Jennie Ensor - The Girl in His Eyes

She rang the doorbell.

After nearly a minute the door opened. Her father was shabby. A beard clung to his jaw and an old business shirt, frayed at the collar, hung over his jeans. He looked at her blankly for a moment or two, as if not recognising she was his daughter.

‘Hello, Laura. It’s good to see you.’ An unpleasant odour leaked from his mouth – tooth decay merging with whisky. ‘Come in.’ He sounded subdued, yet also pleased.

She followed him into the kitchen. It smelled of disinfectant. The table was bare. All the surfaces shone, their usual clutter gone. A lone side plate bore a green scroll of apple peel and a paring knife.

‘Do you want something to drink?’

‘No thanks.’ She stood near the door leading to the hall. He didn’t ask her to sit down and she didn’t want to, in any case. ‘You’re not going to work this week?’

‘I’m taking some time off.’ He moved to stand across from her, by a row of spotless cupboards. ‘They owe me a week’s holiday. I thought I could get some work done on the house.’ He picked up a pencil from the worktop and placed it inside a metal container that was filled with similar items.

She looked around the kitchen. None of the windows were open. The disinfectant smell was starting to react with the eggs she’d eaten earlier.

‘Your mother was over earlier,’ he began. ‘She said she was leaving me.’

He was looking in her direction, but not at her. The quietness of the room intensified. From outside she heard the distant hum of heavy machinery and a periodic rattle that she couldn’t identify. Then those noises stopped and she could make out a faint trill of birds.

‘I can understand that,’ she replied. ‘I don’t know why she didn’t leave you years ago.’

‘I know it was wrong,’ he said, quietly, as if he hadn’t heard her, ‘what I did to Emma. I wish I hadn’t ever gone near her.’

‘Why did you lie to me? You said you wouldn’t do anything to harm her.’

A look of… what was it? Irritation? Self-reproach? It was gone before she could decipher it.

‘I thought I could resist her. I tried to. But I couldn’t stop.’

Like the trip of a switch, anger overtook her.

‘I hate you, for what you did to her, and for all those horrible things you did to me when you were supposed to be my father.’

He stared at her. Drops of sweat began to form on his brow, blue veins clinging to his temples like a peculiar creeper. But she had no sympathy towards him. He was beyond sympathy.

‘Who are you going to go after next, Dad?’ She stepped towards him. ‘Do you have your next victim lined up?’

‘Laura, please. Don’t talk like this. Can’t you try to forgive me?’

‘I’ll never forgive you. You’re not my father anymore, as far as I’m concerned. I never want to see or hear from you again.’

He didn’t speak. He just moved his head slightly as if he hadn’t heard properly.

‘There’s one more thing,’ she said. ‘I want you to go to the police and tell them what you did to Emma.’

‘I couldn’t do that—’

‘If you don’t go, I will.’

She walked through the doorway into the hall, then stopped and looked back. His hands hung at his sides, fingers fluttering like trapped moths.

‘You can’t do that,’ he said. ‘They’d send me to prison. You know what they’d do to me there, don’t you? You know what they do to men who…’ He moved his head slowly from side to side. His face had drained of colour. ‘I’d be done for in prison.’

She didn’t reply. A twinge of pity threatened to overtake her anger.

No. His pleading couldn’t reach her. He had to be punished for what he’d done, and he had to be put out of reach of other girls – whatever might happen to him in prison.

‘You haven’t told Daniel about any of this, have you?’ His eyes scoured her face. ‘He doesn’t have to know, does he?’

‘I told him this morning. About what sort of a father you were to me, and what you did to Emma.’

‘What did he say?’ His voice just above a whisper.

‘I’m not sure he believed it. He didn’t think you could do anything like that.’

‘Now he’s going to hate me as well.’ It was more to himself than to her.

‘You deserve it, don’t you?’

She left him then, pulling the front door firmly behind her and breathing in the fresh, sweet smell of a spring afternoon.

Paul went to the drinks cabinet in the dining room. He poured himself a tumbler of Scotch and drank it quickly, not bothering to sit down. Then he poured another.

His daughter had abandoned him as his wife had – as his son would too, sooner or later. Worse than that, she had disowned him. She had judged him and found him guilty. In her eyes, as well as Suzanne’s, he was incapable of redemption.

The thought burrowed into him.

He could change – no, he would change. He would no longer think about girls, or look at pictures of them. He would never again do what he’d done. He would do good deeds instead, to atone for his mistakes.

But what if Laura really meant what she had said? What if she went to the police about Emma? They’d speak to Jane… He could be charged with having sex with an underage girl; a girl, not even a teenager. A child in the eyes of the law. Sex with a girl under sixteen was automatically rape, wasn’t it? They would investigate him and everything would be public knowledge. There’d be a trial. His photograph would be in all the papers. He’d be crucified.

Even if he denied it all, even if he got the best defence lawyer in London, and Laura and Emma’s evidence was called into doubt, how would he cope with the humiliation of exposure? They’d question him about the most private, intimate things. His life would be on display for the world to see. Even if the jury found him not guilty, people would always look at him askew. He’d be labelled as a suspected paedophile, a dirty old man. The streets for miles around would be full of it – the respectable Wimbledon businessman who secretly abused his own daughter then fucked a twelve-year-old girl, the daughter of his wife’s best friend. He would lose his job. He’d become an isolated old man, unvisited and rebuffed by everyone. His friends would wash their hands of him, so would his family. Whatever he said, or did, he would never be able to make amends for what he’d done.

And what if he was found guilty? What if they sent him to prison?

He shivered.

Sex offender. He would become one of those , the most hated breed of prisoner, the lowest of the low. There would be nowhere safe for him to go. He would be set upon by his fellow inmates at any time, day or night.

His heart began to race. He heard the clang of the cell door, the scrape of metal in the lock. The voices gathering around him, the coarse jibes, the spits. The fists raised, the contempt in their eyes. What would they do to him?

Anything… Everything. They’d make him pay for his crimes in ways he could not bear to think about. They’d take away every ounce of his dignity, every iota of what made him a man. And then they’d do it again.

He poured more whisky then set the empty tumbler down on the cabinet with a clunk.

No. It couldn’t happen. He wouldn’t let Laura do this.

She walked on without seeing what was in front of her, her thoughts twisting and tumbling, one upon the next without respite. What was she going to do? Could she really turn him in to the police, her own father? The relief she felt earlier, walking away from the house, had been replaced by a creeping sense of foreboding. At last she stopped, and wiped the perspiration off her face with a disintegrating tissue from her jeans pocket. She must have walked several miles since leaving the house.