Even as a teenager Ciara McKee could be unspeakably cruel. She was spectacularly lacking in any form of empathy.
She wore her hatred for me as blatantly as she wore her heavy goth make-up and her thick-soled boots. She was as wicked as any evil step-sister could be. I started to dread her visits.
It soon became not good enough that I simply stayed out of her way when she came over. She would come and find me, seemingly with the express purpose of making me feel as bad about myself as possible.
I spent my prepubescent years dreading every second weekend, knowing what was coming. The fact that I dreaded it even more than the weekends she didn’t visit – the weekends when it was just Joe and me in the house – said a lot.
Is it any wonder my young mind started to struggle with notions of love and boundaries and what constituted abuse, given I was so desperate for attention and for affection?
When I was roughly eleven and Ciara would have been sixteen, I remember her perching on the end of my bed as I tried to read. I had taken to keeping my head in a book, escaping to more peaceful worlds as much as possible.
I wanted Ciara to leave me alone but I was too afraid to tell her to get lost, so I just did my best to ignore her.
‘Do you know what I’d do if nobody wanted me the way no one wants you?’ she said, a fraction too loudly for me to ignore.
I made the mistake of looking up and catching her gaze for the briefest of moments.
I didn’t ask her to tell me, though. I stayed quiet. I’d learned that staying quiet generally made things go away quicker. I had already become adept at managing harmful situations. Or so I thought.
‘I’d kill myself,’ she said, as if she was talking to no one, then she turned to look at me. ‘Don’t you think that would be an idea? I mean, you must miss your mum a lot, and you could be back with her? I know some people say it’s a sin, but how could it be? You’d just be going to be with your mum.’
She stared at me for a moment while I stared back. I didn’t know what to say. How to react.
‘That’s what I’d do anyway,’ she added before getting up and walking out of the room, leaving me, an eleven-year-old child, wondering if she had a point.