Coming Undone by Terri White (ebook reader with highlight function .TXT) 📗

arrived. The man who would set us off running for a second time. His hands were rage-stacked ships, fully rigged with sovereign rings that shone as they swept and sank. Not at first though. At first, his hands were warm and soft, waiting, welcoming.

I was balanced on his knee, swaying high off the ground. He was reading me a story, his voice emerging from beneath his chest bones. His fingers gently turned the sticky pages that flinched in the sunlight that tricked its way through the net curtains. The front room was full of giggles and dancing dust as I wriggled and looked up at this new man.

I would come to learn that he was the strongest and meanest of men. You learned these things when a man strangled your mum; when a man punched you in the face that was still smaller than his fist.

Before that though was the beginning. They met in a bar. Mum offered him a place to stay. Her house. Our home. Her bed. Within weeks, it was his home and we were the ones in need of refuge.

The first fist is nowhere in my memory, no matter how much I dig and turn and sift and sort. But the tenth, the twentieth are there. Sometimes it was a full, closed fist and sometimes an open hand or a tightly clenched back of the hand, knuckles bared and braced. I heard the wind rush through the gap between his thumb and first finger as he brought it down from on high, the whoosh being snuffed out by the crack of hand on skin and bone and the scream that would escape my mouth no matter how tight I locked my throat.

A winter’s night. It was Sunday. No Jacket Required was playing, the car we were in sped along. Cat’s eyes counted down the country lanes to home. There weren’t enough, there were never enough, to make the journey long enough. My nerves bobbed and weaved as he and Mum traded clipped conversation, faces lit by the swooping headlights of cars as they passed. I imagined the families, the lives, in those cars that were so unlike ours.

By the time we were walking up the uneven path that led to our front door, one foot taken off-balance as usual by the wonky paving, I sensed a shift. My legs began to shake. ‘Frozen pizzas for tea?’ half-asked Mum.

‘Do we have to? I want something else.’ Maybe I said this, I can’t remember.

‘What the fuck?’ He came alive with anger, spit rained down. ‘There are fucking kids starving in Africa and you’re fucking complaining about what you’re having for tea! Get here.’ I walked over to his balled fists. My body tensed, waiting for the wind. Instead, ‘You can get to bed without any tea, you fucking little bastards.’ I ran, giddy with relief, and I lay, as I always did, on my bedroom carpet, ear pressed tightly to the floor as shouts and crashes rose. I collected them in my hands, kept them safe.

A summer’s afternoon. It was a Saturday. Last night they’d gone drinking, leaving us with a babysitter. He walked into the front room as I folded myself smaller and smaller into the corner of the settee. ‘Were you good?’ he said, with a face straight and still.

‘Yes,’ I said. I was. Wasn’t I?

‘Were you?’ he asked again.

I paused. ‘Yes,’ I said, unsure.

‘You little fucking liar. Get here.’

I walked towards him, tiny steps, but steps all the same. He took a single stride to meet me, his arm touched the sky and came crashing down under my chin, sending my body up into the air. For a second, I was flying. I was free. Then my head, followed by the rest of me, landed in the dining room, next to the silent hi-fi. He stood over me, fists blazing red as I waited for the rest.

A spring morning. It was Sunday. They always got up late, delayed by the rhythmic slap, slap, slap of their damp skin. I was awake, careful not to make noise, fearful of the paper-thin wall between this bedroom and theirs. I wasn’t careful enough. A lumbering, long creak extinguished by one heavy foot on the floorboards. I breathed in.

‘You wake me up? You wake me up? Get dressed and get the fuck downstairs.’

I dressed slowly, but not too slowly. As I stood at the top of the stairs, the vomit stung the back of my throat. I knew what was at the bottom. I swallowed it and walked down.

He beat us in the daylight, under the white open sky. But, unbelievably, there was still worse. What he did in the darkness.

An autumn evening. It was Friday. Mum was working in the pub, he was babysitting. I was woken up by him calling my name. I was in my nightie and barefoot as I walked the handful of steps down the landing. Now it was my turn to creep and crawl.

‘Yeah?’ I asked, nervously.

‘Come in,’ he said. I opened the door, peered around and he was naked from head to toe.

I knew instantly that it was wrong, that I needed to get away, fast and far, but I also knew not to run. What would happen if I did. So I didn’t. One fear overtook the other and I stood perfectly still.

‘Come and sit down,’ he said. ‘Hold this.’ I sat cross-legged on the carpet and held the magazine he’d given me. On the pages were pictures of big-breasted women, also wearing no clothes, brown hair shooting out in big curly mounds from between their thighs. ‘Hold it the right way up,’ he snapped. I froze, confused, until he took it and turned it so it faced him. Relieved, I held it against my chest. I didn’t have to look at the pictures, look into the eyes of the women he was hurting. He was cross-legged across from me, holding his penis in his hand.

He moved his hand back and