my cheeks. Knowing that it was over and I could finally stop thinking. Stop wracking my brain for what she wants.
Stop trying to write the masterpiece that I know is just not in me.
Her hand slips from my hair and she steps back a pace. I sigh in relief as I realise their will be no punishment this time.
‘Eat you dinner,’ she commands, ‘and try to write something, huh?’ The way she phrases it is like I’m the unreasonable one. Like what she wants me to do is perfectly simple and fair but I’m just being a naughty boy and refusing to do it. ‘I’ll be back soon to give you a bath. You smell a bit off… Have you been masturbating lately?’
The question comes from nowhere, catching me off guard. I can’t seem to make myself meet her gaze. I think about the crusted semen on the underside of the desk and blush brightly. It is the only place where the camera cannot see.
She reads it in my face of course.
‘We’ll talk about this later.’
She rumbles back through the door.
I imagine that the room is shaking with each step she takes.
I listen as one by one, the tumblers click.
I realise I am crying…
* * * * *
…It is a masterpiece she wants and I can trace this whole thing back to a single story I wrote in Year 7. Probably the only decent thing I’ve ever written. It had been about him, the man who wasn’t my father, and the things he’d done. Things he’d done to me.
I thought I’d hidden that well though. The part about it being based on me. The teacher had been shocked by the piece and stunned by the maturity of it. Personally I hadn’t thought that much of it. I’d tacked on some fantasy happy ending where everyone lived happily ever after – once the man had been brutally murdered of course.
The teacher had taken me to one side after class and spoken to me about the story, about where I had gotten the idea from. He’d seemed like he was very concerned.
He’d talked very softly and gently.
I’d told him that I read a lot.
I thought that was the end of it.
That was until I got home. My mother had been alternately weeping and furious.
He had been packing his bags. Apparently the police had been around.
She said nothing to me that night when he dragged his bags out the front and disappeared into a taxi. She didn’t need to. Her eyes had said it all.
This is all your fault.
The days immediately following his departure were a whirlwind of activity. People flashing badges, being shunted between a nice, wood trimmed office where a kindly man handed me a doll and asked me to point out where he’d touched and a brightly lit doctors surgery where the severe looking doctor asked me to take off my pants and parted my buttocks. Then there was the long stay in the corridor sitting on an uncomfortable, plastic, moulded chair while stern looking men conferred with mother behind a glass door.
I had no idea what was happening at the time. I think I was in some sort of daze. How could a story have caused all this? The car trip home had been icy. She hadn’t talked; just glared ahead, out of the window.
She’d come for me that night, just as he’d used to, waiting until the grandfather clock in the hall chimed eleven. Her breath hot in my ear as she’d pushed my face into the pillows, stifling my breath. This was back before the weights so I probably could have overpowered her but the shock of it momentarily paralysed me. My head was still thick with sleep and it took me a moment to focus on her low voice as she hissed my fate into my ear.
You want to write? Well you’re going to write. A masterpiece… You’ll write me a masterpiece… Now he’s gone you need to start pulling your weight… This is your fault… You had to write your little story didn’t you…
Suddenly she’d been gone, leaving me with just her wet spittle on my ear to let me know she’d ever been there.
The next day she bought her first weight set…
* * * * *
…I force down a slice of the pizza. Familiarity has dulled its taste to cardboard. I long for the time when she still allowed me books. Back before she realised they were more of a distraction than an inspiration.
Anything to distract me from the blank sheet in front of me.
I take a slurp of the cola, feeling my heartburn protest fiercely at its bite. The sheer quantity of sugar in my bloodstream is making me feel giddy. I check the six hundred mil bottle of water on the desk but it is empty. I have no idea when she’ll bring me another because I can longer remember when she brought me the last.
Time has lost all meaning for me. The clock was one of the first things to go.
Suddenly an idea strikes and I grab my nub of a pencil, scrabbling for a piece of paper. I have a moment of alarm when I think it’s gone but as the lead touches the paper it begins to flow. I write and write and even begin to find a smile crease my face.
It feels good.
It feels right.
Maybe this time….
* * * * *
… Or maybe not. The hard-on pressing against my thigh is the first thing that tips me off. It’s more of the same. More filth as she termed it. More fantasies of the sex that I’ve finally convinced myself I’ll never get. My whole sexual experience started and ended with him. Never even been kissed. Hard to kiss when you’re bent over on all fours, a hand pressing your face into the pillows.
The thought of it kills the fantasy and in frustration, I screw up the four pages I’d written and hurl them at the bin. I want to scream but I don’t. I just sit there, uncomfortably aware that the image of him, whilst sickening, is not enough to make my hard-on wilt.
I sit very still, willing it away even though I know it won’t.
Time passes.
I have no idea how long.
It becomes too much and I slowly let my hand creep down over my gut and into the loose tracksuit pants I am wearing. Guiltily, I peer over my shoulder at the expressionless lens of the camera as though I would be able to see if she was watching.
My fingers pluck my erection free of my bulging thighs and I awkwardly scoot my seat forward so my actions are hidden further in the shadows under the desk.
I wish I hadn’t screwed up the fantasy. Because now as I begin to gently jiggle my wrist, trying to keep my upper body as still as possible, so if she is watching, she can’t tell what I’m doing; now as I begin to stroke my cock, the only thing I can think of is him hunched over and grunting in my ear…
* * * * *
…I often wonder why no one has come for me. Admittedly I was never the most popular kid at school but I did have some friends: Thomas, Mikey and Steve. Surely one of them must miss me? And I was officially enrolled too. Aren’t there people checking up on these things? Surely I couldn’t have just been yanked out in the middle of semester and no one would wonder where I went. We must have moved several times or something. Although I know she is an accomplished liar, even she couldn’t just make me disappear.
She used to drug me a lot back in the early days. I’m certain of it. Well, fairly certain anyway. She told me I was being ridiculous when I asked her about it but I know for a fact my first room didn’t look like this. She was a
