ROCK PAPER SCISSORS
Silk
Word of the year:
redamancy noun the act of loving the one who loves you; a love returned in full.
29th February 2020 – what would have been our twelfth anniversary
Dear Adam,
I’ve been writing you letters on our anniversary since we got married, but this is the first one I’m going to let you read, and I strongly suggest that you read it alone before sharing any of its contents. The thought of finally being completely honest feels good. The first thing I want you to know is that I never stopped loving you, even when I didn’t like you, even when I hated you so much I wished you were dead. And I confess that I did for a while. You hurt me very badly.
It is exactly twelve years since we got married, on a leap year back in 2008. You must know by now that Henry Winter was my father. There are so many reasons, good ones, why I never told you. He was there so often in our marriage, always lurking in the background, even on our wedding day. You just never recognised his face, the same way you didn’t always recognise mine. But I only lied to you to protect you. My father didn’t just write dark and disturbing books, he was a dark and dangerous man in real life.
I had a complicated relationship with my dad, especially after my mother died and he sent me away to boarding school. I knew you were a huge fan of his novels, but I never wanted what you and I had together to be contaminated by him: I wanted you to love me for me. I never wanted him to have any hold over me, or you, or us. But I did ask him to let you write a screenplay of one of his novels all those years ago. Having asked for his help, even just the once, it made me feel indebted to that monster in a way that I never, ever wanted to be. I don’t expect you to understand, but please know how much I loved you to do that. Hindsight tends to be cruel rather than kind. Looking back now, perhaps if you had known who I really was, we would still be married and celebrating our twelfth anniversary. But there are so many things I could never tell you.
In public, Henry Winter was a brilliant writer of novels, but in real life he was a collection of unfinished sentences. He bullied my mother until she couldn’t stand it anymore. When she died, he bullied me. As a child, he often made me feel as if I wasn’t really there. As though I were invisible. The characters in his head were always too loud for him to hear anyone else. His lack of belief in me as a child led to a lifelong lack of belief in myself. His lack of interest made me feel as though I were of none to anyone. His lack of love meant that I was never fluent in affection, except with you. I sometimes think he would have kept me in a cage if he could, like his rabbit. And like my mother. Blackwater Chapel was her cage, and I never wanted it to be mine.
Henry’s books were his children, and I was nothing more than an unwanted distraction. He called me ‘the unhappy accident’ on more than one occasion – normally when he’d had too much wine – even wrote it in a birthday card once.
To the unhappy accident,
Happy 10th Birthday!
Henry
The card arrived two weeks after my birthday, and I was only nine that year. He never called himself Dad, so neither did I.
Nothing I did as a child was ever good enough. We are our parents’ echoes and sometimes they don’t like what they hear. I realised that the only way for me to have a life of my own was to remove my father from it. But Henry wasn’t just exceptionally private, and a little peculiar, he was also very possessive. Of me. I felt like I was being watched my whole life, because I was. I left home when I was eighteen, changed my surname to what had been my mother’s maiden name, and didn’t come back until the day he called to say he was dying.
Everything I’ve done since, I did for you, and for us.
I’ve written a novel, two now, actually, both in Henry’s name. Nobody else knows that he is dead, or needs to. Here’s the pitch for the latest book:
Rock Paper Scissors is a story about a couple who have been married for ten years. Every anniversary they exchange traditional gifts – paper, copper, tin – and each year the wife writes her husband a letter that she never lets him read. A secret record of their marriage, warts and all. By their tenth anniversary, their relationship is in trouble. Sometimes a weekend away can be just what a couple needs to get them back on track, but things aren’t what or who they seem.
Sound familiar?
It’s a combination of your screenplay and the secret letters I have been writing to you every year since we got together. I’ve changed a few names, of course, and blended fiction with facts, but I think you’ll like the result. I do. When Henry sends it to his agent, he’ll include a letter to say that he wants you to start work on the screenplay straight away. You’ll finally get your own story on screen, just like we always dreamed.