He’s dead! His blood is everywhere (except, it seems, where it should be—inside of him!) His eyes are still open. Should I close them for him? I don’t want to touch him!
I’m really scared, more scared than I’ve ever been in my entire life. More scared than the time when I discovered Mum’s body collapsed on the bathroom floor, squirting blood like a hydrant.
Oh, God, it happened so quickly. The stabbing was frenzied. I was so mad. Enraged and utterly insane. Or not insane, because I knew exactly what I was doing. I thought I got him thirty or forty times. I wasn’t counting. With each downward thrust of the knife I was thinking: Die! Die! Die!
I cannot believe what I’ve done. Yet I know it’s not a dream. I’m not on my bed—Dad is!
Over four hours have passed. I guess I’ve had time to calm down some. Not a lot, but enough to clear my head of the maddening fog. And I can’t sleep. I flopped onto the couch and I tried to sleep, but I kept seeing Dad every time I shut my eyes.
This is what happened…
He came home at 8:30 p.m. I’d estimated the time poorly. His over-heated dinner was spoilt, especially the carrots. They weren’t ‘babies’ by the time Dad got to them. They were shrivelled old ‘grannies’.
Looking rather disgruntled, he stabbed the plate with his fork. “What is this warm muck?” he grumbled. “Food? When are you going to acquire real cooking skills? When your husband starts beating the crap out of you? That’s if some poor bloke will have you.” He wasn’t atypically moody or offensive. He ate the so-called food quickly, shoved his empty plate aside and fired up a cancer stick. “Fetch me my newspaper, will you?”
Like a well-trained dog, I dutifully fetched him his newspaper from the coffee table in the lounge room. Ungratefully, he accepted it.
“Lucky you brought it in before the rain got to it,” he muttered.
“Yes,” I replied, shooting lemon-scented dishwashing liquid into the sink.
“I like my paper dry, so I can read it. Be sure to remember that.”
I nodded. “I will.” Then, trying to improve his mood: “Dad? Would you like some dessert?”
He barely acknowledged me. “What’ve ya got?”
“Sultana cake.”
“It’s old, isn’t it?”
“It’s kept in an airtight container. It should be all right still.”
“Forget it. Probably poison me. We wouldn’t want that to happen, would we?”
“No.”
“Chuck it out then.”
I disposed of the cake despite knowing it was perfectly edible. I washed the dishes, cutlery and Tupperware in hot sudsy water, dried and put everything away in their rightful place.
“Would you like me to switch off the television?” I asked him.
“No,” he answered gruffly. “Foxworth’s on tonight.”
Fine. I didn’t ask him who or what Foxworth was. I didn’t care.
I tidied the lounge room a bit and adjusted the cushions on the sofa so they sat like plumped-up diamonds, not plumped-up squares. Straightened the mats. Even watered the brown plant on the windowsill, which is probably not sick but dead. There are no pets to feed, only humans, so my job was done.
Finally, I excused myself. I locked both the front and back doors (Dad always neglected to) and retreated to my confined space at the rear of the house to do some math.
That didn’t go too badly, I thought. At least he didn’t hit me again. Or threaten to.
Maybe the day went extremely well for him.
Or maybe he’s just too tired to get physical.
It all depends on how he’s feeling, I guess.
Mine is the smallest bedroom in the house. Without ducted heating, and because it receives very little sunlight during the day, it’s always freezing. It contains a single bed with a primrose doona and matching valance, plus other essential furnishings. The carpet is a bilious green. The walls are a pale yellowish-green, almost white. It is not the pretty room you’d expect a teenage girl to have. There is no dressing table cluttered with perfume and make-up, no posters of air-brushed musicians or movie stars, no paperback novels, nothing to say that I’m a young girl with a passion for anything other than sleep.
At approximately ten o’clock Dad lumbered up the hallway and muttered something inarticulately at my closed door.
Sweet dreams, my fair princess? Fat chance.
He got ready for bed. He seldom showered, brushed his teeth or shaved. What he usually did was pull on his threadbare pyjama bottoms, kick off his threadbare slippers, and plunge a couple of fingers up his nose before blowing.
I was sitting cross-legged on the floor, textbooks scattered about me. I could hear him stumbling about in the adjacent room. Once he was in bed I had to be especially quiet, so I listened out for the bedsprings. Instead I heard the unmistakable creak of the wardrobe door opening.
Oh, no, I thought.
My heart nearly clobbered my ribcage to smithereens.
I got up off the floor. I waited.
Seconds later Dad burst into my room. He was practically a giant, six-foot-three, barrel-chested with a mass of hair sprouting up out of his ratty singlet top like black alfalfa. His face was a blotchy red. He was holding up an enormous brindled, moth-eaten jacket that is more than twenty years old. A jacket that he no longer wore, but it still looked awfully familiar.
“You little sneak!” he swore. “There was fifty dollars in this, and ten of it is missing! What did you spend it on? More junk?” His eyes scoured the room in search of something new. “What could be so important that you would resort to stealing from your own father? Come here!”
He grabbed the top half of my hooded sweater and, before I could grab hold of something myself, yanked me forward and up onto my tiptoes. He could’ve easily lifted me a metre off the ground and held me there until I choked.
There was no time to expostulate, to defend myself verbally. No way was I going to be able to defend myself physically. To defend myself physically was to accomplish an impossible feat. I was outweighed by at least twenty kilos, and most of that was muscle. So I just let things be. Why complicate the matter further by struggling? I asked myself. Why not just shut the hell up, go limp in his arms like a rag doll, take the beating like a true champ and make things easier for the both of us?
First, his right fist came at my mouth, and I yelped as it struck its target. It was the only sound I allowed myself to make. His other fist swung at my eye, missed, instead struck the bridge of my nose; the blurred vision was instantaneous.
My brain was suddenly encapsulated in a fuzzy lightless place. He released his stranglehold and I dropped to the floor near the end of the bed. I raised an arm and tried to hide my pulverised face in the crook of my elbow. A lot of good that did me; he simply aimed the blows elsewhere. He resorted to kicking me. He kicked my thigh, then my arm, then my stomach.
I don’t deserve this! I thought. I do deserve this! But I didn’t scream. I didn’t dare scream. He had warned me once that if I screamed, I would get it worse.
But how could I have gotten it worse? I wonder now. The pain was incredible.
Dad bent down, his form resembling something less human, more barbaric. This time he grabbed me by the hair. He twisted my neck around, forcing me to look at him.
“Apologise,” he breathed in my face. His breath was malodorous. Nauseating.
Fat teardrops sprinkled down my cheeks. “I think…my arm’s broken.”
He shook me like I was an overstuffed toy. “I don’t care! Apologise!”
“Please, Dad…”
“Apologise, you dishonest little bitch,” he upbraided.
“Apologise and promise me you’ll give back every little cent you stole. Do you want me to call the police and have them take you away? Is that what you want? Because that’s what they’ll do. They’ll take you away, and I’ll let them.”
He sounded like a raving, out of control lunatic. He was a raving, out of control lunatic. But I knew his threats were as empty as washed-up seashells. We both knew it. We both knew Dad would never—not in a million years—call the police. Because who would get taken away? Who would go to jail? You, Dad. Not me. You. And I didn’t steal the money from you. I borrowed it.
You never gave me the chance to explain, although an explanation—even a rational one—wouldn’t have made much of a difference. That was mistake number one. Big mistake number one, because it more than likely cost you your life.
I studied his gaunt hollow-eyed face from less than two inches away, committing to memory the jagged line of his mouth, his thick furry caterpillar brow, slightly off-centred aquiline nose and pasty, pockmarked skin. Sometimes Dad could look really sick, like a starved heroin addict. Now, he just looked psychotic.
“Dad, please!”
“I’m not hearing an apology from you.”
“I intended to give it back.”
“When? Next year?”
“Next week!” I was going to suggest no pocket money for a month, two if it made him happy.
Again, he shook me. “I’M. NOT. HEARING. IT.”
“I’m sorry!” I wept at last.
And just like that he let go of my hair and nodded. “That’s better.”
The spring-loaded, retractable blade, purchased from Mitchell’s Disposals, was only long enough to go partway through him. It tore the flimsy material over his chest and sank into his skin, not far, I didn’t think, but far enough to penetrate something. The silver blade slipped in and out so swiftly, it was as if it had never entered. But it did. The horrified expression on his face told me it did. So did the blood.
I wrenched the knife out of his torso and shoved it back in again—and again, repeatedly, until it became an involuntary reflex, devoid of consciousness.
In, out, up, down, in, out, up, down.
Shadows danced over the bare walls, like a ghostly spectator mimicking my actions.
Somehow Dad had the strength to rise to his feet. I stabbed his thighs, his kneecaps; his striped pyjama bottoms weren’t stripy anymore. He took one step back, lowered himself onto the bed and kind of grunted.
I stood over him with the knife raised high, dripping fresh blood that still felt warm on my hands. Type-A blood, like mine.
“Just…ice,” he rasped.
“It certainly is,” I replied with a voice that was my own but not.
His eyes glazed over. They were so wide and round. He watched the knife come at him again. He watched it carve open his midsection like he was a slab of meat—edible for a cannibal—and all the while the two of us were impossibly silent.
At last Dad stopped moving. I stepped away from the bed and took a deep shuddering breath. Dad was gone, and I was alone in my bedroom. Only it wasn’t my bedroom anymore. It was an abattoir. It was a place of death.
The knife was sheathed with blood. I slid it back underneath the mattress without cleaning it. I didn’t think I’d need it anymore. After that, time went by very slowly.
I’m not sure what I did next. I think I went outside and chucked up dinner. I vaguely recall squatting by the back steps, feeling the wind ice-cold on my neck. At one stage I gazed up at the stars, but they were hazy. Indefinable.
I wondered what Mum was thinking. Maybe she was arguing with God about what I’d done. Defending my actions. ”Don’t banish her to Hell, dear Lord. Where do you think she’s been for the past sixteen years?”
From now on, I think I’ll sleep in Dad’s bed. It’s big and comfy and warm. I’ll move all of my belongings into his room and forget Dad ever existed. Close the door on him forever. Because what else can I do? His death is a fait accompli. An accomplished fact and it cannot be reversed.
Forget him, that’s what I will do.
Move on and forget him.