After dinner I make a start on my next passage in my room. I tend to go up as soon as possible in case my parents argue, because they like to bounce insults off me: your mother wraps you up in cotton wool, how will you ever become a man? If I’m not there the arguments are usually over much faster. If they’re not arguing about each other’s shortcomings then they’re arguing about my sister and whose fault it was that she died. The general consensus in my family is that it was my fault.
Before I have read through the passage even once, my bedroom door opens and my father’s head appears. He tells me to get my shoes on and go with him. I am excited and nervous. Sometimes when my father comes home from his night-time expeditions his knuckles are bloodied. I’ve seen him hit my mother with some force before, but never enough to make his own hands bleed. So it must be from something else.
In the car we don’t talk. He puts loud music on. We pull up to a restaurant of some kind but when we get out of the car we don’t go inside, we go through an alley down the side of it instead, and into a house that’s nestled behind it. My father has the keys. The house is smoky and smells strange. There are two women whose faces instantly change when my father enters the room; they look scared and they sit up straight. I feel somewhat better now that I know it’s not just at home that my father makes people uncomfortable. There are lots of weird things on the coffee table. Strange-shaped jars and containers, white powder, bags of pills and green leafy stuff and razor blades strewn about.
Mindy is the blonde girl’s name. She has black smudges under her eyes, she doesn’t look very clean and her hair is dark in places where it’s greasy. She has bruises on her legs although she doesn’t seem to notice them. I see her eyes travel to my dad’s hands and she relaxes when she sees they are empty. The other girl is called Margot. Margot seems like a posh girl’s name, or I always thought it was, it reminds me of that old TV show with the lady who wears the long wafty dresses. Margot doesn’t look anything like that though, she has blue hair and so much eye make-up I can barely tell what colour her eyes are. Margot’s head is shaved up one side and she has a tattoo on her neck. It’s a word, but I can’t read it.
The girls refer to my dad as ‘Daddy’, which is confusing to me because they obviously aren’t related to us in any way. Margot jumps up and comes over to my dad, she kisses him on the lips but he pulls away and pushes her hard, so that she knocks into the table and some of the beer falls to the ground. Mindy rushes to pick it up. It occurs to me that Mindy is also a name from an old TV show my dad likes to watch sometimes. I wonder what the girls’ real names are.
Dad tells me to sit on the sofa while he does some work and he tells Mindy to look after me. He takes Margot by the wrist. I can see he’s grabbing her hard but she doesn’t pull away or cry or anything, she just follows as he leads her out of the room. Mindy puts the television on a music channel; it’s all rap music which I don’t really like. She takes the bag of green leafy stuff and rolls it into a cigarette. I watch as she lights it and draws in, sucking hard, so that almost half burns away before she pulls it from between her lips. She exhales straight into my face. The smoke smells strong and musky, not like my dad’s cigarettes. Her lips are cracked and sore looking but she gives me a nervous smile. She looks so much prettier with it. Her hand is on my leg and I act as though it were not my leg at all, even as she circles her fingers around my knee. I watch the TV instead.
By the time my dad comes back, my head hurts a bit, not like a headache, like a foggy soup inside my mind. Margot is nowhere to be seen and Mindy looks somewhat panicked for a moment until music starts upstairs, obviously reassuring her that Margot is OK. I know that feeling; sometimes my dad goes into a room with someone and they don’t come back out. I’ve waited outside my mother’s room for hours before, waiting to see if she reappears. She always does.
My dad speaks to Mindy in whispers and I can see her biting her lip, trying to look pretty but she looks so tired and scared. I didn’t notice it before but now I can see that she’s shaking, a barely noticeable shudder every time my father reaches for her. She’s afraid to flinch but her body desperately wants to. She obviously knows the penalty well. I can hear her making quiet excuses as her breathing grows shallow. She’s telling my dad that I’m only a kid and she couldn’t do it. Couldn’t do what? Apparently I have to grow up some time and she should do what she’s told. I still feel woozy and guilty for not helping Mindy. My dad is going to hit her, we all know it and so there is nothing more to say. I just sit and watch the spectacle.
As expected, Dad grabs a fistful of Mindy’s hair and smashes her face into the wall. Blood spurts from her nose but she barely whimpers. To my surprise, my father calls me over and pushes Mindy’s face towards mine. She kisses me gently on the lips and I can taste the metal in her blood as it drips from her nose. She also tastes a bit like liquorice, which I don’t really like. My father lets go of Mindy and she takes my hand. My father tells me he will be back for me in a little while and then Mindy leads me upstairs to her bedroom.
Later, as we drive home, I go over in my mind the passage I am to recite for my father tomorrow. The words take on a new significance.
Just as I have come from afar, creating pain for many
men and women across the good green earth,
so let his name be Odysseus …
the Son of Pain, a name he’ll earn in full.
Plymouth, two years earlier
The girl was lying on the ground, her skirt hitched up around her thighs, exposing needle marks and soiled underpants. Imogen looked at the room: cold, stark and empty. What a place to die. The former girls’ school had certainly lost its charm quickly after its closure. Obscenities were scribbled on the blackboard and the windows were thick with dirt. She wanted to cover the girl with a blanket, to keep her warm, to lie with her and stroke her hair, tell her everything was going to be OK. She looked so lonely and forsaken. Imogen had to look away for a moment, and force those feelings down.
‘Jesus!’ she exclaimed, slipping back into her role as someone who wasn’t bothered by things like dead bodies. She held her nose for effect. The smell of the week-old corpse left festering on the floor of the unventilated room was overwhelming. Imogen had to maintain the guise of a hardened exterior, everyone in the Plymouth Police Force did. It was important that they all kept up the bravado, the illusion of morale. If they expressed their true response when they saw these things, these hideous things that occurred, then it would be easy to fall apart, inevitable even. It wasn’t always the big things that got you, it was the things like the girl’s hair being stuck to her face, or that it was winter and she had summer clothes on.
‘Any ID on her?’ her partner DI Brown asked. He’d been her partner ever since she’d started at Plymouth a few years ago, and the pair of them got on well. Most of the time.
‘You look if you want, I’m not touching her.’
‘We’ll let the techs look, I’m not touching her either. She looks about ready to pop.’
Imogen noted the distended and discoloured skin. Her body had reacted the way we all do when we die; it started destroying itself, digesting itself. The bacteria in the poor girl’s body were trying to make their way out, the gases under the skin causing it to swell until even the slightest touch could cause it to burst.
‘You