Iain Banks - Transition

“Of course it’s my dad,” she said one evening, lying on the floor. If we did lie down to have sex, we always did so on a sheet spread over a quilt on the floor; she would not use the beds in the old lady’s house. I had asked her if the bruises came from her father. I had wanted to ask her this for some months now but had never felt the time was right. In all honesty I wasn’t sure the time was actually right then and perhaps if I’d thought about it more deeply I’d have realised the time would perhaps never be right, but I did want to know and I felt we were in a relationship of sufficient long-standing and even commitment that I deserved the prerogative of being able to enquire regarding such matters.

I asked whether he had always hit her. “Long as I can remember,” she replied. “Ever since mum left.”

I said I thought her mum was dead.

“He says she is,” she told me. “Won’t say where she went or where she ended up before she died. If she is dead.” She rolled over onto her front. I stroked her buttocks, which were very firm and round and smooth and one of the few places on her body that she had never marked with the various implements she used to cut herself. I wanted to ask her if her father had abused her in other ways, if he had abused her sexually as well. I had already guessed that he had but I wanted to be sure. However, I was worried that this might prove a rather difficult subject. GF could be very nervous and highly strung and was liable, when faced with a conversational subject she felt uncomfortable with or a line of questioning she objected to, to burst into tears, fly into a rage or storm out of a room.

“I know what you’re thinking,” she said as I gently caressed her behind and she pushed back the cuticle on each finger to inspect the pale moon of nail beneath before biting on the ragged edges of her fingernails. I hesitated, wondering if she really had guessed what I was thinking. I decided, with a disturbed feeling, that she probably had guessed correctly. However, I did not say anything. I kept on stroking the glossy skin of her backside. “It is what you’re thinking, about him, isn’t it? What else he might have done to me if he does this to me. That’s what you want to know, isn’t it?” she said. Still I said nothing. She continued to worry at her fingernails, biting them and tearing at them. She still didn’t turn round to look at me. “Well, what do you think?” she asked.

I could tell from her voice exactly what I should think but I told her I didn’t know what to think. I said this partly to be completely sure and partly because I felt that doing so kept me in a better situation.

“Well, he did,” she said. “From when I was nine.” There was a long pause during which she slapped my stroking hand away from her behind. “He still does.”

She turned and stared back at me then, with a fierce and terrible look on her face. She rolled over onto her back, drew her legs up and let them fall apart so that her genitals were fully revealed, still moist and glistening from our last bout of lovemaking ten minutes earlier. “Still want to fuck me now?” she asked, her expression and tone of voice both defiant and desperate. I looked at that raw wound, then into her eyes.

I told her to stay where she was, then got up and went through to the utility room where I found a clothes line. I went back to the room where she lay just as I’d left her. I asked her if she trusted me and she thought about it and then said that she did. I told her to roll back onto her front, which she did. I brought her hands together behind her back and tied them at the wrists. I could hear her crying but trying not to make too much noise about it. I moved an old heavy chair into position and tied each of her feet to its two front legs so that she could not move them, then brought the companion chair round in front of her and carefully raised her by the shoulders and laid her chest and head across the seat.

I told her that of course I still wanted to fuck her, and I did so, though not aggressively or hard. Instead I fucked her very gently and slowly, until I came. Later I untied her and held her while she cried and I told her that she wasn’t to let her father fuck her ever again, but that was the wrong thing to say because she went into one of her rages and tried to slap and punch and bite me, screaming that she couldn’t stop him.

We tied each other up occasionally after that. I did not enjoy being immobilised, though, and so we stopped. I like to think that she stood up to her father and he abused her less after this time but he did not stop altogether and I always knew when he had done so, either from the bruises or from the reopened cutting sites on her body.

I shall be completely honest and record here that I think people make too big a fuss about incest these days. I’m sure it has always gone on. However I had grown to hate Mr F, GF’s father, and this was as much about the physical damage he did to her and the physical damage that he caused her to do to herself as about the fact that he had raped her from the age of nine, taken her virginity, made her distrust everybody and had treated her like a sex toy rather than a person or a daughter. It seemed to me that he had done something quite literally unforgivable, even if GF had been inclined to forgive him.

I rather lost the plot with Mr F. I went too far. I got carried away. It was not so much that I had let it become personal as that it started out as nothing but personal, because I knew nothing else back then.

I broke into their house when GF was away at a camp with the Girl Foresters. She would be absent for a full week. I crept out of our house, took my bike down the lanes and dark back-roads to their house and used the key that I knew lay under a particular flowerpot to let myself in. I had never been to her house but I had a rough idea of the layout of the place. I knew that Mr F would be drunk and fast asleep that night after his weekly Chamber of Commerce dinner. He was in the bedroom, with the light still on. He was lying on top of the bed, face down, half undressed. He was a tall man, gone to fat about the upper chest and belly, but not as well developed as my old man.

I’d grown up and become quite strong. I’d made myself a cosh from a pair of old socks and a load of piggy-bank change. I whacked him on the back of the head and did it again when he started to rear up, roaring. He went down, gurgling, breath spluttering from his mouth as though he was trying to snore.

I gagged him with thick tape, right round his head twice, and tied him up, then dragged him down to the cellar feet first with his head thumping off each step and tied him to the central-heating unit. I made sure he was well secured and properly gagged, then went up to ransack the house so that it would look like it had been a burglary gone wrong. I was wearing charity-shop gloves and a woollen ski mask that looked like an ordinary hat until you pulled it down. On my feet I was wearing a pair of old sneakers I’d found hanging from a tree in the forest a couple of months earlier. I’d padded them with socks because they were far too big for me. In my rucksack I’d brought another pair of shoes, ones my dad thought he’d thrown out and which were even bigger. I changed into them and walked around in them for a bit, opening drawers and pulling stuff out and pulling back carpets and using a crowbar to prise up a few floorboards. I went into what was obviously GF’s room and treated that just the same; I couldn’t not. Even that felt oddly good. When I thought I heard a muffled noise below, I went back to the cellar and Mr F.

I would have liked to have done something to him like he’d done to his daughter, but that would have been to leave a clue, so I just used kettles of boiling water, an old-fashioned blowtorch and a hammer. When I used the hammer I covered his feet or his hands – as appropriate – with a towel, so that no blood would splash on me, though there wasn’t actually that much. Probably the most blood came when I used a cheese grater on his knees. He screamed through the gag so much that I had to cover his whole head in a sack, and then with a bin bag, just to try to shut him up.