Belinda Bauer - The Facts of Life and Death

Finally they got a good enough grip to lever the slab up and peer underneath, and Ruby felt her tummy flip over.

It was just as Adam had described.

The hole was not big, but it was big enough.

Who knew why it had been dug – for smuggling or family heirlooms or for hiding a priest – but Ruby no longer had any doubt that once the bones of a pedlar had been found here, curled up and grimacing and with knife-marks on his ribs.

She shivered all down her back.

‘Get in,’ said Mummy. ‘Quick!’

Ruby didn’t hesitate. She crouched down so she could slide under the flagstone.

Ching. Ching.

Mummy dropped the slab in terror and Ruby felt her heart stop.

Daddy had come to take care of them.

‘HELLO, WHORES.’

Ruby still didn’t know what the word meant, but it made her feel sick to hear him say it.

Mummy stood up. ‘Ruby. Get behind me.’

She did. She was too scared not to.

‘Don’t hurt her,’ said Mummy, and Daddy laughed a laugh that made Ruby go wobbly inside.

He started across the room towards them and Mummy backed away, with Ruby bumping behind her. She stumbled over the backpack and the red light flickered back into life.

‘John, please listen to me. You’re not well. I think you’re not well. Please stop this and we’ll see a doctor together. I promise you, I won’t let you go through it alone. We’ll go through it together. I promise .’

He laughed again. ‘Cross your heart?’

‘Cross my heart.’

‘And hope to die?’

Mummy didn’t answer. She kept moving round, pushing Ruby behind her, and Daddy kept following them. If Mummy moved left, he feinted left. If she moved right, he feinted right, and when she stood still, he kept coming. Mummy was trying to keep the room between them. Ruby understood what she was doing. But she knew it couldn’t last.

And it didn’t.

Daddy backed them into a corner. The corner furthest from the door. Furthest from safety.

As Ruby felt the walls on her shoulders, Daddy stopped.

He widened his stance. His arms moved away from his sides, slightly crooked at the elbows. He stretched his fingers.

He was getting ready to draw.

Mummy didn’t know, because she wasn’t a cowboy, so when he snapped the gun out of the holster, she screamed like in a horror movie.

Daddy laughed and laughed and laughed to see Mummy shrinking, terrified, against the wall.

‘It’s not real!’ cried Ruby. ‘Mummy, it’s not real!’

But that didn’t make Mummy feel better. It made her furious.

‘You fucking bastard!’ she screamed. ‘Are you crazy? How could you scare us like that? How could you scare your own little girl?’

‘She’s not my little girl.’

Ruby frowned and looked at Mummy.

‘Is she?’ said Daddy.

‘Of course she’s yours,’ said Mummy. ‘She’s your little girl and you’re supposed to love her and take care of her, not scare the fucking shit out of her!’

Mummy reached for Ruby’s hand and she took it, holding on as if they were hanging off a mountain together.

Daddy shook his head slowly. ‘Not mine,’ he said. ‘ Yours. But not mine. I used to think she was mine, but now I know better. The way she betrayed me? The way she’s started sniffing around the boys? The red hair? That’s all you , Alison. Not me. That’s all you and—’

‘Shut up!’ shouted Mummy. ‘You shut your mouth. Ruby’s your daughter and she loves you! Don’t you, Ruby?’

Mummy jerked Ruby’s hand so hard that she winced. ‘You love your Daddy, don’t you, Ruby?’

Mummy’s terror made Ruby nod, even as tears fogged her vision. But Mummy wanted more, and shook her hard and shouted, ‘Tell him you love him!’

Ruby couldn’t. She was so scared she couldn’t speak.

Mummy’s nails dug into her hand. ‘Tell him, Ruby! Tell him you love him !’

Ruby shook her head.

No.

Daddy spun the Colt on his finger, and gave the mean, bitter little laugh that Ruby knew so well.

‘You see?’ he said. ‘She doesn’t love me any more than you do.’

Ruby felt Mummy’s grip ease, and her shoulder slump a little.

‘But we used to,’ Mummy said softly, and Ruby looked up into her mother’s face and saw how tired it was, and how sad.

‘We used to love you, John. We both did. We both loved you so much…’

Her voice wavered and she stopped.

And then Ruby felt her mother sort of straighten up beside her before she spoke again.

‘When you were worth loving.’

Daddy flinched as if he’d been smacked. He looked dazed and very young, and just for a second, Ruby saw him the way he used to be, years ago, when he still had a job and a family who loved him – and it made her feel as if her heart might burst out of her chest with grief.

Then Daddy’s face changed again and he raised the gun and made an inhuman sound and came at them like an animal; like a tiger with its teeth bared, and murder in its eyes.

Mummy screamed and Ruby dropped to a helpless ball on the floor underneath her, her eyes squeezed shut and her hands over her ears, waiting to die.

There was a huge cracking, crashing sound and a frightened howl and then a weird, grunting noise.

And then only the roar of the storm.

Slowly Ruby opened her eyes.

She frowned in confusion as her brain adjusted to what she was seeing in the pulsing red glow.

Daddy was up to his waist in splintered, rotting wood, holding himself in place only by his elbows, the gun still in his hand.

He had gone through the floor.

Right in the place where she and Adam had made spy-holes so that they could watch the sea.

If John Trick had done something instead of nothing at all for the past three years, he might have had the strength he needed to haul himself out of the hole in the floor with the gun in his hand. He certainly tried. He gripped and strained and cursed and spat, and on two occasions he almost made it.

But pissing in the sea like a castaway is no kind of workout. Not like scaffolding, or labouring, or fixing the windows or the roof or the walls of a crumbling little house, where a family is cold and getting colder all the time.

Only his anger kept him from falling straight through the floor and dropping silently past the dark cliffs, into the raging sea.

Only his anger and his madness.

Ruby could see it in his eyes, and when Mummy moved instinctively to help him, Ruby cried ‘No!’ and held tight to the sleeve of her cardigan.

They knelt and watched in numb silence as he strained and struggled to save himself. Somewhere in the sky below the house, the Jingle Bobs tinkled. Trick’s head twisted from side to side and he bit his lip so hard he drew blood as he battled to lift his body on one hand and one elbow.

But because he’d done nothing at all for so long, John Trick finally needed full use of both hands.

He laid the gun down and flattened his palms against the splintered planks.

He hissed as he started to raise himself from the hole like an angry snake.

Ruby squealed. If he got out, Daddy would kill them both. He’d said, Hello, whores , and now Ruby knew for sure that Daddy killed whores.

That was just a fact of life.

Daddy hated women, and Mummy was a woman, and now she was a woman too.

He would kill them both.

Ruby’s legs didn’t want to move at first. But when she forced them, she moved faster than she ever had – running on her hands and feet across the floor like a giant spider.