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

accepted. Now I swam around the room bobbing up and down, in and out, swimming, sinking, drowning, surviving. My ideas were bigger, my visions brighter. Colours popped and jumped and kicked and caressed my eyeballs. I wasn’t just ready to face the world but straining at the leash. The collar around my neck that kept me quiet, kept me small and scared, was stretching, ready to buckle and break under my new will.

I was in my teens: it was the night Mum fought with another of the men in her life – the man who we, she, had to ask permission from. His particular torment for us was control, not sexual violence.

Can I use the car?

Can I turn the TV on?

Can I turn the TV over?

Can I have a bath?

Can I go out?

Can I speak?

Can I drink the milk?

Can I read the newspaper?

Can I listen to music?

Can I have some money?

Can I have a drink?

Can I love my own children?

Tonight, she snapped and kicked out from under the suffocation of his control, freeing her head first and then her body. Words were spat and she stormed out of the living room, over the lino in the kitchen and out of the back door, grabbing her purse and me – ‘Terri, come on’ – as she went.

I jumped up without a second’s thought, figuring there’d be punishment but buoyed by the slightest chance that this time she was busting herself, us, out for good.

Once we were down the path and over the green we looked at each other wild-eyed, high on disobedience and the prospect of freedom, however brief. We turned left at the bottom of the road and walked up the winding streets of the estate. We reached the corner shop, halfway up the estate, where she bought the cheapest cider and lager they sold, litre bottles of each; she’d loosened the cap before we’d even left the shop.

She marched quickly, furiously swigging from the bottle while she told me in detail how much she hated him and why. How he controlled her. How he wanted to crush who she was. How insecure and weak he was. How she was so, so sick of staying quiet, being good.

I hated him, too. For all the reasons she said and so many more she didn’t. ‘You should be seen and not heard,’ he’d say and I’d spend days and nights sitting quietly, my thoughts and arguments and resentments screaming around the edges of my mind while a man who couldn’t even begin to match me told me why I wasn’t worth anything and would always be ‘nothing’.

After each swig and swallow and sprayed sentence, she passed me the plastic bottle. Both hands around its girth, I put it to my lips and sucked, the bottle collapsing in the middle: the liquid fizzed and burned in my too-small throat as I trotted alongside her, struggling to keep up. We walked for what felt like hours; we walked and talked until we’d walked and talked in circles. There was nowhere to go, just around the estate, round and round, where our world began and ended and began again.

The sun had set long ago and the air had turned cold. We had no coats; we were just wearing T-shirts and jeans. The bottles were hollow now, the bottom boasted just an inch of liquid. Home was inevitable; he was inevitable. We crashed from the cascading highs of daring to defy him and started to walk back, slowly and solemnly now. Orange street lights guided our weaving way.

As we walked up the path, I saw the TV still blaring through the living room – he was definitely home and definitely up – and realised quite how drunk I was, though the whole concept was still relatively new to me. Raging, roaring, roll-around-in-a-hedge drunk. My stomach leapt and lurched with the weight and acidity of the booze as we skulked in, heads bowed. He sat waiting, watching the snooker with the volume down low, not speaking, smoking, sucking hard on the cigarette butt clasped tightly between his fingers. His cheeks caved in every time he pulled and I could see every bone in his skull, the way he’d look when he was dead. It was a gift, a power that I’d decided alcohol had given me.

I sat on the carpet, seeing two of every wild, bright swirl that curled under my crossed legs. There were four men taking it in turns to pot balls on two snooker tables on the one TV in front of me. After a few minutes it was eight men potting balls on four snooker tables on two TVs. I lost count of how many should be there, so closed first my left eye and then my right. I needed to focus. Concentrating hard, tongue between my damp lips, the men continued to multiply and duplicate until there was an army of them with blue-tipped sticks and square glasses and tightly tied waistcoats that looked like armour for a battle.

The shouts, slams and bangs of Mum and the man flew overhead, settled on my shoulders and caused me to sink until I was submerged and underwater and I was trying to wave at them back on land but they couldn’t see me, wouldn’t notice me. I wondered if I’d died, if my body had been taken by the sea, or just my mind.

A hand reached out to save me, was offering me help, salvation – the clear liquid in the glass I was being handed by my mum pulled me out. She was in the dining room once more, throwing open the door to the cabinet that we stored the booze in for Christmas – bought bit by bit over the year, saved and stored painstakingly – emptying it out frantically. Then she was back. This time the liquid was brown. Then red. I kept swallowing as directed, taking what was good for me, even when it was rejected and hit the roof