Part 2 – Apostles
Theodora
inside my chest. After all these years, my father still holds the key. All I want is to get that key back.
The summer before my final year at Spearcrest, my father comes to stay at my mother’s ancestral home, Breckenridge House in Surrey.
The stately home, normally so cavernous and hollow, becomes claustrophobic in his presence, which looms like an eclipse, filling the atmosphere of the house with a heavy, eerie silence.
We all feel the weight of his presence. The staff, who make themselves sparse as best they can, my mother, who drinks a little more wine than she normally would, and me, with the marble egg lodged inside my throat making it difficult to breathe and talk.
Just like he always did when I was a child, my father brings gifts with him when he arrives. Designer dresses in beautiful boxes, a watch encrusted with diamonds, jewellery in velvet caskets. I open each present under his watchful eyes, and my throat tightens when he commands me to try each one on.
I obey him, putting on the jewellery and the watch, leaving the room to change into one of the dresses. When I return in an ethereal Valentin Yudashkin gown, the glittering skirts heavy around my legs, my father rakes me with a measuring look.
His eyes have the calculating aloofness of a businessman inspecting merchandise.
“You are very thin,” he comments. “Does your school not feed you well?”
My entire being recoils at his words like a slug doused in salt, curled up and seething and agonised. I shake my head and try to speak.
“The food is good, Papa.” My voice is a pathetic squeak.
“If the food was good, you’d be eating it,” my father says, waving a hand. “And you wouldn’t be looking so awful. A skeleton with skin.”
I don’t look like a skeleton with skin, I want to shout at him. I look like all the other beautiful girls in my school. I look like the models and influencers society adores. I look exactly the way you and mother wanted me to look, and I’ve worked hard to look this way, I’ve made countless sacrifices.
Of course, I can say none of this.
My father, so sure of himself, continues.
“I will speak to Ambrose—that headmaster of yours. He will see to it that something is done about the food.”
“Please,” I breathe. “Don’t, Papa.”
He frowns at me. “I’m not sending my daughter to one of the best schools in the world for her to be starved.”
“I’ll eat,” I say. I don’t even know if I can because, by now, my relationship with food is so comfortably dysfunctional that I wouldn’t even know how to start mending it. But I’m desperate, and I make the promise out of desperation. “I’ll eat, Papa. I swear.”
He glares at me, then gives a curt nod. “Make sure you do. When you move to Russia next year, I won’t have it said that my daughter looks weak and sickly.”
A black panic blinds me for a second.
My heart becomes a dark void in my chest, and my skin crawls and puckers.
I give my father a look of pure incomprehension. He flicks his hand in a gesture of impatience.
“I’ve already spoken about it with your mother. Once your education is completed, you’ll be moving to St Petersburg.”
My education is far from complete, I want to tell him. My education is only just beginning.
But how can I say this when I can barely string a sentence together in his presence? How can I tell him about my dreams of going to Oxford, of completing a degree, then a master’s, then starting a PhD? How can I explain to him that I’ve barely scratched the surface of everything I have to learn, that I want to spend my life in the pursuit of knowledge, that I want to read and write and absorb and create?
He wouldn’t understand. He still sees me as the scared little girl he always sees when he looks at me.
The scared little girl I still am, deep inside.
My education, my skills, my growing confidence—my wealth of top marks and won debates—they fade to nothing when I’m around him. Everything I am shrivels and withers under his gaze, leaving nothing but a mumbling, pathetic creature.
It takes me every atom of courage I can scrape together to squeeze my voice out.
“I want to go to univer—”
He doesn’t even let me finish the sentence.
“You don’t need to. You’ll never have to work a day in your life, Theodora, and you will serve a far more important purpose. You are educated, young and obedient—you will make a desirable bride, and right now, that makes you my most powerful asset.”
A wave of nausea knocks through me. “I don’t—”
He raises a hand. “I’m not a monster, Theodora. You don’t have to marry straight away, and I won’t force you to marry someone you despise. I will try to keep your happiness in mind—but you will marry. You must.”
He speaks without cruelty and without empathy.
That, right here, is the true core of my painful, complicated feelings for my father.
My father doesn’t hurt because of all the times he’s grasped me or struck me in anger, but because he’s never once held me or comforted me. I’m not hurt by his insults and orders and demands, but because he has never once told me he loved me or shown me he cared for me. His cruelty has never been as painful as his utter lack of kindness.
And so the fear I feel when I’m around him isn’t the urgent, red fear of danger, it’s not the flinching fear of an abused child.
My fear of him is kenophobia—the heart-pounding, choking fear of emptiness, of the void where something ought to exist.
The gaping nothingness exuding from my father seeps into my skin, is absorbed like a disease until it’s filling every part of me, until I become that void. I stand in front of my father in the gifted gown, and the abyss inside of me yawns wide, swallowing everything inside of it until I become a listless, hollow doll.
My spirit, my hopes, my dreams. Everything is devoured, reduced to nothing.
My father watches it happen.
He must be able to see the emptiness in my eyes, the limpness in my body. He must understand what’s happening to me because, for the first time in a long time, he gives me the rarest of all his gifts.
A smile of approval.
of the summer holiday in a sort of numb state of dissociation.
It’s not depression or despair. It’s not even sadness. It’s less than all those things.
It’s less than not feeling anything.
Like barely existing at all.
I walk through my mother’s house, sit at the dinner table next to my father, attend my parents’ social gatherings and dinner parties. I wear the beautiful clothing and jewellery. I eat when my father tells me to, forcing food inside myself, swallowing through the nausea. I dance with the young men my father introduces me to. My face shapes itself into the polite smile required of it. My mouth forms courteous, empty sentences.
And my soul—my mind—my consciousness, whatever it’s made of—floats somewhere above, watching thoughtfully. My body is a chess piece gliding across a chessboard, but I’m not the player.
That summer, I don’t read at all.
I don’t touch a single school book, not a volume of poetry, I don’t even re-read old favourites. My hands don’t so much as brush longingly over a book cover. My notebooks and laptop remain untouched. I don’t write a single word.
I become the Theodora my father always wanted. The obedient doll.
I’m surprised to find there’s a sort of dull relief to be found in not quite existing.
When he finally leaves near the end of summer, the habitual rush of relief doesn’t spread through me to warm my cold limbs. I watch his car pull away down the long drive to the gate and feel nothing at all. That night, I sit at the dinner table and push my food around my plate, staring at nothing. I sleep dreamlessly and wake up already tired.
The following day, I pack my things in preparation for my return to Spearcrest. My final year of school. My final year of freedom. My final year battling it out with Zachary Blackwood.
I should be excited, nervous, elated, scared—but I’m not any of those things. The thought of Spearcrest leaves me untouched. The thought of Zachary doesn’t even feel real. A dream. Less.
A shadow of a dream.
Did I imagine him?
Maybe.
I return to Spearcrest under the shadow of a great hourglass. My father’s hand turned the hourglass, and the sand has already begun to pour and gather. It’ll be pouring down with all my hopes and dreams until there are none left and I’m suffocating in sand.
If only there was somebody to save me.
But why would there be? I can’t even save myself.
