strangers over the sweetness of this year’s plums. Mother says I am not well.

You had said you loved me, said that it didn’t matter to you where I came from, only how you felt when you were beside me. How you chafed against your family’s plans of engagement to a girl with a social pedigree as fine as your own. How you complained about the evenings you were forced to spend in her company over tedious formal dinners, insisting that your thoughts were only of when we should meet again.

You promised we would go away, away from London, someplace where we could simply be ourselves, with no one to pry or ask questions. A place that would be fertile ground for our love to flourish, you said.

Perhaps you never meant to choose me over her. Perhaps you never meant to choose me at all.

Memory is persistent in its machinations.

I replay the day of your disappearance from my life over and over again, reliving the pain. No, it’s not even that I choose to do so; the memories have assumed their own agency. I am helpless against their cyclical existence. The bleak reality of them, their unflinching adherence to facts, renders every other memory of you; of us, false.

I waited for you. You said you’d come. You didn’t.

What did you mean by it all, my love? I must stop calling you that. Mother says I am not well, and contrives to confine me indoors, insisting that the doctor give me stronger sedatives. Your absence pains me, like an inexplicable malady for which no physical cause can be found. Knowing that you are not dead, but simply, elsewhere; living out your days and nights, reading The Times, smoking your cigar, planning how you will court some other woman. Knowing that your absence is your choice is the thing I cannot bear.

I must learn how to forget you. Mother says I must. I must practice, in the way I would practice a new song upon the piano. But instead of teaching my fingers to play the right notes, the new melody, I must unlearn you. Unlearn the memory of the touch of your skin from my fingers, unlearn the particular rhythm and timbre of your voice. I must perfect my sonata of forgetting.

I shall design for you a deep dwelling-place, intricate in its power to hold you. Fill the chasm your absence ripped through me with the parts of you I cannot yet forget. Your hands, your eyes, your mouth especially; all I will incarcerate. Manacle the memory of you.

Stone by stone, I will obliterate you.

Plunging you down and down, the sound of your cries will be swallowed by the darkness. The dank walls anointed with all the tears I ever wept for you, keeping you safe. Touch your hands to them, my love, feel them dripping on your skin as you curl up to sleep; cold, forsaken. Their incessant falling, permeating your dreams, as my breaths, in soft sleep beside you, once did. My tears, the only sound you’ll hear now; falling, falling.

At first, I will still remember where I keep you. I’ll imagine you, itching round and round in circles.

Trapped in a prison with circular walls, Around and around and there isn’t a door

No door at all, my love. No door. And no key needed without a door; no key, and no keyhole to peek through. Can you imagine?

I will be your gaoler and your prison. Finally, I’ll have found a way to contain you, stop you seeping through my body, my memory, my dreams.

Now, I shall visit you only when I choose. Wearing my ebony crepe, and my black-veiled hat of mourning, I’ll kneel upon the stone floor, put my warm lips close to the cold grate of your cell, and speak of all that wracks me. Oh, the ways I shall unburden myself; you shall be my confessor, my unholy priest, hidden in your dark hole.

It won’t be my sins I shall speak of, but yours. Down they’ll all tumble, upon your bowed head, your bared back, barbed and treacherous. I’ll tell you all the things I no longer want to remember, my love. For I know you’ll keep my confessions safe.

You said you loved me.

I won’t remember the evening you took me dancing at Holburn. Won’t remember the surety of your hands upon my waist or the intensity in your dark eyes as you whirled me about the dance floor. I will my tongue to no longer recall the sweet delicacy of the strawberry ice we shared on the balcony, sweetening my intoxication from the champagne and your closeness.

We danced the Valse à Deux Temps as if we were one body, do you remember? And you told me of the ancient Greek myth — the original beings the Gods put on the earth with four arms, four legs, a head with two faces; they were male and female together. And that, with me, you felt you’d found your true other half. How I threw my head back and laughed, letting you pull me even closer to you, delirious with love, as around and around we glided. How I never wanted the night to end.

Do you remember, my love?

I won’t remember the nights with you, stolen nights, in secret rooms, far away from the places of your own frequenting, where you pulled me down onto the bed with you, wrapped me in your arms, and said you’d never let me go. I won’t remember my body yielding to you, my limbs melded to yours with desire. You called me your wild-haired siren, bid me open my eyes as we made love. You would not have me look away in modesty, or close my eyes. You said you wanted to see my eyes darken with the pleasure.

Do you remember? Do you regret, now, your betrayal of me?

I won’t remember the picnic in Covent Gardens, the tangy sweetness of grapes on my tongue as you fed them to me. Won’t remember drifting to sleep in the tender sun and waking, to find you had surrounded me with fresh-picked roses. Won’t remember opening my eyes to see you standing above me, letting petals fall all over me, before you fell upon me, too.

Ring a ring of roses, a pocket full of posies …

Your kisses were a language I believed only I could translate. Our stolen time together, the only time that mattered.

After I have confessed all, purged myself of you, I will still sometimes creep to the grate’s edge, like a child with a shameful secret that fills her with guilty glee and stand, looking down that foreboding vertical tunnel, upon you. I’ll throw you titbits of bread, and watch you eat them from the floor, knowing you will starve. Sooner or later. Sooner or later.

We all fall down …

Mother says I may have to go away somewhere, where I can completely rest. Somewhere they will keep me safe, and watch over me. I have not learned to take comfort again in the trivial exchange of pleasantries, nor to take pains over the latest fashion in gloves.

A certain gentleman has stopped calling upon me. I tell Mother I’m too busy unlearning you; it takes such a lot of effort. She found me fully clothed in the bath, raking at my fingertips with lye soap and the scrubbing brush for the kitchen floor, streaks of blood garish against the white enamel.

Forehead upon the dingy glass, I sit at the window seat, staring at my fingers, scabbed and marred, moving incessantly in my lap, playing across invisible piano keys. I’m working out how to play the melody of you in reverse. I’m working out how to unmake you. The doctors, the nurses, don’t understand how important my work is. At first, they let me play the piano in the yellow sitting room, thinking the playing of familiar songs would soothe me. But I played such discordant refrains, made such frenetic sounds, I upset the other patients.

Can’t they understand how sternly I must assault the keys, how pure the chaos must be if I am to unmake you?

I still haven’t erased the memory of your skin from my fingertips. I keep trying. Now I am forbidden to wash or bathe alone, given only soap, and no scrubbing implements.

Sister hasn’t visited in such a long time. Why can I not forget you as easily as the world forgets me?

They instruct me to fold up and put away my grief, neatly, like my spare nightgown. They insist it’s possible. They keep me mostly in a small room; a small bed, a small table. My life has shrunk. Except for you. They don’t know the magnitude of the hole I forged for you, inside me.

Memory is persistent in its machinations.

One day, someday, as Mother does now with me, I’ll only visit you out of guilt. Sporadically, as one does to a dying, distant relative. I’ll watch you withering, pity you, as if from a distance. As you gaze up at me, pleading, your cheeks hollowed out from hunger, your hair matted and coarse, I’ll sing to you:

Ring a ring of roses, We all fall down

One day, I’ll leave here.

You’ll become a memory locked inside the absence of one. You will become the final echo of a scream that can no longer be uttered. A dying breath.

I will myself to forget you. I will forget you. You will be forgotten.

Here, inside my oubliette, built with the force of my hate for you, my love for you. For you. Forgotten.

Oubliette.

© Melissa Coffey 2018 (Revised 2021)

Note: An oubliette was the name for a deep dungeon with no door and only an opening (trapdoor) at the top. It originates from the French word “oublier” which means “to forget”.

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