by Poppet
I hate him. Everything about him.
What’s worse is the cigar smoke sticks to that hair. He always stinks of stale tobacco, washing it over me whenever he bends down to get his face in mine, his exhalations fetid. He’s beaten me for my cathartic response many times.
He turns my stomach with his stench.
The worn doorknob turns, the catch rattles, the hinges groan when the door inches open. It’s marginal. Taunting.
A pinstripe of light etches into the peeling paint, garnering my full focus.
It’s like waiting for the devil. I can’t help the way my eyes saucer and my fingers tense, every muscle taut with terror.
The clomp of his boot scrubs the wood, the steel toe-cap banging into the hollow shell of the masonite. Violently the door shunts abruptly into wide open, with such force it ricochets off the wall, the doorknob leaving more of its brass in the dent on the wall. The paint’s all gone from there. Cratered with the acne of domestic abuse, this house is scarred.
Liquor hits my olfactory nerve and I know he’s been drinking. It’s how he stays warm, it’s how he stays numb. I have no such luxury. You can always smell evil before you see it.
There is a day coming, one impending, the future beckons, when the meek inherit the earth, when the diminutive overthrow the mighty, when the power is stripped to the bone of the tyrannical. Today is not that day.
“Boy!”
“Yes?” I blurt, his dramatic entrance and looming hulk writhing my bladder.
I can’t get a read on his face with the light behind him. I’m staring at a black cardboard cutout of what looks like a human, but there’s no human in him. I’m highlighted whereas he’s masked with darkness, and I carefully school my expression to subservient. One wrong look and he’ll loosen that belt and land the business end of the buckle on my bruises. The need to pee gives me a cold shiver and I clench my abdomen, desperate to stave off the embarrassment of losing muscle control out of sheer fear.
“Get up, you lazy shit. Go help your mother.”
The words are retarded and he sways a little. If I move too fast and annoy him, he’ll beat my head into the floor before I get past him. If I move too slow I’ll get the same. I hate not being able to read him, all I know is once the rum goes in, the thug comes out.
Nodding, I get to it. Scarpering off the thin mattress, my naked feet hit the splinters and rough edges of a floor more battered than me. There’s no mat in my room, it was taken as punishment, never to be returned. Apparently it’s a luxury, and I don’t appreciate them, so says the law maker of 82 Grayfield Road.
Gulping down the cube in my throat I sidle past him, tensing for impact, ready to duck and run if he looks like he’s gonna whale on me, and get just beyond him when the hand comes up to slap the back of my head. “Move it! Wake the bitch up, I’m hungry. I’m sick of this shit. I don’t work all week for her to sleep on the one job she has. She’s good for nothing, like you. If I give her money to put motherfucking food on the table, then that’s what she’ll fucking do! Move! This isn’t a fucking hotel!”
The force of his palm connecting with my cranium shunts me into a stumble, but I grab the momentum and rumble down the steps, racing to the kitchen, skidding on the slick linoleum when I turn the corner next to the pantry. She stares up at the ceiling with eyes so haunted. Like the fish Roger cooked and forgot to remove the eyes. Dead and swollen and wrong. Amy looks broken.
Don’t know why she wouldn’t let me call her mom, but she’s still my mother. Dropping to my knees, I give her a tender shake. “Amy?” I give her another shake, but she feels so cold and the way her skin cools mine gives me the jeeblies. “Amy, wake up. Please?”
Doom grips my lungs and my breathing becomes tremulous. My tummy feels like it’s having a seizure, shuddering inside me, and I know something very bad is about to happen.
“Amy, pleeeease,” I whine, squeezing her arm, on a bruise gone green, trying to rouse her from her coma.
This time there are no tears pooling in her eyes, her eyelids don’t flinch, her mouth doesn’t wring into misery, she just stares at the jaundiced ceiling with her tatty hair mopping the floor, soaking up the blood. Grandma calls her white trash, bottle blonde, and not good enough for her son. She’s good enough for me.
When Grandma badmouths mom, it feels like she’s dissing me. If Amy isn’t good enough, then I’ll never be. I’m her blood, and it’s mottled and frayed with the same indelible stains. We’re the cloth spat on to polish the boots that kick us.
My eyes water and the crushing ache in my chest increases, the need to cry for her, to get her to wake up, it’s pressing on me from the inside, so heavy and cruel.
“P-leeease,” I whisper, hearing the boots coming down the stairs, afraid of what he’ll do if she’s not making toast and tea.
I don’t know how to cook or I’d do it. I’d do anything to save her, but I’m not big enough to save her from him.
Desperate, I poke the cigarette burn on her chest. It’s a puss-swollen blister, and I know how they hurt if you catch them with a towel never mind a fingernail.
Amy doesn’t squeak, or tell me off.
She’s so cold, maybe if I warm her?
“Okay mom, you sleep, I’ll make you and dad some tea. That’ll warm you up, and then –”
My words clog my throat when dad fills the doorway, filling the exit. I’m trapped.
Withering against the steel cupboard, I stutter, “I’m making tea. Amy’s cold. I c-can’t wake her. D-don’t be mad, I’ll make the tea.”
He stares at her, his brows drawn down, like he’s about to tornado us into heaven the second he moves.
I can’t fill the kettle, I’m shaking too bad, and I know if I don’t do it he’ll beat Amy until she wakes. He thinks the best alarm clock is a fist to the face.
“What did you do?” he growls, and the rage in his tone undoes me. The aluminum kettle clatters into the sink when I flip to face him, flattening myself to the hard edge of the cheap metal casing.
“N-nothing. I tried to w-wake her, but she … she’s cold. I th-thought t-tea would w-warm her.”
He stomps up to her, delivering a harsh kick to the underneath of her ribs, right where it hurts the worst.
Amy slides, her head flops, the swollen eyelid so dark against her pale skin. She’s too wan, too white, too ghostly.
“S-something’s wrong with mom.”
“Don’t call her that!” bellows at me, but for once he’s not raging across the kitchen to smash my face in, he’s frowning at Amy.
Dropping to her, he holds her neck.
Oh god, he’s gonna kill her for not getting up to cook!
“N-no!” I squeak, my voice shrill.
Adam looks at me, his brown eyes black. His breath fogs up the kitchen with stink. He smells like vomit and cigars. “You killed her. If she didn’t have you to baby this wouldn’t have happened. You killed your own mother!”
He stands, menacing and bitter, fists clenching, the massive muscles in his arms threaded with rock hard veins.
He terrifies me.
Dropping to my knees, a sob yanks out of me with three million hooks, shredding my insides out.
Bowing to the floor, I curl into a ball, ready for the beating. Everything inside is shivering, I can’t breathe, my fish fingers for dinner riding up my throat, bitterness coats my tongue, snot blocks my nose, and I can’t see through the tears. Dust coats my lips and I can’t inhale again.
I killed mommy.
She’s gone away, leaving me here.
Abandoning me.
I’m alone.
With the monster.
Now there’s no one to hear my screams. It’s better when there are two of us. It spreads the pain out evenly.
I know he’ll beat me so bad for this that I won’t walk for a fortnight.
Jesus, I killed mommy!
I killed Amy!
Curling tighter, I wait for my punishment.
Grief stran
gles me.
I hope I die too.
I hope he kills me for killing her.
I’m a murderer.
Looking up, just once, I wonder if I can make it to the screwdrivers. Without her here to protect me, he’s better dead.
That’s when the pointed boot connects with my eye, and the blast of pain sears straight down my spine, exploding my head.
Hell is brimstone and fire, so says Mrs Carter.
The burning lambasts my senses and I know there is a hell without flames, it’s the hell of incinerating agony.
~ Chapter 4 ~
Never again remember that day
Never again let light shine on it
~ Job 3:4
THE SMELL IS sour. Rancid.
Blinking, my left eye won’t open. It’s so swollen it’s pressing down on my eyeball; a perpetual ache.
“His majesty finally deigns to grace us with his pathetic presence.”
Kill him.
Scooting to the corner where the cupboards meet I stare at my father loafing in a kitchen chair, legs stretched out under the table, the bottle clasped loosely in his hand. It’s not the bottle that worries me, it’s the cigar in the other hand, with its fat ember burning hot, waiting for skin to put it out. Remaining silent, I wait for him to tell me what I have to do now. He’s the king here, I’m the dust. He jabs a thumb towards Amy, not even looking, his eyes too glazed to focus. This is perilous ground, the twilight between him getting explosively violent over the slightest misdemeanor, or passing out. I’m waiting for him to flake out, and know to do whatever he says in this window of madness. If I want to live, this is the gauntlet to obey without question.
“We have to get this story straight, boy. If we tell the cops you killed her, you’re gone. They’ll put you in prison until you’re old and decrepit. If we tell them she’s missing, paint it like she ran away, left us, then there’ll be no questions and you can stay put. Want me to lie for you, boy?”
Gulping against the arid wasteland in my mouth, I nod, my heart immediately drumming a death march at the thought of going to prison. They rape boys there.
Adam sits up from his lethargic slouch, stabbing the tabletop with his elbows, glowering at me while folding one powerful hand over the other, that one always in a fist. It’s as if one half of him is addicted to violence, waiting to release it, to exorcise the urges riddling his soul. “You fucked us both this time, Christopher. You drove her into the ground with your unreasonable demands, she had nothing left after she gave birth to you and you’ve leached her dry every day since. You ruined her, son.”
I don’t know what to say. I can’t help it. I get hungry. I grow out of my clothes. I needed help with my times tables.
Out of words and drenched with shame I stare at the floor, my eye throbbing, stinging whenever I shift my eyeball in its socket. I didn’t mean to kill her. If I’d known I would’ve gone to bed hungry. I’ve done it plenty times, when she says there’s no money for food cos it’s all inside the bottles Adam drinks.
His right hand hits the wood of the kitchen table, the fist pounding it like a gavel. “Who’s going to cook for us now? Eh you little bastard?! You don’t think! What are we going to do when I need to get off? If you were a girl you’d be hiding under your bed right now, bleeding from your smelly cunt.”
Closing my eyes against the wrath, I can’t stare into his vacant soul any longer. He chills the pneuma within me, freeze drying my humanity.
“This is your mess, I expect her buried before dawn. When you’re done burying her in the back yard, then you go upstairs, pack her shit, and bury it with her. Make it look like she ran away with all her stuff. If you don’t and the cops discover what you’ve done, I can’t help you. You hear me? This is on you, Christopher. Now you have to become a man. You’ll be burying your childhood with her tonight. No more snivelling, crying, sneaking off, or whining. Today you are a man and you take responsibility for what you’ve done.”
“Yes sir,” I whisper, my words tremulous and traumatized.
I stay paralysed until he stands, stomping to the living room to watch his naked movies and take the stuff in the needle.
Alone with Amy I crawl across to her, nuzzling my face in her chest, looking for comfort, but there’s no touch, no respite from the torment squeezing my heart so hard it hurts with every beat. Sobbing, I silently cry into her sweater, embedding her softness into my memory. When the house goes quiet, I sit up, dizzy and wretched, looking at the harsh sulfuric glow of the raw light-bulb on its noose. It sways and flickers as if there is interference, a spiritual shadow sending Morse code from the other side. It’s the same effect as when the clouds cross the sun. Immediately I suffer a shiver, my skin rippling with cold.
When I open the back door and trudge into the overgrown yard, I pause to look up at the moon and it too curtains over, clouds scudding in a hurry to staunch all light from my life.
I’ve crossed a barrier, one of the defining moments of my life, a milestone. Some boys become adult when they’re twenty-one, some become adult when they hit sixteen and get their own wheels, not me. Tonight, at the ripe old age of eight, I become a man.
Gulping the pebble stuck in my throat, damming the tears down, I stalk through the long grass to the shed, grabbing the shovel which is as tall as me.
I choose the peach tree for her resting place. She was that sweet, that soft, that nurturing. I’ll never eat another peach as long as I live.
Digging and digging and digging, my arms ache, my back is on fire, my muscles shake, and cold sweat drips down the planes of my smooth face. Then the gathered storm shows mercy and the deluge veils me in the cloudburst, softening the ground, my digging becoming a swamp of mud.
It takes me more hours than I’m aware of to dig a deep trench, and then with numb arms and a broken heart I dawdle wearily back through the yard and up the steps into the kitchen. Amy is heavy for such a little lady and I resort to rolling her by shoving all my weight against her, over and over, exposing the wet circle of urine left behind by her corpse. Interrupting my efforts I stare at the mess, at the shame, and feel like a hand of understanding has cupped my crown. She pisses herself too. I’m not the only one to be that afraid of Adam. I know he’s dad, but dad implies I have affection for him. I don’t. I curse the day he was conceived.
The sour smell is from this. It’s not just urine, it’s the cocktail of fear and pain and death and all that is ugly leaking into the house in an unholy pool. Her skirt hid the puddle in the delicate drapes of blue daises on white cotton. I am her blood. We are kin. Renewed grief rocks my spine, hunching me over her delicate frame while I keen into her cardigan, my filthy nails poking through the fragile lace knit of baby blue yarn.
“I’m sorry,” I blubber, snot drooling from my nostrils, the mud on my legs and hands marring her pristine beauty with my sin.
No matter how much I hug and rock her, kissing her forehead, my tears falling into her wide open and sightless eyes, there’s no undoing what’s been done. Death is forever.
Emotionally numb and marrow cold I continue rolling her, out the door, plummeting her down the steps, a chilling crack splitting the night while lightning adds her melodrama to my nightmare. Amy’s neck is strange, her jaw at an odd angle now.
Looking down while I catch my breath, I spy the yellow and purple marks up her legs where the skirt has snagged up. Once I get Amy to the long grass, rolling her doesn’t work, and it takes more than I have to inch and shove her across the yard, breathless and broken when I get her to flip into the deep trench.
I’m going to miss her.
“Me too,” I sniff, slumped on the ground staring into her grave. I nod to the voice who whispers to me.
The rain is icy and relentless, drowning her in moments, and I watch the frigid baptism hide her blue eyes under a mirage of rippling clarity.
I reach for her fingers, lifting her heavy arm up and kissing her hand. “I’m so sorry mommy, I never meant to hurt you.”
>
Festering in my heart is a river of rage, its banks burst, blindsiding me when I bellow a scream into the night, then glaring at my only salvation I yank at her clothes, shredding them with the last shards of my reserves, exposing the blisters and scars, the cuts and scabs.
He never touched her face, but we wear long sleeves all year for a reason. Legs splayed, sodden and smeared, I come undone by the porcelain beauty staring through the shifting mirror, disgusted that I could hurt anyone so perfect.
If only I’d known what I did, I’d not have done it. I didn’t know I was breaking her, that she was going to die because she had to look after me.
Memories blind my sight and I replay her half smile, the tired blemishes under her eyes. “Christ, don’t do that. Please baby, the house must be clean when daddy gets home. Be a good boy and fetch the mop.” – “Not now Christ, my little savior, I’m tired baby.” “Not today, son. Mommy’s sore. We’ll play tomorrow.”
The signs were all there, but I was too selfish to see them. Running inside without wiping my feet, missing my mouth when guzzling my gruel, messing my last clean shirt when she told me we had no money for soap.
Shame engulfs me and I crawl into her grave, hard up against her, turning my head so my face is submerged while I nuzzle her neck.
Why couldn’t we die together?
Why couldn’t I die instead of you?
I love you, Amy.
Wracked with sorrow, I hold my breath, but the tears keep coming, my heart keeps beating, the pain keeps stabbing.
~ Chapter 5 ~