“So, it's not a butterfly?”
“If that's what you think it is, but I've got a whole stack of cards here that stand a pretty good chance of looking like butterflies if we're not too careful.”
“Sorry. I guess a lot people say ‘butterfly’ just for effect.”
“It does tend to lose its edge somewhat after the first seventy-five times.”

I was going to ask if she kept a count but thought the better of it. We'd done the bonding stuff you need to do before you do the serious stuff and now was the time to settle down and get on with it. I guess I was just putting off the inevitable, which is strange considering the fact I'd always fancied the idea of sitting a Rorschach Test. I used to think it cool, the idea of a test where there are no right or wrong answers. Claire and I tried to do a word association test at uni but we never had the proper lists and so it ended up just being an excuse for a giggle. The thing that gets me is that, even when I've seen an illustration from the tests — in books and on TV — I've never thought there was anything more to see than what it was: a symmetrical-looking ink blot. I never saw anything more on the page, but then I guess I was never exactly looking to see anything there.
Perception is this particular way of experiencing the world. The doctor was very nice. She explained all of this to me in great detail.
“Perceptions are patterns that form in the mind after exposure to stimuli. Because of the nature of our patterning system we may be unable to use one perception because some other is already leading us along another path. That is the first stage of thinking. Perceptions happen very quickly — they don't have time to draw on our storehouses of knowledge and experience — they are the gut reactions we learn to rely on. The second stage is where we process what we've seen, if and when we have time. There's where logic comes in. The first part is a mishmash of chance, circumstance, experiment or mistake. Put simply, there may not appear a reason for doing something until after you have done it.”
They say that seeing is believing. Well I've seen plenty of things in this life that I don't want to believe. On further examination there's often more to be told once the other senses get involved.
It was an accident that took me there. Life, as I see it, is a series of interconnected little accidents. Oh, there's intent in there too but only in a vague way. We start off a conversation for example — it was a conversation that led to the accident — we want to persuade someone to do something, or not to do something, to stay when they want to leave, for example, and we end up telling them to go ourselves. I wonder why that example sprang to mind? Maybe because Jack never bothered his backside. He always knew I'd come back of my own accord. That's the thing about life, you've got a fair idea where you want to end up but it is impossible to do anything other than point yourself in the right direction and bang! No, a bullet is a poor illustration. It's more like being on this ship where you continually need to make tiny course corrections if you are going to reach your goal. Or sail off the edge of the world. Sometimes you hit things you never quite intended to. At least you may never have thought you did. No matter what direction I took I always seemed to run aground back with Jack. Have you ever lost control of a conversation? It's a scary place and there are no brakes.
Jack and I were married in April. It was a cold day but thankfully it didn't rain — I don't think that whole ‘April showers’ thing applies anymore, not since we joined the Common Market — and I remember thinking of T. S. Eliot in the church. It was a quaint idea, a church wedding. His, I might add, not mine but you do things to please the one you love, when you're still in love. He always had a fondness for the traditional.
I must have been about five the first time I asked about my name. That was the first time I think my identity started to matter. Suddenly finding myself in a class of thirty other children who all seemed to be coping better than me but I guess that was just my impression. The only thing I said that day, when asked, for the record, was: “My name is April.” Impressions are perceptions that become imbedded, that stay with you: the dents and scratches and cuts, intentional or accidental.
I was born in May. My mother was nine and a half months pregnant with me — I was due on April 23rd — 400 years to the day after Shakespeare (my dad had looked it up in some almanac weeks before) — but I was late and my mother never let me forget it, nor the Caesarean scar she carried with her to the grave. They didn't know anything about ‘bikini cuts’ back then. Some pain you are supposed to forget but she never did.

“It looks like a cloud.”
“What kind of cloud? A storm cloud maybe?”
She shouldn't be doing that. She shouldn't be leading me. I wonder how many times she's done this? She looks comfortable. It would be so nice to snuggle up beside her and rest my head on her breasts.
“A fluffy cloud.”
People think that clouds look like things too so I have no idea what she'll make out of that answer.

I don't think I intended to crash the car. That would be plain silliness. No one in his or her right mind would knowingly do such a thing; it wouldn't be logical. My solicitor's still harping on about taking the ‘temporary insanity’ path (isn't that what ‘diminished responsibility’ means?) but I'm not sure. I was the driver after all — Jack was too drunk, nothing new there — and so it has to be my fault and yet it still was an accident. Things weren't meant to end up there. If you had asked me the week before or the day before or even the hour before where the future lay, I would not have said there. It was not meant to happen and by that I mean to say there should have been no meaning to what happened. It was a drive from A to B, from one moment of some small significance in the grand scheme of things to another. It should have been a time in my life condemned to oblivion, obliterated by the events that were to follow it. It was just a straightforward drive down a road we had been down many times. I had fulfilled my part of the bargain, I had stood by him in front of his peers and friends and played the good and faithful wife, now I was going home to tell him it was over. It had been over a long time before that but no one would have known because no one was looking; we see what we expect to see. I had rehearsed the scene so many times in my head. It was going to be so bloody civilised. All we had to do was get there.
The first car we had was an old Beetle. It had been bright yellow in a previous existence but, by the time it had come to us, it had transmigrated into an awful shade of red. But it was cheap and cheerful and there was something of the lost puppy about it. I think the seat covers had been made from lost puppies, to tell you the truth. We had sex in it just the once, to christen it. My suggestion actually. Jack liked that I had ideas like that, that I took control, but only in this regard. In all other respects he had to be king of his castle. It was the first time for both of us. It wasn't our first time together you understand but there was something inside me that said, before you die you must copulate at least once on a whim in the back of a 1966 Volkswagen Beetle in the rain outside a service station beside the M8.
Dad's car was grey. Actually he owed several over the years but the only one that's clear in my mind was grey. But it wasn't drab. It was shiny. I haven't a clue of the make. It was something terribly nineteen-fifty-ish, a sensible car with the hardest seats in the world and a funny gear lever attached to the steering column, which I thought, was dead cool; that should narrow it down. I used to love to sit in the front seat and try and change gears. All I can envisage of my childhood is black and white. Sometimes he'd let me sit on his lap if it was just the two of us and the roads were quiet; I'd steer and he'd work the pedals. It was usually on the way back from those piano lessons I whinged for weeks for and then complained about constantly. I didn't understand why I had to practice. I just thought you sat down and played. Those damn scales just didn't seem to be going anywhere — up and down, up and down — and if I never hear the name Czerny again it will be far too soon. Dad was good. This was his way of rewarding me for going or it might have just been a novel method of keeping me quiet on the way home. I never thought there might've been something in it for him. It turns out I haven't got a musical bone in my body. I told Mum about them after he died, our little drives — not long after the funeral to be honest — and, you know, she still managed to be raging with him.
Dad wasn't really a part of my life till then. My first significant memories are of the two of us driving that car. Before then all I can see is Mum. I know he was there but it doesn't seem that he was around much. He wasn't there when I was born. That wasn't the done thing then. Mum says he was late getting into work that day and got sacked because of it but I only heard about that a long time later once it had passed into legend. That was the catalyst that sent him out on the road. It paid the rent and put food on the table he so rarely sat at the head of.

“That one's a puddle.”
“What kind of puddle, April?”
How many kinds are there?

I've been told that the human body holds eight pints of blood. I've held that simple fact in my head for most of my life. It was just one of those things I knew, like the capital of Iceland or the French word for shit. It's strange how knowing something in itself is meaningless until you can associate it with something. I never saw my father die. I never even saw him dead and for years I half-regretted not going to view the body at the funeral parlour but I couldn't. Who I was then couldn't. Maybe I could today or tomorrow. Tomorrow would still be better. Jack was dead by the time I came to. I don't know exactly how long I'd been out but it seems not long. He was dead. He was dead. Jack was dead and I was lying outside the car with a broken collarbone. He was dead and he'd been bleeding and there was a pool of blood beside the car. The sun was going down and the pool was red like rust. It was so very peaceful.
I've always had this thing about not being late. Men used to joke about it — Jack certainly did — about the fact that they'd arrive half an hour early for a date and I'd still beat them. Jack once said I'd be early for my own funeral. It was a joke — everything was a joke with him — but I didn't laugh and we ended up rowing about it. We never had a sensible row ever. They were always about the most trivial of things. It was as if neither of us could see the bigger picture and let minor details irritate us.

“Keep you eyes on the road love.”
“I am, Dad.”
“That's a good girl.”
“How fast are we going?”
“Not that fast. Why? Are we going some place in a rush? Speed's not important, April. I know you like being on time but always remember that: speed is not important. Be willing to be ten minutes late in this life rather than be ten minutes early in the next.”
“I'll remember.”
“And it's not wrong to have a wee look in the rear-view mirror now and then to see who's sitting in the back seat. Just a peek mind.”
“Yes, Dad.”

“April? Are you with us?”
“Yes, Doctor?”
“This is the last one now. Are you ready?”
“OK.”
“What do you see?”
“Death.”
“Death? Death isn't real. I mean it doesn't have a shape.”
“It's what I see. Does that mean I fail?”
“No. No, you don't fail. It's not that kind of test.”

This is an important story. The image of the inkblot is central to everything I do. This story wasn't the first time the notion that people see things that aren't there and knowingly believe things that aren't true. I was brought up to believe that freedom could be found in truth but that is not the case. A lie firmly held is as good as any truth.

The idea of writing the backstory in reverse is not new. Pinter did it in Betrayal.