Hilary Mantel - Beyond Black

She gave them names anyway: Blighto, Harry and Serene. One day Blighto came to the house and bumped against the back door. “Oh, he’s knocking,” Al said. She opened the door though she knew she shouldn’t, and tried to give him half her wafer biscuit.

A man came shooting out of nowhere and hauled the dog off her. He kicked it into the yard while he got Alison up off the floor. “Emmie, sort it!” he yelled, then wrapped his hands in an old jersey of her mum’s and went out and pummelled the dog’s face, dragging it back to the sheds and twisting its neck as he dragged. He came back in shouting, “I’ll shoot the fucker, I’ll strangle that bastard dog.” The man, whose name was Keith, wept when he saw how the dog had ripped at her hairline. He said, Emmie, she ought to go to Casualty, that needs stitching. Her mum said she couldn’t be sitting in a queue all afternoon.

The man washed her head at the kitchen sink. There wasn’t a cloth or a sponge so he put his hand on the back of her neck, pressed her down over the plastic bowl, and slapped the water up at her. It went in her eyes, so the bowl blurred. Her blood went in the bowl but that was all right; it was all right because the bowl itself was red. “Stay there, darling,” he said, “just keep still,” and his hand lifted from her nape as he bent to rummage in the cupboard at his feet. Obedient, she bent there; blood came down her nose too and she wondered why that was. She heard the chinking noise as Keith tossed the empties out from under the sink. Em, he said, you not got any disinfectant in here? Give us a rag for Christsakes, tear up a sheet, I don’t know, and her mother said, use your hankie or ain’t you got none? In the end her mother came up behind her with the used dish towel and Keith ripped it out of her hand. “There you go, there you go, there you go,” he kept saying, dabbing away, sighing the words between his teeth.

She felt faint with pain. She said, “Keef, are you my dad?”

He wrung the cloth between his hands. “What you been telling her, Emmie?” Her mother said, “I’ve not been telling her nothing, you ought to know by now she’s a bloody little liar. She says she can hear voices in the wall. She says there are people up in the attic. She’s got a screw loose, Gloria says.”

Keith moved: she felt a sudden sick cold at her back as he pulled away, as his body warmth left her. She reared up, dripping water and dilute pink blood. Keith had crossed the room and pinned her mother up against the wall. “I told you, Emmie, if I told you once I told you a dozen times, I do not want to hear that name spoken.” And the dozen times, Keith reinforced, by the way he gave her mum a little bounce, raising her by her hair near the scalp and bobbing her down again. “Gloria’s buggered off back to Paddyland,” he said [ bounce ]. “That’s all [ bounce ] you bloody [ bounce ] know about it, do you [ bounce ] understand [ bounce ] that? Do I bloody [ bounce-bounce-bounce-bounce ] make myself [ bounce ] crystal-clear? You just [ bounce ] forget you ever [ bounce ] set eyes.”

“She’s all right, is Gloria,” said her mum, “she can be a good laugh,” and the man said, “Do you want me to give you a slap? Do you want me to give you a slap and knock your teeth out?”

Alison was interested to see this happen. She had had many kinds of slap, but not that kind. She wiped the water from her eyes, the water and blood, till her vision cleared. But Keith seemed to get tired of it. He let her mother go and her legs went from under her; her body folded and slid down the wall, like the lady in the attic who could fold herself out of sight.

“You look like Mrs. McGibbet,” Al said.

Her mother twitched, as if her wires had been pulled; she squeaked up from the floor. “Who’s speaking names now?” she said. “You wallop her , Keith, if you don’t want names spoken. She’s always speaking names.” Then she screamed a new insult that Al had never heard before.

“You poxy little poxer, you got blood on your chin. Where’ve you got that from? You poxy little poxer.”

Al said, “Keef, does she mean me?”

Keith wiped his sweating forehead. It made you sweat, bouncing a woman a dozen times by the short hair of her head. “Yes. No,” he said. “She means to say poxy little boxer. She can’t talk, sweetheart, she don’t know who she’s talking to; her brain’s gone, what she ever had of it.”

“Who’s Gloria?” she asked. Keith made a hissing through his teeth. He tapped one fist into his opposite palm. For a moment she thought he was going to come after her, so she backed up against the sink. The cold edge of it dug into her back; her hair dripped, blood and water, down her T-shirt. Later she would tell Colette, I was never so frightened as then; that was my worst moment, one of the worse ones anyway, that moment when I thought Keef would knock me to Kingdom Come.

But Keith stepped back. “Here,” he said. He thrust the dish towel into her hand. “Keep at it,” he said. “Keep it clean.”

“Can I stay off school?” she said, and Keith said, yes, she’d better. He gave her a pound note and told her to yell out if she saw a dog loose again.

“And will you come and save me?”

“Somebody’ll be about.”

“But I don’t want you to strangle it,” she said, with tears in her eyes. “It’s Blighto.”

The next time she recalled seeing Keith was a few months later. It was night, and she should have been in bed as nobody had called her out. But when she heard Keith’s name she reached under her mattress for her scissors, which she always kept there in case they should be needed. She clutched them in one hand; with the other she held up the hem of the big nightie that was lent her as a special favour from her mum. When she came scrambling down the stairs, Keith was standing just inside the front door; or at least some legs were, wearing Keith’s trousers. He had a blanket over his head. Two men were supporting him. When they took off the blanket she saw that every part of his face looked like fatty mince, oozing blood. (“Oh, this mince is fatty, Gloria!” her mother would say.) She called out to him, “Keef, that needs stitching!” and one of the men swooped down on her and wrenched the scissors out of her hand. She heard them strike the wall, as the man flung them; looming above her, he pushed her into the back room and slammed the door.

Next day a voice beyond the wall said, “Hear Keef got mashed up last night. Tee-hee. As if he ain’t got troubles enough.”

She believed she never saw Keith again, but she might have seen him and just not recognized him; it didn’t seem as if he’d have much left by way of original features. She remembered how, the evening of the dog bite, once her head had stopped bleeding, she had gone out to the garden. She followed the furrows dug by the dog’s strong hind legs, as Keith dragged him away from the house, and Blighto twisted to look back. Not until it rained hard did the ruts disappear.

At that time Alison was saving up for a pony. One day she went up to the attic to count her money. “Ah dear,” said Mrs. McGibbet, “the lady your mother has been up here, darlin’, raiding your box that was your own peculiar property. The coins she’s tipped into her open purse, and the one single poor note she has tucked away in her brassiere. And not a thing I could do to stop her, my rheumatics being aggravated by the cold and damp, for by the time I was up and out of my corner, she had outstripped me.”

Alison sat down on the floor. “Mrs. McGibbet,” she said, “can I ask you a question?”

“You surely can. And why should you have to ask if you can ask, I ask myself?”