A stand-alone one-shot born out of having too many ideas for the one-word-prompt 'bitter'. I hope you enjoy!
Notes: Set during series 4, episode 9 (my favourite Rachel and Eddie episodes are always the ones before the big dramatic ones, they had so many gentle, intimate moments in this one).
More canon than AU.
Characters belong to the BBC, words are my own.
I. Clementine
Bitterness is disgustingly versatile. It can be felt, tasted, smelt. It can be spoken. And it runs rampant through Waterloo Road Comprehensive in the aftermath of Maxine Barlow's murder.
Eddie.
The week behind us had been hell.
It had been the sort of week that, when conjured in memory, brought with it something almost tangible. With the sight of the desolate faces I met in the corridors there was a putrid tangy taste on my tongue. A scent in my nostrils when I think of Rachel, and her pale, gaunt face and trembling hands at the school assembly. Perhaps it was bile conjured from the devastation; watching the bowed, grieving heads of these students I realised were children now in age alone.
I had taken an orange from the canteen with my lunch and readying myself to peel it, my thumb had sunk right through the skin on the underside.
It was rotting in the middle. Inedibly so.
It got me thinking about bitterness. Earl Kelly had been more or less the same. He had turned out to be a bad apple, rotten to his core. Rachel was an intelligent woman. Surely she understood that such levels of decay could not be reversed. Nor could the extent of it often be seen from the outside.
Until it was too late.
It didn't matter to her.
She holds herself responsible for the resentment that had replaced the innocence of her children. She believes she should have been more watchful and noticed when Maxine and Earl's frisson had turned sour. She should have seen the spite in the boy. She believes she should have been able to smell it in the air.
She had not confided this in me, however.
We don't talk like that much anymore.
I keep to my classroom. The orange, satsuma or clementine, lay rotting in my bin. The smell of it had grown sickly sweet and repugnant. I recall circling my thumb around its innards as it hollowed, brackish juice running down my wrist, before I had slung it from my hold in temper.
Rachel holds me at arm's length. She confides in me in school matters only, starting with new, tighter security measures and ending in her resignation. She keeps to her silent self, behind her desk. And I remain in my classroom, beside my unemptied bin. Wrinkling my nose in distaste as I work.
Perhaps I should have looked more closely, chosen with more care.
As it turns out, the putrid smell and the acidic taste in my mouth were not just from old oranges and bad-apple boys.
Fruit often rots right under the tree that grew it.
Her trust in me, however, is enough to ask me to take her job when she is gone.
Rachel Mason slips from my hands with every sorry minute of this day that passes.
"Yeah. A married man, you'll be favoured by the board."
Her words shake me. Because despite the intensity of time we have spent together, over a mere year, I had seen her at her dazzling best and her despairing worst. I had seen her turn a wayward student around within a day. I had seen the delight, the pride in her face when she looked at her work, our work. I had seen her temper frayed and her eyes red. I had seen her scars, figuratively, literally. I had seen her grey and inert, carried on a stretcher from a burning building and the memory still makes me shudder.
And despite all of that, this was a Rachel I was not accustomed to. The words are not quite spat, but I feel the friction behind them. They add to the sickening smell in the air. Her voice is exhausted, but her words sting. She sounds defeated. As if she has slipped through the cracks between anger and exhaustion, right down, into the darkness and had no intention of pulling herself out again.
What was it?
Whatever it was, it was in disconcerting harmony with the taste that has lingered this week in my mouth.
Since Maxine Barlow was shot dead.
Since my engagement.
Bitterness?
This train of thought is in its infancy. Perhaps I am on to something, perhaps I am mistaken. I am still reeling from the rotting fruit in the canteen. Everything about Rachel is a risk. It spurs me on with temerity to do what I do next.
"Excuse me, I need to see Marley."
Hurriedly, she crosses the room, to pass by me and leave through her office door. I have decided not to give her the chance. She starts, momentarily, as my arm locks in place across the doorframe at almost the height of her face. I stand firm under her stern glare. It is the glare of a superior, and if I know her, she is about to pull rank.
"What the hell do you think you are doing?"
I just know her so well. It gives me the confidence to continue down this ever so risky path; the knowledge that she could pose as my boss all she wanted, but we both knew deep down that our bond surpassed formalities long ago.
And if it was time to check Candice Smilie's fruit bowl for mould, then perhaps it was time to check the whole goddamn place.
"Are you going to tell me what this is really about?"
I speak my words out on breath, whispered to her shoulder as we stand inches apart, in the open doorway, Joyce blissfully unaware, her back still turned. I enjoy the look of fright I see in her eyes. Rosy cheeks like an overly ripened red apple. Caught. Perhaps she thought me too much of a coward to call her on it. Perhaps she thought she could sting me with embittered comments for the rest of our familial lives together; birthday parties and christmases, family dinners and christenings. Her mistake, I muse, was in forgetting that I am no pushover. Nor am I someone who goes down without a fight. Regardless of how much of her burned and damaged skin she exposed to me.
"I don't know what you're talking about. Move."
"There's a couple of things I could be talking about. Maxine, the firearm, Bolton, what Paul said. Steph's obvious drink problem, your resignation…"
My next words, I deliberately project at volume over my shoulder,
"Could be any of that, couldn't it? But I'll remind you that it was you and not me who just brought up my wedding. So let's have a chat about that, shall we?"
It has the desired effect, of course it does. Gasping, she hauls me back into the room by my obstructing arm, slamming the office door, enclosing us both back into privacy before Joyce has even fully looked up. She is trembling as she leans heavily against her desk, one hand flat to the wood, the other against her brow. I feel no sympathy for her, knowing now that the acrid taste between my lips was not unfamiliar to her. It had been a long week of death and decay. It was long overdue time for us to dig out the rot.
I slowly pull the glass partition fully closed.
And finally.
Silence.
She looks up when the noise fades out, fire in her eyes. We haven't looked at each other like this in many months. The argument that ensues only further affirms my notion that this was going to end in one of two ways.
The first being that we would kill each other.
And the latter being quite the opposite.
"So? What did you mean by it?"
"What do you think I meant?"
"Clearly you're not happy about it, or you wouldn't have said it."
"I said it would give you a leg up in the running for headship. If you took something different from what I actually said, then that's your problem. Not mine."
"Do you ever get tired of lying?"
"Excuse me?"
"Told you before I could tell when you were lying because your lips were moving. I just wondered if you ever got bored of it. Because maybe if you told the truth for once, it might make you feel a hell of a lot better. You might make better decisions, perhaps you wouldn't be so rash. Because this, Rachel, leaving halfway through a school year at a day's notice, is ridiculous."
"I'll remind you that I am your boss."
"And I'd like to keep it that way."
She gives a spiteful laugh, shaking her head and turns her back to me, moving to the inner wall of the office and resting her head in frustration against the coolness of the filing cabinet in the corner. She would say nothing more if she had it her way. If I wanted the truth, I would have to twist it out of her. Like a dirty thumb inside the rotting centre of a clementine orange. Mixing it into pulp. Simple when you first find the source of the mould.
"Leave me alone, please."
"Do you want me to marry your sister?"
Her head snaps up, fury soiling her face.
"What?!"
"I said, do you want it?"
"I don't think it matters what I want, does it?"
"What if I told you that I want what you want?"
"Then I'd tell you that you need to reassess what's important to you, considering the fact that I'm not Melissa."
I see her now as I never have. The name of my betrothed hangs in the pungent air. Rachel's skin is mottled, her eyes are dark and dull, she holds herself up with the cabinet as if her bones were crumbling. Decay of irreversible levels. Now that it has started, a thumb through the flesh, there is no stopping it.
"You know what your problem is, Eddie? Your impatience. Nobody gets a chance, do they? It happens on Eddie's watch or it doesn't happen at all. It is exactly what I despised…what I hated about you when I first arrived here. I hated you then and I hate you now."
The bitterness pours out of her, like fermenting fruit. It stains the walls and soaks into the carpet. It is the colour of clementine juice. And matches the stain on the sleeve of my shirt. I have only heard her talk with the smallest hint of this before, when I put my heart on the line for her and she laughed in my face. At the time, at least, it had felt like humiliation.
The nausea hits me like a wave and I suck my cheeks in between teeth, wincing. Now that I can see it for what it was. I had put her on the spot and she was frightened and insecure. She had needed sweetness, tenderness and reassurance. She had needed me and she had needed space. The rash and clumsy decisions I had made in the aftermath of our previous confrontation had left her in stale stasis. Secret, festering wounds. The realisation leaves a much more sour taste in my mouth. Oh god…
I think about my decaying classroom dustbin. I had picked the fruit in haste, without looking, without thinking.
I had picked the fruit.
"And if you're marrying her as some twisted way of getting a rise out of me then you are even more awful than I thought."
There it is. She parts her lips in shock at her own words. Finally, I had crushed the truth out of her, in some, sickly, sticky, messy way. Like a clementine in my fist, with skin splitting and flesh expanding between fingers as fermenting pulp. Its bitterness staining my skin. I watch as she looks at me with resigned horror.
I step towards where she is cowered against the filing cabinet. To my surprise, she straightens, as if drawn to me like a magnet. I take one cautious glance behind me at the unlocked office door.
"Would it have worked?"
"What do you think?"
I could wrap a fist around her pretty neck in temper. I fear my fingers would break the sensitive skin, and sink into the rotting flesh. At least it would juice the truth and that unfamiliar sharpness out of her. Instead I rest my hands, at either side of her head against the harsh, metal surface behind her, our faces are close, so close the tang on our breath meets in the slight space between.
She can read my fury. Her chest heaves so heavily I fear she may faint, the heady concoction between us providing too little oxygen to sustain us for long. Not only that. Standing so close I can feel her innards wasting away. Bones brittle and organs rotting. I can see the pain she has been masking.
I wanted the truth. There it was, and it winded me, and my shoulders shake with exertion.
Under seemingly healthy, supple skin,
She was rotting from the inside out.
Through shaking lips, in pain, in vulnerability, in a whisper, as if it were her dying words.
"Do you love her?"
Could this madness be blamed on
fretfulness,
fatigue,
fermentation?
I consider closing the gap between us. I think about dragging my tacky thumb over her bottom lip and if she would be able to taste the bite of the perished fruit from my skin. I think about bringing open lips to her neck and sinking my teeth in, biting, sucking out the badness, to make up for my neglect. With my body, I press against her and consider kissing her, to end this agony for us both. People, lovers, are often wrote to kiss sweetly,
perhaps we could reinvent it by kissing,
sourly?
I think about how our mouths would open and I would use my tongue to part her lips and how I would blatantly taste the bitterness of jealousy on hers. How I would consume it as if I were starved.
But then the office door swings open.
It sounds louder than it is, after that momentary deafening silence. In the heaviness of the atmosphere between us, the intrusive and unexpected din of the door sounds like an explosion, and we both flinch, jumping apart.
It is Melissa.
"Hey, here you both are. What's all the shouting about?"
And my future wife and I both watch in horror as Rachel finally sinks to the office floor.
