Page 4

She must have passed out then, she thought, because the next thing she knew, the clouds had mostly gone and the moon was out. She was lying on the plinth of one of the partly constructed buildings, behind a pillar. Her pelvis and lower stomach were one single throbbing mass of pain, and her arm throbbed, too, where she had been bitten. Moaning softly, she tried to get up, only to double over, retching. She retched until she had vomited everything in her stomach, until she was throwing up bile, and still it didn’t feel enough.

Sometime after that she walked homewards, stumbling. She had tied the remnants of her jeans around her waist, but her legs were bare and smeared with blood, more blood dripping from between her thighs on to the road and on her sneakers. She whimpered a few times with the pain, but not only with the pain.

Worse than the pain and the violation was something that was pushing at her consciousness, like a spectre leaping and mouthing to be noticed: this had happened before. The pain, like a knife cutting into her, the violation, the sense of being used as a tool might be used, none of this was new. When? Where? She tried to think, but all she got was the memory of a voice.

"Don’t tell. It’s your fault this happened. You wanted it. Your fault. Yours. Yours. Yours."

Whose voice? When?

Bent over with the pain and the cramping in her stomach, she stumbled through the deserted streets back to the house she had fled a few hours ago.

Here, she was at the door, fumbling. Automatically, she pried off her bloodstained sneakers, using one foot to scrape the shoe off the other without untying the laces. She would be tracking blood into the house anyway, she realised vaguely. Whatever. She wasn’t wearing the shoes indoors, so they couldn’t get her for that, and there weren’t any rules against bleeding on the floor, as far as she knew. She tittered. Funny.

The door wasn’t locked, and she opened it quietly, thinking to go to her room and change, clean herself up somehow, bathe, rid herself of the sense of being nothing, of being dirt. Maybe she could lie down and sleep it away and in the morning, if the wounds weren’t too bad, nobody would even have to know.

The pain was increasing now, rather than decreasing, spreading out from her vagina and her arm in concentric throbbing waves which met in the centre of her body and rippled back again the way they had come, all the way to her scalp and the tips of her toes, so that she felt light-headed and unsteady on her feet. Her mouth felt odd too, hot and dry, and she wondered if she had got infected somehow. That was all she needed, an infection.

She was tiptoeing past her sister’s room when she heard the soft moaning. At first she thought the moaning was inside herself, for she was no longer sure of the boundaries between reality and what was going on in her mind. But as she leaned on the wall, trying to absorb the pain, she heard it again, clearly, right through the thin wall. Moaning, and sobbing.

"DeeDee?"

Silence within, and then the unmistakable sound of a blow.

The door to DeeDee’s room was never very strong. When she threw her shoulder against it, it burst open, and she almost fell inside, the tattered jeans wrapping around her legs and tripping her. Her sister, naked on her bed, turned away, her hands over her face, and someone else, naked too, turning, face twisted in anger.

"You," she whispered.

Memory, denied so long, unfolding, the spectre out in the open. Dark nights lying in bed, dreading what was to come, knowing it would come, tomorrow if not today, the violation, the pain.

Your fault. You wanted it. You.

She threw herself at him, at her father, at the reason for her existence in the world, her nails scratching at his face, and he caught her easily, hit her hard enough to knock her back through the door into the passage. She bounced off the wall, almost fell, caught herself, and he was on her, hitting her again, and finally she fell on the floor, curled over, barely feeling his blows, consumed with the pain inside her, the pain that threatened to tear her open.

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