‘SMACK HER! Smack her!’

 

Inside the Roth home at Anders, Celia had just been made to stand on her head. Seven years old, half-naked and choking.

With the shutters pulled to, the lounge had a dim underwater feel. The white carpet, seared here and there by sunlight, glimmered pale as sand. The casement window was open; the curtains hung stiffly, baked solid in the ovenheat of another Swiss summer. Celia’s new polka-dot bikini clung to her bottom as if she’d been swimming.

‘Smack her, for goodness’ sake!’ she heard her mother scream again, high above, and she felt herself being lifted bodily and shaken, her scalp and elbows scraping the floor as her mother’s grip around her ankles kept slipping, chafing her skin.

‘It’s all my fault, my fault. I gave her –’ The voice of her grandmother was heavy with self-reproach but she didn’t come any nearer, her sandalled feet tiny and furtive between the two armchairs.

‘Well then, do something! Smack her, hard, that’s the only way to get it out!’

Chair legs and sofa legs, coffee-table legs, human legs shuddered and swam before Celia’s eyes, turning into a mangrove of changing shapes, bloated and stick thin and impossibly twisted, splintering, disintegrating … Her face was running with wet. She retched, and retched. Her head was about to explode, her ears had gone deaf. She was breathing lungfuls of dust but no air. No air –

‘SMACK HER!’

The sandals got suddenly bigger: her grandmother was bending down, her sea-green eyes reduced to dark pools of distress, her Cupid bow lips drooping, her old woman’s fingers twitching as they reached out towards her, claw-like …

Ever afterwards it wasn’t the exquisite lips and eyes Celia remembered, only those hands, every single knotted joint of them. As soon as her grandmother held something out to her, a thickly buttered bread slice perhaps, or a piece of homemade apple tart, a new nightdress even, she’d see those misshapen knuckles and her mouth would go dry, her throat constrict into a compulsion of swallowings.

The fingers had hardly hit Celia’s back when the dust in her nose released itself into a body-racking sneeze. With a final retch her throat unclenched, expelled – and she slumped free, on to the carpet. Free and alive.

As she lay there heaving and clutching at her throat, she tried to focus on the sweet an arm’s length away. Banded red, white and brown like a large marble, it was covered in swirls of blood and slime, matted with hairy fluff where it had rolled across the carpet. Celia moaned, closed her eyes. And allowed herself an extra moan because for once in her short existence it was her, and not her brother Walter – five years older and five years more loved and adored – who was centre stage.

‘I didn’t mean to hurt you, little one. I’m so sorry,’ her grandmother said.

‘Didn’t I tell you, Mum? Smacking’s what’s done the trick. Thank God!’

Then the weight of a hand on her shoulder. ‘Are you all right now?’ Already her mother’s tone had cooled to the detached proficiency Celia had learnt to equate with affection.

Quickly she let her lids slide open. Her bikini top was askew, exposing two pale-pink nipples like blind eyes. She ignored them. Gave her aching throat one last rub, and grimaced. No use prolonging her ordeal. Something itchy had started to trickle along her spine, down her thighs and arms, a mixture of sweat and old carpet freshener, traces of moth repellent, the ghosts of unwashed feet. She was glad to get up.

‘I shall never buy the boiled sort again, never ever, don’t you worry,’ her grandmother vowed gently, but the words felt like smacks.

All Celia wanted now was to go to Lake Constance as they had planned and not lose any more time, in case Walter arrived home early with his pail load of slimy tail-thrashing trout from Uncle Godfrey’s fish farm out of town. Her mother and grandmother would fuss over him no end. Praise him as the man of the house, the mighty hunter – as if scooping up fish with a hand net was such a big deal. In a diffuse way, though, Celia knew their fussing had a lot more to do with the fact that her father was no longer around.

Let’s go, she lisped to herself, Let’s go, pleasepleaseplease. She pictured the afternoon hours spread out like the shimmering surface of the lake, with herself in the middle splashing and paddling, or licking a triple ice cream on the hot shingle.

A hiss of running water sounded from the kitchen down the corridor, then her mother returned with a small plastic basin and a rag to clean the blood trail off the carpet.

Walter came wheeling his bicycle round the corner just as they were getting into the car, his pail swinging precariously from the handlebars. Celia saw his damp brown curls glisten in the sun, far superior to her own ‘rat’s tails’, and she wrinkled her nose, trying in vain to snuggle herself into the garage-cool upholstery of the back seat. She couldn’t help watching the cleft in his chin widen as he laughed – couldn’t help touching her own lower jaw, which leaned out of her face like the witches’ in her Grimm’s Fairy Tales.

For a while the boiled sweet featured as Horror Exhibit Number One: suitably rinsed and wiped, it was displayed in a cork-stoppered jar on top of Celia’s chest of drawers.

She showed it to everyone. Her friends Lily and Nita giggled and asked to have a feel. Walter smirked and Auntie Margaret, who wasn’t a real aunt but Lily’s mother and her own mother’s best friend, called it a ‘dreadful monster’. Grandfather simply nodded his moonfaced head, then carried on polishing the furniture in his antiques shop. Uncle Godfrey and his housekeeper inspected it with puzzled smiles. And her mother’s clients fled to the safety of the Beauty Room.

One day Celia took it into the yard to let Charlie, the black labrador that belonged to old Frau Gehrig from upstairs, have a sniff. He wagged and grinned civilly enough (or so she thought), his lips pulled back a little further, his velvety red tongue flopped out a little more … and his eyes blinked shut in ecstasy. Then he ambled off to his kennel, leaving nothing but a slobber on her palm.