by C. S. Barnes
Intention
C.S. Barnes
Contents
A note from the narrator
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Now
A Note From Bloodhound Books
Copyright © 2019 C.S. Barnes
The right of C.S. Barnes to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by her in accordance Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2019 by Bloodhound Books
Apart from any use permitted under UK copyright law, this publication may only be reproduced, stored, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means, with prior permission in writing of the publisher or, in the case of reprographic production, in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency.
All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
www.bloodhoundbooks.com
A note from the narrator
When I was four years and nine months old, it occurred to me that I might be different. Not in the overtly self-conscious way that most people will feel at one time or another; I was a child, after all. But on those first taster days of school I already didn’t like the other children; I didn’t feel challenged by the lessons; I didn’t miss my mum. They’re relatively small things, but I’ve come to think of them as building blocks – strong foundations for slightly larger issues. For instance, when I was eight years and six months old, I squeezed the life out of our family cat. My mother told me that it wasn’t my fault. Poppy was old, and it certainly wasn’t anything that I had done. I don’t think she understood what I was trying to tell her.
To begin with it was a passing thought, a curiosity I only pursued due to the absence of company. By ten years and two months of age, my father had become so preoccupied with beating my mother – and my mother so preoccupied with covering her bruises with make-up – that they barely noticed what their little girl was occupying herself with. In fact, the behaviour went so unnoticed that I managed to convince myself that it was quite normal; that working out the amount of weed killer required to annihilate a catalogue of household animals was a perfectly acceptable pastime for any above-average-intelligence preadolescent. Regrettably, despite my desire to normalise it, my growing intelligence hindered my adoption of that belief with any real conviction. The first time my mother picked a pungent carcass – it was a swallow, or some other bird of a similar size – from my windowsill and deposited it in the outside rubbish bin, I knew that I was crossing some lines.
‘I just found it,’ I had told her. ‘I wondered how long it would take to change.’
Decompose, I meant, and I think she knew. But nothing more was ever said on the matter. That was my first real mistake. Although, the fish in the freezer incident was a childish error on my part, too, but we’ll come to that later.
When fully-fledged adolescence arrived, the household in which I lived transformed into your average miserable family. Miserable because alcohol is a depressant, not a mood lifter – a reality that my father insisted on testing and verifying for himself on a daily basis. Everyone in our local Accident and Emergency Department was on a first name basis with my mother by the time I was eleven years and eight months old. Through my ritualistic attendance of the hospital’s visiting hour to see her, they soon came to be on a first name basis with me too.
For a while it was convenient to believe that my mother was just clumsy; that doors, floors, and other miscellaneous items around the house were somehow conspiring against her. However, when a boy at my secondary school asked an allegedly innocent question about my father’s behaviour towards my mother – ‘Like, does your dad do it a lot or…?’ – I discovered that not everyone was capable of ignoring it as well as me. A nervous laugh moved in a Mexican wave around the classroom, and then I thumped the boy in the face. A bloody mess escaped from his nose as he dabbed away tears. I was thoroughly impressed. My mother, less so.
‘We don’t use violence; it doesn’t fix problems,’ she had said.
‘So why does Dad do it?’
We didn’t talk for a week after that. She broke her vow of silence, just once, to inform me that my father was cleaning out the fish pond. She muttered something about dead fish and contaminated water and then turned back to the task at hand: ironing my father’s best white shirt ahead of his evening with friends. I asked if the water smelt like bleach, but she didn’t answer. I can’t remember whether it was her silence or something else altogether, but that week I heard everything for the first time. It seemed my ears had become attuned to the sounds of my father’s after-hours activities. And apparently once you tune into that frequency, you can never turn it off.
The only time my mother and father presented a truly united front was in their efforts to hide the injuries that followed, yet there were times when they couldn’t even manage that. One morning stands out in particular; their antics from the previous evening had left my mother’s right hand entirely useless. This was something my father regretted when his breakfast was served fifteen minutes late. Each offer of assistance from me was greeted by ‘she can manage’. Losing patience, he squashed my fifth offer of help. The grip of his fingers around my wrist was quickly followed by a twist, and then a grinding sensation.
‘You get that bloody hand off her.’
It was my mother’s first and only intervention.
That evening I felt the front leg of a stray cat crack inside my hand. I realised then that his angle hadn’t been right at all, not if he’d wanted to break a bone.
On reflection, it could be considered a perverse achievement that we lived like this for so long. But times change and I, as most children do, eventually had to depart for greener pastures. The beatings worsened after I left for university. My mother never told me, explicitly, but she never really needed to. My early video chats with her soon disintegrated into half-video, half-darkness; while my face was suspended in the corner of my laptop screen, the space that hers should occupy remained black. Given that she never mentioned it, I assumed that I wasn’t expected to either. With this home-life situation a secondary concern now, my main problem became how to correctly perform an autopsy on a pig – a primary concern for most biology students at university, and one that I took to with disproportionate excitement. In this new setting, the animal-based experiments that I had so frequently performed at home became something worth sharing, with a room full of people no less, all of whom were up to their elbows in entrails themselves.
My fellow students would animate carcasses – using one hand to manipulate the mouth of a long-dead animal while providing an amusing voice-over for the creature – and smuggle organs into each other’s work spaces in a manner that I found refreshing, encouraging even. The interactions with these new associates helped me to grow and explore myself in a way that I was told I should at university. One classmate – Ang
ela Straven – even shared her experiences with formaldehyde and methanol over two bottles of wine and a girls’ night, and from this the preservation of my experiments was born and the subsequent storage of them as well. It all went a long way towards normalising my behaviour, although it’s possible that wasn’t a good thing.
On an irregular basis I was lured away from my student life of beans on toast, animal dissections, and Friends reruns. My mother was always pleased, or relieved, to have me home, while my father often greeted me with a notable lack of interest – that is, of course, on the few occasions when he felt moved enough to greet me at all. If nothing else, these visits home reminded me of precisely why I had abandoned the house and its misfit occupants in the first place, so perhaps, in that sense, they served a purpose.
Our family history may make for a surprising read, I suppose, for anyone viewing it from an external angle. We managed. It was our very own version of normality. The most surprising element, in fact, is not the abuse and the subsequent damage that it caused at all. The most surprising thing, I think, is that one of us didn’t die sooner.
Chapter 1
We were dropped back into the dysfunctional dynamics of family life at the end of my second year of university, when I reluctantly returned home for the summer months. A complication with contracts – thanks to my would-be housemates – meant that keeping away for the holidays was not an option that year. On the afternoon of my arrival, my mother’s arm was already tucked away in a sling which disappeared after a day or two; I had just escaped an outburst. Beyond that everything was average, unchanged. After my first evening in my own bed, my first morning was made up of dead air between my father and me; I made tea in the kitchen as he tried to read his morning paper. He tutted, shuffled the pages. Something was irking him but I didn’t want to ask what. He left the house without saying a word and that’s when my mother appeared; bright-eyed and unexpectedly chirpy, she set about making breakfast with an unnecessary smile on her face. My deadpan expression – somewhere between amused and bemused – felt misfit.
‘Are you okay, love?’ my mother asked, back to me, buttering toast.
‘Of course,’ I lied. I wasn’t okay but I was unsure of why.
We shared a quiet breakfast of toast and too-strong tea while my mother enquired about my plans for the day – I had none – and I toyed with the idea of asking what hers were. It had never crossed my mind what my mother did all day: how she filled the time, what a normal Tuesday might be. Tuesdays were cleaning days, as I later discovered.
‘Will the Hoover disturb you?’
My head was firmly wedged inside JG Ballard’s Crash.
‘Gillian?’ She sounded nervous; how she must sound when she talks to my father in similar circumstances, I thought.
‘Sorry?’
‘The Hoover.’
‘Oh.’ I shook my head. ‘That’s fine, it won’t disturb me.’
After this, my Stepford mother reappeared to clean corners of the house that had long been forgotten and were now only inspected by her.
‘There are some places the Hoover just can’t reach,’ she said, scrubbing away.
I couldn’t offer a complementary response and so I opted for a subject change. ‘What time will Dad be home?’
My mother was on her knees, angled in such a way that I could only see her backside rising and dipping intermittently, and an elbow jutting out in a determined beat as she rubbed at something in the corner of the living room.
‘The shop closes at half past five now, so he should be home by six because Tuesday isn’t a pub night. I don’t know when dinner will be,’ she added, pre-empting my next query.
I felt she had given me more information than I needed, like she was providing me with tips for surviving Tuesdays. Would I get these every day?
My mother was right about the timing. At six on the dot, my father wandered into the house and stuck his head into the kitchen to deliver a curt nod of ‘Hello’ to my mother and a stare of disapproval to me. He smelt of raw meat; the odour of a butcher that I had come to exclusively associate with him.
This clockwork running of the house appeared common practice for them. Everything was timed down to the minute from my father showering the work-day off himself, right through to my mother setting the Sky box to record her soaps – ‘So we can skip through the adverts,’ she said, as though this were an activity I was expected to partake in. They – we – even ate dinner together.
‘Could you pass the salt?’ I asked anyone.
‘You don’t need salt,’ my father replied.
Nevertheless my mother passed the shaker; my father passed her a disapproving look. Tuesdays may have been cleaning days but in my first four days of being at home, cleaning was all I saw my mother do. It appeared as a compulsion for her, as if something important depended on clean corners and properly swept floors. Late one Friday afternoon – when the house was a clinical level of clean after a week of bleach and buffing – my mother wandered upstairs and through my open doorway. The time had come; we were going to have a chat.
She found me lying down in my room – another unchanged element of the house; it still held a single bed, still boasted pink walls. I was poring over the pages of a book with feigned concentration.
‘Do you have a minute, love?’
‘What do you need?’
‘I just thought we could have a little chat.’
I shook away the beginnings of a frown. ‘About?’
‘Oh, anything.’ She edged closer to my bed, making the journey in small movements, as if hoping that I wouldn’t see how close she now was. ‘How’s university going?’
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. 2004. Jim Carrey. ‘Constantly talking isn’t necessarily communicating.’
We discussed university, we discussed my plans for the summer – again, I had none – and we skirted around the issue of how I felt about being home. Disgruntled, mostly, but that wasn’t a feeling that I shared with my mother. Instead I told her it was a change, and I would adapt, as would Dad. She hadn’t mentioned my father at all during the conversation but I knew that was the direction in which we would eventually steer things.
‘He doesn’t mind you being here,’ she said, responding to something that I hadn’t asked.
‘No?’
‘No.’
‘Geraldine!’
My mother’s shoulders bunched up as if trying to shield her from something.
‘Dinner!’
It wasn’t a question so much as a command. My mother shot me a look – almost a grimace that cocked her mouth up at one side. With a shrug she stood and paced to my doorway, asking on the way: ‘What would you like for dinner, love?’
‘I don’t care.’
I don’t mind, I should have said.
‘Woman!’ My father launched the word up the stairs like a small grenade; the sound was guttural, aggressive. My mother again flinched at the sound before flashing an uncomfortable smile and moving from the doorway.
The quiet that followed this incident was deceptive. When I ventured downstairs a short while later, I heard the throaty laugh of my father drifting out of the living room. I crept past the doorway and made for the kitchen where I discovered, resting in the corner of the room, a complete dinner slumped on top of a ruined plate that had been cracked into five neat pieces. In the opposing corner there stood my mother, trying to settle a tremor as she soaked her hand beneath the cold tap. Despite seeing everything, I couldn’t make it all fit.
‘Is he having dinner with us?’ I asked.
‘It was too hot. I should have warned him.’
The Wizard of Oz. 1939. Judy Garland. ‘There’s no place like home.’
My mother pulled out a chair opposite me but, after a second of deliberation, sat hesitantly on the one next to me instead, as if her first choice was too suggestive of confrontation. With a damp cloth tucked around her injured hand, she was left with no other option but to use only the edge of her
fork to chip away at her dinner. It was unexpectedly satisfying to see her struggle.
While my mother tentatively chewed a series of half-mouthfuls, I fell into rearranging my dinner into different patterns across my plate. She eventually noticed.
‘Is there something wrong with your food?’
‘No, there’s something wrong with my family.’
Something flitted over her face; was it disappointment? Surprise? Discomfort?
‘Can I speak openly?’ I knew this was the proper way to introduce a potentially difficult conversation. I’d heard it said on television.
‘I thought you already were.’ Her tone was blunt; it didn’t fit her at all. But then it softened. ‘We hardly have secrets here, love, you can say what you like.’
A problem that I had often experienced was an inability to devote an appropriate amount of consideration to a thought before voicing it. Too little and the thought was clumsy, misshapen; too much and it was clinical, accusatory. Despite having a loose idea of what I wanted to say, there wasn’t quite enough time to format it, which is perhaps why it emerged as an emotional blunt force trauma: ‘Why didn’t you ever try to leave?’
My mother dropped her fork and it bounced off her dinner plate, making for a dramatic gesture. I remained silent, stern, perhaps even parental. ‘Do we have to have this conversation, Gillian?’
In my experience it was considered bad form to answer a question with a question, but it didn’t seem appropriate to highlight this. Nor did it seem appropriate to suggest that the reason we were having this conversation was because the issue had never been addressed before, and there was only so much extracurricular reading I could do around the so-called battered-woman syndrome before my curiosity called for first-hand research.