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  ‘Fuck me,’ I whisper in his face, ‘Fuck me like a whore.’

  This time there’s no stopping him. He lets out a low guttural groan and rams me hard and selfishly, without feeling or sentiment. Nothing between us but raw physical need and theft. The pain scalds through my whole body, like a chainsaw scouring out my insides and I can’t take much more of this pain, this tearing and burning and violation but then slowly, inexorably, it relents and dissolves into something alien and needy and so fucking lovely that it brings tears to my eyes and from nowhere, these explosions in my head, one after another and I forget where I am and when I remember, he’s coming inside me. Fast hard jets of cum spray shudder and stab my insides and I’m coming too, spurts of pleasure gushing from some inner coil and then it’s leaking away, deflating quickly like a balloon worried loose and the sobering aftermath creeping upon us so suddenly. And how empty and sullied I feel.

  We’re sitting a foot apart, staring ahead into the falling sodium light, panting and sweating and I can feel myself plunging into a desperate, dull, deadly vacuum. He must sense it cos he drapes an arm around me and pulls me close. I recoil and look away, fighting back big quivering torrents of tears. Something horrible is happening to me. It’s unfathomable. The moment he withdrew his cock, he sucked my soul out too. I dress quickly and self-consciously, shielding my body like he’s a stranger. I meet his anxious gaze and a tear trickles down my cheek. I pull my coat on and open the door.

  ‘Millie,’ he says, ‘It don’t have to be like this.’

  But it does. It does. Another look and I’m gone.

  I pour myself a tumbler of Scotch, snort a long draft of beak and run myself a hot, foamy bath. I perch on the toilet lid, pull my knees into my chin and sip cautiously at the whisky. I hate Scotch and I fight hard to suppress a gag reflex but once in my guts it sparks and smoulders like any other whisky. I slide into the bath and add more foam so I don’t have to look at my dirty, refracted body splayed out before me. I let the cocaine rob my head of all thoughts and feelings. Nothing left now but a vague sense of buzzy contentedness. Time passes. The water grows cold. I add more hot. I drain the whisky, doesn’t taste so awful this time, and the slow burn glows through me.

  I close my lids and forget. The water softens and caresses my swollen holes, cleansing me, absorbing the steady emission of spent fluids with reprieve and discretion. And then I’m slowly, seamlessly, drifting into strange, disjointed cocaine dreams.

  A bang bang bang in my chest jolts me awake. I bolt forward, clutching my heart and a great whoosh of air screams through my lungs. I take deep, controlled breaths and the palpitations subside. The water has gone cold and my skin is pricked with goosebumps. I haul myself out of the tub, lungs lurching at the effort, and as I catch sight of my bleary outline in the steamed up mirror the realisation hits me like a clenched fist.

  SEAN.

  YOU FUCKED SEAN.

  The palpitations thrash back, hard and fast.

  Christ, Millie, what have you done? I drag the flat of my palm across the milky width of the mirror and my reflection confronts me like some ugly foreboding. Why, Millie? Why?

  I pad myself dry, slip into Dad’s towelling robe and fumble my way downstairs. Dad has left a light on in his study. I pour myself another whisky, slump on the couch and lie there for a while, staring out at nothing. Gradually the darkness and silence, ruptured only by the ticking of a clock, begin to estrange me. I feel disconnected from my surroundings, like I’m viewing the room through a window. I slide my eyes across the room in search of an object, an image, that will jolt me from this abstraction but everything recedes further and further away. I change seats, snap on a wall lamp, and am flung into a different juncture. Now my surroundings are suddenly crowding in on me, demanding attention, cluttering my thoughts. I pull a newspaper from beneath a cushion and throw my head into my lap, drinking in every picture, headline and sub-headline, not daring to look up at the ever-shrinking room. I read the paper a second time and then I place it on the floor and slowly, timorously brave the room. The walls glower back.

  I cross my legs and uncross them. I cross them back again and then flinging myself to the floor, allow myself to succumb to the fact that I don’t feel right. It’s nothing to panic about, though. Deep breaths. And it will pass.

  It gets worse.

  My head starts to reel with irregular thoughts. Sex with Mr Keeley. A severed child’s ankle floating in the Mersey. Melted skin, sliding of cheekbones. I smack my face hard. Get a grip – I tell myself, keep yourself busy, Millie – and don’t think. I flick the TV on and focus heavily on the faces of two men, the husband and the lover of some absurdly obese twenty-year-old and things abate for a while but then the faces suddenly melt molten yellow and my heart is flapping like a trapped bird. I vault up and take a deep drag of air. It’s okay, I reassure myself, you’re okay. I drain the rest of the whisky, perch on the window ledge and concentrate on acting and thinking as normally as possible. I manage to keep it together for a few minutes but then I catch sight of my reflection in the mirror above the fire, eyes all wild and alien, face a decade older. I am not OK. I’m losing it here. Something is very very wrong.

  I pace the length of the living room, five steps forward, four steps back, deliberating whether or not to wake Dad up and confess. Confess what though? That you’re about to overdose on cocaine. No! Don’t say that. You’re fine.

  ‘I’m fine,’ I tell myself out loud, recoiling from the harsh scratch of chemicals in my voice. I pace some more. Five steps forward, four steps back.

  ‘I’m O-K. I’m O-K. Left right left. Left right left,’ I chant out loud. I realise with blessed relief that the movement is slowing me down, tiring me out. At last. At long fucking last. Sit down. Have another drink. A fag. That’s what I need. One cigarette and I’ll be just fine.

  My jacket is hung over the banister in the hall. I delve in the pocket and pull out an empty cig packet. My heart bang bangs in the crux of my solar plexus. Where are the fucking Marlboro Lights the lad at the garage got me? I swoop again, dig deep into the lining of the jacket, utterly desperate, now. Nothing. In flashback I see myself tearing off my clothes, ready to lie back in Sean’s car with my legs splayed open for him. I see the pack of cigarettes fly out – fuck knows where. Who cares? Serves you fucking right Millie. Serves you right.

  But I need a fag, quickly – a cigar even. I flounce into Dad’s office. I know where he keeps them. Clutching my skull to stop it splitting in two I kneel at his desk. The bottom draw is locked but I know for sure he keeps his Chobitas in there and without even thinking I force the lock with his paper knife and now it’s open and I’ve found the cigar box and it does not contain cigars. I empty it wildly on the floor, still expecting a secret stash to reveal themselves but instead I see papers. I’m dazed and faint as these letters and photographs take focus and slowly, so slowly, I know what this is and how dearly, badly I wish I had not come in here. And then I’m prone and gasping on the floor, swamped by a flickering side-show of words and truth and lies and I’m giving in to this sharp crackling wave moving up my body, pushing me out to some place black and empty.

  CHAPTER 9

  Millie

  The first thing I see is sky. Acres and acres of sepulchral pasture. I hoist myself up and squint out of the bedroom window. A dozen blocks of concrete foreboding loom in the distance. Two armies of high rises split between north and south, sizing each other up across the no man’s land of the city which is slowly uncoiling beneath the morning light. In the street below nine to fivers are pouring boiling water over their frost-slapped cars. A postman lumbers across the road with his head hung low. The whole of the city is flat and hungover.

  The first thing I hear is Mum. Fighting with Dad.

  MUM.

  She’s back.

  Downstairs in the kitchen.

  Dad is pleading his love for her. I can’t fathom what she’s saying but the tone is stoic and unfamiliar, all sapped of Mum. I he
ar the sound of crockery smashing. And Dad sobbing. Mum shouting. Dad sobbing. Mum shouting. Sobbing and shouting. Sobbing and shouting till their voices curdle and clot into a crazed cacophony – a high-pitched screaming which grows louder and louder then collapses into stock still silence. The only thing audible now is the jerky throb of my heart, sore and inflamed as it bangs against its cavity.

  I bite into the nowhere of my pillow and will the silence to end and the fighting to continue and the house to be claimed by the same ghosts that wrenched us from our last one.

  Please. Mum. Say something. So long since I’ve heard your voice Mum. Don’t leave me again. Stranded in this silence. Don’t leave.

  My pillow’s damp with tears and the back of my neck sticky with sweat. A weak, powdery sunlight is bleeding through the curtains. My eyes stretch and fasten onto a grey lightening split on the wall. Beyond the plaster, Dad is snoring passionately in the next room. And Mum is not by his side.

  My bladder is full, my throat sore and a cocaine depression is hollowing its way through my head. I fumble my way to the bathroom, head thumping behind my eyes groaning inwardly at the sudden explosion of daylight from a curtainless bathroom window. I slump to the cold seatless basin of the toilet. My arse is tender and swollen and my piss stings – a horrible lacerating chemical sting that is replicated in my throat and nose. I blow the surplus of last night’s excess into a tissue – blood and beak and all the vice of the city. I wipe my cunt from front to back, smell the tissue and retch. I fill the sink with hot water and lug a steaming flannel across my face. Then I brush my teeth ’til they’re flecked with blood and spit the foamy gunk into the sink. I plunge a hand in, free the plug and stick a finger in the eye of a whirlpool. The tornado spins away from the suck of the drain, tumbles and quivers and clings to the sink before it’s dragged down the plughole with a bellicose gurgle. I dry my face and brave the mirror. My reflection leers back, white and ugly, cowering under my scrutiny. I trudge downstairs.

  I slob out on the kitchen table and, with my chin buried deep between my palms, endeavour to make sense of the night. My dreams pretty much determine my mood for the day. The boundaries in my mind separating the subconscious from the conscious must be bleary eyed, unsure, because my dreams often seep into reality with such a seamless sincerity that often I inhabit a world whose foundations are entirely fictional. Sean though – that was no dream. He fucked you. He had you. The cunt had you.

  I down two mugs of sour tap water. I blow my nose and flick the kettle on. Absent mindedly, I prepare two cups of tea. The depression intensifies.

  Staring out into the gloom of the yard, a spate of meaningless thoughts crawl through my head. Sean’s crass sculpture, the fireworks, the three-bar fire in Jamie’s living room, Dad’s groupie, the cluster of bruises on that young girl’s back.

  Sean.

  Fumbling for my key at the doorstep, taking a bath, opening the bottle of Scotch, snorting myself into panic attack, drinking myself out of one, routing for fags…

  Another burst of memory rushes in on me, colliding with a wave of liquid panic rising somewhere, deep in my guts.

  Oh Jesus. No. Please let this be another dream hangover. An image starts to crystallise in my head – Dad lying naked with a faceless woman. I try to let it flow but it stays unformed like a foetus. I remove myself from the cold grey yard and with a floundering heart advance to the study.

  Everything is as it was – the broken drawer, the cigar box. I black out.

  I have no notion at all how long I’m out. Seconds? Minutes? I drag myself to my knees. All around there is evidence of me, prying. The snooping daughter. I’ve even chipped a drawer. Mum would be mortified. She rescued this little fella from a tip in Southport. The most cherished of all her foundlings. It was damp, snapped at the spine and denuded of drawers.

  ‘You’re wasting your time love,’ Dad had said.

  And behind the dissenting smile I threw Dad, I was thinking exactly the same. Months she spent nursing it back to health. Invested so much time and effort. Time, I used to think, she’d denied my father of. And now in hindsight I see the ugly irony of it all. That the resuscitation of mangled bits of metal and wood might somehow fill an emotional hole that Dad had dug with his own bare hands.

  That’s what she was best at Mum. Being a Mum and a wife. Put her everything and beyond into looking after us.

  The cigar box is empty, all it’s contents strewn across the floor. A lethal kaleidoscope of lies and deceit, unearthed in an accidental discovery. My eyes fall lazy and listless as I toil through the painful heap of blurs and dots. The sunken pall in my guts has been preparing me for something much much worse, and now it caves in on me. Mum wrote to me. I remember removing the letters from the pile, isolating it from the rest of his filth, not wanting to believe it. I was going to burn them. I couldn’t read them.

  Certain things I was too stunned to see last night now become apparent. The postcode on one envelope is rain smudged and incorrect. It belongs to our previous address. The envelope is from a Mont Blanc set I bought her one Christmas. She always opted for the quill and ink method, Mum – even for making Doctor’s appointments. But she never used even a sheet of the paper from that set.

  ‘They’re too nice!’ she’d protest. And so they lay supine on her dressing table like a piece of inordinate jewellery. Just bits of paper. Profound and sentimental in their nakedness.

  I stare at my name on the front of the envelope. I can’t open it. I open it. I take out the letter and am shocked to tears – not just by the familiar neat hunch of her handwriting, but by the date – 19th June. She sent this less than six months ago.

  June 19th

  Darling Millie,

  I wish more than anything I were looking into your eyes right now. These are things that should be spoken, not written. I love you. I love you so much and each and every minute of this silence between us, is killing me. I put that distance between us. I walked out, walked away from the thing I love most in the world. I’ve called and I’ve called and waited for you my darling. I’m begging you to give me a chance – please let me explain.

  How I miss you, Millie. How I wonder still whether I did the right thing. I wanted so much to wait til I’d seen you through University. I wanted to be there when you got home from lectures, when you brought your boyfriend home, when you stumbled in drunk! I wanted to be there when you got your first assignment marked, when you learnt to drive, when you came back forlorn from an exam or a date that didn’t meet your expectations. I want to be there when you graduate.

  Did Daddy speak to you, Millie? Did he explain? We agreed he’d judge when the time was best for you to hear of our horror, but two years have dragged on my baby, and I’m dying here without you. I can’t go on like this for much more. You won’t answer any of my calls, you tear up the train tickets I send you. You turn and run away from me in the street. Oh my darling, I have hurt you so badly haven’t I? Maybe I should have stayed, stuck it out like so many others do. Maybe your father has been cruel and selfish to keep you in the dark for so long. But darling you were so young, so very young – If I’d have told you the truth you would never have recovered from it. I hung on for as long as I could, until the day you passed your exams – and that’s the day I cracked. I’d waited seven years darling but if I’d have known I wouldn’t see you in all this time, I never would have gone. I would have stuck it out like the other wretched mares whose men tear their lives to shreds. I’m so sorry Millie.

  I’ve enclosed some money for a train ticket. I need to see you, Millie. I’m begging you now. Please don’t hate your father. In spite of what’s happened between us he’s a good man and he adores you. He lives for you. I know that. And I know that hiding behind these lies has hurt him almost as much as his silence has hurt me.

  Please forgive me for walking away, but I can’t ever regret it. If I could turn back the clock, I still would have run but I would have taken you with me. Forgive me little darling,

>   I miss you so much it hurts

  With love from your loving mother

  xxxx

  I fold the letter in two and slide it back in its envelope. I try not to cry but it’s hopeless. I’m helpless. I sob and sob and if I had a gun I swear I would blow myself away. I drag the back of my hand across my face and blink my vision free and work through Mum’s letters in order. Fuck. Fuck. This has been… I can’t come to terms with this. How could he? How could he do that to her? How could he keep this from me? I sift through the rest of the poison – Dad’s pathetic keepsakes. Letters from love-struck students, pictures, so many pictures – so many faces. Matchboxes. Train tickets. A handmade card with a Penzance postmark. The writing is faint and almost identical to Mum’s.

  Migod Jerry what have I done to you?

  Going away. Going far, far away.

  I’m so sorry – sorry for all of you

  Can’t stop. Won’t stop loving you.

  Mo? Auntie Mo?

  My heart bloats then vanishes.

  It returns with a sharp needle sticking through it.

  There’s another card. New Zealand. She’s in New Zealand. She’ll wait for him forever. Auntie Mo is not dead, then. I am ecstatically crushed.

  Jesus, what did you do Dad? Please no, Dad. Please tell me you didn’t fuck her sister? Was I there? Were we all there, on holiday together? What have you done to my Mummy, Dad? Your students, these other faces, these smiling, pretty virgins – I can square all that. In my treacherous fucked up logic, I can almost applaud you for that. I’d take your side. I would. But her sister? Oh God no. Fuck, Dad – what have you done to her?