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

on the head, on the cheek, told how much I am loved. I don’t remember there being a single expression of love, either from hands or mouth.

The bubble around me and the world grew. I looked at the other kids around me as if they were aliens – which, to me, they were. They looked like me on the outside only. I couldn’t talk to them, relate to them. I spent my days inside, reading anything that had words on it – newspapers, dog-eared thrillers, bodice-rippers, the backs of packets and tins. I watched men in bright tights wrestle each other on TV, swept away by the fantasy world they created.

‘Why don’t you have any friends and play out like a normal kid?’ Mum asked, at the end of her tether, seeming to be sick of my small, dark presence floating around the house like a ghost. I couldn’t explain to her that I felt so apart from all of them. Like I’d been dug up out of the earth, made to look like a child when, really, I was something else. I sat; I stood. I read. I wrote stories that took me away on pirate ships, eye patch strapped on, hat askew, as I led my men and my ship bounced on the rough sea.

But at night, I couldn’t hide. I had to go to sleep. And as I lay in the top bunk, my mind raced, filled with images and sounds. I knew they were going to come for me. When everyone else was asleep and I was still awake, they would come. There was no keeping them out. No chains, no locks, no barriers strong enough. I daren’t sleep, because that would let them in, but when I couldn’t fight it any longer and my mind and body closed down, they were in my dreams. Or were my dreams just memories? They appeared in through the ceiling, walked straight through the bedroom door, came in the windows to my right shoulder. They brought me home to my bed each time but I also knew that there might come a time that they decided not to, when I’d be lost forever.

The nights I didn’t dream of being taken, I dreamt about dying, of being killed. I felt the sharp edge of the knife inside my chest, snaking, as it made its way through bone to the fat and the organs below. The knife was pulled and jammed back in over and over. The skin opened, blood rushed in and filled the hole, spilled out of the sides all over my skin. I turned from white to pink to scarlet red, lying in a river of my own blood. I didn’t scream or fight or twist and turn. I didn’t try to escape. I submitted to the violence, to the pain that poured over me. I knew that I was dying and I was relieved.

My mind was twisted and torn, but really it was my body that I wanted to destroy. First I had to reclaim it. I knew it had been taken from me, stolen by those who had no right, who took it without asking, who took it with balled fists and set jaws and stuffed it, broken and bowed, into the corner. I wanted to reclaim it and then I wanted to destroy it. To light a match and watch it burn. My mind would finally quieten as the flesh blistered and shrank.

Ever since I could remember I’d wanted to make my skin sting, my eyes burn, my insides bleed. I broke rulers, careful to let the end form into a point sharp enough to slice my skin open until, at last, I saw red. Snapped biros between my teeth and scratched at my thighs until they were inflamed; bits of plastic sat inside new rivets. I hit myself in the head and recognised the pain and jolt of my brain banging against my skull momentarily. I pulled at the skin under my eyes and wondered how hard I’d have to pull to tear it off my face entirely.

I had a brown bottle filled to the top with blue capsules. I wasn’t sure what they were or why I was taking them. I rolled the lid between my thumb and forefinger and imagined the relief if I took one, two, three, four, five until the bottle was empty. I knew very little but I did know that existing was painful, too painful, already. Every second of my existence was pain. All I wanted was for it to end. I was just twelve years old.

CHAPTER 10

If it was escape I longed for, there was one sure-fire route to oblivion, well trodden by members of my family, going back generations.

The first time alcohol touched my lips, I wasn’t yet as tall as the mantelpiece: the taste delivered by a few slurps out of a can of cheap lager from the Spar, handed to me by my mum.

But it was so much more than how it tasted. Boy, did it make me feel. The warm, beautiful, bouncing buzz didn’t stay just in my belly – it flowed, flooded down into my thighs, floated to my chest and curled up inside my head. There it sat; it settled, for a moment, cotton wool around my brain, protecting it from the bruises, momentarily filling in the scars. And for that moment, I held my breath and felt something remarkable, something that I struggled to recognise when it began. I was comfortable, standing right there in the world, wearing this skin. A feeling I’d forgotten, if I’d ever in fact had it. Shoulders back, stomach out, spine straight. I felt brilliant and bold. My bones rattled, my body flinched and jerked, as if I’d been plugged into the mains, the dial turned up to ten.

The second time, it was the same hand – my mother’s – reaching out, offering more, more, more. Smiling as I shyly