One hour later. Two hours. Five hours. And my father still hasn’t come home.
*
I am hiding in my room, waiting until it is time to take my sleeping tablet. I watch movies on Netflix, darker and darker fare, a fist to the face, a knife to the throat, blood and blood and blood. But it’s not enough. I start looking at porn. I go for new channels these days. I watch videos filed under
Reluctance
and
Non-consent
. (They don’t use that word either.) I watch for clues. Is that what happened to me? Is that what I looked like? (Pink flesh.) (Splayed legs.)
I want to see these girls cry too.
I can do this for hours and hours. The videos are something to hold on to, something to ground me, to make sure I don’t float away. (I wish I would float away. I wish I could cut myself up into so many pieces that there would be nothing left of me.)
I promised Bryan I would try. (I don’t want to try.)
I read the magazines Beth sent over in her latest care package,
Grazia
and
Vogue
and
Elle
, accompanied by Lush bath bombs wrapped in floral printed paper from Liberty, six bags of Percy Pigs and salted caramels from Marks & Spencer, a tin of Darjeeling first-flush tea from Fortnum & Mason, two BADgal eyeliners from Benefit and a tube of Elizabeth Arden Eight Hour Cream.
For my darling goddaughter!
she wrote on one of those Papyrus greeting cards she buys when she’s on a business trip in the US.
Hopefully this will cheer you up! Much love, Beth xxxxxx.
It doesn’t look like her handwriting. She probably gave her personal assistant a credit card and told her to go buy stuff that a ‘normal nineteen-year-old’ would like.
I try to remember what normal felt like.
I turn each page with care. I want to sear these new images into my mind to replace those photos and those comments but . . .
I am pink flesh.
I am splayed legs.
I am a thing to be used.
I pad downstairs as softly as I can. I don’t want to attract any attention. They will want to talk to me, and there are no words any more, there is only one word,
that word
, and I cannot say it out loud. I fill up a glass of water to soothe my mouth. I pull at the handle of the medicine cupboard, but it’s locked. I curl my hands into fists and practise my deep breathing like the therapist showed me, but something is throbbing in me. It is a yawning mouth in my belly, sharp teeth, and it needs, and it needs and it needs. I have to make it stop.
Breathe in.
One. Two. Three.
Breathe out.
In the silence I can hear the faint echo of music seeping out underneath the door to the TV room. I strain to listen.
You fill up my senses . . .
My mother’s tuneless voice croaks along to that old song she and my father love so much. They used to laugh every time it came on the radio, and they would dance in the kitchen, while Bryan and I groaned with embarrassment. ‘No one waltzes any more,’ I would say. ‘You are so lame.’
‘Just you wait,’ my mother told me. ‘Some day you’ll have a special song with your own husband and your children will say it’s “lame” too.’
I had believed her.
I will never have children now. I would not allow them to grow inside me, where I could infect them. I would not allow them to grow up in a world where bad things could happen to them, such very bad things, and I wouldn’t be able to protect them.
My father used to grab my hands and pull me to my feet and twirl me around, telling me that ‘Annie’s Song’ was the song they played at their wedding. ‘Your mother was the most beautiful girl in Ballinatoom.’ He would blow a kiss at her.
‘It was the best day of my life,’ he would always say.
I look out the window, but only my mother’s car is in the drive.
I walk into the hall. My mother’s voice is thick, choked. She stops singing every so often to hiccup.
‘
. . . Let me die in your arms . . .
’
Her head spins when I push the door open, the hope in her eyes dying when she sees it is me. She is curled up on the sofa, the coffee table pulled over near her, a glass of wine placed precariously near the edge. No coaster.
‘Emma!’ I remember her saying when I put a glass of her home-made lemonade down on the wooden table. ‘A coaster, please. That table was expensive and I don’t want any watermarks on it.’ Ali and Maggie had looked at the ground, but I could see Jamie smirking. ‘Cool, will do, Mam,’ I said, grabbing a coaster, pretending that I didn’t care.
She has an old biscuit tin full of photos on the seat next to her, most of them the yellow-tinged prints of the seventies and eighties, and their wedding album is open on her lap. I used to love looking at it before. The thick wooden sleeves, a love-heart cut into the front of it, the date of their wedding swirled underneath. I would turn each page, laughing at the mullets and drop waists and padded shoulders. They all looked so young, standing outside the cathedral, waving at the photographer.
I should ask my mother why she’s crying but I don’t want to know. I am afraid. (I am always afraid now.)
The song comes to an end, pauses for a second and then starts again.
You fill up my senses . . .
‘Look at this one,’ my mother says to me, but I don’t move closer. I don’t want to be near her. She holds up the album, pushing back a thin layer of tissue paper, and points at a photo caught in the thick cream board. ‘Look at that. D’you see that? Do you?’ She doesn’t wait for my response, just drops the album back on to her lap, knocking the glass over, wine slopping on to the pages. She wipes at it with the edge of her dressing gown, hissing
shit
under her breath. ‘Old Jimmy Fitzpatrick, how are you, boy?’ she asks the photo album. She looks back at me. ‘He was our best man, do you know that? Do you, Emma?’
Of course I knew that.
‘Some best man,’ she snorts, and turns the page. ‘Oh, and there
you
are.’ She raises a glass in mock salute at the photo. ‘My dear, darling Father Michael. Man of God. Man of the cloth. The fucking prick.’
‘Calm down.’ I don’t know what else to say.
‘Calm down? Calm down! Don’t you tell me to
calm down
.’
‘I’m sorry,’ I say. And I am.
‘You’re sorry,’ she says in a sing-song voice. ‘Little Emma is sorry. Poor little Emma.’
I want to leave. What is she going to say? More words that can never be unsaid, more images that will never leave me.
‘Where do you think you’re going?’ she says when my fingers are on the door handle.
‘I just . . . I just came downstairs for my tablet. The cupboard was locked.’
‘Oh yes. Your tablets. Have to keep them under lock and key, don’t we? Can’t trust you not to do anything stupid. Again.’
She doesn’t mean this, I tell myself. She doesn’t mean any of this.
‘Maybe I’m sick of having to keep my medicine cupboard locked, did you ever think of that? Maybe I would like to be able to relax in my own fucking house without worrying about what you’re up to in your bedroom. Whether I’m going to go upstairs and find you lying in a pool of your own blood. The
mess
of it.’
‘Please.’
‘Selfish, that’s what you are. Don’t care about upsetting your brother, or your father, or me and—’
‘Please, Mam, don’t—’
‘Please don’t what? What, Emma?’ She laughs. Why is she laughing at me?
I don’t know what to say.
‘Do you know what happened today at Mass? I’m surprised you didn’t see something on Facebook.’
I haven’t been online today. Sundays are the hardest, when photos from the night before are uploaded, the girls glittering like prizes to be won, short skirts and high heels and I feel so very afraid for them (don’t they know what could happen? Don’t they know that they need to be careful?) and I feel so jealous of them. (Why me? Why did it have to happen to me?) And Sean and Paul and Fitzy are always there and they are always smiling, laughing. (I have ruined their lives.) Smiling and laughing and smiling and laughing. (I have ruined their lives.)
‘So you don’t know what I’m talking about?’ She shakes her head. ‘Of course you don’t. We have to protect little Emma. We have to make sure little Emma is OK, don’t we? But what about
me
? What about me, Emma? Who is making sure that
I’m
OK?’
I don’t know what to say. Tell me my lines, please.
‘He shook their hands,’ she says. ‘He actually went up to them and shook their hands. Some days I really wish . . .’
‘What are you talking about?’ I ask her.
‘And after all the times we’ve had him to the house,’ she continues, as if I hadn’t spoken. ‘He baptized you. He gave you your first Holy Communion. I arrange the flowers for the cathedral. And he went and shook their hands.’
‘Whose hands, Mam?’
She looks up at me. ‘Are you sure you want to know?’
I don’t know what I want.
‘Because I can tell you if you really want to know,’ she says. ‘Well? Do you? Do you want to know what happened today?’
I don’t know what I want any more.
‘But I’m not supposed to tell you. Don’t want to upset Emma, do we?’ There’s a pause, both of us staring at each other, and her eyes narrow. ‘Well, I think you should know.’ She grabs the page of the album, as thick as a board, and starts to tear at it.
‘Don’t!’ I cry out, but she ignores me, pulling the page from the old wooden book-frame, the spine of the album tearing, letting the other pages fall loose too. She throws the offending page at me, and the sharp corner of it hits me square in the forehead.
‘Take a good look at it,’ she says. ‘That man, that man gave a speech at our wedding talking about love and gentleness and kindness—’
‘Please—’
‘And then today, do you know what he did? Do you?’
‘Please stop—’
‘His sermon was about not judging others, and how important it is to assume that everyone is innocent until proven guilty. He didn’t use any names – oh, he couldn’t do that, could he? – but everyone knew who he was talking about, and your father and I like idiots in the top pew, after giving fifty euro to the collection plate.’
They are all innocent until proven guilty. But not me. I am a liar until I am proven honest.
‘As if we can afford fifty euro at the moment, when we don’t even know if your father is going to get fired—’
‘What?’ My throat closes up and I can’t get enough air in. My father is going to lose his job? (My fault.)
‘And everyone staring at us, and muttering under their breath—’
‘Please, Mam—’
‘And I passed Ciarán O’Brien on my way to take Holy Communion, and he winked at me, he actually winked—’
‘I don’t want to—’
‘And then, oh, I’m keeping the best till last, young lady. Just wait until you hear this. Then Father Michael waited at the church door until Sean Casey and Paul O’Brien . . .’
(What was Paul O’Brien doing at Mass?)
‘. . . came out, and he shook their hands, and offered his condolences.’
Father Michael has been the Monsignor in Ballinatoom for twenty years. He christened me, he heard my first confession as I listed off the fights I’d had with Bryan and the time I had found a five-euro note stuck down the back of the couch in the TV room and didn’t tell my parents. He was there for my first Holy Communion and Confirmation. He would come to our house for dinner and he would tell me how pretty I looked. When he gave me his plate after he had finished eating, he would smile and tell me that I’d make some lucky man a fine wife someday.
He doesn’t believe me. None of them believe me.
‘It’s pretty obvious he’s chosen sides,’ my mother says. ‘And it isn’t yours.’
Yours. Not ours.
I try to think about what the therapist told me. You’re not going to die, Emma, it’s just a panic attack. Breathe in love,
slut, liar
, breathe out fear,
skank
, breathe in love,
bitch
, breathe out fear.
Whore.
I try and remember but my brain is crammed up with that word and those photos and those comments (her tits are tiny, aren’t they?) and I don’t have any room for anything else.
Slut, liar, skank, bitch, whore.
I turn my back to her. I need to walk away. I need to go upstairs and pull the duvet over my head, diving into the darkness as if I was diving into water.
But I can’t. I am full of this shame, and it is weighing me down, holding my feet in shackles. I can see Father Michael shaking their hands, and I do not know if I can survive this. I just want it to stop. I just want it all to stop. I want the opinion pieces in the newspapers to stop, and I want the phone calls at 3 a.m. to stop, and I want #IBelieveBallinatoomGirl to stop trending on Twitter.
All of those strangers who believe that I am a victim, that I am innocent. (And they are the only ones.)
I stare at my wrists. (I want them to bleed.) I imagine my life oozing away from me, my body weakening, until this could be over.
My mother is gasping,
sorry, sorry, sorry
, begging me to talk to her.
‘Please don’t tell your father, please, Emma, I didn’t mean to tell you, I swear.’
But she did mean to tell me. She wants me to hurt as much as she does.
‘Please, Emma? Promise me. He’ll kill me, he’ll, well, I don’t know what he’ll do.’
He’ll divorce you, I think. He’ll pack his bags, and leave this house, without a backward glance. He would be happy to have an excuse to escape. He will leave you alone with me.
‘I can’t take it any more,’ she says, ‘I just can’t take it any more, I can’t, Emma, I can’t take this any more, I just can’t, I can’t take it any more . . .’
She babbles while I stare at a photo on the wall. It is the four of us, taken before Bryan’s grads ball in sixth year. We look happy.
I want to rip it from the wall and smash it.
She whimpers, then starts to cry again, but it’s softer now, a low gurgling in the back of her throat. I stay still. I hear shuffling, the thud of something heavy hitting the ground, and then my mother’s breathing eases from tightly wound gasps into longer, slower sighs. I wait until I hear the chafing sound of snores before I turn to look at her. She’s stretched out on the sofa, her mouth slack, a little pocket of fat gathered at her jawline. Her glass has tipped over on to her chest, the liquid seeping into her dressing gown. I bend down and collect all the sheets of photos, hiding the wine glass behind the sofa so my father won’t see it when he comes in. I take a photo out of the old biscuit tin. My father with a pint of Murphy’s in one hand, a cast on the other from a broken bone during a GAA match. My mother in a shapeless dress, a long pearl necklace around her neck, holding her glass of orange cordial out to the camera. They look so young.