Coming Undone Terri White (ebook pc reader TXT) 📖

recovered. Once he did, I recall him promising to be there, to be present, saying how much he missed us, how much he missed me. I felt nothing then, and nothing again when, once again, he disappeared from my life – leaving me with no consoling memory of a goodbye.

CHAPTER 7

Into this gap, the father-shaped hole in my life, walked other men, almost immediately. I never had the chance to hope they would be better men, better fathers than mine had been – it was clear from the start that some were, in fact, much worse. The first that was worse arrived within a year or two of the day we fled Dad.

There was a morning. A morning when I looked at him from where I sat curled up on the sofa. This morning, he was solid. Just yellow hair, white skin, hard bone. Just blood. I knew that if I nicked his thumb with a butter knife, red would run into the blond hair that curled around his wrist, making a crunchy matted knot that tasted like metal as you sucked. It lay heavy and thick on my tongue.

He winked now, safe in his security. ‘So,’ he said. ‘We played wrestling last night. Right?’ The first bit was for her; the second was for me.

I giggled and bowed my head. ‘Yes.’

She nodded as the acrid smoke from the frying pan snaked and settled into the twists and turns of her perm. We glanced, co-conspirators now. The familiar shiver and nauseous bloom in my tummy. I laid my arm across to stop it spreading and gripped my second rib, holding myself in place.

Her make-up was smeared and her smell sour, but last night she stood in thick choking clouds of Elnett and perfume. Smoothing down her leather skirt and tilting her head, she’d put the finishing touches to the woman in the small mirror perched on the windowsill over the sink. I could tell she was pleased with what, who she saw. I practised arching my back and raising my cheekbones skyward: first one and then the other.

There was a night. A night that she moved down the hall, carried away on her familiar sweet smell. I clutched at her with sticky fingertips as she glanced my way, irritated by the tiny person she recognised but didn’t see.

‘What?’

Panic swelled my tongue dormant. ‘It’ll hap-p-pen,’ I managed to stutter, an increasingly frequent occurrence by then, soon to be joined by wetting the bed. ‘If you … go.’

Her heels hit the uneven steps down the front path as she went. I watched her grow smaller in the frosted glass, until she disappeared entirely. Then there was just me and him under the darkening sky.

I was in my white pyjamas on the orange and brown sofa. My eyes began to fall and close. ‘Stay awake,’ he urged, prodding my arm. ‘You can’t go to sleep!’ The carriage clock on the mantelpiece said I should be asleep, that I shouldn’t be here. I pulled at the loops of loose threads on the cushion as things I didn’t understand danced across the TV screen.

‘But I’m tired,’ I said.

‘Stay. Awake.’ He stared.

I imagined what I always do when this happens: that matchsticks, half the size of those in my nana’s kitchen drawer, are jammed between my eyelids, propping them open. I played it on repeat: matchsticks, matchsticks, your eyes are open; you’re awake. Matchsticks, matchsticks, your eyes are open; you’re awake.

I started to pray. Though I don’t understand Him, I’m pretty sure I believed in Him, that God was there. Let me go to bed; I’d do anything, please let me. Eventually He heard because he said: ‘You can go up to bed now.’

I climbed the stairs, grateful, scared, hoping that tonight I could just sleep and wake up in the daylight, safe. As my eyes fluttered in my head, the fractured second floorboard let out a hesitant creeaaakk. It aborted, drew breath. As he advanced it slowly exhaled a low moannnnnnn. The room was black and the thin pink blanket covered my crown, but I could still see him. He was creeping on the raw ends of his toes towards the next door on the left. Propelled by the force that held him by the bare waist, a puppet with shaking joints and a frozen smile, lurching along.

He inched into the light, the shadow on his back falling, draped behind. The crack beneath the door was still white. I breathed in, sharp, in the second before he seeped through. The edges of the pink blanket were tugged, tugged, tugged as my knuckles turned grey. The fog curled around my ankles, inched up my calves, cupped my knees and coiled the white skin of my thighs as he bargained and pleaded and I was pared, peeled and torn.

‘I’ll buy you chocolates,’ he said, as I folded my lips around him. He never did.

Later, I told someone who told someone else, about the nights my skin was pulled back. There was an afternoon. He’d taken an overdose, was retching, spitting, vomiting, screaming in our toilet. He was crying, begging. His pleas sounded so much like mine. But mine were silent, stored in my belly, and I despised him for his weakness.

‘You fucked your “dad”,’ they said to me at school when my mother’s boyfriend’s name, our address, my age, ended up in the paper. I found it hard to disagree. The stain seeped inside me, thickened my blood, turned my bones to charcoal. It was part of me now. I’d never be free. He was me and I was him.

When the first men I wanted laid their fingers on me, it was his touch that I felt, his face that I saw. I’d always be his. His thumbs would circle my throat until it fell still.

CHAPTER 8

Peace reigned in our house briefly. We sat in our trauma, the tranquillity licking at our wounds. Time passed.

And then he