Darkness is something I’ve lived with most of my fucking life. Locked up in the cellar and then a cell, with just a tiny window of light. There’s something about total darkness that feels like being in space, and it’s like a damn cocoon or something.
I stretch out my legs on the couch in my large room, sat only in boxers, my ribs hurting a little from where the first few kicks and punches landed. I can still feel the pain in the spot on my neck that hurts like a motherfucker.
With the air from the open window cold on my bare arms, I lean over to my table for my smokes.
I’ve got the picture of Violet propped up against the lamp. I study her face.
Do I look like her? Yeah, I do.
I recognise the crooked smile playing on her lips and the shape of her nose and chin. She’s dark like me, that much I can see. And she’s young, too young. I can see that too, a kid really. She stands in a doorway offering up the bundle in her arms, as shy as a baby. At least that’s how I read it.
Her shoes are ridiculous. Heavy lace-ups. It highlights the frailty of her ankles. They could make me cry, those thin little ankles. If I was capable of crying.
Deep down, I’ve always believed my mother was dead. And that I’d known her. In order to feel her loss, I must’ve known her presence. And I do feel her loss. I always have.
Which is why I’ve been searching for her all my life, because I loved her and because I’d lost her.
I searched but you never answered.
I take a smoke from the packet and lie back with it unlit between my lips. I remember right back to the start of it all, where my memories first began.
The children’s home.
By the age of four, I knew the lie of every loose floorboard and squeaking hinge. By the age of five, I knew which corridors were patrolled. By the age of seven, I was an expert on the enemy.
I light my cigarette and inhale as a memory weighs in.
It’s the smell that lingers in my memory still. The dirty tobacco smell of Finchley’s fingers when he put his hand across my mouth to stop me crying, after he beat me with his belt. Those fingers stinking and yellow from those roll-ups that he made with such care. Then the taste when he put his fingers actually in my mouth, making me gag.
He’d grab me by the collar of my pyjamas and pull me to my feet, shake me like he was a dog and I was a rat. He’d preach at me for what felt like forever. His whisky breath blasted in my face. I’d screw my eyes shut, then I’d start to cry and he’d shout at me for that too.
I wanted to hit him but I didn’t have the guts. I was a toddler. He was a grown man. He could’ve killed me with his bare hands. That’s what I thought was the truth.
Barley a teenager, I began to distrust pretty much all the adults in my life.
They were all two-bit liars.
I knew as a kid when I was forced to go church, that I was full of original sin. I started to believe I deserved it.
I glance at my bruised and cut-up hands. Last night felt different. There was no release with my fists. Instead of flying high like I usually do, I went crashing.
But what else is there?
My brain drifts over to sunshine brain hair, and little emerald cities.
My need to touch Amy swamps me such that it eclipses everything else as I lie on my cruddy sofa, soaked in sweat and blood and god only knows what else a hundred times over so that it smells as rank as everything else in my fucking world. I fight back the gut-wrenching trembling that threatens to kill who and what I am.
And I don’t fucking like feeling this way.
10
YOU
THERE IS A LOUD KNOCK at my room door. It feels like the whole estate shudders. A firework goes bang right outside my window.
I flex my legs and toes. Sit up straight on the sofa. It’s nearly ten o’clock on a Saturday night.
‘Yes?’ I say inside my own head. The sound bounces back, mocking me.
Even if my life depends on it, my body isn’t going to let me budge an inch.
It’s him.
Another knock, much louder.
I have a clear view to the door from where I’m sitting on the couch. I stare at it. At the peephole. Until my eyes sting with wetness. The light from the hallway, which should shine through like a little beacon, is eclipsed by whoever is on the other side. All I can see is a round dot of darkness.
I stare with such fierce concentration, as if I can make out the bulky shape of him through the solid wood. The vein in my neck pulses like it might burst. I hold my breath until my head pounds and my fingers start to tingle.
Then I hear boots retreating, going up the stairs, not down. Then the sound of the door to the top floor room opening and closing.
What did he want? It’s nearly ten at night.
I’ve noticed he always shuts the front door, properly. It makes me feel a bit better. I still have to check it. Even though I don’t have a key, anymore.
I wonder if I should go upstairs and knock on his door. I find myself having the conversation in my head.
Oh, hello. Did you knock? Why don’t you go live someplace else and leave me alone?
No, that won’t do it. His touch is like a drug, and to be
