Regards

Chapter 1: Remorse
¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯
         She looked over the harbour, her eyes red from crying. A ferry was just leaving, no doubt bound for somewhere exotic. She wasn't religious and if she had believed in fate, she probably would have been wondering why she had been dealt such a lousy hand. But, as it was, she couldn't think at all. Her mind was blurred, full of half-memories and questions that should have been asked, that now, would never be answered. This, mixed with sudden realization, made her feel slightly nauseous and more than a little light-headed. She swayed slightly on the cliff and, subconsciously, came to the decision that it would probably be safer to sit down. She sat there, staring absently at the activity below, until the sun glowed red.
         She jerked out of her stupor, suddenly aware of how cold she was. She started shivering and turned to look at the cliff path behind her. It wound on and on until it got to the faint silhouette of the town. She turned back to wide expanse of water, wishing she could sail into the horizon. She closed her eyes and tried to forget everything that had happened in the last week, but it was impossible. She sighed and opened her eyes. She felt like crying but she had no tears left to cry. She felt drained and no longer angry or hurt. Just tired. She lay back on the soft earth and closed her eyes, all of a sudden, exhausted. She gradually sank into the welcome unconsciousness that real, true and overwhelming sleep brought.
         When she woke, it was dark and lights were illuminating the entire port in a sickly artificial light. She was dizzy and she had a headache. She put her hands down to push herself up and her fingers touched something hard and cold. She looked down and saw it was a necklace. She picked it up and examined it. It was a long chain, long enough for her to fit it over her head without having to undo it. A rock (she assumed it was a rock) hung from the end. It seemed to be shimmering. She looked at it closer and saw it had a sheen to it, like oil in water. It was shaped like a diamond and reflected the light of the street-lamps below. It swayed in a wind that just wasn't there. A faint white light was surrounding it and she could just make out buzzing, that was growing louder and louder.
         Suddenly, all the lights in the ferry port switched off. The sudden darkness took her by surprise and she dropped the necklace. She searched around for it but the lack of light made it difficult to see her even own fingers.
         Just as suddenly as the lights had gone off, they came on again. She looked around for the necklace but she couldn't find it anywhere. She thought maybe she had dropped it off the side of the cliff, but she was at least five feet away from the edge. Then, she felt a sudden cold against her chest. She looked down and saw the necklace was now draped around her neck, although she had no idea how it had got there. She held the stone up to her eye and examined it. She was curious, but couldn't work out what it could be. She got up and walked back to the cliff path. She couldn't explain it but she felt she didn't want to take it off. As if it wanted to be around her neck.
         She wandered slowly down the cliff, picking out the steps that had been carved into it's face, and onto the beach. She looked out at the sea, and could just make out the lights of some kind of boat. A tanker. As she looked at the horizon, she suddenly realized it was pitch black. She looked at her watch, but couldn't see anything. She hurried back up the cliff steps and onto the path that led back to town.
         As she approached the town, she found she could see her watch in the bright white light that was cast onto the road by the harsh bulbs. It was five minutes to twelve. Almost Witching Hour, she thought, smiling as she remembered her favourite book. She could almost see giants roaming around the backstreets. She had a very overactive imagination.
         She got to the town sign: Welcome to Portburn. Please drive carefully. Someone had drawn a swastika across it, in fluorescent-pink graffiti.
         As she wandered up the street, she thought about her parents. Now, both of them were gone. She couldn't remember much of her father. He had left when she was very young. what she could remember wasn't very good. Bits of arguments between him and her mother, the sound of the back of his hand against her cheek, the slamming of a door. She hadn't cried when he'd passed away. She'd asked her mother about him a week before her twelfth birthday, when she reckoned she would be old enough to understand, and her mother had started shaking with anger. She had never asked again.
         She thought about the funeral. The last goodbye, the vicar had called it. She didn't want to say goodbye to her mother. It would be like admitting the car-crash had happened, confirming the fact that her mother was now...gone. And she wanted to remember her mother as she was before, fun and full of life. She didn't want to to look at a coffin. Especially her mother's. She couldn't do it. But she knew she would be forced to go. Maybe she could pretend to be ill. Pretend to have a stomach flu or something. But even as she thought about the different symptoms of the bugs that were going around, she new it wouldn't work. She'd already done the flu thing to get off sports day, which had been the week before. They'd caught her then as well and she had been made to join the hockey team. Her ankles still ached from where she had been hit, countless times.
         She reached the lane that led to where she was staying and she stopped. She gazed at the grand old house, not seeing it. She was looking at her future. Living in a house with about fifteen other children, being ignored, being forsaken, forgotten. She looked at the huge arches that surrounded the old windows. She looked at the sloping lawns that wound down to a river at the end of the garden. When she was younger, she had dreamed of living in a place like this when she was pretending to be a princess up in their attic. This wasn't how she had imagined it.
         In her fantasy, she had lived with her mother and her father, but here, he would be kind and generous. In her vision, he wasn't exactly handsome, but he had bold features and soft, sturdy brown eyes, the kind that would never let you down. He would take her for picnics in the woods and take her riding across the hills. He would be the kind of father who sat in the library and thought. He would be a thoughtful man, full of knowledge and ideas. He would write books and be a successful author, she thought. He wouldn't shout at anyone or blame anyone. He wouldn't be a sincere man, but he would be quiet, in a relaxing sort of way. He would be stern, when she had done something wrong, but fair. Always fair. He would be a man, that if faced with a problem, wouldn't dive right in and improvise (which normally makes it worse), but he would sit and think for while, looking at the problem in its whole, until he found a solution. He would like art and museums, but not in a boring way. He would always make it interesting for her, so that when she grew older, she would like paintings and history as much as he did. On Saturday mornings, you could find him in his armchair in the library, next to the fire, with a cup of tea and a newspaper. When Joelle came in, he would lift her up onto his knee, and they would do the crossword together. After that, he would shut himself away in his study and write, while Joelle's mother helped her with her homework. Sometimes, in the afternoons, her father would take her to a gallery, and they would look at the art all afternoon, then, when they came back, Joelle would go to her room and sketch some of her own art that had been inspired by what she had seen earlier that day. If she thought it was  good enough, she would take it show her parents. Her father would then put her picture up in the library. As the years progressed her art would get better, and the wall of the library would get covered in pictures, some from when she was very young (these were mostly of houses with three stick men next to them, or a badly drawn horse), and others from when she had grown older, sketches of little stone cottages she had found in the country, or of busy town markets.
         That could never happen now. When she was younger, she had sometimes thought that her father might come back and then everything she wished for might come true.... When she was younger. Always when she was younger. Even if he did come back, her mother was dead now. The dream could never be complete without her.
         She was jerked from her day-dream by a shout coming from the house. The head-social worker was standing in the doorway, her brow furrowed with fury. Joelle sighed and headed towards the front steps.
         "Have you seen the time? Where have you been?" asked the social-worker, Beryl.
         "Out" answered Joelle flatly.
         "Out where?"
         "Just... out" said Joelle, logically. She became very logical when she was annoyed or anxious. She walked past Beryl, through the door and up the stairs. Beryl bustled after her, bombarding her with questions. Joelle just ignored her, in the hopes that she would get bored and go away. She didn't. It was only when they got to the door of her room that she realized how tired she was. When she finally sat down on the bed, Beryl having disappeared (having told her that they were going to 'Talk more in the morning'), she found she barely had the strength to stay up right. She undressed without bothering to turn on the light, then she crawled into bed and was asleep almost as soon as her head touched the pillow.

Chapter 2: The First Time
¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯
         When she awoke, it was dawn, and she could hear the birds singing outside. At first, she wondered why she couldn't move her legs, then she realised that Jack, the care-home's fat tabby cat was lying on her ankles. The wide expanse of His Catness drowned almost the entire lower half of her body and somewhere to the right of her feet, there was a wet patch where he had been drooling. She reached over to scratch him behind the ear.
         There was a bird on the window and Jack had been watching it slyly. It was the same bird that had landed on her window-sill every morning since she had come to the home. It hopped around on the ledge, teasing poor Jack. He eyed it hungrily, even though the last thing he needed was more food. The bird carried on hopping and chirruping outside the window. The cat made a move as if to pounce, but he never made it past the end of the bed. And still the little bird hopped around, singing his song, all to aware of what he was doing to the cat. Jack made a strange coughing noise, somewhere between a grunt and a whine, jumped off the bed and stalked out the room, tail high in the air.
         Joelle, who had been watching all this, chuckled to herself. With the cat gone, the bird flew off, satisfied that Jack had had his daily torture. She dressed and went in search of the bathroom. She still didn't know where it was after a week of asking.
         After she had washed, she decided to go for a walk, before anyone was up and could stop her. She retraced the tracks she had made the night before. She reached the cliff, but the snaking path had lost it's mysteriousness. She wandered along it aimlessly until she came to the place where she had fallen asleep.
         She suddenly remembered the necklace. She had completely forgotten about it and she couldn't remember where she had put it. She found her hand floating up to her neck, where she found the silver chain, warm from the heat of her skin. She hadn't noticed it before then. She held the object in her fingers, caressing it, as if it were her most treasured possession.
         It was flat and looked a bit like a leaf or a distorted map of France. As it caught the sunlight, it seemed to change colour , as if it were reflecting it's surroundings, but in it's own unique way. She decided it was beautiful, but not in the way other things are beautiful. That's material beauty. It wasn't beautiful because of it's shape or it's colour, but because she felt as if it were alive, as if it were reading her, seeing in her things she had not thought could possibly be there. She loved it for that, but it also scared her. She didn't like the idea of a rock (for that was what she presumed it was) being alive.
         The ferry port beneath her was full of life. Cars were checking in, huge metal containers were being lifted by heavy-duty cranes onto enormous tankers and ferries were going in and out of the terminals like yo-yos. It looked like a huge ant colony.
         She stayed there for a long time, watching the hustle and bustle beneath her, or staring vacantly out across the ocean. When she started to get hungry, she decided she had better go or she would miss breakfast. She stood up and instantly felt as if she was going to faint. Quickly, she sat back down, put her head between her legs and counted to ten. She sat back up but still felt dizzy and light-headed. She lay down and waited for her headache to recede, but instead of going away, her head felt as if it were being compressed by one of those crushers you find in scrap yards. She didn't notice that the necklace had gone ice-cold. She felt the colour leave her cheeks and fainted.
         When she awoke, she was surrounded by people who looked like they were wearing fancy-dress. At first, she thought they were people from the circus that had stopped in the next field. Then she realised she was in a town, lying on a cobbled street, surrounded, not by circus performers, but by monks carrying baskets of bread and fruit. That couldn't be right. When she'd fainted she had been on a cliff. And as far as she knew the nearest monastery was about fifty miles away from Portburn. She was very confused. And her head still hurt. She groaned and tried to sit up but one of the monks pushed her back down gently. She let herself fall back and wondered what the hell was going on. The monk tested her forehead and checked her pulse, while the others stood around, whispering.
         Without warning, the monk lifted her up and walked through the crowd that had gathered. He took her through what she thought was the monastery and into what must have been a dungeon but had been converted into a doctors surgery/hospital. He laid her gently on one of the beds then walked off. While he was gone, she looked around. The windows had bars on them and she could make out four iron rings hanging from the wall. Before sh ecould take in anything else, the monk returned, followed by a nun. They talked in whispers, so as not to wake the other patients. The nun gazed at her, frowning. The monk then came over and the nun went back to her office. He sat down and stared at Joelle for a long time before speaking. She stared back.
         "What is your name?" he asked in a strange accent that she couldn't place. She didn't answer.
         "You are not from here. Where have you come from?" eh asked, undeterred. Again, silence.
         "Do you speak English?" Nothing."Parlez-vous Francais? Deustch?. Or maybe you are from here, but don't want to say your name or where you came from? Or maybe you don't know?" No reply. The nun came up from behind him and coughed quietly to get his attention.
         "I have a letter here for a Miss J...Joe...Joelle Blake. Do you know such a person?" Joelle remained silent, hardly daring to breathe, but her eyes must have given her away, because the monk looked at her strangely.
         "No, I don't. But leave it on the table and I will deal with it" he replied. When the sisiter had gone, leaving the letter in the fruit bowl, the monk turned to her and gave her an odd look.
         "My name is Brother Luis. Do you know this girl, Joelle?" asked Luis, an expression on his face, somewhere between amusement and pity.
         "Y...Yes" stammered Joelle.
         "Who is she, to have such an unGodly name?"
         "She's no one. She's not from here. She lives a long way from here. A  really long way" she added to herself.
         "And you? What is your name?"
         "Beryl" she said, saying the first name that came into her head (that of her hated social worker) "My name's Beryl. Beryl...Smith."