Invisible Witness

Bex O’Brian

Bex with her sisters and Carrie in the jacket.

Word Count 1123

When my mother died, we found a number of Super 8 home movies. They most likely would have festered in my sister’s attic until we all died, and that would have been that. But she has a husband who actually gets things done, and in due course, he took the films off to be digitalized.

My computer dinged a couple of weeks later, and I received five attachments containing the movies. Sitting in my living room in France, the early evening pressing in, I opened the first one and was immediately flung back to the summer of 1972 and to one of our frequent trips to England to visit my father’s family. My mother was British as well, but her family didn’t merit a visit for reasons I never understood.

That summer, besides staying with my grandmother and various aunts and uncles, my father accepted an invitation from an old RAF buddy, a man whose name, I think, was Hugh Pugh. He and his family lived in a thatched-roof cottage in Tiverton, Devon.

There I am, hopping on the back of a pony, in loafers no less, and galloping off. On the beach, with the adults swaddled up, taking warming nips from flasks, me and my sisters along with Hugh’s daughter Carrie, are charging into the churning surf. Carrie became my friend. And, when the family moved on to visit yet more relatives, I stayed behind with Carrie and her pony.

I don’t have much of an impression of Carrie, but I must have liked her because I invited her to come to Montreal the following summer. Once back home, I promptly forgot about it and her.

So it was something of a shock when a year later Hugh phoned and said Car would be arriving for a months stay.

In the preceding year, I had made, at least in my mind, that leap from childhood to being a very cool, dope-smoking, boy-alluring, radical teenager. A journey aided in no small part by Carol, a woman whose young son I babysat. She was the hip mother on the block, who soon started to invite me over to talk and smoke dope. She was beautiful and thrilled me with stories about her sex life. She once described her then-husband doing a handstand while naked and how funny his penis looked hanging upside down.

I was besotted with her, and the thought of sharing her with Carrie filled me with a jealous rage. Thankfully, when Carrie arrived, she had no interest in Carol, and thankfully, as well, she had made the same rocket trip into teenagehood. But that was about all we had in common. It wasn’t long that I didn’t want her around. This was the end of week one.

We must have muddled along, sitting on my front steps smoking cigarettes, bored, waiting for something to happen, something real.

At times, I would sneak off to Carol’s to moan about Carrie, about my parents, about whatever else disaffected teens moan and groan about. We’d get high, and she’d sympathize, especially when I talked about my father and how distant he was. Such an unfathomable man who was prone to rages. Carol more than once said he sounded like a dick.

I don’t remember who orchestrated the dinner. Perhaps my mother who was jealous of my relationship with Carol. The night ended with all the parents smoking dope and Carol sitting on the floor of our living room. No one had ever done that before.

One afternoon, leaving Carrie reading on my bed, I went over to Carol’s. I found her sitting on her stoop. I sat down a few steps below, my back against the wall.

“Your father and I are in love,” she said, with no preamble. “He’ll be moving out as soon as I find us a place.” Her voice was full of love and wonder.

I probably said something accommodating. I always do. Years later, when I found my boyfriend in bed with another woman, I offered to make them tea.

Once back home, I threw up. I wanted to crawl into my bed and wanted, more than anything, to be alone. But there was Carrie in my room, on my bed.

The dissolution of a family, even when all attempts are made to protect the children, is a chaotic affair. This being the ‘70s, there were no attempts to protect the children. Nobody gave a shit.

Poor Carrie was suddenly thrust into the maelstrom of our disintegrating family.

As Carol said, my father left as soon as she found a place, which was the next afternoon. Years later, they would laugh at the flirty phone call in which he asked, “Where do I live?”

He took some clothes but left behind a bowl full of loose change and single cufflinks that had lost their mate. He took the car but left behind all his books and the balsa wood Geodesic dome he had been working on for years, a model of what he intended to build on land my parents bought. He left the land as well. He took his income, which left us with only the money my mother made. While her career in broadcasting was good, women in those days weren’t paid well at all. He left his daughter from his first marriage, my sister Mercy, who had only moved in with us a couple of months before.

Carrie was witness to all this leaving and taking. Witness to the exposed resentments. Why, my mother wondered, should she feed his daughter while she can barely keep her own children above water? This was an exaggeration. What was galling was the pittance he paid my mother for us, his children.

What did Carrie do during the sudden outbursts? What did she do when my mother was seized with rage and humiliation and screamed at us kids to fuck off and leave her the fuck alone? Or I had one of my crying jags thinking only of how my world had been blown to shit. She must have known she wasn’t wanted. She must have felt impossibly alone. Long-distance phone calls were still a big deal, so I doubt she picked up the phone and called home.

I do remember finally taking her to the airport. Carol drove. And before she was through the gate, the relief at seeing her gone was so great that I started dancing and high-fiving Carol. I suspect Carrie heard, which shames me no end.

Along with the reels of film, I also gained possession of my mother’s diaries. I read through her entries for that summer. There is not one mention of Carrie. Not of her arrival. Her stay. Nothing. Carrie, the invisible witness.

Bex lives mostly in France with her husband and their dog. She’s been scribbling around on various projects for the better part of thirty years and made very little money as a result. Thus conditioned, she is thrilled with the advent of Dorothy Parker’s Ashes. She is the author of the novels (Under Bex Brian) Promiscuous Unbound and Radius, also available here. At present, she’s working on a new novel entitled, The Last Lover.