One thing I noticed almost immediately after Caleb absconded from the scene with his trousers still unbelted was my missing hairclip. The one shaped like a butterfly. The one Bryce had caressed so amorously just moments earlier.
My hair hung in my face as I got to my feet. Feeling cold and shaky, I pulled my pants up from around my ankles and zipped them shut. I rearranged my cardigan, noticing the grass stains on my elbows. I was distinctly aware of a burning, throbbing pain between my legs. I looked down at myself. There was something wet and sticky on my thighs. Blood, I thought, hopefully nothing else.
My head moaned. I don’t believe this, I thought.
At least I was still wearing Mum’s necklace. If I had lost that, I would have been absolutely heartbroken.
Mum…how could you have let this happen? How?
I searched all over the place for my hairclip. I even foraged through a knot of bushes hugging the miry banks of the lake, but I couldn’t find it.
It must have fallen out while I’d been running. Running not from but toward the root of all evil, and from the source of kindness and goodwill.
It could be anywhere! I thought.
It was only a cheap accessory, but Bryce…the way he had touched it. Priceless.
I stood there for what seemed like a very long time, on the very spot I was raped by Caleb Brack, and contemplated what to do.
Should I go home? I asked myself.
Should I go back to Bryce’s?
Should I chase after Caleb and get my revenge? Hurt him the way he hurt me?
I never considered reporting the incident to the police. I still had some wits about me.
But my nerves were shot. I felt numb.
I went home; to the place I thought I was safest.
I limped up the drive, pausing—even in my obvious distress—to collect junk mail from the letterbox. Once I was inside with the doors locked, I slumped to the floor, in the dark, and wept. I wept for myself and for Bryce (h e should’ve been my first). I wept for Mum. I even wept for Dad, albeit for him I felt no remorse. The tears I shed for him tasted bittersweet.
Later, when the tears stopped coming, I got up and flipped the light switch, revealing the hallway and barely illuminating the door at the end of it. The door of the so-called ‘tomb’. It remained shut.
But not for long, I thought with resolve.
My legs were like rubber stumps. I don’t know how they were able to propel me forward.
The hallway seemed endless. Everything looked strangely fuzzy; the walls resembled cotton wool.
I felt as if I were being propelled through a dream, only it was someone else’s dream. Someone else had invented these things which surrounded me: the oil paintings of desolate seascapes hanging on the flaking oyster-white walls; the cracked and scarified towel cupboard with its yellowed doily and empty vase; and the egg-shaped mirror which cast the fleeting reflection of a poor, woebegone individual with a frenzied look in her amber eyes. I was in a dream that belonged to the convoluted mind of someone who was a trifle deranged.
And then suddenly I was at the door. Suddenly I was gripping the handle, turning it, kicking the door inward.
How did I get here?
Then I was stepping over the threshold.
The stench hit me like a mighty hammer. I turned abruptly and dry retched. I covered my nose with one hand and searched blindly for the switch on the wall with the other. When the light came on I had to squint and blink my eyes to make them see properly. When they finally could see, I lowered them to the bed. To the thing splayed on the doona.
It doesn’t even look like Dad, I deduced.
Rigor mortis had disappeared days before, but every appendage still looked unreal, stiff, like the artificial limbs of a mannequin. His skin looked mottled and the blood was caked like a reddish-brown all-over-body mudpack. His legs were hooked over the edge of the bed so that the ingrown nail of his big toe was touching the floor. The rest of him lay on top of the mattress in a grossly seductive manner that suggested he was there initially for sex, not to greet Death. He was gazing vacuously at something across the room. I followed his sightless stare to the window.
I wondered if he’d hoped to get one final glimpse of the outside world—a world untainted by his blood and by my ineffable hatred—before leaving it for another. All he would have seen were the flower-patterned curtains that Mum had adeptly sewn when I was but a seven-week-old embryo with webbed digits.
There was one hideous detail that made me feel only slightly better about being there. Dad didn’t look at peace. In fact, judging by his contorted facial features, one might assume that his soul—at long last freed of its corporeal integument—descended straight into the fiery underground chasm of Hell.
He was just a harmless corpse; a decaying, putrid, ghastly-looking corpse, but harmless nonetheless.
Even in life he was never a truly sensational-looking man. But he could look downright mean without actually trying to, like he was capable of harming anything or anyone that got in his way, which he was.
“I have to touch him now,” I said, keeping my voice steady. “I’ve looked at him, I’ve seen what he is and what I’ve done to him. Now I have to touch him. To feel that he’s real.” That this is real. This whole damned scenario.
I didn’t know what I hoped to accomplish by doing it. I already knew that he was real. That if I touched him, my own warm, pliant skin would come in contact with a cold, hard substance; a substance that is curiously dry or slimy, but which of the two I wasn’t sure.
I think it all came down to the notion or belief that by seeing and touching Dad, by facing him one last time with me having the power, with me once again having the upper hand, I could get over his death, and forever be a stronger, more resilient person because of it. Whatever problems lay ahead, I could deal with them on my own, because I will most likely have to.
Quite painstakingly, I undressed. I didn’t want to infect my clothes with the smell and feel of death.
I’d have to incinerate them, I thought grimly.
Naked, I approached my old bed. The bed I had slept in—until very recently, that is—since I had grown too big for the crib. The soles of my feet landed in something sludgy, like decomposing rubbish, and I wondered if I was actually stepping on collops of human flesh. I shuddered with revulsion but kept going.
Studying him from less than two feet away, I couldn’t count how many times I’d slashed him. Maybe there was one slash for every year he had walked the earth. That would make it forty-four slashes, I thought.
I shooed away a drone of flies that adorned his head like a laurel wreath. I reached out with my left hand and deftly probed his chest with the tips of my fingers. Chest hairs stiff with blood brushed against my palm.
When nothing happened (I had half expected him to roll over and throttle me), I lay down on the bed next to him, on my side, like when I was really young and, at Mum’s jaded insistence, Dad used to read me stories from the big book of fairy-tales. And I told him what I thought. “You had it coming to you, Dad,” I whispered fervidly in his blood-speckled ear. “For so many years you hurt me. You chastised me when I did nothing wrong. You helped Mum commit suicide and I miss her dearly. Because of you I lived an abnormal childhood. Because of you I lived in fear. Because of you I’m forever different, I’m forever an outcast.”
Suddenly enraged, I clubbed Dad’s chest. The mattress bounced from the impact, causing our bodies to convulse. My fist got stuck in a particularly large hole I’d carved. I repressed a bloodcurdling scream and wrenched it back out of him. Part of his guts and/or skin stuck to my knuckles like an emollient hand lotion.
I clubbed him again and again, telling him I hated him.
Telling him I hoped Hell did exist and he was down there for all of eternity. Down there to suffer a trillion more pains and atrocities than what I suffered.
Wearied, I stopped. Breathing raggedly, I climbed off the bed, got down on my hands and knees and crawled out into the hallway, pulling the door shut behind me. I passed out.
And all day Wednesday I slept a dreamless sleep. Upon awakening, Tuesday night’s events rushed at me like a flock of screeching vultures, assaulting every part of my body. It was dark again. I checked the digital clock on my bedside table. Three numerals—6:08—glowed an eerie, traffic-light green.
Slowly, excruciatingly, I uncurled myself, inflated by antagonism. I got to my knees, wavered slightly, but managed to stay in an upright position. Combating a dizzy spell that threatened to pull me back down, I rose upward until I was standing reasonably erect.
Methodically, I showered and dressed and applied make-up. My mind was a black abyss, empty of all intrinsic mortal thoughts.
Soon it occurred to me that I was ravenous. Yet there was nothing in the refrigerator or the kitchen pantry that I fancied. The food I fancied was fattening and un healthy. So I grabbed my purse and caught the bus to the cafe on Maynard Street with its eclectic range of shops. It’s an interesting building that long pre-dates the computer era. Pensioners largely occupied it and single mothers buying supper for their hyperactive kids. By the time I got there my hunger pangs had diminished. I sat in a booth totally removed from the rest of the people. I ordered a sour cherry muffin and a cup of herbal tea. I prodded the muffin and sipped the tea. I stared up at the diner’s ugly tessellated walls, then out the window at the dwindling throng of customers strolling past. Eventually the rain fell. I’d forgotten my umbrella. I missed the last bus. I had to walk home.