The radiator contracts with a sullen metallic groan. I am terrified the curtains are not closed properly and I’ll wake to find the moon’s face prying in on me. I hate myself for such a stupid fear, but even thinking about the moon brings those memories back. I play the game where it happened to someone else, but that doesn’t work. I can remember too much, the slanting church roof, the stink of his flesh. I’m a cow for allowing these memories back. My nails dig into my palms. My skin crawls with pent-up tension. Tomorrow my period is due, an unwanted novelty that has worn thin. I turn over, pressing my head into the pillow. My scream is so loud in my mind that I think they will hear. I breathe in the suffocating darkness of the pillow and lift my hands above my head but when I bring them down it is not the roots of my hair they tug at. I know whose hair it is. I have stared at her curls in the photograph on the sitting room wall. That 1960s schoolgirl smiling under her blue beret, surrounded by classmates who’ve swapped hippy beads for overweight husbands in Northwood and Kensington.
I want to scream that I am not my mother, but I cannot feel any sense of myself. I lie like a crumpled puppet, choked by everyone’s need for a second chance. I have felt disembodied once before, after taking pills Clare had found. But the way my body rocks in the bed is more frightening. I twist my head, desperate for comfort, and screw my eyes shut. Other eyes, huge and unblinking, watch from the blurred after-image invading the darkness beyond my eyes: the eyes of the Man in the Moon. They change to those of a fly, triangular legs and twitching limbs tussled in a spider’s web. I’m going mad, like my mother. I want to cry for help like a child. But I am fourteen, with buds of breasts and the downiest of hair and the weight of expectations like a skin hardening over mine.
There is a shard of pain as some hair comes loose. I grimace and let go, my knuckles intertwining above my head, fingers clawing against fingers. A fragment of fingernail peels away. It just happens with a sharp incision of pain. I gasp. The nail hangs, jagged and half broken off. I press it across my wrist and squeeze my face into the pillow, too shocked to feel pain or cry out. What I feel is a flush of revenge. I am damaged goods if I could only tell them. Now I am soiling this replica schoolgirl they’ve tried to create. But suddenly it hurt and aches more as I keep scratching till my arm is a mass of scars.
Then, just as suddenly, it hurts less, as if an amphetamine was unleashed into my bloodstream. The sensation is of giddy exhilaration. If my body is theirs to move about, then these scars are my graffiti scrawled on it. It is no longer myself I’m hurting, but their possession. Without warning, the elixir fades and the brief, startling high is gone. Only a throbbing pain is left, another bewildering layer of guilt, and a fear of discovery which makes me dress next morning with the door locked. I don’t know what I have done or why. I’m frightened of what Gran will do if the scars are discovered. I cannot eat with worry. I clench my sleeve under the table before cycling off, waving with my undamaged hand like the dutiful schoolgirl they all long for.
Now I am twenty-two again and Luke is fucking me. It is the fourth of October, the first of those Sunday evenings we will spend in that hotel. The bedspread is ancient and frayed. It grates against my breasts as I press my face into the pillow. He grips my hips, raising them to meet his thrusts. I can’t understand why, since he started touching me, I keep vividly recalling being fourteen again. But the years in between keep disappearing. I feel I’m back in my childhood bedroom. I raise my hands above my head and seem about to stab at my neck before Luke grabs my wrists and pins them down. I am grateful he is withdrawn into his own silent world. I pull my hands free and intertwine the fingers, protecting my neck from him or myself. Luke is suddenly still, watching in the light from the window, with not even his cock moving inside me.
Perhaps he wants to prolong it, anxious not to come too soon. But I feel he can sense this malaise within me. He appears to wait for permission to continue. The pillow is wet. What a kip, I think, even with damp bedclothes. Then I realise I’m crying. I thrust my hips backwards, I want Luke to move, I want to break the spell of uninvited memories. Luke stirs and I try to focus on his hands or cock. But it’s like an outer layer of skin has been split open and I am shocked to find my younger self preserved within. I feel robbed of the person I’ve carefully become and stripped more naked than I ever wish to be again.
These blocked out memories have been swamping me ever since Luke pulled my sweater over my head while undressing me. It is something I have never let any man do before. It reeked too much of being somebody’s plaything and was too intimate to be allowed, just like I never permitted some men to kiss my lips. But tonight with Luke it seemed less an act of possession than of boyish wonder.
Tonight he seems less sure of himself, as if surprised at my arrival. There has been bad news, he says, but it doesn’t involve him. We are like strangers with little to say, initially as awkward as adolescents. The pretence remains that we are purely here for sex, even if we each suspect there is more to it than that, but are uncertain of what it may be.
There is no sense that we have ever made love before as Luke undresses me. The room is freezing, but he takes his time, starting with my shoes and slowly removing my jeans. I raise my hips, lying back to help and then lean forward, returning his silent smile as I lift my arms to allow him to pull my woollen sweater up. For a second it covers my eyes and, unbidden, the first memory comes. My breath grows faster. I cannot even scream. Luke stops, with the sweater half over my head, disturbed by this sudden tensing of my body.
‘What’s wrong?’ he says.
‘Pull the bloody jumper off!’
He does so and I shake my hair free, lying back on the eiderdown with my eyes tightly shut. Luke pauses, unsure of what is happening. Then he begins unbuttoning my blouse. I feel his fingers but am only half aware of them. The memories are so vivid that if I open my eyes I feel I will be back in Gran’s kitchen.
I feel my school polo-neck being yanked over my face again so that I’m momentarily blinded. I think I’m suffocating as Mammy holds me down and Gran draws my scarred arms from the sleeves. The kitchen blinds are closed against prying eyes. My flesh is goosepimpled. I feel violated, struggling to extract my head from the polo-neck as Gran fingers the scars. I jerk free from my mother and half fall with the polo-neck caught around my throat. I can’t breathe, I’m going to choke. Mammy senses my panic and panics herself, tugging at the twisted garment as Gran shouts at her to pull it off. It comes free and I close my eyes against the questions they keep repeating.
Did a boy inflict these scars? Why had I kept them hidden? Had a man done anything, a neighbour or a teacher who’d warned me against speaking? Was I in trouble? I sense Gran’s fear in this euphemism, her terror of a cycle repeating. Neither of them understand what I need to tell them. I hate them for that as much as I hate myself. A new voice at my ear, a monkey with no face, whispers that I should punish them too.
For three weeks I’ve hidden these bruised arms away, skipping school to avoid swimming and locking the bathroom when I washed. At night I’ve only half slept, promising myself I would leave my arms untouched, even counting the hours I managed to stay this itch. But always I know that at some stage the scratching and biting will begin again. Nothing prevents it, silent pacing or meaningless prayers. Behind the radiator I keep a shattered plastic ruler. This ache only stops when I use it to draw blood and creep downstairs for watered whisky to ease the pain. A map of purple bruising stretches up to my shoulders. The addiction feeds on the fear of discovery. Twice I’ve dreamt my mother has found me in pain and taken me in her arms. Twice I’ve woken disappointed to fret about hiding the flecks of blood where my arm rested on the pillow.
But now, as they stare at my arms in the kitchen, I am suddenly defiant. They are scared of me for the first time in my life. I have stepped beyond their control. The discovery gives me strength. I sit with half my school uniform torn off. I know I cannot explain these scars but now I don’t want to. I hate Mammy for being weak and I’m ashamed of her illness. I hate Gran because I need someone to blame and because no matter how hard I try I can never achieve her dreams heaped on my shoulders.
Even as a baby they had forced me to choose, playing a game where they called from different sides of the playground