school photos 23

Sitting up in bed, the whitewashed wall keeping her back straight, the light of Janine’s cigarette was a beacon in the darkness of the night. John was lying at a crook angle beside her, his feet wrapped around hers. She was glad he’d found sleep, another slippery wrestling match; two falls and an easy submission was enough for one night. Maybe one more bout, would have been nice, but she’d already decided to give him a re-match in the morning. Some dirty grappling would help waken her up and slow her down. She felt as if she was always hurtling towards or away from the men in her life. Teasing one leg out from under his, then the other, she sat up on the edge of the bed.

She reckoned the cold space of her own bed might allow her to shut her eyes, but it was always that same dream over and over again. The details differed, but it always began with the smell of blood. Sometimes she’d be a little girl. Sometimes an adult. Rarely, she’d be the age she was now, or even older a suggestion that she’d always be able to escape from the event, but never the nightmare.

            The palm of her hand, fingers splayed in a c-shaped curve, rested on the lower panel of the flaking dark green paint of their front door. Her breathe would be stuck in her mouth, but she wouldn’t be able to swallow or breathe until she pushed it open.   A women’s voice. A voice on the edge of exhaustion, yet able to maintain something that told her it was her Mum’s voice who was inside their house, in the hallway. All she had to do was push the door open. Her hesitation meant she missed what the man said, what Daddy said, gave her time to clatter down the close stairs and into the safety of Mrs McGilvery on the bottom landing. The door creaked as she pushed it open.    

            ‘Run,’ said Mum.

            The police report said that had been impossible. Mum had been dead for hours. Little Paulie dead in his cot. Fiona dead in the living room. All that blood lapping into the good piece of rug at the fireplace and  ruining it.

            Daddy wasn’t dead. He was in Carstairs, escaped every night, flew straight at her in her dreams, catching his hand round her mouth, shutting her up, before she screamed. He was a big man, worked as a butcher for Nairn’s, six-foot-four picked her up like a package of discarded victuals. Biting down, she tasted the meaty flesh on his hand beside the thumb. He shook her like a rat, carried her over Mum’s naked eviscerated body, right breast flapping a bloody cut off covering her face and mouth. Her hair, her beautiful blonde hair, running red, rusting red. None of that mattered. All that mattered was she could finally breathe.

            Daddy, Daddy, Daddy did dreadful things to her. The police report said vaginal and anal penetration, bite marks on her shoulders and neck, multiple contusions, bruising around the windpipe and neck. Her body stuffed down the side of the couch. Left for dead. Daddy sitting next to her laughing, looking into the unlit fireplace.

            Night brought its owner terrors for those trying to care for her. She screamed non-stop at bedtime. No relative could hold her, or help her. No foster parents. The battlefields of children’s home hardened her, taught her not to show any emotion, but she never slept, not for years, unless she was in school at her desk, or on the bus, safe places. Hospital. Always the hospital was home. Drugs allowed her to sleep without dreaming. To be half-alive and move through the murky shadows of the day was the real nightmare. She leaned over and pecked John, smacking her lips licking the salty damp of his cheek. He was a real puppy of a man, she thought, bumbling about full of energy and good will. Completely harmless in his own way.

            Yet, he’d got her daddy’s eyes completely right. The depth of the black holes were his eyes should have been. Psychiatrists and psychologists had talked about her delusions and explained to her Capgras syndrome. Her dad was an imposter in his body. The shock of her abuse had ordered her thoughts in a particular and conventional way, to lessen that shock. She’d learned to agree, to be moulded by their arguments. To ooh and ahh, at their brilliance, it was more than her life was worth to disagree. They hadn’t seen his eyes, the void that they held the darkness into which she did not want to fall.

            She had learned a strategy for avoiding it. When she was drawn back down to dream, her hand on the door, her Mum’s voice heavy in her ears, she did not have to push. In her dream she could stand waiting, Daddy on the other side talking in that low voice, words she couldn’t quite make out. He was waiting too. Waiting for her to push open the door. This she imagined was what purgatory was like. The distance between them uncrossed territory.  But purgatory was always better than hell.  

            Stepping onto into the hallway was like stepping into a daylight empty of people, full of muted and comforting hospital noise. She crept back to her room and stood by the window, looking out into the night. Out there was a little girl Lily that knew the answers. Real life was out there going on without her. ‘Go and get it,’ she said, kissing the glass on the windowpane.  A faint trembling flickered through her body, her mind slithering past a hair in her vision, that could be flicked away and float out of sight on its own and she could truly see. She stumbled across to bed. Her body was tired, but not ready for sleep, never ready for sleep. Morning would be better when John was roused up and ready to go.