Unbind (44 page)

I was near crying, the burning sting there, right at the back of my sockets. Inside a thought circled my brains,
My little sister lost her virginity before me! How! How! I don’t want this for her. That bastard. That dirty bastard.

He caught up with us and yanked Amanda from my grasp. I was so violent with rage, I turned and slapped him really hard. I stood up to him again but he snorted anger, his nose flaring.

I used the only defence I had, the only one that would surely get him away from us. “Touch her again and I’ll go to the police. You bet your bottom dollar… I’ll do it! Stay away from her! She’s only 14!”

I was crying then.
Fourteen
. Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad, but it was with this dickhead. My little sister! I’d watched her learn to walk! I remembered when she had blonde curls before she got so dark-haired. I remembered her stealing my clothes and make-up.

“Nah, you won’t! You won’t!” He seemed so sure.

Amanda pulled on my arm and yanked me away. “Chlo, don’t mess with him! Don’t mess with him! He’s harder than you! He’ll hurt you! Just… let me go.”

It hit me like a sledgehammer. I stared into the dull eyes of my little sister who was telling me she would take the fall, now. She’d go with him and do what he wanted, just to stop this trouble escalating even more than it already had done. It broke my heart. Her lip trembled and ugly, large tears rolled down my cheeks.

“Come home with me,” I demanded, snivelling now, stuff dripping from my nose and mouth. “We’ll fix this.”

“You can’t Chlo, you can’t,” she pleaded.

Damage already done.

She walked back to him and they started to move off, back to their crew, who stood in the distance watching with interest. I stared numbly as Amanda followed him. Their gang climbed into a bunch of beaten-up Vauxhall Corsas parked nearby, hidden behind a lorry parked up for the night.

I felt a sense of urgency—a need to stop my baby sister in case harm came to her that night—given I’d just threatened her boyfriend.

I hid against a tree and did the only thing I could think of. I put my phone to my ear and dialled 999. When someone answered, I asked for the police. “Hi, yes. A vehicle, registration… T60 WBR… the owner is dealing drugs. He’s an adult and he’s having sexual relations with a minor… I know this because she’s my sister, the address… it’s—”

Something smashed behind me. A glass. Or something. It hit the tree. I remembered… they’d all been holding bottles of beer while conducting their little meeting.

I began to turn toward him when from my periphery I saw Sonny swinging the rough edges of a broken bottle in my direction. I knew it hit me because of the sharp push that made my head knock forward, my chin momentarily flying at my chest.

I didn’t feel it, though.

Yet everything stopped.

My body swung slightly and tilted, but didn’t fall.

A shadow ran and ran fast. Vaguely, I heard the screech of cars rush off into the distance. The cowardly bastard got me when I was vulnerable.

A stab in the back.

I laughed inwardly to myself, smiling on the outside. He had tried and failed. It was just a little tap, nothing more.

My phone fell out of my hand and I heard the woman on the other end yelling… I saw the object on the grass and it felt a hundred miles away as I attempted to reach down and pick it up…

There was a wetness coating my back.

“He glassed me,” I said in barely a whisper.

Was this real?

The pain began small, but got bigger, and bigger. Razors. Razors. Heat. A hose pipe had been stuck in my collar, or something.

I fell to the ground, my body on its side.

In shock, I only knew that this couldn’t be happening.

I refused to admit the reality.

One human being—to another? Was this possible?

I couldn’t move. Tears that had been flowing had stopped, caked dry on my face. I struggled for breath. Nerves buzzed and tingled. I felt light-headed. If I had the energy, I would have screamed, cried out, for Amanda to come back.

Was I really bleeding profusely from the head? 

Nobody was coming to help me…?

Another human being… was capable, of that.

Turning my neck made everything seem foggy, then I started to fall.

I blacked out.

WE SAT BY the chiminea nursing our liqueur coffees, Cai’s eyes glued to my face, waiting for more. I didn’t want to tell him the rest and I wriggled uncomfortably in my lush wingback.

“Is there a place that guy is, so I can go and fuck him up?”

I sniffed, revelling in the warmth his protective instinct roused in me. “He got time for what he did to me, and for dealing coke and sex with a minor… but less than eight years later, he got out on good behaviour… then got himself sent back again. It’ll always be that way for him, Cai. They know nothing else. The circle repeats.”

“You don’t think he could ever change?” Cai pursed his lips.

“I saw what was in his eyes, it was a soul lost to the darkness… a soul content to stay there. That was a more frightening thing than getting my head split open—the fact that some people just are irredeemably black inside.”

Cai looked deep in thought, then asked, “What happened to Amanda?”

I cringed. “I made a deal with the police. I’d press charges against Sonny if they caught her in possession.”

He frowned hard. “Why’d you do that? That sounds crazy.”

I shrugged, feeling nothing like that teenager who had the balls to make a decision about her sister’s life within a split second. “I woke up with my head stapled and glued like a fucking infant school project gone wrong, Cai. One more millimetre they said, one more and I could’ve been dead or facing the repercussions of nerve damage. The blood, Cai…” I started crying and he moved over to sit by my feet, “…all that blood. I didn’t know I had so much blood in me. When I woke up, I—I was blindsided, couldn’t see any other way she’d get herself free of that world. I knew they’d be lenient and they were. She got community service, rehab, all that kind of stuff. Except when she grew older, she went back there. Did it again anyway. She’s an addict, Cai.
They
made her one.”

“Actually, some studies have shown that addicts have certain personality traits that make them more prone to addiction if a certain set of factors come together.”

I looked at him and realised.
His mother.
“I forgot your mother was an addict too, I’m sorry.”

I stroked a hand through his hair as he rested his cheek against my lap. “Hers stemmed from abuse too. Don’t ask me how I know she was abused, I just know.”

“I’m sorry,” I said again, because I didn’t know what else to say.

“You once said you didn’t realise it was abuse. What did he do to you, Chloe? What did he do?” Cai ground out, his head buried in my thick leggings.

“Who? My dad?”

“Yeah.”

I avoided the question. “Did I tell you my mother called this morning to tell me he’s just had heart surgery… and I felt absolutely nothing. It’s why I was trying to rip your bag from the ceiling… I can’t force myself to feel anything for him.”

“Damn it… what did he do, Chlo? Tell me.” Cai lifted his head, his eyes teary, desperately in need of knowing.

My mouth trembled and I reached out to stroke his face. “I didn’t think it was abuse. I knew it was wrong. I didn’t think it was abuse.”

“Quit stalling and tell me.” He frowned hard, seething.

“No, I’m frightened. You’re frightening me, Cai. I don’t want to tell you. You’ll never want to be in the same room with him if I tell you.”

Cai pushed up from the floor and held out his hand to me. “Stand up and do to me what he did to you. Do it. I can take it, Chloe. Show me. Show me like I showed you at
Sub Rosa
. Show me, damn it.”

The hurt in his stance and demeanour was so incredible, it reached even the forked, drifting tendrils of my being. I stood up and looked him in the eye with nothing but disdain, jabbed a finger in his shoulder, pushed hard enough to shift him.

“You’re tough, are you?”

“Yeah,” Cai said, his eyes never leaving mine.

“Show me then, show me how tough you are.”

“I don’t hurt people,” Cai said, acting my part.

“You’ll one day learn it’ll get you nowhere being a runt.”

“A runt?” He grimaced, his face twitched.

“An idle little nothing.” I poked his shoulder again.

“I’m not idle, nor nothing.” Cai said.

I twisted his arm behind his back, then spat in his ear, “You, are nothing. Now say it.”

“No.”

I got him on the floor, my entire body pressed on his back so he struggled for breath, or to escape. “You’re nothing. You’ll be nothing. I hope you fail… I hope you know what it’s like to lose. You’ll never do a thing good. You’ll never succeed… you never show us any love. Why should you get anything in life?”

“No,” Cai said, perhaps unable to believe this was the treatment I received.

I grabbed his hair and was just about to pull his head back and smack his face against the wood floor. “Say it. You’re weak. Say it and I won’t make a mess of your face.”

“I’m weak,” Cai said, and burst into tears. I rocked back on my heels and knelt by his side, watching with tears of my own as Cai laid on his belly crying his heart out, his large bulk shuddering right before my eyes.

“No, no…” he repeated, still unable to believe all that happened to me.

That is how our father treated the daughters he was meant to love, to cherish, to protect.

“He was most lenient on Anabel because she never answered back. I never saw him hit our mother but I saw her holding her side, or fiddling with the concealer stick for too long in the mirror. I know him and Mum had a stillborn boy before I was born and he never forgave my mother. She kept trying to give him a son, but she never did. I still can’t find any logic in existence that justifies the things he did.”

“Oh god,” Cai moaned, wiping tears from his eyes.

“When I had my head smashed open, he thought it was funny. Said I must have done something to deserve it. When I told him it was Amanda’s boyfriend who’d done that to me, he almost hit me while I laid in a hospital bed. He didn’t want to believe his youngest was at the mercy of a drug dealer. He didn’t like it when he found out I grassed her up… she wore orange overalls and had to clear rubbish around the town so everyone could see. My father was all about the appearances you see… keeping them up, putting on a show… nobody knew what was really going on.”

Cai laid there, still struggling to pull himself together. I continued on, because this was my chance. This was the moment—the floodgates were open.

“It didn’t matter what he did, I still did well at school and I was popular. Looking like this has its merit, you know? I had Kay most of all but like I said, even she didn’t know half the things I was dealing with at home. Like the nights when one of us put a foot wrong and he’d hold one of us down while encouraging the others to hit the one allegedly in the wrong. When we were small, we didn’t know much different I guess. I knew my mother suffered badly with depression but she was either low or so high on pills, there was no reasoning with her. It was only when Amanda started using heavily that Mum said enough is enough… and she forced everyone to go to family therapy. They’ve all had CBT but I haven’t. I’ve never had therapy even though I probably should, but I just don’t want the cracks to get bigger Cai. I don’t want them to get bigger.”

He got himself to a sitting position but he still couldn’t look at me, his gaze fixed on the door of his workspace, like he needed his own escape too.

“How did you cope?” he asked, still not looking at me.

I took a long breath and breathed out again. I thought hard and I said simply, “I love life. I love that there are good people, interesting people. People who want to talk to me and have a laugh, too. Most of all, I always knew, I had my marbles. I had this mind to use. If only… if only I didn’t have this memory too, this memory, Cai…”

He turned to look at me, his eyes red but no longer leaking. “Memory?”

“I have this memory.” I pointed to my skull. “I can remember all the names and faces of people I’ve ever met. I remember when I fell from a rope swing into a stream when I was little, I was wearing some cheap high-top trainers I loved. They were ruined by the mud. I remember what top I wore to a school disco when I was 13, a thing I spent hours picking out. I remember the day Kay got her first tattoo,” I smiled, “I remember how long she spent making sure the design was right, how faint she looked when the dude doing her ink brought the needle toward her skin. I remember the ringlets in Amanda’s hair and how innocent they were and I remember every, single moment of pure evil he ever wrought on us. You see I can’t forgive, Cai, not when I can’t forget.”

He shut his eyes and looked down at the floor. “I wish you’d told me all this sooner, tigress. I wish you had.”