by T H Paul
“He’s an evil man, isn’t he,” Millie said after a few seconds.
“Yes, he is,” Penny said. She felt violated and abused. Anger raged inside. She would hurt him. She would destroy him. How could he have done that to her? She thought he was a good man, a father figure when she needed one. He was a monster. She’d make him pay. She would get him to suffer for what he’d done to her.
8
Some people deserve mercy, others, like that monster, don’t. I’d eventually find a way to get to him. It wasn’t as easy as I first thought, as I had no idea what I was really up against. Once I did, revenge would be swift.
Suddenly I had no one. My father was gone, and Mr Jenkins was a fraud. I was at an age where I needed a male role model. Soon I’d take whatever attention I could get, and that didn’t help me either. We’ll get there, I’m sure. I’m not proud of any of it. I should never have been in that position, however.
He should have been there. He should have protected me. Isn’t that the job a father does––isn’t that why dads are so special? It seems I was never meant to know. Mine was gone. And my mother had gone to pieces as a result. I know she blamed me.
News of the arrest had become national news after just a few days, the evidence that the police were to go on to find at the studio damning proof of the man’s guilt. Thankfully for Penny, no one at school had made the connection with her and the man in question––no one knew her well enough to know she’d been dancing there since the age of five. Due to the nature of the crimes, there were no names used in any report, so Penny and her dancing secret were safely locked tight.
Still, every time she would walk up to a group and hear them discussing the local pervert, Penny would be reminded of those images, in that office, on his computer. Reports showed that the police had found the hidden camera in the changing rooms. The man’s trial was set to start in a month’s time, while the police continued to gather evidence. Being huge news for that part of the country was sure. Penny was dreading it.
Police would later knock on the door of her home––Penny spied them from her bedroom but kept hidden––her mother too drunk to have heard it. They walked away, this time. There was no car on the drive––the replacement Thomas had promised had still never materialised. Penny was sure the police would be back. Reports in the paper suggested they found two sets of girl’s fingerprints in Mr Jenkins’ office––the assumption being that he’d done things to them in that room, though Penny was certain it was from when she and Millie broke in. As far as Penny could remember, no one was ever allowed in his office. She now, feeling disgusted, knew why.
The discovery of Mr Jenkins’ hidden life had put a pause on the friendship of Millie and Penny, not for any other reason than it just was an unspeakable connection, a taboo subject. Neither knew how to deal with or handle what they’d seen, nor what it meant for their relationship with each other. At least Millie had a dad to whom she could turn. Penny envied her friend more than ever.
While an absent father was painful, having a mother who was home but absent was an altogether different proposition. Barbara spent nearly as much time crying as she did drinking, which was saying something. Penny assumed her tears would be pure alcohol by that point––there couldn’t have been any other liquid, besides the drink, left inside. That meant Penny couldn’t have any friends back to her place during these difficult months––that hadn’t happened for nearly a year, anyway. Everybody knew that Penny’s mother drank. Abbey had been the last friend that Penny had had over to play, back in the time before it all changed. Penny stopped herself reminiscing too much. It couldn’t change what had happened.
As summer arrived, the school now over, the trial of Mr Jenkins was underway. They rarely used the first name, and Penny wasn’t sure she ever knew it, though finally the J initial that sometimes got added in front of his surname was confirmed to be for Jack. Jack Jenkins. A special officer from the police, a female from the local station, had spoken to Penny and asked her about anything unusual concerning Penny and her dance teacher that might have happened. From her comments, they made a written statement, but they didn't expect that Penny would be required to attend the trial.
Penny was surprised it had even made it that far. She’d been spending each night dreaming up new ways to hurt, ways to kill, him. Make him crap razor blades, make his throat refuse to swallow, make his body retain water. She had tried anything that would inflict pain and agony on her former dance teacher. She would wake each morning expecting to hear news of his unfortunate death, but there was nothing. Nothing she ever did seemed to make any difference to him. Penny couldn’t explain why that was. Maybe because she had once held such affections for the man, idolised him at times––maybe that was why?
Barbara had sobered up, somewhat, by the time of the trial. She had been called to give evidence, as had all parents of the remaining eight girls who made up his class at the time of his arrest. Most damning of all would be the two families who’d taken their girls out of the group a few year’s previous. The courtroom, which included Barbara who was sitting on the balcony listening, would hear how he’d sexually assaulted the two girls on that trip to Paris, making them sleep in his bed with him one night. There were gasps from the jury at that revelation.
“Did he ever do anything to you?” Barbara had demanded to Penny that night when she came home. “Did he touch you where he shouldn’t have?”
Penny didn’t know what to say––she knew the man was now a fraud, a fake––a monster––though hadn’t, thankfully, ever done anything like that to her. She would have liked, however, to say yes, he had. He touched me all the time, made me swear never to tell you, swear that I’d get in trouble and never become a real dancer if I talked to anyone about it. She thought about saying that to her mother but had realised that would have then involved her in the trial. She didn’t want to be anywhere near that place.
“No, he didn’t.” Her mother seemed relieved.
“Thank goodness for that, then,” she said.
The trial lasted just two weeks. Jenkins was convicted of multiple counts of sexual crimes against children, as well as the grooming of young girls, and was sentenced to a maximum of ten years in prison, though would have to undergo a full analysis if he was ever to released. He was to remain on the sex offenders register indefinitely.
With the trial over, Penny spent much of the remaining month of the summer holiday by herself. Her mother had returned to drinking. Penny would often go to sleep hearing her mother crying over how it was all her fault, how she should have stopped it, shouldn’t have forced Penny to keep dancing. It was during one of these outbursts that Penny heard her mother say she’d heard rumours.
So her mum had suspected something was going on and kept taking Penny there, anyway? Before the month was out, the food would run out––there was plenty of supplies of alcohol, but it seemed no money left for anything else.
9
There are so many ways those next two years could have gone, yet I didn’t see it going like this. How was I to know I couldn’t change what always ended up happening? How was I to know I couldn’t fight my DNA?
Home life for the remaining two Black’s over the next twenty-four months was to settle, somewhat, after that summer. Barbara went on her first session of rehab and managed three months sober. She was able to get a job during that period––the money needed to run the home, put food on the table and make ends meet, but it came at a cost. Soon she had enough to repurchase alcohol. The cycle repeated itself.
Penny had taken a newspaper round. It gave her a little pocket money each week, which proved enough to buy the essentials for school. Without the cost of dancing anymore, nor the need to run a car, money did go a little further than it ever had before. There were also only two mouths to feed, not three. Neither spoke much about the absence of Thomas.
What they talked about even less were Penny’s abilities. It was as if there was some unwritten code that because it was P
enny’s secret gift that was at the very core of the family’s breakdown, it was a subject that they could not discuss.
But Penny was sure her mother was desperate to talk about it.
Penny pushed through her exams numbed more and more by the silence. She felt an outcast, sensing that what she could do was not appreciated by her mother. It was as if Penny had the plague. Penny resolved, therefore, to keep it from her mother as she had before. True, her mother now knew––both her parents understood a hell of a lot more about it all than Penny did, and that would have been helpful had they talked. However, because of the silence, because of the lack of any meaningful connection, Penny was made to feel like she was dirty, unclean. Possessed.
The whole ordeal with Mr Jenkins had not helped her feeling dirty, either. It seemed to Penny that Barbara had never been able to look at her daughter quite the same again. She was always disapproving of Penny’s choice of boys, not understanding anything her daughter was doing, not seeing that she was in fact no longer a little girl. It was as if she’d ignored the fact Penny was now sixteen. Some of Penny’s classmates were having sex already––or so they were saying. Penny laughed so much about it the day she’d read their thoughts. Not one of the boys who boasted they were having sex had ever done so. It seemed lots of people liked to talk the talk, but they were all full of rubbish.
Still, the fact she was of age, didn’t appear to have made her mother’s radar. She guessed, seeing as she was not old enough to be sent out to buy more alcohol, there was only so much use Penny could currently be to her always falling off the wagon mother.
Then, a few months before Penny’s seventeenth birthday, it suddenly all changed. As if coming to her senses, as if realising she had been living with a girl that possessed extraordinary abilities all of a sudden, Penny’s mum started asking for help. Penny, you can change this, Penny you can find ways to get us money. Give me this ability, give me that one. Make me stop drinking.
“I can’t, mum, nothing works on you, I’ve already told you,” Penny said. A lot went unspoken. So you have been testing on me, trying to hurt me, trying to get rid of me? Bitch.
“But there must be some way. I mean, look at us. We’re living like peasants. We haven’t got anything, can’t go anywhere. I need to be able to find a job. I need to be able to earn some money!”
“Then stop drinking!” Penny lost her temper. It was always the same, always came back to the same issue––her mother was a terrible, hopeless alcoholic, and until she realised it herself, there was no helping either of them. However much money Barbara might have or earn, Barbara would just spend it on drink. She would soon lose the job she had from whatever employer had been foolish enough to assume Barbara could do it.
“I’m trying.”
“You’re trying? How many bottles are there in the bloody kitchen, mother?” They both knew there was half a dozen; all purchased that morning. Some effort her mother was putting into stopping drinking.
“Just do something for me, Penny, please. Do something for us.”
So it had started, her mother had finally realised she might be able to get something from her daughter, might have some value and use for her after all. Penny wasn’t going to be used by anyone ever again.
“I can’t.”
“That is rubbish, and we both know it! What you are saying is you won’t.” She hadn’t been, but she realised it was also that. Maybe there was an indirect way of helping, seeing as nothing she did on her mother made a difference, and Penny had never been able to do something for herself. But even as that thought came, she knew she couldn’t do that, either. Her mother had never really loved her, and her father never wanted her. Why do something good for them now? Where had their protection been when Mr Jenkins was viewing secret images of her, taking photos of her, patting her leg. Where were they when he was buying underwear for her? They were distant, removed. They didn’t care. Well, now she didn’t care either.
10
I can’t help but blame myself. If I’d never told my mother what I could do, if I’d never given into her questions, maybe we’d all still be together? Maybe it wouldn’t have all changed, and I wouldn’t have done something that I would ponder for the rest of my life––something that despite trying to undo multiple times during my lowest points, I couldn’t. What I was about to do would remain that way forever.
I wish I never confirmed to my mother that I had the gift, and I wish I had talked to her about the shame, the emptiness I felt following the revelations about Mr Jenkins, as well as the painful absence of my father. I wish I’d done a lot of things differently.
As those final few months came to their dramatic conclusion in that otherwise quiet and unassuming cul-de-sac on the edge of London, Penny became more focused. A chasm had opened up between her and her mother, something she felt there was no control over, something so unmovable that it might as well have been the Grand Canyon in real life.
After the months of growingly more hostile confrontations between mother and daughter––Barbara continually urging her daughter to do something for them both, Penny becoming more and more withdrawn, desperate not to give in––a steady silence held. Barbara had returned to the alcohol like a duck to water. If anything she was drinking with such abandonment that she was now doing severe damage to her already, no doubt, battered liver.
Penny couldn’t help but continually push away the one thought that kept coming back to her. She knew nothing had worked on her mother––she couldn’t have directly done something to help her mum if Penny wanted––but there was always an echo now, each time Penny tried, dangling before her the one thing she could do. Penny knew it was possible. And as those months went by, she was fighting her inner demons to stop herself doing just that.
The school was the escape she needed, and with everything going on with Abbey, Jack, Kelly and co––it was all on top of Penny at that same moment, as her world went from dark to even more darkness––Penny did at least find some let-up. No one knew about her at school. That was something. As hard as it was, as difficult as she found it to be around some of her classmates––especially some of the girls––it was paradise compared to home life. Her mother had not been at the previous three Parents Evenings, not because she’d decided not to come, but because Penny had made it so. Each time the night would come, Penny would erase all memory from her teachers’ minds that they hadn’t, in fact, seen Penny or her mother. It was the best Penny could do.
Penny would continue to visit the cinema with Millie, probably the one friend Penny had left to call on. They paid for their tickets now, Penny with income from her paper round, Millie with her own Saturday job in a supermarket. No need to kiss Jack Ferguson and creep in through the back door. By that point, he was already well into Abbey and those legs, anyway. It was a year before Penny would ruin them both.
The incident happened one weekend that summer, school over and Penny without the distraction that it had given her. It’d been over a year since she had admitted to her mother that she had powers, over a year since her father had walked out, too many months of losing sleep over both situations. Homelife had become almost unlivable, the house a constant mess, it smelt now too, and Penny was sure that was because her mother would wet herself, too pissed to realise the lounge was not the bathroom. Penny despised her life and dreaded that anyone she knew, someone she liked, would ever come knocking on her door.
Penny confronted her mother in the kitchen late one night, catching her like you would a rat, scurrying for more alcohol, desperate for something more on which to feast. Penny had hidden all the booze. She had a look in her eye, too.
“Finally,” Barbara said, seeing the calm but terrifying look in her daughter’s face, whose eyes displayed a previously unseen quality as sinister as they were bright. “You’ve run out of resolve. You’re going to do it, aren’t you!”
Penny wasn’t sure exactly what her mother thought she was about to do––Penny was sure she didn’t know she in
tended her harm––but whatever Barbara thought, Penny didn’t care.
“It’s over,” Penny said, trying her best to control her words, her emotions jumping loops inside her stomach, her gift poised and ready to strike. Barbara just laughed, a howling cackle that made her sound as mad as she was alcoholic.
“Yes, finally I see who you are, my mutant child. Finally, you come to it, too weak and too afraid to do anything else.”
“Shut up!” SHUT UP!” Penny was backing away, her hands to her head, battling the rage she was feeling, the overwhelming urges to follow through, a force almost controlling her, willing her, twisting her to kill.
Barbara laughed all the more. “Where is my vodka!” she screamed, coming at Penny with her hands raised, nails stretching out for her daughter’s face. “If you’re going to kill me at least let me have one last drink,” she said, as Penny brushed her off, pushing her forcefully away from her. Her mother fell to the floor.
“I’m not going to kill you,” Penny said, willing herself to believe it. “But you’ve got to leave.”
“Leave?” Barbara said, looking up at Penny from the floor, her eyes blurry, head spinning. “Leave? You’re chucking me out of my own home?”
“You call this pigsty a home? It’s a dump. You’ve made it a dump and have no idea quite how horrendous it is.” Penny was just about holding her rage at bay. Kill her it said, kill her it always continued to plead. Penny put both hands to her head as if she could silence that inner voice.
“It doesn’t ever go away, you know,” Barbara said, remembering from long ago––another life, it appeared––how it had been with her. There was no getting rid of that feeling now it was fully alive, fully active––demanding blood.