Scarlet Letters

Stop. That was what red meant to her.

She remembered early lessons as a child: that sinking feeling in the pit of her stomach when she saw it in her dad’s face, and the lesson on forgiveness as the flush faded from her sore skin (it’s not enough to say you’re sorry; you have to do something about it, you have to stop doing what you’re doing wrong).

Then tracing lines in white with her fingernails that turned to red if you dug in hard enough, to show that she was sorry, that she knew she’d done something wrong again. It was all about penance, extirpations of guilt, Christ on the cross putting sin at a standstill. It wasn’t a million miles to the razorblade at age fourteen, the red that slipped slick and luxurious across her skin, blood sacrifice to keep the demons at bay, keep the anger locked up behind a criss-crossed network of scars and let it out in short, sharp bursts when no one was watching.

Something about red elastic bands. Like a code laid out along the pavement. You almost wouldn’t notice them if you didn’t know they were there, but once you knew, suddenly they were everywhere. She had to remember what it was he’d said about them.

There were other things later. Rites of passage. Red that said she couldn’t be a child any more. Red on some guy’s fingers, on the towel on her parents’ living room floor. Endings that were meant to be beginnings. The story didn’t quite play out how it was supposed to.

It came and went for a while, much like the men in her life, and the anger. She saw it drunk one night in a lover’s smug smile, and it took three guys to hold her off. In the morning just bruises, bite-marks, places where she’d tried but failed to reach the blood through the skin. That was always the problem really: she couldn’t reach him any more. Time to stop trying. Time to move on.

Red elastic bands. There one was, at her feet, and she remembered the answer: Royal Mail. The postmen threw them away every morning as they were doing their rounds. No real significance, then. But it would serve as a reminder. She picked it up, put it round her wrist, and joined the resistance.