Jennie Ensor - The Girl in His Eyes

He wiped his eyes with the back of his hand. If only he could let go and sob as he had as a small boy. There’d be some relief in that. It was more than half a lifetime ago, the last time he’d cried. As he remembered it, horror once again crept over his skin.

He’s wearing only his T-shirt. His underpants are on the floor by his bed. His mother has come into the room. She has seen him. He pulls the covers over himself quickly. He can’t stop what happens next. The hot wetness trickles down into the sheets.

He expects her to go away, to leave him to his embarrassment, but his mother doesn’t leave the room. Her eye muscles twitch, as they do when she’s concentrating. She walks towards him, stands over the bed.

‘You should be ashamed of yourself. You’re only ten years old and already you’re doing that filthy thing.’

He does it in the middle of the night mostly, when there is no chance anyone will discover him, not in the bright, early afternoon with his mother and sisters around. But today he feels small and lost. Everyone has forgotten about him, no one seems to care about him anymore. He needs the good feelings to wash over him and wipe the bad ones away.

‘Get out of bed.’

He hesitates. He can’t. She will see.

‘Get out of bed, Paul.’

Her voice won’t let him disobey. He does as she says. She looks without speaking. He can’t look at her but he can hear the disgust in her voice.

‘I always knew you would turn out like this.’

She tells him not to move. He hears her go into the bathroom and she brings back a towel. White, spotless.

‘Wipe it all off. Go on.’

He does what she says. She takes the towel from him.

He thinks he’ll have to stay in his room for the rest of the day and go without dinner, as he has to whenever he accidentally breaks something or plays in the yard too loudly. Or she’ll ask his father to give him the belt when he comes in from work, as she does for the most serious offences.

But this time it’s different.

‘Put those on,’ she instructs, pointing. She watches him put on his underpants. ‘Come with me.’

He follows her, afraid at the sudden coldness of her voice. They go downstairs. She opens the door to the cellar and gives him a push.

‘Down you go. Right down inside.’

When he reaches the bottom of the steep stairs, the light goes off and the door shuts. He hears the key turning in the lock. All around is black. The light switch is on the outside wall. His foot hits a small hard object. He gropes for something solid, finds the fuse boxes. His hand brushes into something soft and wispy. He pulls it back.

He’s always hated this place. Coming down here to fetch the stepladder, or to right a tripped fuse, he scuttles in and out, taking care to avoid peering into the grimy, shadowy corners. But he always puts on the light and keeps the door open. This time, he’s trapped.

He calls out for his mother. She doesn’t answer. He can see a bit more now, enough to make out a bucket on the ground and bicycles propped against the walls. He makes his way up the stairs and raps on the door. There is no handle, there’s no way he can open the door from the inside.

‘Don’t leave me here! Please!’

His voice is frightened. He’s five years old again and afraid of the dark.

He leans against the wall at the foot of the stairs. He wonders if there’s a torch or a lamp somewhere, but he doesn’t want to move from this spot to go into unknown places, where horrible things might lurk. He checks his watch, but the dial is too dark to read. His father won’t be home for hours. He listens out for his sisters. He hears muffled voices approaching. One is the nasal whine of his older sister. She is back from somewhere. He calls out again. Footsteps running away; laughter.

It is their revenge too. They blame him for everything they do wrong and he is always the one punished. Juliet scratched Natalie’s arm, leaving a red gouge, and both said that he’d cut his sister with his penknife. His mother is too stupid to see, or she just wants to take their side. He got beaten for it, with the buckle. His father thinks it’s good to be tough with him, it will shake out the ‘girly stuff’.

Soon, he needs the toilet. It’s quiet outside the cellar, it has been quiet for ages. They must all be upstairs now, or outside in the pool. Where is his mother? He tries to distract himself by counting to a hundred slowly. If she doesn’t let him out soon, he will have to pee right here.

He gets to forty then starts crying, and he can’t stop. He pushes his fist into his mouth to muffle the noise, because crying during punishments isn’t allowed and he doesn’t want to be a cry-baby. His mother doesn’t love him, he is sure of it now. If she loved him, she wouldn’t make him stay down here, alone in the dark. She knows he is afraid of the dark. She taunts him about it sometimes, saying he is too old for such childish behaviour. And now there’ll be another thing to taunt him with. The disgust was plain on her face.

Shame rises inside him, filling him. Then it turns to anger, and the anger turns to hate. His mother will mean nothing to him, he decides. He won’t let her hurt him anymore.

Paul held himself very still. The pain of the memory was leaching out of the deep place he’d kept it all these years. His heart was tight, like someone with iron hands was squeezing it and trying to squash it into a pulp. For the first time since that day, he wanted to cry.

No, he couldn’t let himself cry. He never cried. It was too late for that.

He walked on, along the path towards nowhere in particular, the first drops of rain wetting his face.

Laura put down the casserole dish she was about to wash. The phone was ringing. The sound had hardly registered amid the chaos of her thoughts.

It was her mother, thank goodness. Mum hadn’t answered any of her calls since their conversation at the flat two days ago.

‘Mum, are you alright? I’ve been calling your mobile for hours.’

‘I’m sorry, darling, I should have told you earlier. My mind’s all over the place at the moment. I couldn’t face being in the house any longer with your father, so I left this morning. I’m staying at Katherine’s for a bit. I only got my phone up and running just now. I left the charger at home and the battery ran out.’

Her mother’s voice was frail and distant. Laura pictured a thrush lying injured on the ground. There had been one yesterday, outside the entrance to the block of flats, just alive. She’d picked it up, covering it with her other hand, intending to take it to a safer place; so light, so tiny, from time to time gently fluttering against her hands. But when she uncovered it a minute later, it had stopped moving.

‘Well, I’m glad you’re still alive. Will you be OK?’

‘I hope so. I’m doing my best to cope with everything.’

‘Do you want me to come over?’

‘You don’t need to. Katherine’s looking after me, plying me with tea, and gin and tonics. I couldn’t ask for a better friend.’

‘I did the right thing to tell you, didn’t I?’ Telling her mother what Dad had done to her years ago had been a relief, a burden finally lifted. But not for her mother.

‘Yes, you were right to tell me. Only it’s hard to take it in, what he’s done.’ Her mother’s voice grew wobblier. ‘I just can’t get my head around it, how he could have done those things to you. I feel so bad that I wasn’t there for you. That I didn’t do anything to stop him.’