Glimpse

by Stephen B King

  The feeling of nausea, and that I would faint passed, as the blood flow slowed, and I was aware of him sitting cross-legged in front of me. “Listen up, dog breath.” I was careful not to grin again. “I’m going to take you to the nurse. Now, you can do one of two things. You can rat me out, or say you fell over. I’d recommend the second option, if I were you.”

  I suppose, reading this, you, dear reader, might had ratted him out, and called his bluff. But, I was like a fish out of water; life had been bad with my dad, but he was gone. For all I knew I could be in this place for years. So, I reasoned maybe Jeremy would be better if he wasn’t my enemy.

  “You see, cocksucker, if you tell the nurse on me, yeah they will punish me, but really, what can they do, send me home? So, no matter what they do, I will still be here, and I will get you back sooner or later. And, if you think this is bad, well, just wait till me and my mates get you for ratting. What’s it going to be, shit for brains?”

  He half-carried me, half-dragged me to the infirmary, where Nurse Jackie looked after me. All the way there, Stubsy repeated what he would do if I told what had happened. He assured me they would never believe me, and even if they did, he would get me back the very next chance he got.

  “Oh my goodness, what’s happened here?” the nurse said as I stumbled into the room.

  “New boy, Miss. This is Paul Rankin, he stumbled and fell and banged his nose on the corner of a brick wall. I was worried he might have done some real damage, so I thought I’d bring him here.”

  “Jeremy, tell the truth, have you been fighting again?”

  “No miss, ask Paul. We were walking along and he tripped and fell onto the wall.”

  She stood with hands on hips, clearly not believing him, and that was without me saying a word. I realized then he had a reputation, which only gave his threats more validity. I was the new boy, and he ruled the roost. If I was going to survive in this hellhole, I needed him off my back. I mumbled a few unintelligible words, and she looked at me.

  “I fell, he’s telling the truth,” I said slowly.

  She shook her head, I don’t think she believed me, but what could she do? “All right, Jeremy, you did the right thing. Now, Paul, let’s have a look at this nose.”

  And that was my initiation to Harkerville.

  ****

  If you ask me what I learned while at Harkerville, I would say survival. At least twice a week, Stubsy, or one of his cohorts; there were three of them, would punch me, often more than once. Sometimes he would kick me instead if his hands had hurt too much from punching others before me. Either way it hurt like a bastard, as my dad used to say. What it meant was that no sooner had the bruises faded, then I was given more.

  It wasn’t just the beatings; it was the constant living in fear of receiving a beating. Did it change me? Mold me into something else? That’s not for me to say, but I’m sure the psychologists will say it did.

  Stubsy had a habit of creeping up behind his younger, more vulnerable victims like me, and letting fly with a kick like a mule. By that, I mean he did not hold back for fear of braking bones. We never knew when we were safe from his bullying, and if some of us stood around talking we would do it with our backs to a wall. At least then we would see him coming and would have some time to prepare for the pain.

  He was punished regularly, but as he had once told me, what could they do? He was also a very adept liar, and for some reason I could never explain, I think the adults liked him. In a way, I suppose you could say he kept a lot of other kids in line who might otherwise be troublesome.

  One boy, Michael O’Connor, tried to rally several boys to take on Stubsy, and stop the bullying once and for all. It was a plan doomed to failure. I was almost the only one who could see the futility and abstained. The other renegade, Clarence Spinney, naturally, told Stubsie. Maybe he gained a reward, or maybe he was promised some sort of relief from the beatings, I will never know, but it was a rout.

  Michael was found in the vegetable garden, beaten to a bloody pulp, some said a steel star picket was used. An ambulance took him away, and I never saw him again.

  The technicolor dreams from my childhood were constant friends. I had them frequently at Harkerville. In the best ones, I tortured Stubsy and his friends with all manner of household items I had fashioned into weapons. It helped sustain me, knowing I could always fall back on my imagination for making them bleed. How I loved to make them squirt copious amounts. Every night I enjoyed doing just that. I stabbed, cut, slashed, poked, and stomped them over, and over again.

  What else can I say about Harkerville? Well, the food was good, the bedding warm, and the adults cared, at least.

  While there, a representative from the Office of the Public Trustee visited. Sister Kate was there too, obviously to ensure that I had a ‘guardian’ with me. It seemed that my father had left a will, where everything had been left to me, in trust, until I reached the age of eighteen. The property was freehold, and there was around twenty-six thousand dollars in the bank, which they would manage for me, less their percentage, obviously.

  What I didn’t know then, was that if I had foster parents, especially a family member, they could claim a wage from the estate, in addition to a government allowance, to look after me. While at first, I thought of him as my savior from the relentless beatings from Stubsy, my Uncle Phil was not to be so. Never was there a truer saying than: out of the frying pan, into the fire.

  Three months later, it was like I was being paroled, and I left with him. Cynthia and Sister Kate waved from the veranda, and in the distance, I saw Stubsy, and he looked pissed.

  I thought I had been rescued, but I hadn’t. I learned why Dad didn’t particularly like his own brother; because he was a homosexual pervert. It was a week before I found that out, when he whipped me with his belt, tied my wrists to the iron bed frame, and raped me. When he untied me, I was bruised, crying, and bleeding from my anus.

  Uncle Phil was huge, like his brother, and any resistance from me was futile, and painful; I had always been slight, you could even say under developed. Once or twice my father, when he had been hurting me, said I wasn’t even his child. He accused mum of screwing the milkman, newspaper man, or anyone other than him. Remember, he was a very big man, and I was tiny in comparison, and he often reminded me of that discrepancy, which, he said, proved he was not my father.

  I want to stress here that my uncle didn’t turn me into a homosexual. I hated every single moment. But, I knew there was nothing I could do about it, so I just went along. There was no alternative, and to avoid being hurt more, as well as raped, I suffered in silence. So, for the next five years, I was Uncle Phil’s sexual plaything, and slave.

  In the beginning, I would have loved to have had Richard’s phone number and would have called him and begged for help. For a long time, I even believed he would come to my rescue. I thought about trying to locate him, but I was sure the police department wouldn’t give out the phone number of a fellow officer. Worse; I could not remember his last name. For all I knew there could be five hundred Richards in the West Australian Police Force.

  But after a while, I realized he had been just doing his job, and what I thought had been kindness was just an act. I reasoned that if he had cared, even just the tiniest bit, wouldn’t he have come to check up on me at Harkerville? He knew where I was and I didn’t know where he was, or how to contact him. I realized he didn’t know his phone number had been taken from me, but I was eleven years old and thrust into a home with other troubled children, yet he never once thought to see how I was coping?

  I still had a sort of childish hope that he would turn up one day, so I could tell him what Phil was doing to me. But he never did. I could have called the police myself, but my uncle had convinced me that no one would believe me. That happened during a conversation early in my stay with him. He had just used me, on a miserable night in June. My wrists were tied to the bed head, his favored position for me, he held a knife to my throat, and I
was crying.

  “Paulie, my boy. Don’t you be thinking of telling anyone about what we do. You know they won’t believe you, don’t you? And, if you do tell, I will kill you. I know you like the sex; your crocodile tears don’t fool me, so just keep your mouth shut, and all will be fine.”

  Cynthia visited, but was in the same room at the same time as was Uncle Phil. I wanted to scream out what he did to me almost nightly, but his eyes bored into mine, and I was just too scared. He allowed no time for me to be alone with her, obviously so I couldn’t inform on him. I suppose, if she cared enough to insist she could have interviewed me on my own, but like my father, Uncle Phil was such a charmer she thought the sun shone from his smile. I remember clearly how they laughed and joked with each other; I was an afterthought, so the rapes continued.

  Uncle Phil was always on at me to give him the house when I inherited it, as repayment for him taking me out of Parkerville. I knew that was never going to happen, I would never agree to his terms because at night, after he had used me to satisfy his lust, I often cried myself to sleep, and enjoyed a series of recurring dreams.

  They began with sadistic images of what I wanted to do to Stubsy, and after a few weeks, when I tired of torturing him in beautiful, bloody ways, my fantasies turned to what I wanted to do to Uncle Phil. One kept me sane during those years. I had Uncle Phil tied upside down suspended from the chain that ran across the ceiling of the cool room in the shop at home. I recall watching his terror-stricken eyes as I stood before him, sharpening the knife on the steel that hung in the handle of the door. He was gagged with thick sticking tape across his mouth, but his eyes begged me to set him free. I skinned him alive, but slowly in inch wide strips designed to increase his pain, and my pleasure. I would ask him, repeatedly: “Are we having fun yet?”

  Once that seed was sown, there was no way I would ever have given the place up for sale, it was fueling my fantasies. I yearned for the day when I could use it for what I saw as its true potential: a torture chamber for those I wanted revenge on.

  ****

  Karma has a funny way of popping its head up like a Meerkat.

  Three months before my eighteenth birthday, I was working as an apprentice butcher. There was never any other career I wanted to pursue; for me it was natural to follow in my father’s footsteps. My teachers at school thought I was capable of so much more; university, a doctorate, law, there was no doubt in anyone’s mind that I had the intelligence. If I had done anything else, it would have been psychology. The thought of playing around in people’s minds was almost as attractive as cutting up carcasses. The appeal was so great, at night I studied psychology text books, but it never seemed to beckon me toward a career, it was more of a deep-seated interest.

  While Uncle Phil enjoyed using my body whenever he wanted, he would always go back to his own bed to sleep, and in the mornings, one of my ‘chores’ was to take the filthy, pig, his toast and coffee so he could have breakfast in bed.

  Why did the abuse continue for so long? Why did I not fight back? Well I am only small; weak if you will, not at all built like Dad, or uncle Phil. Resistance would have been futile, and while I dreamt of murdering him in the goriest ways, the harsh reality was that had I done that, the police would have found out. I would have gone to jail, or back to Harkerville. The more time slipped past, the harder it was to do something about it, does that make sense? I had my dreams, and they had to be enough; I suffered in silence; it was always less painful if I did.

  On my unluckiest mornings, I would have to perform oral sex on him when I delivered his breakfast, which would make me want to vomit afterward. However, if the Gods were with me, either he wouldn’t be in the mood, or I was running late for work. Uncle was a believer in my being on time for my job. After all, he took every cent of my wages, so it was important that my pay wasn’t docked for being late.

  On the best day of my life to that point, I entered his room, tray in hand, and discovered Uncle Phil had suffered a stroke. I never felt so happier at any time in my life as when I discovered him awake and dribbling out of the side of his mouth. Oh, my God, how good was it to walk into his room that day and see him like that? One look at his face told me all I needed to know. There he lay among his scrunched-up pillows, with the left half of his face having slid lower than the other half. One eye was open, the other closed, spittle pouring from the side of his crooked lips making a puddle on his shoulder. I could have broken out in song.

  He waved his good hand at me feebly, while he muttered incoherently, and I knew he was begging for help; like that was ever going to happen.

  “Well, Uncle Phil, I don’t think you’ll need your breakfast today, will you?” I teased, as if nothing was wrong.

  I sat on the end of his bed, made myself comfortable, and sipped from his cup of coffee, having first perched the tray on my lap. I chatted away to him, telling what my plans for the day would be at trade school, and that for him not to worry, but I might be a bit late home that night. He moaned, and pointed to the door, as if asking me to call him an ambulance.

  I ate his toast and marmalade. “Well, they say what goes around, comes around, and I guess your time has come. Isn’t payback wonderful?” I could hear the glee in my voice.

  I looked at him and could tell he knew I wasn’t going to help him; that I was going to let him suffer, as I had suffered. The really, really, great news was that I would be blameless. I stood up, brushing the crumbs from my top. “Well, Uncle, I have to get off to work now. Sorry you didn’t feel like breakfast today. Oh, one last question: Are we having fun yet? Wasn’t that what you used to ask me?”

  I picked up the tray, and whistling, I closed the bedroom door behind me, and went to the kitchen to wash up the dishes. When I got home from work I would have to call an ambulance. They in turn might call the police, and if they were called, I wanted no indication that I knew he had been ill earlier that morning. My story would be that I had gotten up and had gone to work as per normal. How was I to know he had had a stroke? That would be how I would act. The paramedic could call the police, protocol might demand that, because one way or another, Uncle Phil would be dead. If he was still alive when I got home, I would turn him in bed, so he was face down, and smother him with his pillow.

  I cautioned myself to make sure I appeared completely normal to everyone I encountered during the day. Perhaps that was all elaborate and over the top in planning that far ahead. But I wanted to leave nothing to chance. I was going to be free for the first time in my life since I was four years old; nothing was going to spoil that.

  I’m not sure what time during the day he died. But, when I got home about seven thirty that night he was lying on the floor, halfway to his bedroom door, and I reveled in the knowledge that he had tried to save himself and get to the phone, and failed. I stared down at his body and it took all my will power not to start kicking him. Thankfully, common sense prevailed.

  With phone in hand, I practiced what I would say in my most serious voice, but no matter how hard I tried I kept giggling with sheer unadulterated joy.

  Then, a sudden idea hit me: what if Richard is the officer to turn up for the call out? Nah, couldn’t be, over six years has passed. It was a Mundaring patrol before, and this is East Perth, won’t that be a different patrol?

  The thought was enough to sober me up, so to speak, and I could make the call for an ambulance, without bursting into hysterical laughter. While I waited for them to arrive, my thoughts of hatred for Richard returned with a vengeance.

  Now, I feel I should explain something here. I wasn’t angry at that other cop, whose name I couldn’t remember without a struggle, who attended my father’s death. He didn’t give a shit in the first place, and so I couldn’t hold that against him. But Richard? Who would give a scared kid some sort of hope that there was another human being out there that gave a damn, only to not follow it through? In my opinion, only the worst sort of person in the world would do that.

  Sitting at the
kitchen table, sipping from my cup of tea, waiting for the ambulance to arrive, I made a vow to myself. A sacred promise that no matter how long it took, no matter what I had to go through, I would find him, and make Richard’s life hell. I smiled at the thought and felt more content than I had in a long time.

  Chapter 7: June

  Her name was June Daniels, thirty-two years old, slim and very attractive, and she was due to fly out to Melbourne on the Qantas four a.m. plane. Because it was such an early flight, she had her bag packed and ready, so if she was running late, it was one less thing to worry about. It was a very important business meeting she had to attend, and if she was successful, it would mean a very large promotion, and a bonus.

  Her husband worked away on an oil rig and was home only one month out of every two, so it meant calling on her mother for babysitting duties. June was on her way home after dropping her son off, as her mum had gladly volunteered to look after Joshua for three days.

  Her favorite song, Mascara, by Killing Heidi, came on the radio as she drove along, which was enough for her to crank up the volume and sing the lyrics.

  Up ahead the flashing lights for her local supermarket beckoned, and she smiled as she decided she deserved some ice cream. Milk was also getting low and as her return flight was a late one, it made sense to buy supplies now. There was a vacant car parking spot alongside a Nissan, which she gratefully accepted. Her only regret was that she turned off Heidi, halfway through the song.

  “Oh well.” June Daniels jumped out of the car and almost ran across the car park, deep in thought which flavor to buy, the choc mint or indulgent strawberry. On her way back to her car, having decided on choc mint, she saw someone struggling on crutches while carrying an over-full shopping bag. She debated going to help, when the person fell, making the decision for her, and she dashed between two parked vehicles to assist.