Chapter Eight
Several short seconds after that, Vanessa Tautphoeus, in her room, mind you, longed for Millicent (as she called Sam) to embrace, as she stared in disgust at her naked thighs. This, then, was what she had survived for? To wither away, like a tree with wasted roots, feeling numbly in the dirt for something left with which to connect?
She thought she felt a breath over her shoulder, and instinctively wrapped up her nakedness; had that been Pluck’s spirit, come for revenge? Had it been Guilt, come to mock? Her imagination? Or something else; perhaps, she admitted, her own exhalation, seeing as her face was at that moment twisted over her shoulder.
Her parents. . .her shyness. . .the men she’d paid. . .when she rummaged through the squandered detritus of her life, she found only regrets, shame and shrivelled strips of what had once been her integrity. To do her life over, without regrets—that was her dearest wish. Was that possible? Was that possible, in this world, or another?
Let’s say it’s not been my fault, she proposed, that I’ve never found love. Let’s call it punishment, test, or purification. Does that mean it had been, or was still, possible? Or, rather, is there something about me constitutionally unsuited to any form of love?
Put another way: Is my life just a tedious waiting game for death?