THE FIGHT
Gravel spits and an engine revs, then cuts off. The front door slams a second later, shaking the mullioned windows. My father screams my name from the foyer. I can hear him though I’m on the third story of the house. I wince. He knows. He knows I know.
“Ashlyn Elizabeth Carr! Where are you?”
I weigh my odds. If I stay here and he has to come up, will he be more furious or less? Time heals all wounds, though whoever penned this bon mot clearly didn’t have a teenage daughter. Our wounds only get deeper, wider, nastier. They fester.
“Ashlyn! Come down here immediately.”
I creep from my room to the hall. I can hear my mother now, emerging from the solarium where she keeps her office. She spends all day in there, arranging dinner parties and sojourns to the countryside, writing thank-you notes. She is useless. Meaningless. Living a pretend life in a pretend world. Since my brother died, she’s done nothing but plan her stupid parties and nip on the sherry. A tot in your tea, dear?
“Damien? Whatever is the matter? Why are you out here screeching like a lunatic? I thought you were in London today.”
“Is she here?”
“Ashlyn? She’s in her room, most likely. Why, what has she done?”
There is a momentary scuffle.
“Damien, really. There’s no need to manhandle me. It’s beneath you,” and my father’s ironclad voice, “Step aside, Sylvia.”
Footsteps now, running up the stairs, thunking hard against the gray wool runner. Father used to be thin, but years behind computers and rich meals in his clubs have robbed him of his runner’s physique.
I scramble back to my room, slam the door, and try to turn the lock, but his hand grips the knob and the door swings open, jettisoning me across the room.
Damien Carr is suitably named. He has eyes like burning coals. Possessed. Driven. Evil. He looks to have the devil inside him now.
“What did you do?”
“I didn’t do anything. I haven’t a clue what you’re speaking about.”
“You’ve cost me the deputy exchequer position. They’ve pulled my name from the short list. Someone sent a salacious email from an anonymous account. I know it was you.”
“It wasn’t me, Father. I don’t care enough about you to bother destroying you. It must have been one of your other enemies.”
This brave speech costs me a molar. The pain of his fist blinds me; I see stars. When my ears stop ringing, I spit the tooth into my hand and sneer at him.
“You can hit me all you want, but I didn’t do it.”
“You’re lying. You’re a lying, thieving little cunt, aren’t you? How did you do it, Ashlyn? How did you manage? I know it was you, don’t bother denying it. The IP address was from that dingy café you skulk about, off Broad Street. Oh, you thought I didn’t know where you spend your days? Who’d you open your legs for to get this done, eh, Ashlyn? I know you’re not smart enough to have managed on your own.”
“Damien!” My mother watches this scene with horror from my bedroom door. I can only imagine what it looks like. A play in which I am the writer, director, and producer.
Here’s what I want to see.
Ashlyn: grinning maniacally, teeth rimed in red, holding a tooth in her hand. Her cheek and jaw are already swelling, she can feel her skin stretching out so it’s shiny and tight. She knows what this looks like; she’s been on the receiving end of her father’s fist many times.
Damien: his face puce with fury, eyes bulging with hate, spittle in the corners of his mouth from his buffalo clumsy sprint up the stairs, desperately trying to restrain himself from attacking again and failing.
Now start the fight again, only this time, give the audience a second, a beat, to realize he’s going to punch her before he does it.
The two of us face off as we have so often lately: my body bruised and battered, his sides heaving like a prized Thoroughbred flogged to the end of the race.
A beat. Yes, that’s right. That’s better.
My father hates me. Always has. All my parents see when they look at me is the irresponsible twat who let their beloved heir drown. It doesn’t matter that I was barely more than a wee babe myself, I was supposed to be holding his hand. I looked away for a moment and when I looked back, he was facedown among the lily pads.
Ever since Johnny died... Well, there’s no reason to pretend we ever were a happy, loving family, but the rift was complete when Johnny was four and I was six. Johnny, sainted, beloved Johnny, forever cast as the four-year-old cherub. The innocent facing the monster’s maw. I sat with my hand on his tiny back and wondered if Monet would have liked to paint him there, his sturdy little legs disappearing into the muck, the green of the lily pads vibrant against the white of his shirt and the brown of his wet hair.
Then the screaming. So much screaming.
I prodded at him, yes. But I did not hold him under. I did not push him in. No matter what the witnesses said. They lied. They realized who my father was and wanted a piece of the action. As if Sir Damien Carr would reward them for their accusations.
I don’t think my father cared for me much before the accident, though his animus after was legendary. He expected decorum at all times; I was a wild, rough-and-tumble girl child who liked to set fire to the curtains and tear apart the ancient silk and wool rugs with my rollerblades, and, because of the Queen’s magnanimity, could inherit all of Damien’s vast fortune. Not that I wanted it, who cares about money?
He started cheating on my mother well before their marriage bed grew cold and distant. I walked in on him once, with another woman in my mother’s bed. They were giggling and laughing and happy. She was blond, ice blond, like my mother, even looked like her a bit. But she sounded so different. So light and loose.
These sounds were unfamiliar, they drew me, a moth to the flame. I wanted to see what had finally, finally, made my parents happy.
Silly me. Silly, dangerous me. He came to my room that evening. Explained my role in their complicity. Tell your mother and I’ll kill you, he said, giving me his lopsided, gap-toothed smile. A smile to others, a threat to me.
And I, weak little mouse, thought, Sure, Daddy. I’m happy to cover up for you.
No, I didn’t. I put his words in my growing databank of slights and hurts and nasty things, ready to be pulled out at a moment’s notice, a sharpened razor to the wrist. To the throat.
Don’t worry, Daddy. I know your secret now, and I’ll keep it in my heart where no one can find it until the time is perfect, and then I will use it against you and laugh while you burn.
Our relationship worsens the older I get. I push my father’s buttons, as my mother likes to say. She does it now, her lips pursed. Instead of kicking his sorry, cheating, lying, homicidal ass out of the house or offering to get me to a dentist or even have Cook bring up an ice pack, she takes his side.
“Ashlyn, don’t push your father’s buttons. Tell him what he wants to know.”
“I. Didn’t. Do. Anything. What do I have to gain seeing you humiliated further? It’s embarrassing enough the whole world knows you’re fucking that trollop. It reflects poorly on the family.”
Ah, the time-honored tradition of daughter throwing her parents’ words in their faces.
He roars and his hand swings again but I’m faster this time, braced and ready for the blow the moment the words leave my mouth. I duck, grab my bag with my right hand, and scoot out the door, leaving them both staring in shock.
I clatter down the stairs, one flight, two. I can hear him behind me, shouting. He’s gaining. My boots are at the back door. I detour through the kitchens, past the shocked face of Dorsey, our family’s cook for my whole tender life. She steps out to stop me but she’s too late, and my father crashes into her. They go ass over teakettle into a heap on the flagstones, giving me the break I need.
“Ashlyn,” my mother calls again, pleading this time, but I grab my boots and I’m out, doing a runner through the labyrinth and out the back garden. Thanks to Dorsey, I’ve escaped.
Again.
Half a mile down the lane, I scoot through the hedgerow into our fields. I smoke here by the stone fence. It abuts the graveyard, where I like to go after dark. I sit by Johnny’s grave. His presence comforts me. He, unlike the rest of the family, forgave me ages ago.
I find a spot out of the wind and assess the damage with my hand. My face hurts, but my jaw isn’t broken. I still have my tooth clutched in my left palm. I wonder if anyone can put it back in for me. No, too dangerous.
I have a water bottle in my bag, dregs from yesterday. I swish out my mouth, spill the last of it over the bloody stump of gory white, then press it firmly back into place. The pain makes me go wobbly in the knees, so I sit down hard on the ground. Shut my eyes and grit my teeth, praying the tooth will take root.
I need a cigarette. Or a bump.
I have to get out of this hell.
There have been rebellious daughters since the beginning of time. Most are like me, I assume, stuck in a house with people whose priorities put them last, who don’t care a whit about them, except to see what price they can fetch, what ladder they can be used to help climb, which advantageous match can be made. Too rebellious, and they shipped you off to a nunnery (or school, nowadays) or pawned you off on the first idiot man who’d take you. And if you thought Daddy was bad, just wait until you understood what the rest of your life was going to look like, on your back or on your knees, being forced, getting pregnant, and good luck living through the birth of the first, not to mention the thirteenth.
Female rebellion is a time-honored tradition, yes, but it’s usually more genteel now, death by a thousand cuts. Mine is coming to a head, soon, and I won’t bother with a thousand cuts. Just one. Well placed. Well timed.
Finality, Damien, comes for you on the wings of chariots.
The last fight we had, Daddy swore to cut me off, and I told him to go ahead, I didn’t need his money, his filthy blood money. Lord knows there’s none on my mother’s side; she married up, way up.
Without my inheritance, I suppose I’ll have to get a job. I can get an ID card that states I’m eighteen, forge enough documents to establish a short-lived work history. Rent a flat. I’ve been saving money—it’s one thing to have access to Daddy’s accounts, those can be frozen at any moment by the solicitors. No, I’m smarter than that. I’ve been filtering money for the past few years. Granted, a lot of it went up my nose or down my gullet, but I have over forty thousand quid stashed away now.
I don’t want to work, but I’ll do what I have to if it means escaping. I just want to get away. Find some peace.
My God, do you blame me? My parents are the real monsters.