Park Hill

I remember, now, that it was raining. It probably wasn’t; the whole thing seems somewhat more poetic peeling open the envelope amidst a maelstrom outside.

Around all the legal jargon proceeding the second letter sealed inside it transpired that she was dead.

At first, I wrote letters after I moved down south. Then came the occasional text, a Christmas card... and finally, a silence that stretched across her final years. It surprised me then that I should feel it so strongly that she had passed, especially as the letter insinuated that it had been a long, drawn out and unnecessarily painful passing for a dear sweet woman.

The second letter hidden inside the larger legal manilla envelope was from her directly; I remembered the recycled paper stationary that she used to write to me with in those first years and it still smelt of her. I peeled the seal and unfolded the writing with a mixture of intrigue and melancholy. Why would she feel the need to write to me in her last days given how terrible I’d been at keeping in touch.

My Dear Little Prince,

So many times I’ve put pen to paper, and just as often thrown it away, comforted by the thought that you were out there, living your own life. Now I fear there won’t be too many more chances to write to you.

Even now I do not know what I can say but the act of merely putting pen to page will hopefully ease my soul somewhat. I’m sorry. For all the things you had to endure growing up here, for having to put up with me after your parents had gone, for any damage that this place may have done long term. With the benefit of hindsight a lot of what happened does feel like the childish folly of youth and the all too powerful sense of community sweeping us down the wrong fork in the river.

You should never have had to deal with any of this. We made a mistake bringing you to that place and persisting. I hope this may give you a few answers if indeed you wish to seek them out.

All my love and eternal devotion,Aunt Jill.

Below her flowing cursive script was taped a small iron key, the type I had for the lock on the garage, it fell weighty and cold into my palm. The letter itself made little to no sense to me. Jill had always been a kind woman and taken me in after my parents passed away that night, her apologies for the fire made little sense, she’d saved me and dragged me out and for bringing me to Park Hill in the first place, well, you may as well apologise for taking me aboard the Titanic. No one could have predicted the inferno that swept through the building. I attributed it to the impending fear of death and if this had offered her some sort of impractical sense of absolution I was glad of it. I wept then to think that I may have been able to offer her more comfort in those final days, to tell her the apology was unneeded; that I loved her and all she’d done for me in my youth made her my real family not merely the empty platitude that friends of your parents being referred to as “aunt” insinuated.

A huge wave of guilt washed over me and I wanted to crumple the letter into a drawer somewhere, fling the key into a bin somewhere and bring around the end of the whole situation, forget how ungrateful I’d been and move on pretending I was a good person. Or maybe, with that cold weight of metal in my hands reminding me of the hand rail in Park Hill I used to clamber up those stairs two at a time after class, it was a deep primal fear I thought I had buried in some field in the north and in my childhood.

I’d always thought of the fire as some freak accident, a terrible loss; something that had left my innocence in ash but with Jill’s letter in my hands I felt the flames licking at my arms again, sliding its tongue towards where it left its indelible mark on my neck as I read it through again. I was in the halls again, completely enveloped in flame, the details shifting like oil on water, shouting, almost rhythmic, at a fever pitch racing through the corridors as Jill’s hand burst through the wall of flame to drag me towards a world I’d never chosen. Maybe it was just adrenaline and grief, twisting my thoughts. Maybe I was seeing subtext that wasn’t really there. Was Jill suggesting that the blaze wasn’t accidental?