Coming Undone Page 5

  I was in my white pyjamas on the orange and brown sofa. My eyes began to fall and close. ‘Stay awake,’ he urged, prodding my arm. ‘You can’t go to sleep!’ The carriage clock on the mantelpiece said I should be asleep, that I shouldn’t be here. I pulled at the loops of loose threads on the cushion as things I didn’t understand danced across the TV screen.

  ‘But I’m tired,’ I said.

  ‘Stay. Awake.’ He stared.

  I imagined what I always do when this happens: that matchsticks, half the size of those in my nana’s kitchen drawer, are jammed between my eyelids, propping them open. I played it on repeat: matchsticks, matchsticks, your eyes are open; you’re awake. Matchsticks, matchsticks, your eyes are open; you’re awake.

  I started to pray. Though I don’t understand Him, I’m pretty sure I believed in Him, that God was there. Let me go to bed; I’d do anything, please let me. Eventually He heard because he said: ‘You can go up to bed now.’

  I climbed the stairs, grateful, scared, hoping that tonight I could just sleep and wake up in the daylight, safe. As my eyes fluttered in my head, the fractured second floorboard let out a hesitant creeaaakk. It aborted, drew breath. As he advanced it slowly exhaled a low moannnnnnn. The room was black and the thin pink blanket covered my crown, but I could still see him. He was creeping on the raw ends of his toes towards the next door on the left. Propelled by the force that held him by the bare waist, a puppet with shaking joints and a frozen smile, lurching along.

  He inched into the light, the shadow on his back falling, draped behind. The crack beneath the door was still white. I breathed in, sharp, in the second before he seeped through. The edges of the pink blanket were tugged, tugged, tugged as my knuckles turned grey. The fog curled around my ankles, inched up my calves, cupped my knees and coiled the white skin of my thighs as he bargained and pleaded and I was pared, peeled and torn.

  ‘I’ll buy you chocolates,’ he said, as I folded my lips around him. He never did.

  Later, I told someone who told someone else, about the nights my skin was pulled back. There was an afternoon. He’d taken an overdose, was retching, spitting, vomiting, screaming in our toilet. He was crying, begging. His pleas sounded so much like mine. But mine were silent, stored in my belly, and I despised him for his weakness.

  ‘You fucked your “dad”,’ they said to me at school when my mother’s boyfriend’s name, our address, my age, ended up in the paper. I found it hard to disagree. The stain seeped inside me, thickened my blood, turned my bones to charcoal. It was part of me now. I’d never be free. He was me and I was him.

  When the first men I wanted laid their fingers on me, it was his touch that I felt, his face that I saw. I’d always be his. His thumbs would circle my throat until it fell still.

  CHAPTER 8

  Peace reigned in our house briefly. We sat in our trauma, the tranquillity licking at our wounds. Time passed.

  And then he arrived. The man who would set us off running for a second time. His hands were rage-stacked ships, fully rigged with sovereign rings that shone as they swept and sank. Not at first though. At first, his hands were warm and soft, waiting, welcoming.

  I was balanced on his knee, swaying high off the ground. He was reading me a story, his voice emerging from beneath his chest bones. His fingers gently turned the sticky pages that flinched in the sunlight that tricked its way through the net curtains. The front room was full of giggles and dancing dust as I wriggled and looked up at this new man.

  I would come to learn that he was the strongest and meanest of men. You learned these things when a man strangled your mum; when a man punched you in the face that was still smaller than his fist.

  Before that though was the beginning. They met in a bar. Mum offered him a place to stay. Her house. Our home. Her bed. Within weeks, it was his home and we were the ones in need of refuge.

  The first fist is nowhere in my memory, no matter how much I dig and turn and sift and sort. But the tenth, the twentieth are there. Sometimes it was a full, closed fist and sometimes an open hand or a tightly clenched back of the hand, knuckles bared and braced. I heard the wind rush through the gap between his thumb and first finger as he brought it down from on high, the whoosh being snuffed out by the crack of hand on skin and bone and the scream that would escape my mouth no matter how tight I locked my throat.

  A winter’s night. It was Sunday. No Jacket Required was playing, the car we were in sped along. Cat’s eyes counted down the country lanes to home. There weren’t enough, there were never enough, to make the journey long enough. My nerves bobbed and weaved as he and Mum traded clipped conversation, faces lit by the swooping headlights of cars as they passed. I imagined the families, the lives, in those cars that were so unlike ours.

  By the time we were walking up the uneven path that led to our front door, one foot taken off-balance as usual by the wonky paving, I sensed a shift. My legs began to shake. ‘Frozen pizzas for tea?’ half-asked Mum.

  ‘Do we have to? I want something else.’ Maybe I said this, I can’t remember.

  ‘What the fuck?’ He came alive with anger, spit rained down. ‘There are fucking kids starving in Africa and you’re fucking complaining about what you’re having for tea! Get here.’ I walked over to his balled fists. My body tensed, waiting for the wind. Instead, ‘You can get to bed without any tea, you fucking little bastards.’ I ran, giddy with relief, and I lay, as I always did, on my bedroom carpet, ear pressed tightly to the floor as shouts and crashes rose. I collected them in my hands, kept them safe.

  A summer’s afternoon. It was a Saturday. Last night they’d gone drinking, leaving us with a babysitter. He walked into the front room as I folded myself smaller and smaller into the corner of the settee. ‘Were you good?’ he said, with a face straight and still.

  ‘Yes,’ I said. I was. Wasn’t I?

  ‘Were you?’ he asked again.

  I paused. ‘Yes,’ I said, unsure.

  ‘You little fucking liar. Get here.’

  I walked towards him, tiny steps, but steps all the same. He took a single stride to meet me, his arm touched the sky and came crashing down under my chin, sending my body up into the air. For a second, I was flying. I was free. Then my head, followed by the rest of me, landed in the dining room, next to the silent hi-fi. He stood over me, fists blazing red as I waited for the rest.

  A spring morning. It was Sunday. They always got up late, delayed by the rhythmic slap, slap, slap of their damp skin. I was awake, careful not to make noise, fearful of the paper-thin wall between this bedroom and theirs. I wasn’t careful enough. A lumbering, long creak extinguished by one heavy foot on the floorboards. I breathed in.

  ‘You wake me up? You wake me up? Get dressed and get the fuck downstairs.’

  I dressed slowly, but not too slowly. As I stood at the top of the stairs, the vomit stung the back of my throat. I knew what was at the bottom. I swallowed it and walked down.

  He beat us in the daylight, under the white open sky. But, unbelievably, there was still worse. What he did in the darkness.

  An autumn evening. It was Friday. Mum was working in the pub, he was babysitting. I was woken up by him calling my name. I was in my nightie and barefoot as I walked the handful of steps down the landing. Now it was my turn to creep and crawl.

  ‘Yeah?’ I asked, nervously.

  ‘Come in,’ he said. I opened the door, peered around and he was naked from head to toe.

  I knew instantly that it was wrong, that I needed to get away, fast and far, but I also knew not to run. What would happen if I did. So I didn’t. One fear overtook the other and I stood perfectly still.

  ‘Come and sit down,’ he said. ‘Hold this.’ I sat cross-legged on the carpet and held the magazine he’d given me. On the pages were pictures of big-breasted women, also wearing no clothes, brown hair shooting out in big curly mounds from between their thighs. ‘Hold it the right way up,’ he snapped. I froze, confused, until he took it and turned it so it face
d him. Relieved, I held it against my chest. I didn’t have to look at the pictures, look into the eyes of the women he was hurting. He was cross-legged across from me, holding his penis in his hand.

  He moved his hand back and forwards until it got bigger and harder in his fist. I held the magazine in front of my face so I couldn’t see. ‘Hold it lower,’ he shouted, gasping for breath. ‘Lower, now.’

  Slap, slap, pound, sigh, slap slap.

  I did as I was told, inched it down.

  ‘Lower.’

  A little more.

  ‘I said lower.’

  It occurred to me too late that he wanted me to see. Needed me to see. Small white wet flecks shot out of the end of him and sprayed all over the room. I looked at the ceiling, the Artex charmed me like a snake into another reality. I escaped into it, climbed into the other dimension, my arms opened wide.

  The next morning, he held a bacon sandwich. She hadn’t trimmed the fat off. We had bacon scissors, useless for anything else, right there in the drawer, but she didn’t take them to the task at hand. Just tossed the white, thick rinds into the spitting, kicking oil. The rinds bobbed now, black and hard and curled, in the shallow pool of shimmering grease. They glistened, strangely beautiful in the sunlight.

  The chewy slick was a welcome distraction. From him, from what happened. ‘Pass the red sauce,’ he said. I picked up the ketchup and reached out my fist. The only part of me still whole. Those fingers brushed bone as I met his eyes and smiled.

  I can’t remember if he instructed me not to tell, but he didn’t need to. I felt ashamed, complicit, smeared with him and knew that I couldn’t tell anyone about that night ever.

  One day I cried at school, the shame and disgust falling out of me. I told the teacher I was crying because of what happened to me before, when I actually wanted to tell her that I was crying because of what was happening to me now. But I couldn’t; I didn’t. It was my fault.

  Why would both of them do this to me unless I’d welcomed it, wanted it? Why couldn’t I see what I must be putting out into the world of men? It was my fault; I just had to take it.

  But crying at school was definitely a slip. They called my mum and we were referred to family therapy. We sat in a room separated from another room with glass that I couldn’t see through. There were people watching us through the glass.

  I looked at the glass, the mirror, saw myself looking back and wondered what they saw, the invisible ones. What did they see when they looked at me? The things that I was trying to hide? The very worst of me?

  The woman asked why I was afraid; who and what I was afraid of. He sat two seats away.

  ‘You’re safe now,’ she said. ‘You know that he wouldn’t ever do anything like that.’

  I nodded, nodded, nodded, resisted the urge to shake my head and scream until my voice bounced off the ceiling and down into his throat, cutting off his air. Instead, I sat mute. The shame, the sickness curdled in my stomach and ran down into my thighs and feet, leaving me still as a statue.

  I was so alone in my secrets. And so lost. I no longer existed in the world. I was away, away, away, where the birds flew and flocked.

  One morning, after I’d escaped the terror of home, I turned up at the door of the local church. Drawn by the singing, the happiness, the open door. I woke up early every Sunday after – the day they would sleep in until lunchtime – got dressed into any half-decent clean clothes, scrubbed my face bright and then turned up at the door again. It was the only place I felt safe, felt beyond their touch. I looked up, told Him it all. It was the only roof that I ever stood under and spoke the truth; where I didn’t feel like I was already dead.

  When we did eventually leave him, it was remarkable how unremarkable it was. There had been far worse times. The time he’d discovered Mum drinking a bottle of wine in the middle of the day, dragged her upstairs by the hair, sat on her chest and, knees pinning her arms, took aim and punched until her nose shattered and her fingers snapped and blood sprayed and splattered. The time the knuckles on the back of his right hand had sent me and my brother up into the air in tandem, after my fingers had caught in the kitchen window as we played.

  This morning, it began with a crash, a bang and then silence that hung heavier than the thuds that fell in between. Through the wall, I heard the drawers of the dressing table being pulled out. They bounced off the carpet, their contents danced in the air. Angry muffled words flew with them; the quieter responses belonged to her. I sat in my bedroom, hiding in a place where there was no hiding, but at least I wasn’t in the thick of the war. More words, spat. The front door slammed, his heavy foot unsettling the second paving slab that led to the gate that led to the street that led to his car, in which he drove away, tyres screaming.

  Immediately, something was different. Mum, wide-eyed, whirled around the living room. The one-sided fight had been about the absence of socks in his underwear drawer. And at the front door, a balled hand and a promise: ‘If there aren’t any socks in that drawer by the time I get home, you’ll be getting some fist.’

  We knew that there was nothing my mum could do in the next eight hours to avoid getting some fist, to save the bones in her face. But what Mum said next caught me off-guard.

  ‘Put some stuff in a bag – we’re going,’ she said. We stood still, didn’t move. ‘I said get a bag, put some stuff in – we’re leaving!’ she shrieked, pulling us upstairs. I dug out my favourite bag – a tote bag from the Brownies featuring a smiling girl outside a country cottage, roses around the door.

  We left the house – me, Mum, my brother and sister. I still couldn’t believe we were really going. What I did believe, though, was that he was going to kill us. He would come back, find us trying to leave and first he would kill Mum and then he would kill us. I saw our bodies, piled on top of each other, our tongues bursting out of our non-moving mouths. I stroked the little girl’s face, her features smooth and unchanging under my fingertips. The roses stayed pinned.

  We walked out of the door, four more pairs of feet hitting the uneven paving slab as one by one we marched in order. We walked down the street, round the green, past the shops and arrived at the bus stop. We waited for the bus to come bumping, humping down the hill, while in my mind I saw his car come around the corner, coming for us. The bus stop was exposed on both sides, including the left-hand side his car would appear from, catching us in his headlights. I tried to look for an escape route, but could see only capture.

  I thought of our dog, who had been on the end of his boot a hundred times or more. She would hide under my bed, curled into the tiniest ball as he hunted her, before making a desperate bid for freedom along the radiator, his outstretched fingers and ends of his feet straining for the edges of her fur. He always caught her, her howls alerting us to the fact that he had, that he’d found her ribs, was enjoying the moment of pleasure from feeling his steel toe pin her to the hot metal. And now, we’d left her at home to run. And if he couldn’t kill us, he would kill her.

  But we had nowhere to go and no one to save us – he knew my nana, who lived just a few streets away, and my mum’s few remaining friends who also lived in our village. Mum had no money of her own. And so, we pitched up in the place that those with no hope go: the Citizens Advice Bureau. We sat first behind a desk facing a harried woman who listened to the basics of Mum’s story, our story, while we piled silently onto one seat. We were then spoken to in a private room. I heard Mum. ‘He’s going to hit me tonight … He said I’d get some fist … He strangled me on the settee after I said I didn’t want his baby.’

  The lady softened, began to call around, searched for a safe place, a refuge. There weren’t many places that could take three kids, I learned very quickly. She called, her voice dropped, the phone went down. She called, her voice dropped, the phone went down. The fear in my belly grew. But then – good news. There was a refuge that could take us – the last one with any room in the country. I’d never been out of our town. We were given money for the
train we couldn’t afford, warned to go straight to the station without telling anyone. We were still in danger. This is when most women die.

  We arrived safely at the refuge, walked up tall steps, knocked on an imposing door and, once the person on the other side had established who we were, we were let inside the house. The refuge was full of women and children who looked just like us – our mirror image, over and over: small, brittle and terrified. Women who needed to be invisible but were alert for the fight they weren’t yet sure they didn’t need to have. The fear was hot, thickened the air. There was a panic button linked through to the local police station. I wondered how many minutes, how many seconds, the door would hold under a boot.

  The other children had knotty hair, balled fists, dirty knuckles and wild, suspicious eyes. The women clutched mugs of tea and spoke in small, sore sentences. It was the first time I’d heard accents other than ours being spoken and the sound of their singing belied the brutality of their song. One had left when her husband finally stabbed her after years of beatings. She’d run before, but he’d found them. He would find them again, she said. He always found them. Her girls twirled around her words, knotted hair dancing. She would go home to him, sorrys accepted, just days later. He’d found them.

  We had our own bedroom but shared a bathroom, a kitchen, a living room. There were rules: everyone did chores and contributed to the running of the house. We weren’t to tell anyone the address of the house, or that the house was a refuge. Breaking that rule would be when the men came. At that point, our only protection would be the female workers in the refuge.

  On the second day that we lived in the house that didn’t officially exist, I found it: a book on UFOs and alien abductions, tucked in the back of the cupboard under the telly, giving voice to those taken in the dead of night. They all spoke the same language, a language that I recognised: of bright lights, cold metal and paralysing fear. I read it, their stories, over and over, carrying it everywhere, always, tucked under my arm as I moved from room to room. At night, I lay with it beneath me, waiting for the men to come as darkness fell and the moon looked away.