Young Writers Society

Perfect. Everything has to be perfect. No mess, nothing out of place. Dinner’s ready. She waits, the silence consuming her. Her eyes dart around, checking and double checking, until he falls through the door, clattering and grumbling. The heavy footsteps find their way through to the living room.

His beady eyes move over her, a look of disgust purposely painted on his face. He can’t seem to focus, his vision clouded by alcohol. She sighs quietly and waits - expectant of what is to come. His breath pollutes the air with its sour stench. She is untying his shoelaces before his fat arse sets off an earthquake when it hits the seat. His mother prided herself in such things. Lisa thought that she probably found satisfaction in having his dirty laundry washed, dried and pressed before it got anywhere near the floor. She was forced to carry on this ritual, this way of life, always serving others, namely, her father.

Shame washed over her, she had to call the drunken lump before her ‘Dad’, and he wasn’t even a man! She timidly tip toed towards the door, careful not to disturb him,

“Stop sneaking about!”

She scampered from the room.

“Can’t do anything right” she heard him mutter.

His dinner is presented to him, from servant to king. One look at it and it’s splattered across the wall. The chicken and gravy make faces at her and taunt her before sliding down to a pile of infected mush on the carpet.

Retreating to her dingy little room, she tried to suppress the hot tears. As soon as she heard thunder rumble in his belly and snore its way out of his mouth she fled the dungeon, running and running, the symmetrical houses blurring peripherally, never stopping until she reached the sanctuary. She threw herself on to the sand and lay there, exhausted until she caught her breath. Daring to look up, she stared out at the endless sea. She wished she could disappear into it sometimes, like a shadow, and dissolve. She sits there for hours; soaking up the sun like a drug, while her thoughts evaporate into the humid air.

Just as the solitude begins to become all too much, just as she considers that rippling sea as her final option, she hears a gentle ‘thud’ beside her. An angel in a boyish disguise has sat his stocky form next to her. She doesn’t know why Brian puts up with her half of the time, with her constant tales of abuse and never ending turmoil. He can’t do anything to help, they both silently acknowledge this, but he can listen. She needs someone to listen. She turns to him and rolls up her trouser leg for the fifty thousandth time to reveal a rainbow of bruises and burns against a pasty, pale background.

“Red and yellow and pink and blue...” the song echoes in her mind.

She watches his eyes, iced with caramel hues; scan her leg, appreciating each mark as if it were a work of art.

For the fifty thousandth time Brian touches her arm and shakes his head. She knows what he’s thinking,

“What the hell am I supposed do to?”

If he was thinking that he wouldn’t bloody be there.

The streams that run from her eyes puddle at her chin and waterfall from it. She feels so ungrateful that she has nothing to offer him in return for all the times he sheltered her from the beast at home, for all the times he endured her. A hot, shivery feeling begins to swallow her. She lies back to indulge in it, it’s not a nice feeling, but it’s a feeling – and it’s not physical agony.

The heat pumped through her veins and encompassed her mind. She felt herself fall into a feverish mental hell. Thoughts of her mother flood into her thoughts. She wonders if she looks like her, the same coffee coloured hair perhaps, the same eyes. Her mother might not have left a trace, but did some of her accidentally slip into her daughter’s appearance or her personality? If it did it could explain her father’s perpetual flow of raging issues with her.

She wonders why her mother left without her. She didn’t blame her for leaving; her father was a living explanation of that, she just wished she’d taken her, or at least waited till she was old enough to have the choice to go too.

Sometimes she fabricates memories of her, just to have, just for a little while, just like the others. The sheer absence of them devoured her.