SHORT STORY

EBONY EYES

Prologue

The mist and rain of the late autumn afternoon swirled in and out of the grave stones as a solitary figure walked towards the mound of a lately filled grave. She placed a single red rose on top of the dirt, then left the way she had come.

Another figure, its face hidden by a wide brimmed black hat, gazed out of a window, some distance away.

At the local hospital, a nurse went about her duties as usual.

Maggie returned home, from the funeral, to find the door to her cottage open. She went inside, removed her wet coat and, after hanging it up, opened the door to her study. Someone was sitting in her special chair; the one she sat in on cold winter evenings as she watched the dancing flames play back other winter evenings from another time.

The chair swung round. The left side of the face that greeted her sagged. Strands of limp black hair had been hurriedly arranged in an attempt to conceal the disfigurement. It was, Maggie thought, a useless attempt at concealment. The brown eyes, the left one of which drooped, were heavy lidded. A wide brimmed black hat, weighed down with moisture, clung to the woman’s head, like beached seaweed. The woman’s left arm dangled over the side of the chair.

Maggie recognized her immediately.

‘Carole?’

Carole Overton’s head moved stiffly as she spoke.

‘Maggie how nice to see you. Awful circumstances though, yes? I saw you place that single red rose on Colin’s grave. Now why you would do that, I wonder.  But I think we both know the answer don’t we?’

Maggie shook her head, ‘I’ve no idea what you’re talking about.’
'Really?'

Carol raised her right hand and used it to place her useless left hand on her lap. She then reached  behind her.

And placed the shotgun on her lap, with the barrels lying across her left arm.

Maggie gasped.

‘A lovely thing, in its way, isn’t it?’ said Carol.

Maggie watched, in disbelief, as Carole raised her right hand and “broke” the gun.

‘Loaded too, I see,’ Carole said. ‘Expecting unwanted visitors are we?’

‘Carole give me the gun!’ Maggie made a grab for it, but Carole pulled it away, and flicked the twin barrels into place against the stock.

‘Sorry, not ready to hand it over just yet. Now, don’t you want to know why I’m here?’

‘No. I just want you to leave.’

‘Sorry. No can do. You don’t get off that easily,’ said Carole, ‘now step back while I stand up. ‘

She pointed the gun at Maggie’s chest.

‘Step back now!’

‘Be careful,’ said Maggie, ‘Please that gun is…’

‘Loaded? Yes Maggie. I know.'

Carol moved closer to Maggie and gestured towards the chair with the gun, ‘Now sit!’

Maggie sat down.

Carole leaned against the kitchen table. She took two cartridges from the box that she’d placed there earlier.

‘I’ll just pop these into my pocket for later. Did you know that Colin taught me how to use a shotgun? He said all women should know how to use guns, just in case…’ Carole’s voice drifted off. She suddenly started humming to herself and pulled the gun close to her chest.

‘We have to take care of each other, now he’s gone, don’t we?’

Carole’s eyes glazed over and she looked away.

Maggie seized her chance. She swung the chair around and jumped from it. She started for the door but Carole was too quick for her.

‘Oh, no please. You can’t go yet. You haven’t told me what I want to know.’

Carole raised the gun.

‘Now be a good girl and sit back down!’

Maggie staggered backwards into the chair.

‘Well?’ said Carole.

‘Well what!’ said Maggie, her eyes not leaving the gun.

 ‘I want you to tell me about your relationship with my husband.’

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

‘Weldon hospital ring any bells?’

‘I was a junior nurse there but I…’

‘You were his nurse while he was a patient at Weldon hospital,’ said Carole, ‘so stop treating me like a moron. Did you really think I didn’t know?’

‘He was a very special patient wasn’t he?’ Carole continued, ‘and you - you were a very special nurse weren’t you?’

Carole place the gun barrel beneath Maggie’s chin and raised it. ‘Weren’t you?’

‘I may have nursed him. I nursed a lot of patients. It was a long time ago,’ said Maggie.

‘Oh come on!  Don’t insult me. I saw you there!’

'But I...'
Carole nudged the gun against Maggie's throat.

‘Nurses shouldn’t take advantage of people in their care. But you did just that! You took advantage of my husband's situation and then you took him from me. I’m afraid I can’t let you get away with that!’

Carole aimed the gun at different parts of Maggie’s body.

‘Let’s see now, head or heart? Hmm. Perhaps the heart. More fitting and far less messy. Don’t you agree?’ Her eyes narrowed.

‘Carole don’t! This is madness,’ said Maggie.
'Madness is as madness does my dear.' 

Maggie closed her eyes and saw herself in Weldon hospital, thirty years ago.

She had been a junior nurse back then and knew nothing of war injuries; of what shrapnel could do to the human body.

Colin Overton had been in Vietnam. He’d married Carol, at her insistence before his battalion was shipped out. He had only been in Vietnam for three months when a land mine ended his soldiering.

Three of his mates, guys he’d done basic training with, were blown apart in front of him. He was luckier, he was in one piece but badly injured.

He’d spent months in hospital and Maggie, who just happened to be on duty when he was brought on to her ward, was assigned to care for him. She changed the dressings daily, bathed him; did the personal things for him because he couldn’t. She also wiped the tears from his eyes when the indignity of his situation overwhelmed him.

Maggie remembered how Carol had behaved and looked, when she visited her husband. She would perch seductively, on a chair at the foot of the bed. Carole knew the effect she was having on her husband and she basked in the enjoyment of it. She would sit there, smoking one cigarette after another, until it was time to go. Then she would get up, creep her fingers along the bed, knowing exactly what she was doing, and make her way to the door. Once there she would turn, touch her fingers to her lips and blow her husband a kiss.

One day she came and simply took her husband home.

Back in the present Maggie realised Carole was staring at her.
'Enjoy the memories did you,' said Carole, 'God what did he ever see in you?'

‘Possibly something he didn’t see in you,’ Maggie said gently.

‘He was useless,’ Carole paused, choosing her words carefully, 'in every sense of the word.’

Maggie smiled. That wasn’t her recollection of Colin at all. She suddenly remembered a night, when, in the anonymity of her beachside cottage, they had found peace and comfort, in each other’s arms.  That was to be the first of many such nights. 
No, she thought, she hadn’t found him useless at all.

Sometime later Carol had suffered a stroke. It had affected the left side of her face and body. She never came to terms with what had happened to her and as a result she was temporarily confined to the psychiatric ward of Weldon hospital. Carol was pregnant at the time and her condition gradually worsened. When the baby arrived there was really only one choice.

‘I’ll take the baby and go up north, find a job. At least that way I’ll have a part of you,’ Maggie had told Colin at the time.

He hadn’t objected.

Maggie called the little girl Ebony. 
She never saw Colin again.

Maggie wondered if, given present circumstances, she would have done things differently, but deep down she knew the answer.

She was suddenly very tired.

‘Just tell me what you want to know Carole.’

‘You and my husband had a secret,’ said Carol, ‘and I want to know what it was!’

‘After the baby was born Colin and I decided…’ Maggie didn’t finish.

The door opened and a young woman came into the room. She had short, black, curly hair, and piercing brown eyes. She looked at Carole first and then at Maggie.

‘Mum?’

The full force of both barrels hit the young woman in the chest and she crumpled to the floor.

‘No!’ Maggie screamed and rushed over to the lifeless form. ‘Oh God! Carole what have you done.’

‘I think you’ll find she’s quite dead,’ Carole said, her voice cold and distant. ‘You took my husband. So it’s only fair that I take something from you.’

She walked over to where Maggie was leaning over the body of the dead woman. Carole knelt down, and looked into the lifeless face.

‘She doesn’t look a bit like you,’ she said, ‘the eyes and hair are all wrong. But I can see Colin in her - oh yes she’s definitely Colin’s daughter.’

Carole looked at the uniform the dead woman was wearing.
‘Do you know I think I’ve seen her somewhere. She looks sort of familiar.’

‘She was a psychiatric nurse at Weldon Hospital and she was your daughter,’ whispered Maggie.

Carol stood up, ‘Oh No, that can’t be right,’ she said, ‘they told me at the hospital that my little girl was stillborn.’

‘No,’ said Maggie, ‘your little girl wasn’t stillborn.’

‘Such lovely brown eyes. But they should have been blue.  Blue is such a lovely colour isn’t it?’ said Carole.

She smiled and taking two cartridges from her pocket, reloaded the shotgun.

She placed the shotgun in her mouth and pulled the trigger.