Compulsion

Compulsion Part 2

Georgia associated with Elias only if she had no choice.

It was just a shame that their families were friends. Because that meant they met often. Too often! Which really further exacerbated the issue. For everyone in Georgia's family, which basically meant her father and her sister, thought that Elias was a decent guy! Georgia had yet to believe that. And she was unlikely to ever reach that belief given the fact that Elias continued to tease her. Georgia doubted any rational, sensible person would consider Elias' comments to be anything as simple as teasing. But she had come to accept that whenever she bumped into Elias, the odious man would be obnoxious.

It was fourteen years since Georgia, her younger sister Caitlin and their father, Jacinto had moved to a new town. They were there to rebuild their lives. Their once happy, peaceful, loving life had been dealt a blow when a burglary gone wrong landed Georgia's mother, Maria, in hospital. Though Maria was revived on the way to hospital, on arrival and after a battery of tests the doctors said her head injuries were too severe. There was nothing they could do for her. She was unlikely to survive her injuries and or the implications of the damage to her brain.

The doctors told them that she was not going to be with them for long. In reality her serious head injuries meant that she never recovered consciousness. So while the two girls and their father had sat and cried and talked and cried by her bedside, they'd also had to face challenging options and three days after the burglary Georgia's mother died. The days that followed saw more tears as memories and hopes surfaced and were dashed. For the three of them the loss was made all the more painful for they could not bring themselves to return to the house. They couldn't even bring themselves to call it their home. The thought of entering what had once been a home they associated with laughter and chatter was now associated with a violent attack. They suffered greatly during the subsequent days when access to comfort blankets in the form of photographs and objects remained out of reach while their house remained a crime scene. In that time hard decisions were reached.  The girls had never returned to what was once their home. Their happy home remained memories of fun times and lots of laughter The sound of their mother's voice, telling them to get a move on for school that morning was something the girls tried to store. For their father, those early days were even tougher. The home he and his wife had built was now buried under new painful associations linked to the burglary. His visits to the house, to retrieve documents, clothing and other necessities, were traumatic. He tried to hide his distress from the girls but they saw the toll the visits took. So when Jacinto proposed that they move rather than return to live in the house once the Police had finished with it, the two girls had agreed instantly.

The arrest of two men who were charged with the crime coincided with the moment her mother stopped breathing. That swift arrest had at least spared them the angst of knowing that the burglars and murderers were still at large. They were further spared additional trauma when the two young men when faced with the evidence confessed to the accidental murder and admitted to the burglary. They'd been looking for gold, on the mistaken assumption that people they assumed to be of Indian descent had lots of gold jewellery. They'd seen wedding photographs in newspapers, and read about the lavish Indian wedding ceremonies that showed the women decked out in bejewelled saris and covered in jewellery practically from head to toe. Maria had tried to explain that she was catholic, and the only gold she wore on her wedding day was her engagement ring and her wedding ring. They didn't believe her. They demanded Maria handover her gold jewellery. She told them that the only gold jewellery she had were the two rings she wore and the cross and chain around her neck. They'd wrenched that off her. And insisted that she had more. In their attempt to convince her that they meant business, they had hit her. Slaps initially. She pleaded and explained over and over that she had no jewellery of worth.  Crying she had showed them her jewellery. Showed them that it was paste. Maria had never been one for jewellery. As a mechanical engineer before she married, she had always steered clear of wearing jewellery because of the nature of her job. Although she'd had her ears pierced as an infant, she very rarely wore earrings as an adult. Her gold cross and chain were her mother's. Her husband gave her the two rings. She'd never seen the need for any further jewellery. Even her watch was a simple leather strapped item. Nothing fancy. She'd tried to tell them that. Tried to convince them by showing them. They had all but dragged her to the bedrooms, assuming she kept her jewellery there. In their haste they ignored the fact they had scared her into believing the worst was about to happen. They ignored the fact that she was clawing at the hand and arm that held her, inadvertently storing their DNA under her fingernails. When they got to the bedroom she started to scream, and one had slapped her and told her to shut up while the other had run his hand through his hair and in his agitation inadvertently left some of his hair at the site. They told her all they wanted was the jewellery. Nothing else. She told them she didn't have any more. Just the chain, cross and two rings. They simply had not believed her. Their judgement clouded by what they had read in the press about grand Asian weddings and what they had extrapolated to believe that it represented all people of Indian descent.