Repression ▶ M•C ▶ 2/3

Chapter 50

                  

Cat's POV

"Hey Cat, can I talk to you?"  I looked over at the open bedroom door through the mirror I was in front of. I nodded and carried on applying makeup onto my face, trying to get ready as fast as I could for the flight later. "What's wrong?" I asked after they hesitated for longer than I thought they would. I turned around and watched as Michael perched himself on the bed opposite me. He seemed nervous, staring at his hands and kicking his feet. "Are you going to tell me or what?" I smiled and crossed my arms. He paused, taking a deep breath. "What was it like when your mum died?" He rushed, lifting his head up and staring at me with his curious eyes. My smiled fell and I huge chill ran up my spine and along my arms. I didn't know why I was so surprised, sooner or later he was going to come to me for answers, it was just actually hearing it, hearing her name, and it brought back everything I had learnt to forget about. I put down my lipstick and sat beside him on the bed, pressing against his shoulder and putting my hand on top of his. "You don't have to say anything if you don't want to, I know you don't like to talk about it" He tried to apologise. I shook my head and smiled slightly. "No, it's okay, I'll tell you" I wasn't sure how to start, I've never really opened up to him before.

"I had just turned fifteen, and it was a beautiful summer's day so Harriet and I were at my house, lying on my lawn and trying to get a tan. Around lunchtime my mum stands by the back door and tells us she's going to go get some food for us to eat. She had her hair tied back in a bun and was wearing a long pale shirt which had paint smudged across it and a pair of scruffy blue jeans with rips in. We didn't take much notice but she left anyway, leaving us home alone. We started to get hungry about an hour after she had left, but I wasn't even remotely worried, she probably got side-tracked and went to buy some new paint on the way back from the store. But then it got later, we were both staving, but I still had hope in my heart that she would come walking through the front door at any moment, with huge bags filled with food. Four hours after she had left, there was a knock at the door. The police officer that showed up at my house said she had been in a car accident a few hours ago; she died before she could get to hospital. Because we didn't have any relatives that lived near us, I was the one to identify her body. I stood in the morgue and looked down at the empty shell of the woman that gave me life. I had never felt such immense pain until that day, until I saw my talented, cheerful and beautiful mother, lying still, cold and grey on a metal table covered in a long white sheet"

I replayed those memories in my mind, losing all sense of what was going on around me. Michael squeezed my hand and I snapped back into reality. He had started to cry, something I wasn't expecting, I had learnt to turn my emotions off when I talked about her, and I forget that other people still felt empathy when they hear me talk about it. "After that I refused to go to school, I moved in with Harriet's family and tried to cope. After about a year of moping around I decided that this wouldn't be what my mum would have wanted, she would want me to succeed instead of wasting my life away. So I got Harriet to start helping me with school work, teaching me things that I had missed and bringing home the work she would do in class to show me. I slowly managed to feel more like myself again, but I still wouldn't step one foot into the high school we went to. I was too scared to have everyone staring at me, thinking I had lost my mind. For my seventeenth birthday her family bought me a camera, they thought it would help me express how I felt more clearly. From the moment I held it in my hands I knew that this was exactly what I wanted to do with my life. I began taking pictures of everything, teaching myself how to take photos from the perfect angles and how to get the perfect lighting all the time. I didn't think I was that good until people started to notice my work, it felt like I was actually starting to achieve something. A few months later I sent a bunch of my photos to Sydney University, where I was offered a full scholarship and it wouldn't cost me a penny. So what I'm trying to say is that sometimes the biggest passions in life can come from the biggest pains. I enhanced mine and made it into something beautiful, what will you do with yours?" 

I stood up and packed away the last of my things into my suitcase, before turning back to look at him. "Come on now, we have a long flight and your girlfriend has run away, we don't have time to be thinking about the past" I smirked, walking away and leaving him in my room, as I walked down the stairs and out the front door to the taxi. I began talking to some of the boys, as we waited for Gwyn to bring George home. Several minutes later Michael comes walking out with his suitcase too and puts it with the others, coming over to me and leaning towards my face. "Thank you" He whispered into my ear, without anyone else noticing, before stepping back and starting a conversation with Calum.