Just Last Night(101)
I help him through the kitchen, to the back door, scrabbling for the key on the windowsill.
I throw it open and we make awkward progress, me half-holding Fin up, down the deep steps into the garden. I don’t want to be responsible for him fainting onto a hard surface. I’d willingly split my head open to break his fall though. That much I know.
On the patio, Fin sits directly on the stone, back resting against the garden furniture, a wrought-iron chair. I sit next to him, my legs outstretched alongside his.
“Are you feeling better?” I say to Fin, and he murmurs yes, and I slip my hand in his. He’s very cold, but he squeezes it. He breathes deep lungfuls of the freezing air.
After a while, his breathing is steady and his complexion is a healthy color again.
I lean my head on his shoulder. He puts an arm around me, his hand holding my waist.
“Are you ready to tell me whatever it is you’ve not told me?” I say.
I don’t know where these words have come from—they travel from my subconscious, out my mouth, entirely bypassing my conscious decision to utter them.
“Yes,” Fin says, without hesitation.
42
The lipstick-pink hydrangeas I remember from the summers of our youth are still there, their heads now petals of rusted, brittle slate-brown in the depths of winter. There are lights on timers in the flower beds, blinking on in the falling dusk.
Fin starts speaking.
“The first time my dad beat me I was six. Maybe seven. I didn’t know what I’d done wrong. I remember the sheer confusion, above all. More than the pain, or the shock of the violence. Knowing that people thought I was a clever boy, but for some reason I couldn’t figure out what had led to me being walloped like that. Like a math problem where I just couldn’t add up. Think, Finlay. After that first time, it carried on once every month or so, until I was eleven, or twelve, I think. When I got old enough to fight back, or to tell people—people who could’ve caused real trouble, like teachers. Before then, I drove myself mad thinking there were ways to avoid it, if only I could adjust my behavior accordingly.
“There was also about six months or so when I was ten that it mysteriously stopped, which afterward I put down to him screwing a secretary at his firm. My being left alone ran concurrent with heated arguments with my mother, lots of slamming of doors, and someone called that slag Christina by my mum, who got fired.”
Finlay gives me a wry look but I’m not ready for wry yet.
“I always knew when a beating was coming, I learned to read the signs. He’d get this malicious glint in his eye, or he’d been drinking. Or he’d come back from the office in a foul mood. He’d pick fault, work himself into a temper with me to justify it. It was like an outlet he allowed himself, but he was fastidiously careful. It was always in an upstairs room with the door closed, it was always as quiet as possible. For the most part, he never left bruises. No belt or anything. No marks. He’d already thought about how he might get caught, and in a really twisted way that gives me peace. I don’t ever need to wonder if he intended me harm, if he intended me to suffer in silence, and be disbelieved if I told anyone. I know for sure he did. It might have been an irrational urge in him, but he controlled it in an incredibly rigid, rational way.”
My face is burning hot in the extreme cold. I have to take my hand out of Fin’s and rub it on my skirt.
“That day, you waited for me on a bike ride,” I say. “When Susie and Gloria rode off. Do you remember that day? He hit you for that, didn’t he?” My mouth’s dry. Looking back, I can picture the intensity of Mr. Hart’s wrath, and the limp, blank acquiescence of Finlay as he was pulled indoors.
I could easily cry but I fight it, I don’t want to, I don’t want to turn this into Finlay having to comfort me.
“Yes, but that wasn’t because I stayed with you. If I’d left you, the thrashing would’ve been for that. He constructed no-win scenarios for me. Like I said, when he wanted to do it, he always found cause.”
I nod. “I see.” Except I don’t, not at all.
“Aged thirteen, having not been belted for a while, I found the courage to tell my mum what had been going on. But my dad had established this narrative that I was malign, I was disruptive. If you demonize a child, they tend to get a bit demonic, making it easier and easier. He was clever enough an abuser to have discredited me. I could do no right, Susie could do no wrong, that was always how it was. So straight away, my mother said I was lying, that it was a disgusting thing to say about my father, and how dare I. She actually said: ‘This is typical of you.’”
“She really didn’t believe you?”
“No, I think she did. I’m not going to let her off the hook and say she thought it wasn’t true. I think she probably knew, instinctively, it was. My mum liked our social status, she liked our house, the holidays. My mum valued appearances. Look at how the affair was handled. I bet Susie never told you about that?”
I shake my head.
“Yep. We had it drummed into us that you do not talk about the family skeletons. It getting out that my dad was violently assaulting his young son would’ve torn it all down. When I said he’d been viciously beating me for years, either he had to be thrown overboard, or I did. It was a straight choice. My mum chose my dad.”