the tenancy agreement: chapter 3

1974

August

Lucas is bare-chested, gaunt like a mummified Audrey Hepburn, his button nose beaded with sweat beneath his uncut thick hair, ribs like road markings on his concave chest. He’s cut and bruised old and new, knife wounds centimetres deep and shiny cigarette burns and knuckle marks, his skin a twilight hue of purples, clarets, twisted green yellow sunsets. Swollen eyes from crying he can’t stop, he looks through the open bedroom door, heaving silently inside himself.

She is bound from the ceiling. His sister. Tanya. Long electrical flex tied through a metal ring and to her raw wrists cut bare to flesh by the friction and the pressure, the heels of her feet just reaching the floor. Her face has been badly battered and both eyes are swollen shut, popped like meat beneath the force of blows thrown repeated and methodical. She sobs drily and it sounds to Lucas like puking an empty stomach but worse. Left stripped from the waist down Lucas feels embarrassed at the sight of her pubic hair and wants to save her from it all but his chest is too thin and his arms are too weak and he can’t stop crying, fucking idiot, fucking idiot. He presses his nails hard into the back of his hand which turns white and then red when the skin breaks. White shirt dowsed blood red it clings like a wet t-shirt to her pregnant stomach – and she barely sixteen and never had a boyfriend, not a real one. Their father is pacing around the unfurnished room smoking cheap cigarettes erratically, his movements jerk like pairs of insect wings – a dragonfly! – and become nearly unnoticeable in the haze of the stifling room, his licked lips leave the butt end wet and flat, sodden together by his heavy draws. It’s always so hot. He punches Tanya again in the face and she moans a bit out of torn lips, then three more times quickly, like one movement. Won’t be long before her face gives in. She tries to recoil but doesn’t have the energy. It’s the hopelessness that makes Lucas cry more and he puts his hands over his eyes but peers through the bloody nail-bitten fingers. The humiliation nauseates. Dad brings the flat sole of his heavy boot into the centre of her stomach; she lurches backwards on the flex, its polymers squeaking like new trainers on the metal ring with the movement, and she screams but it sounds inhuman, he face so swollen that such glottal reflexive noises are the loudest she can make. Lucas runs into the room, grabs weakly at his father’s arm.

“Dad,” he says. “Please don’t.”

“What’s that?” he shouts, and shakes his arms free of Lucas’s grip. “You want to help her? Fuckin slut.”

“Please don’t hurt her again. She’s not a slut. She’s my sister. Please.”

“You want to help the little fucking slut?” He jabs Lucas in the face, the nose of constant breakage, which knocks him backwards and out the door. “Slut wants to get her own fucking daddy in shit, having his fucking babies.”

Tanya screams, a bit louder, but blood bubbles out with it.

“It hurts,” she says to a godless sky.

Lucas edges back towards the door frame, his eyes stinging from the punch. Was she in labour, forced into birth by the trauma, the hatred?

“Get the fuck out of here,” shouts dad.

*

Lucas runs down the stairs, his feet slip on the threadbare carpet. Into the living room, as bleak as the bedroom, a soul of shit. Three broken chairs line the walls, mouldy and peeling, the table an orange crate lined with drained beer cans and cigarette butts in a depraved symmetry, a skewed homage to Warhol’s surface.

“Mum,” says Lucas, running up to a woman who sits in a tatty armchair in the middle of the room, upholstery torn apart and spewing spring guts and flammable stuffing like a violent crime. She must only be in her forties but looks twenty years older, her skin greying and her eyes empty holes of irredeemable void, her face scarred if not bloody; she stares into space and her hands tremble as she brings a cigarette to her lips but doesn’t draw on it, just holds it, combusting. Dad is shouting at Tanya, his insults coming down the stairs, killers of their own.

“Mum,” says Lucas again, trying to rouse the fossil of familial past. “He’s going to kill her, mum. Please do something. He’s going to kill the baby mum. Please stop him.” He shakes her like a corpse but her gaze is fixed somewhere away from the earth. He wants to punch her, to make her feel what he feels, but he can’t do it. “Please come and help me.”

Lucas runs back up the stairs, about halfway, then back down and into the kitchen. He pulls a dirty knife from the dirty surface. There are maggots on dead meat hunks. The drifting dust given visual life in the filtered sunlight makes him feel claustrophobic. Tanya screams again. He hears the gurgles of a baby.

*

Dad looks around at Lucas, out of breath at the doorframe, his face taut with disgust, and pushes past him, a bloody heap of flesh clasped in his hands, half-wrapped in a ragged oily cloth. Two words are tattooed on his fingers. ‘Fuck Love’. The heap glistens fresh.

“Dad?” says Lucas. He stops in his tracks and looks at the boy, can’t stop himself from smiling.

“You want to see it? Your little brother?”

He thrusts the baby towards Lucas. It’s awful, a misshapen mess of flesh and underdeveloped bone fragments. He can see one lidless eye and stunted arms capped with anomalous fingers. A gurgling sound comes from its face, like a plughole draining. It’s trying to breathe, to cling on to its pointless short life. Lucas trembles so hard he thinks his heart will stop; he reaches a tentative hand towards the baby, and swears it reaches back. It doesn’t. He touches it with his fingers and the tissue pulses beneath his hand. A reflex thing. Dad laughs, pulls the window open, throws the baby out of it, gurgling as it falls.

Tanya is still hanging from the ceiling, her thin legs like chicken and covered with blood that’s piled on the floor at her feet. Lucas runs into her and tries to hug her, to untie the flex bound so tight around her wrists, but he can’t reach it, his hugs hurt her broken ribs. Behind him his father blocking the doorway.

“He didn’t make it,” said dad, grin spread across his shit face.

Lucas ran at him, knife clutched outwards like an extension of himself. Dad takes the knife and pushes Lucas hard into the wall. He gets up, runs at him again, punched down this time. He gets up again.

“Don’t fucking push me boy. It’s your turn tonight.”

Lucas charges again. This time his father picks him up off the floor. He kicks his legs pointlessly.

“Mum,” he shouts out. The man laughs.

“You’re calling for that cunt? Boy, she’s not going to help you with nothing because she is fucking nothing. She’s a fucking lunatic.”

He carries Lucas into the front bedroom.

*

Mother’s in the armchair. She’s humming and in a soft voice starts to sing. Dream Lover. It doesn’t drown out Lucas’s cries.

“Because I want...”

*

He drops Lucas face down onto the mattress, pushes the back of his head down and holds him in place with one knee in the small of his back. He ties his wrists and ankles with shredded linen. Lucas’s screams have become desperate heaves. He pulls the boys trousers off.

*

Tanya is hanging from her wrists. She hangs and listens to her brother.

*

Mother’s cigarette has burnt away untouched. The ash falls to the floor in one piece.

*

In the street a dog runs up to the blood soaked cloth, to the mangled baby. It sniffs at it. It runs away.