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The house is loud this evening and filled with the usual arguments over stolen make-up, overrun bathroom times and imaginary boyfriends.
These ‘boyfriends’ are the hot topic in the house. Of course, none of the girls have a boyfriend, but they like the sound of it so much, the normality of it and they so desperately want to be wanted, that pictures of random guys who are so obviously models from a catalogue, appear on their phones with stories of ‘till death do us part’ kinda love.
These stories always amuse me and sometimes, if I’m in the mood, I would sit with the girls in the lounge or at the dinner table and listen to those stories, questioning the ever-changing details.
I sit at my desk in my pyjamas, finishing off my English homework. My favourite radio station plays in the background and I tap my foot in time with the song, humming the lyrics under my nose.
A light knock on the door pulls me from my homework.
“Yeah?” I shout. It’s an invitation, and the door opens to let Paula in. She looks serious and composed.
“Ariel, your social worker is on the phone. She needs to speak to you about your sister”, she utters, scanning my face with her gaze.
Dread envelopes me in its cold blanket as I run downstairs, jumping over the last two steps.
“Hello?” My voice is coarse, giving away my dread.
“Hi, Ariel, it’s Jo. There’s been a... development with your sister and I wanted you to hear this news from me”. My social worker sounds distant and professional.
I don’t say a word. My knees suddenly feel weak and I want to sit down but there’s no chair in this small room.
“Ariel, your sister’s been taken to hospital today”, Jo continues into the silence. “There has been an accident. She has sustained broken bones, fractures and a concussion. Doctors are saying that she is in a critical but stable condition, so they are hopeful”.
My mind reels, unexpectedly tilting on its axis and I think I might throw up. Fear numbs my head, filling my ears with cotton wool and I hear Jo still speaking, somewhere in the distance, but I can’t make out a word.
“Was it him?” I croak down the line.
An answering silence stretches over the phone.
“Was it him?!”
My heart picks up the pace as her silence says more than she ever will.
“We are in the process of carrying out our investigation”, she says carefully, “but in the meanwhile, your sister has been placed under our care. She’ll remain in our care at least until the investigation is completed. I’ll come and get you to see your sister when the doctors say it’s okay for visitors.” Her composed voice echoes in my spinning head.
She pauses once more.
“I’m sorry, Ariel”.
I pull the phone away from my ear, fighting to pry it out of my frozen fingers, before handing it to Paula. My hand and knuckles are sore from gripping the phone so tight.
I turn on the spot and walk upstairs, to my room, as I hear Paula say something into the phone in a hushed voice behind me.
I step into my room and slam the door behind myself.
I’m worked up, angry, furious. Choppy, shallow breaths come out of me and my lungs feel restricted and small. I can’t sit down and can’t stop myself from pacing. My hands ball into fists by my sides. My head pounds. Anger and hate swell, surging high, spreading its searing heat to every part of my body and clouding my mind with a blinding red blanket. Pressure builds inside me, somewhere in my gut, pushing at me from the inside, at my internal organs. I think I’m ripping apart from within and then it starts pounding, like an iron mallet colliding with my insides, crashing at my walls, again and again.
Blinding fury comes next like an avalanche. I want to hit him, want to hurt him, badly.
Pulsating hatred electrifies me. With my every step, with my every thought. of my sister, of me. With my every memory. Of him. Of me. Every hit I took, every hit he dished out. Every depravity he subjected me to. Scared, lonely, lost, silent, pushed, beaten. His touch, his smell. The exploding pain of his gold ring, driven into my face by his fist. His drunken, hungry eyes lingering over my body...
He came into our life with the sleazy, self-righteous facade of a preacher, hiding underneath a vulture who found an easy prey in a weak ‘God found’ single mother and her two daughters. Low lives like him can smell the naivety and desperation of an ageing woman from a mile away.
I protected my sister for as long as I could. I covered her, taking more of his hits. At the end of the day, I was already the broken one, with demons talking to me in my dreams. I kept my sister away from him.
My mum promised me that she had left him. She promised me she would keep my sister safe. I trusted her. I was told that services kept him away, but she must have gone back to him. I only ran away because I couldn’t take it anymore. I ran away from him to stop the abuse, only to find something worse.
I spin in the room, looking for something, anything, to do to release the pressure inside, to stop it from tearing my guts. I throw my arms, sweeping everything off my desk and with it the first release comes.
A bellow comes from my throat like a wounded animal wail. But I don’t care about it as my fist flies into the mirror and a million rainbow shards sprinkle over the floor. Blood drops sprout on the carpet like red poppies with my every step. More blood poppies blossom on the carpet around me. They follow me as I look for another kill.
I spy my childhood keepsakes, arranged on the shelf, along with some childhood pictures of me, my mum and my sister, in beautiful silver frames. We look happy in them, like a family should be. My mother is smiling, still happy, tightly hugging her children. Still caring, still protecting.
I pick them up one by one and with an agonising roar hurl each across the room.
They break, shattering against the wall, leaving small piles of ruined childhood on the carpet and I scream more, like a broken beast in agony.
My vision is blurry. I raise my hands to rub at my eyes, shocked to find tears there. I don’t remember the last time I cried, I didn’t know I still could.
I wipe at my face, leaving bloody streaks in its wake. My legs give way and I collapse on my knees as I raise my face up to the sky and wail.
The room rings as a piercing shriek bounces off the walls, deafening me and it takes me a few seconds to realise, that it’s coming from me. I scream, from the top of my lungs with the fury of a broken childhood, with all the hurt, anger and fear of a damaged body and a crippled mind and a young, broken soul.
The pounding starts in my head. It spreads, picking up the tempo, gathering strength. Slowly, it rises to a buzz of a hive full of angry bees. The noise climbs higher and higher, ascending to a loud, piercing screech of a wrongly tuned radio. It completely blankets my thoughts, eliminates everything but that pain, pounding its searing iron mallet into me.
It reaps inside my skull, tearing my eardrums. I cover my ears with my hands, collapsing sideways on the floor, wanting to make myself smaller, willing for the torture to stop, and when I think I can no longer take it, the ear splitting sound of broken glass rings in the room, followed by explosive arcs of icy shards raining over me.
And I scream, covering my head.
Glass shards fly, stinging my skin, sprinkling my hair and, in the next instant, the pounding in my head dies. The deadly rain of broken glass stops.
In shocked silence I lay, curled up in a ball on the floor. The cold October wind rushes into the room, rustling papers, scattered on the floor and moving my hair. I raise my head and survey the sea of shards around me and the black gaping holes of the windows.
The room is quiet and pitch black with only a pearly white luminescent glow dissolving the darkness around me but it’s too faint and does not reach too far into the room.
I scan the room, searching for the source of a glow and when my gaze falls to my body, I freeze. This pearly luminescent glow is coming off me. My skin is aglow, over all that I can see.
Shocked, I stare at my glowing arms. They are like a weak version of luminescent lights in a hospital’s corridors. New scratches and old cuts cover my arms, but I can’t see any of it, as my mind is transfixed on the white glow. I stretch my arms in front of me, turning them side to side, bending them, flexing my fingers.
But the glow doesn’t disappear under my stare.
What is this? What is happening to me?
I tentatively touch my left arm with my finger. I’m not in pain, I’m not hurting.
But as I look at it, the fear that I might have finally lost my mind takes over and in a sudden surge of panic, I rub at my arms and legs, scratched by the glass, in a vain attempt to remove the glow, but it’s still there.
“Please, no. God, please, no”, I chant like a prayer.
I have finally lost my mind.
I feel light headed and I think I’m about to pass out. The room spins, so I grip the carpet in a desperate need to ground myself, to stop the Earth from tilting. Blackness encroaches from the corners of my vision, bleeding into my eyes and mind.