When She Was Bad(103)

‘So we don’t know if he was provoked. It could have been self-defence. She sounds like a prize bitch. Maybe she was goading him. She could have been, right?’

My daughter is already jumping in to defend the brother she has only just discovered, and my heart aches remembering how she was at school, in the post-therapy years, when confronted with an underdog, with someone being bullied, how upset it made her, how strident on their behalf. Over-compensating? Maybe. And perhaps she’d have done the same even without the therapy. Perhaps left to her own devices she’d have rebelled against the patterns of behaviour learned in infancy anyway and grown from bully to defender of the weak. It’s always the way with children. They drag behind them the different versions of themselves so you’re never really sure which one is real, but you love them all just the same. I want to take her in my arms and make it go away. I want to take the burden of everything I’ve just told her about herself away, so she can’t lie awake in the dead early hours and wonder just who and what she is. I want to let her think that her little brother is still the victim, more sinned against than sinning. But she deserves the truth.

‘Sweetie, it was bad. What he did to her. It was real bad.’





44

Ewan



When he’d walked through the doorway off the kitchen and seen the narrow stairs plunging into the darkness below, with another door at the end, there had been a thudding in his head, as if someone was inside his skull, hammering to get out.

‘This way,’ she’d said.

And then the kitchen door had slammed itself shut behind them, blocking out the light, and now it was pitch black and the thudding in his head was so loud as they felt their way down the steps that his whole body was vibrating with it, as if he himself was the thing hammering to get out. His chest felt like it was about to explode, and his breath tore from him, ragged and far too loud. The air down here was different than it had been in the kitchen. Several degrees colder, damp.

‘The door handle should be somewhere around here.’ Rachel’s voice ahead of him sounded as if it were coming from a long way away.

And now, along with the pain and the lack of breath, there was another sensation building, building, building inside him. Terror. Don’t open the door. Please don’t open the door. He didn’t know what he was afraid of and the words stayed trapped inside him along with the fear.

‘Aha, here we are. I think you’ll love the basement.’

The door creaked open.

‘The light switch should be somewhere around here, don’t worry.’

Click. The gloom ahead was lit up by a dim, yellowish light, reflecting off some sort of wet, rocky surface. Another memory flashed into his head. Dark. So dark. Water running down rough walls. A smell of damp stone. Cold bones. He didn’t know where the memory had come from. Only that it made him feel weak, like he was disappearing.

‘What do you think? Not bad, hey?’ Rachel was gesturing around the dimly lit room, which turned out to be some kind of gym. A rowing machine crouched in one corner black and low, next to a treadmill, its inbuilt screen now blank. There was a shoulder press and a spin cycle and a machine for working abs. In a normal situation he would have enjoyed checking them all out, but this wasn’t normal. He wasn’t normal. Another flash of memory. Water. Damp. A hollowness in his tummy. Pain. Pain. Pain.

Rachel was bending over a black crate by the wall. When she straightened, she was carrying something in her hands.

‘What do you say?’ she asked. ‘Skipping contest?’

She held out the thing in her hands. She was carrying a rope.

‘Don’t,’ he said. Or perhaps he just thought about saying it, because she didn’t stop coming towards him, the rope wrapped around her hands. And he remembered something, or thought he did. Cords cutting into soft skin. A bare mattress. Longing to wrap his arms around himself, just so he could feel some human warmth.

And still she came.

She wanted to hurt him. Then she’d get the others to hurt him. That’s why she’d brought him down here alone. To this dark place that smelled of cold, and where the plop plop plop of water on stone was like a physical pain in his heart.

The anger came out of nowhere, arriving with such force that it was as if it had been gathering inside him for his whole life, just waiting to be unleashed.

Too late, Rachel realized that something had changed. He saw her expression go from challenging to uncertain and then to something else. Scared. She turned towards the door, but he grabbed her arm.

‘Leave me al—’ Her command was cut short by his right hand clamped over her mouth from behind.