The Judas Scar by Amanda Jennings Page A

she had none. The image she carried was based entirely on a single photograph she had of him. She’d found it about a month after their mother’s death, when she and her sister finally mustered the courage to sort through her personal effects. They’d wedged a chair beneath the door handle of the new shared bedroom at their nan’s house. They’d put their mother’s beloved Ella Fitzgerald on the tape machine. Then they sat cross-legged on the floor, her sister holding a bottle of vodka and an expression of grim determination, their mother’s precious shoebox between them. They stared at it for a while then in one swift movement her sister tipped the bottle up to her lips, winced, and pulled the lid off the box. There were hundreds of letters inside. All written to their mother from their father. Harmony was staggered as she read them. They were beautiful; incredible expressions of love – poetic, ethereal, surreal even. They were written in curling handwriting with intricate doodles and motifs decorating the white space around words that struck Harmony as the most romantic ever written. As she picked up one of the letters a photograph fell from its fold.
    Harmony gasped. ‘Is that him?’
    He was the most handsome man she’d ever seen. He wore a loose white, unbuttoned shirt and stood on a table laden with wine surrounded by a group of people laughing and clapping along as he played a guitar. Her mother was amongst those at the table. She stared up at him with adoring eyes, her face sliced in two by the widest of smiles, love pouring out of every part of her.
    ‘Fuck him,’ her sister had spat as she snatched the picture off her. Harmony was about to protest but kept quiet when she saw the tears coursing down her sister’s cheeks. ‘I fucking hate him. I hate him.’ She grabbed the vodka and drank some more then scrabbled to collect the letters and shoved them back into the box with the photo.
    ‘We’re burning them all, the whole box of crappy, lying rubbish. He’s nothing, a ne’er-do-well and a wastrel, and I hate him.’
    Harmony didn’t know what a ne’er-do-well or a wastrel was and wasn’t sure her sister did either. They were the words their nan used if she ever referred to him, but as the woman spent her spare time dressing Boris, her snappy pug, in miniature human clothes, Harmony had sense enough to know that not everything she said was necessarily the truth. While her sister swigged at the vodka again, Harmony inched her fingers towards the box, removed the photograph of her father and surreptitiously slipped it into her jeans pocket.
    ‘And I’m changing my name. I’m not having that stupid, hippy name he bloody chose a moment longer. I’m Sophie from now on, okay?’
    Sophie was her sister’s middle name, the name their mother wanted to call her. The piercing look of anger in her sister’s eyes made her wonder if she was expected to change her name as well. The thing was she liked Harmony and wasn’t keen on Patricia – her own middle name – at all.
    As she followed her sister downstairs, Harmony tried to work out why it was all her father’s fault anyway. Cancer was to blame for taking their mother away from them, not their absent father. He hadn’t been around for years and years. Why was her sister freaking out about him now? It didn’t make sense.
    They found their nan sitting on the sofa reading the listings from the Radio Times aloud to the pug, who wore a hand-knitted pink cardigan with big blue buttons.
    ‘We’d like to burn this and everything in it,’ her sister announced. Her attempt to mask her vodka-slur made it sound as if she was pretending to be the Queen.
    ‘What’s in the box that you want to burn exactly, Starla?’ their nan asked sternly.
    ‘Letters from the wastrel.’
    Their nan gestured sharply at the fire. ‘Good riddance to bad rubbish.’
    ‘And I’m not called Starla,’ her sister said, lifting her chin high.
    ‘I’m Sophie now.’
    Their