past times

It’s hard to watch someone you love hurting. It’s hard to watch them wither and lessen in their pain. But you can’t look away. Though you can do nothing, to look away would be a desertion. After all, if they can endure it, you can watch it, surely? No matter how much it hurts, you cannot look away. And in any case, you might miss it, the point where you could do something to help, that point where you could stop it. So no, no matter what, you must not look away.
And this is how it was with Jenny, my baby sister. She was a young woman of 24 with her own baby, but she was still my baby sister. I knew he would hurt her even before she did. I could see the signs in her, as if the future was an episode of Eastenders already written up in the TV guide.
My baby sister had become a pale, insipid version of herself. Less quick to laugh, and make the crowd laugh, until eventually she just simpered at weak jokes. Less quick to dance and drag others on the dance floor, till eventually she settled for tapping her foot whilst seated. He belittled her intelligence and laughed at her opinions, until she decided silence was the safest option. She flustered at his irritation with her indecisiveness, while he made it impossible for her to make a decision, in case she made the wrong one.
By the time she was ready to tell me, he had moved on from mental torture to physical. The way she grimaced when sitting showed her bruised buttocks as if she were naked. Burns on her wrists, carelessly self-inflicted while cooking, yet more severe than anyone had ever carelessly burnt themselves before.
Her jaw broken, when he considered himself untouchable, because she would lie to protect him.
I watched, when lesser people would have looked away. But I watched and I waited, and when she was ready, I was ready, as she knew I would be.

The call came after midnight, an insistent ringing that fractured my sleeping brain. I knew immediately it was Jenny.
Sam murmured and rolled but I soothed her with gentle lips and she fell back into oblivion. After all, this was not her family tragedy. I stroked her hair back from her face and drank in the vision and scent of her, just in case. I cursed my family for its legacy, and searched for an escape from destiny.
The past can make your future.
You might say ‘No. I won’t replay the sins of the past.’
But when the past expects it of you, and you can’t find another option?
I could call 999 now, or less urgently call the local police station, explain to a kindly female domestic violence officer. I owed it to Sam, surely? She, who loved me, treasured me and through sheer bloody-mindedness refused to give up on me and finally healed me.
But Sam would know as surely as I did, it was 999 or nothing. A kindly female officer, would understand my frustration, but be unable to act, unless my sister herself, requested help.
I had been there too many times with Mum. I had begged and pleaded with the kindly female officers to help her. But they never did.
And I was cute then. I had no tattoo’s, no hard muscles, no foul curses to make you step back , wince and so let me get the first jab, stab, boot in.. I was just a kid then, with pretty eyes and longer eyelashes than even Jenny’s. Those kindly female officers would sit me on their lap and pet me. They wanted to help, of course they did, but they were as hamstrung by the ‘law’ as I was by my misfortune in parents. I was a beautiful child with big tear swollen eyes, begging them to take him away so he couldn’t hurt my Mummy anymore.
The kindly female domestic violence officers did not take him away. They took me and Jenny away instead, into ‘care’.
So I won’t be ringing the local domestic violence unit.

999 then? Even as I search through the knife drawer in the kitchen, I know I won’t be doing that either. They may take him away, but not for long. And it would be Jenny, who would suffer when they let him go. Oh Jenny, I’ve fought so hard not to be like either of them. Him a sadistic bully or her, a pathetic weakling. Many psychiatrists in many prisons have told me I must forgive her. And if parole is in the offing, I tell them I have. Will I end up hating Jenny like I hate her? Will her child hate her as I hated our mother? At the moment he watches with big long lashed eyes, just like mine. With a toddlers’selfishness (perfectly correct in any other family) Jenny tells me he only cries when frightened for his own safety or peace or calm. So Jenny (perfectly insane in any other family) tells me she does not cry, in order to spare him. Her child (and it breaks my heart that my sister takes pride in this) merely sucks his thumb at tension he cannot yet understand. Jenny will not see, hear, accept, even consider the time when he will understand. She has tried to glance quickly between myself and her son, as if speed will show family ties, or hereditary traits. I’m bewildered she does not worry more for the sperm that created him.
But she needs me now, and I’m glad. She is, as always, my baby sister.

The knife is here, different but identical. Every kitchen has a small very sharp knife like this. Use might have blunted it, but I’ve never used it, and Sam would throw it away if she could. But she can’t because that would admit abnormality. So it’s never been used, but it’s been washed and boiled frequently, as if used to gut pigs on a daily basis.
I gut him. I gut him and stuffed a dirty tea-towel stained with tea and blood in his mouth to shut him up. I can still see his shock when the knife went in to his fat glutinous stomach. It hung like a deflated cushion dripping red strands of sinew over his belt.
He would have liked to get that belt off and take it to me, or Jenny, but I pushed it deeper and then pulled it sideways, using both hands and all the strength I had. I felt muscle and fat give beneath the blade.
It is not easy to cut a big grown man deep in this stomach. But I did it. I did it for me and Jenny. We had just got back from Foster Care. I had met Sam, so my life was just beginning, and Sam’s too, because she understood and we found strength together.
But Jenny, she had just met another big bastard and a new nightmare had begun for her.
And yet after all that, she still went and picked a carbon copy. She acts as pathetic and powerless as our Mother, as if because she picked ‘him’ she must keep within the lines of a play, and be ‘her’.
‘It’s not nature’ I beg God, any God who might be listening.
It’s nurture and if she learned it, she can unlearn it. She won’t be like her and be attracted to men like him. If it’s nature, we are both lost.

When I get to Jenny’s he is still dazed from the blow that she gave him. It is ironic that she calls me in hysterics now, when she thinks that she has hurt him. She thought she had killed him, but sadly (to my way of thinking) not. His skull throbs I imagine and he may be nauseous, but no lasting damage. As his head strengthens, so does his capacity for insults and cruel taunts. He considers me a joke, no more worthy of respect than my sister.
He moves toward her, lips thin and grimacing, fist clenched ready to repay her the blow she caught him. I know it was just one blow, not meant, done out of an instinct to protect herself. She probably didn’t even realise she held the iron. Probably doesn’t know she still has it in her hand.
He jerks his head in my direction, but keeps his eyes on her, spitting his words in disgust ‘So your freak dyke sister’s here. ‘What’s she gonna do then?’
I wait for Jenny to use the iron, to smash his brains to pulp with the hot plate, to protect me. I wait, but she doesn’t.
When it’s done my face is streaked crimson, and I can taste his blood coating my lips. My hands are coated bloody red, deep solid colour where my fingers pushed till intestines pushed back, fading to gruesome streaks at the elbow.
I spread my arms for Jenny to comfort me but instead she looks at me in horror. Instead she holds him and kisses his face and tries to hold together straps where his stomach was. Instead of ‘Daddy’ she calls his name.

I’m calm. It’s just like before when I was 12. Then I had not disfigured my face, and hands with crude words and Indian ink. That was before I shaved my head, and taught myself hardness. Before Sam,
And if the kindly female officers could not take me onto their laps, they comforted me.
I wait for Mum. She protected me just once before, took responsibility for me one single time. I feel no guilt, she owes me.
And then I remember, she’s in for life.
I’ll have to pay this time.

*****

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