Текст книги "Tank"
Автор книги: Carmen Jenner
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Текущая страница: 11 (всего у книги 16 страниц)
I didn’t expect to spend the night of my formal, my last farewell to high school and all the bullshit that that entails, with blood on my hands. Well, that’s not entirely true.
I’d been putting up with Tami Roger’s bullshit for the last three months, and so far she hadn’t yet put out, but after agonising over this fuckin’ decision as if it were going to change her entire life, she’d finally decided tonight was the night.
And I’d thought I’d fuckin’ earned it after the bullshit she’d put me through for weeks in the lead up to the dance. I’d been rimmed out by Tami’s dad for wearing my leather jacket instead of a fuckin’ monkey suit, and her mum hadn’t wanted me in the pictures at all. Suited me just fine. I hated havin’ my photo taken. I had confiscated a Polaroid of Tami though, and tucked it in the pocket of my leather jacket, because she looked fuckin’ hot in that dress, and I’d use it to spank my monkey to when she wasn’t around to blow me.
We’d danced at the formal, surrounded by all of her friends in their dresses with their dipshit dates in fuckin’ tuxedos. If they’d played that fucking Kylie Minogue song one more time I was gonna outright execute some motherfucker. Tami had gone on and on about how this was “a night we’d remember for the rest of our lives”.
I’d remember it, alright, but it wouldn’t have anything to do with reaching a milestone to mark the passage of time.
In a way, I guess I’d expected to get my hands bloody tonight, and I had. Twice.
In a cheapo hotel room after the dance, I’d taken her virginity and she’d bled like a bitch. She’d also freaked the fuck out when I’d tried to go down on her afterward. So instead, we’d lain there in silence, naked and wrapped in one another’s arms. Or I’d lain there in silence; as usual, Tami talked too fuckin’ much about all the shit I didn’t give a fuck about, and then she’d bitched me out when I’d fallen asleep. It wasn’t that I hadn’t realised what this night had meant to her, or that I resented her fantasy for the perfect first time. Truth is, first times will always suck, no matter who you’re with. I tried to make it okay for her, but I know it wasn’t the experience she built it up to be. It wouldn’t have been, not with anyone.
She wanted romance and those three little words that she seemed to say almost every time she opened her mouth, but that I could never say back. I liked Tami a lot; I liked going down on her, I liked her going down on me, and I’d even enjoyed fuckin’ her, but I didn’t love anyone. I never would.
To love was to hurt.
My mother had taught me that, and it had been a lesson she didn’t even know she was teaching, yet it was likely to be the most valuable one I’d ever learn.
I see that now, as she crouches down on the floor beside the body of her husband. All the shit he put her through, all the bruised and busted up eyes, all the rapes, the violence, and the mental beatdowns, and still she cries over his dead body.
“Jonah, what did you do?” she whispers.
“What I had to,” I say evenly, though the blood on my hands makes me feel like the whole world has tilted on its side. I’m the only man left standing, and I don’t feel a single ounce of relief because of it. I pull her away from his prone body. “You need to stop touching him. Fingerprints, Ma.”
Her panic-stricken gaze meets my serene one. “We need to call the police; we need to report it. We can say he attacked you. We’ll say that it was self-defence. There’s a history of violence there; they won’t question it.”
“I’ll still go to jail, Ma,” I say. “And it won’t be juvie.”
“Oh, Jonah,” she says, and for the first time she seems to gather herself together. She stands and takes my blood-soaked hands in hers. I pull them away, because he doesn’t deserve to touch her anymore. Even the sight of the stains on her hands makes me sick.
“They’re so steady,” she says, and then she looks up at my face and her tears spill over. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry, Jonah.”
“It’s okay,” I say. My voice is a monotone. It doesn’t even sound like me.
“Let’s get you cleaned up.”
I shake my head and draw away from her. “I gotta get rid of the body.”
“Where?” She glances down at the monster’s prone figure. I guess I’m the monster now. I’m the one with blood on my hands. I’m the boy who finally grew big enough to fight back.
“The quarry doesn’t get used anymore—hasn’t been touched for years. I’ll weight it and drop it. No one will ever find him,” I say, as if I’ve only just thought of it. I haven’t. Since I was nine years old, I’ve known the abandoned quarry would be where I’d dispose of my father’s body. I’ve dreamed about killing him a thousand different ways, but I hadn’t prepared myself for the fight, or the sickening crunch of my knife sliding between his ribs. I hadn’t realised just how many jabs it would take with the bloody blade to take the fucker out. If I had, I might have used a bigger knife, though I hadn’t been thinking much beyond stab, maim, kill when I’d seen him bailing my mother up in the kitchen, probably over something as insignificant as whether she made him a fuckin’ sandwich the right way.
“He can never hurt you again, Ma,” I say, and I’m surprised to hear the tremor in my voice.
“Oh, my boy.” She hugs me, despite the blood painting my white shirt red. I hug her back, but my hands don’t touch her. I can’t touch her with his blood on my hands.
I wish I’d done it sooner. I wish I’d planned it better so she wouldn’t have to see. So the memory of her son murdering his father with a kitchen knife wouldn’t be burned into her brain for the remainder of her life. I wish I’d done a lot of things differently, but at least I wasn’t too small this time. I’d never be helpless again. My mother would never be helpless. I made sure of it.
When I hit sixteen, I got a job on the milk run. The hours sucked, but the exercise was good for me. I lost all my puppy fat, and I used the money to buy my first car and help out Ma. Then I started lifting weights. I couldn’t afford a gym membership, so I taped bricks to an old broom handle and added more and more each week. People started to look at me differently; the monster looked at me differently, and hadn’t lain a hand on either one of us since. Until tonight.
There won’t be a funeral for my father; we won’t report him missing, and it’s likely no one will ever ask. He has no family, save for Ma and me, and he played his friends for money a long time ago. No one gave a fuck about him. Besides, husbands leave all the time. They leave their families for other women; they walk out in the middle of the night for a pack of cigarettes and are never heard from again.
My father would never do anything again. He’d never come home from the pub reeking of piss, he’d never raise another hand to my mother or to me, and Ma would never have to live in fear again, because I’d gut any man who tried to harm a hair on her head. You protect the people you love; you don’t beat them down until they quake with fear. You love them, you cherish them, and you treat them right, and you take down any motherfucker who tries to hurt them.
I made a promise to myself in that moment that I’d never let anyone make me feel small again, including love. If you don’t love, you don’t get hurt.
At least, that’s the way it was supposed to go.
I lie down on the back deck in the sunshine and scratch behind Butch’s ears. He gives a lazy little whine before flopping his big head on his paws and stretching out with a doggy huff. It’s too cold for dresses, but I’m wearing the smallest one I own and it’s tucked inside my panties, which I’m wearing for once, because sometimes being a woman who’s been showered with expensive lingerie requires that you enjoy it.
I blink up at the cloudless blue sky and smile as the sun warms my face, and when I drift off to sleep, my dreams are plagued with him and his needles, and those hands that punish.
“It’s okay, Daddy’s girl. I’m here,” he says, and drives the needle in my vein.
I jolt awake, blinking up at the blackened sky several times. It’s dark, and at first I think I’ve slept too long and Tank has finally come home, but then the familiar rush of heroin pumps through my veins like a lead weight, and I slowly turn my head and glance at my arm. My whole body shakes, my breath comes too fast, too sharp, and I clamp my mouth shut so I won’t make a sound. The rubber cord tied around my arm is removed, and another wave of wonderful, maddening smack sluices through me.
“You’ve been a bad girl, Ivy.”
I shake my head, unable to move much more than that. I want to run, but I’m frozen with fear. I knew I’d seen him. I knew I hadn’t been hallucinating.
“Yes, you have,” my father says, stroking the side of my face. “It’s okay though, Daddy’s girl. I’m gonna take you home.”
If the junk in my veins was a lead weight, his words are a prison made from it. And I cannot go back there. It feels as though I’m moving through water as I kick at his knees, and by some miracle he winds up sprawled on the ground beside me.
“Fuckin’ bitch!” he shouts.
I scramble to my feet and attempt to run, but I slip on the deck and fall hard on my knees, my hands delving into a thick pool of blood. Butch’s body lies headless before me, and a small shriek escapes my mouth. I stare at my hands and forearms painted red with his blood in the moonlight. It’s still warm, and the axe lies beside his prone body right where my father left it. “You’ve spent enough time running from me, Ivy.”
“What did you do?” I sob, unable to take my eyes off Butch’s severed head. Stupid fucking dog. Why didn’t he run?
I push myself up, an attempt to stand, but there’s so much blood that I slip several times. The drugs are making me hazy. All my body wants to do is lie down and sleep, despite my racing pulse and the terror pricking my skin with beads of sweat that cool too quickly in the cold night air.
“Bastard was so fuckin’ dumb he didn’t even bark,” my father says, and he’s on his feet now. He plants a foot either side of my body. I don’t have the strength to stand and so I scramble on my hands and knees, but he grabs my hair and pulls me up, lifting me off the ground so I have no choice but to go with him.
“Let me go.” I struggle, sinking fingernails into his wrists, kicking out behind me, using my entire body in an attempt to jerk free.
“No, sweetheart, not this time.” The cold edge of a blade presses against my throat and a trickle of warm blood escapes and runs down my neck. I swallow, and the blade slices deeper. He leans in and sniffs my hair before laying a kiss against my shoulder. He follows the trail of blood with his tongue, lapping it up. Sick fuck. “You been fucking that filthy biker; I can smell him on you. Smell his scent and his cum. You’ll regret that, and so will he. You’re mine, Ivy. You belong to me.”
With the knife at my throat, he urges me forward, through Butch’s slippery blood. I wince as my foot skates out from under me, and I shed silent tears for that stupid dog, who I’d known for such a short time but had grown to love as if he were my own. He was lying next to me; he probably hadn’t even had time to bark before my father had hacked off his head.
He pushes me down the outside staircase leading to the long twisting drive. There’s a car parked in the driveway, a shiny black SUV, much nicer than the beaten up old Corolla we’d had when I was a kid. Whatever my father had been doing in the three years I’d been gone, it was paying a lot of money.
“I don’t belong to you,” I say through gritted teeth, as he pushes me toward the vehicle. “I never belonged to you.”
He chuckles. “Ah, my little girl, you’re still just as delusional as you always were. You belong to me,” he whispers against the shell of my ear, and his tongue darts out to lick me. It’s warm and wet, and his saliva burns like acid. “You’re mine. Stop fighting it.”
His free hand cups my breast and I try to jerk away, but the bite of the blade at my throat is a gentle reminder of why I shouldn’t fight him. It can always be worse, so much worse. “I missed my little girl so much. Don’t you want to come keep Daddy company?”
From head to toe, repulsion washes through me. The heroin courses through my veins, taking full effect now. It thickens my limbs, makes them heavy with lethargy, my mind too. I begin to itch all over, and all I want to do is sleep, but I know if I let him take me then that’s it for me. Drying out, Tank, the idea of love, of being loved and giving that in return—it all disappears. It dies here with this man, with this blade.
My father wraps his arms around my waist. He’s no longer holding the blade to my throat. He no longer needs to. He kisses my neck, in much the same way Tank had when he left this morning, and I smile and lean back into him because the memory of safety, of the promise of something beautiful and new fills my addled brain. For a moment I’m back in the kitchen with Tank, where he’d bent me over the island bench and fucked me and then showered me with kisses before reluctantly walking out the door and flying down the drive on his bike. I sway back and forth with his arms around me, lean my weight on him a little more, and wish that I wasn’t so sleepy. I wish that we were back in that kitchen, and that he was moving into me, one hand grasping the nape of my neck, the other steadying my hips as he pounded into me and then brought me to a beautiful slow release that felt so much like dying and coming back to life again, rebirthed, renewed, made whole once more.
That memory is ripped away, stolen, driven to a screeching halt by the cruel and hollow voice of my father. “Now be a good girl and get in the car.”
I blink several times, but I don’t budge when he tries to move me, because I remember who I’m with. Stupid of me to forget. Even with the drugs impairing my thoughts.
“Fuck you,” I say, and my voice is slurred and pathetic. I lash out with my elbow, smashing it up and into his jaw the way Kick had taught me years ago when I first came to the club. My father grunts, but doesn’t budge; and that little act of defiance earns me an excruciating punch to the kidney. Pain bursts through my lower back. I gasp for breath, and double over on instinct. He uses that opportunity to his advantage, wedging me tightly between him and the car door.
“I’m sorry, baby,” he says, and I’m whacked in the back of the head. I blink away the stars in front of my eyes and fight to stay awake through the white-hot pain, but it drags me under anyway. I rally and I fight, I lash out at whatever I can, even though it’s all for nothing, even though I know I have no chance in fending him off while the heroin is dragging me under. With any luck, he’ll strike me too hard and kill me by accident. I’d rather be dead than let him take me again. Because I know exactly where I’m headed, and I know this time there’s no chance of ever escaping. Dying with a needle in my vein would have been better than this. Winding up like my mother would have been better than this.
I wake knowing exactly where I am. The smell, the feel of the sheets beneath me, and the dank, heavy weight of the air pressing all around me.
My head hurts; my body, too. My limbs are still stupid with misuse. I wish I’d died. I wish he’d hit me hard enough to crack open my skull, and had left me bleeding out on the gravel drive, because anything is preferable to this.
I blink several times, but pain, despair and lethargy roll over me in waves. I close my eyes, and I’m back in Tank’s kitchen where it’s warm and light and beautiful. So much different than my reality.
Two weeks after that dreaded party, I’m busying myself with schoolwork when my father enters the room. I must be caught up in my equations because I don’t even hear his footfalls on the stairs or the door swing back on its hinges. I glance up at him as his huge form fills the doorway. He’s high. I know it, and I feel the peculiar sense of both dread and jealousy wash over me. In the days since his “friend” introduced him to heroin, he’s been meaner, flighty and paranoid. He’s also been a lot rougher with me. Careless. Where once he was careful to never leave marks on my skin, now my body is covered in bruises.
He produces a needle from his back pocket and pops off the safety cap. I stare at the sharp tip and long for the release it will bring me, but I also don’t want it, because though I can’t feel a thing but blissfully unaware when the drug pumps through my system, afterward I feel everything, too keenly.
My father smiles. It’s faint but cunning, like a cartoon fox convincing prey to follow him to his den. The truth is, he needn’t do much convincing. I want it so bad my teeth ache, and as he moves forward with the rubber tie in one hand and the needle poised in the other, I see myself extending my arm towards him.
“That’s my good girl.” I don’t look at him; I just keep my gaze focused squarely on the needle in his hand.
He sits down on the bed beside me and ties the rubber restraint around my arm. I glance down and my face flames when I see the track marks scarring my pale, once smooth skin. He pushes the end of the needle to release the air and then he slides the tip into my flesh.
My father pulls my hair aside and presses a kiss to my shoulder that I don’t shy away from. I no longer care whether he touches me or not because the poison is already working its way through my system and all the fear, the hurt and the pain fade away.
“We’ll have to move onto another area soon. Those veins are going to start collapsing in on themselves before long,” he whispers as he sets the needle down on the nightstand. Without his body to support me, I fall back on the bed. In the space between my drooping eyelids, I see him remove his belt. He’s in a hurry. He doesn’t move with the languid grace of the images in my mind, but seems to be rushing, juddering with halted, lurching movements. I giggle at that thought and my laughter is a tangible thing, breaking off in front of me, shattering into a swarm of butterflies and light prisms as I feel his familiar weight settle on top of me, into me.
For a half second I remember that I’m supposed to do something. I’m supposed to fight … but it’s barely even a thought and then it’s gone, borne away on the wings of the thick poison that chokes me with its tar and opiates. This drug is a monster holding me down. It pins me to the bed. I leave my body and drift beneath it, through it, until finally I’m on top of it, above it, and I see myself lying prone, empty, helpless.
I scream and lunge for the monster, but I can’t unseat his hold on me. Thick ropy muscles strain, oil-black and dripping onto my faded pink flannel sheets. I’m suffocating beneath it, screaming without sound. I lunge at the monster, at my father, again and again, but it’s too strong, he’s too strong, and eventually I give up. I drift in silence, floating in mid-air, my arms stretched wide, as if I were floating on the surface of a serene lake.
It’s the sharp bite of a blade that brings me down to earth again. The freedom, the release, the euphoria is gone, replaced by pain with wicked teeth and frayed nerves. When I look down, the sheets around me are covered in blood and my father straddles my legs, completely naked. His eyes are feral, and his hands work furiously with the knife in my skin. My breath comes in a rush, in horrid, terrible gasps as I see more of my blood spilling onto the sheets, more blood pooling beneath me … and the pain. The agony is unbearable, so much worse than when the one with soulless black eyes used his knife. This is so much worse than that.
My father stops his ministrations and wipes at the gouges he just made in my flesh, sitting back on his heels to appraise his work. He grabs a corner of the sheet and dabs at the blood oozing from the wound, and it feels like scraping sandpaper over a fresh cut, but so much worse. A billion times worse. It’s the most pain I’ve ever endured, and my body is frozen in shock, save for the shaking.
As though he’s only just aware that his meat canvas is awake, his empty eyes roll over me and he finally meets my terrified gaze. He’s high as a kite. He presses a bloody hand to his lip and makes a shushing noise, as though he were cooing a tired baby back to sleep. “Shh, there’s my girl. Now everyone will know,” he whispers, as he climbs off the bed.
He picks up the used needle and the bloody knife then walks away, slamming the door behind him. I raise my head, but I can’t see. A part of me doesn’t want to see. Despite the bolt of searing pain, I roll over and stumble out of bed, hitting my knees on the concrete floor and crawling over to the big double wardrobe with the full-length mirror. It’s the one luxury—other than books I have no interest in reading—that he affords me.
It takes me several moments of trying before I can get to my feet, and when I do, the pain is so bad and the blood loss so great that my head spins in ways very different to the heroin. I’m shaking so badly my vision is blurred, and I have to wipe away the blood from the wound with the flat of my wrist in order to see it properly.
Now everyone will know, he’d said. I couldn’t fathom what that meant when I’d heard it, but now, as I look at the words he’s carved into my flesh, right over my pubic mound, I understand it all too well.
Daddy’s girl.
I lean over and vomit on the concrete floor of my bedroom, my prison cell. I don’t know if it’s the pain, the drugs, shock, or dread over those words and the things he did that stirs within my stomach, or if it’s a combination of all of those things. But either way I lose my bearings. My feet go out from under me and I collapse, hitting my head on the hard surface. My stomach lurches again, and this time I don’t even want to turn on my side. I don’t have the strength.
Let me die. Let death come with its icy fingers and sweep up my soul, stiffen my bones and body with rigor mortis. Let the faceless men, the non-heroes of my dreams dance alone in my ashes as the world, this room and my life burn around me. I am done. I’d rather face an eternity of fire, of wandering alone across barren, salted earth or nothingness than this.
I’d prayed for death, but it hadn’t come. I hadn’t died, though it had certainly felt like I had. Maybe a part of me had. The part that believed that even though I knew what my father did was wrong, perhaps there was some vestige of humanity left inside him, buried deep underneath the grasp of his sickness and the hold that his heroin addiction had on him. I know now that that isn’t true. And when I wake to his brusque shaking on my shoulders, and his monotone, unconcerned voice, I realise he really doesn’t care whether I live or die. In his mind, I’m no longer his daughter but a possession, like a dog you tolerate, or a watch that used to be nice but that no longer works. I am a plaything. Maybe that’s all I’ve ever been.
And though the drugs he pumps into my veins make me weak—and mostly compliant—there is still a tiny fragile glimmer of fight in me, of sense, of the knowledge that one day I will get out, and I will flee, and he will never find me. I’ll make sure of it.
And I did that pretty well … up until now.
