Father’s Music

Then, just as suddenly, it hurts less, as if an amphetamine was unleashed into my bloodstream. The sensation is of giddy exhilaration. If my body is theirs to move about, then these scars are my graffiti scrawled on it. It is no longer myself I’m hurting, but their possession. Without warning, the elixir fades and the brief, startling high is gone. Only a throbbing pain is left, another bewildering layer of guilt, and a fear of discovery which makes me dress next morning with the door locked. I don’t know what I have done or why. I’m frightened of what Gran will do if the scars are discovered. I cannot eat with worry. I clench my sleeve under the table before cycling off, waving with my undamaged hand like the dutiful schoolgirl they all long for.

Now I am twenty-two again and Luke is fucking me. It is the fourth of October, the first of those Sunday evenings we will spend in that hotel. The bedspread is ancient and frayed. It grates against my breasts as I press my face into the pillow. He grips my hips, raising them to meet his thrusts. I can’t understand why, since he started touching me, I keep vividly recalling being fourteen again. But the years in between keep disappearing. I feel I’m back in my childhood bedroom. I raise my hands above my head and seem about to stab at my neck before Luke grabs my wrists and pins them down. I am grateful he is withdrawn into his own silent world. I pull my hands free and intertwine the fingers, protecting my neck from him or myself. Luke is suddenly still, watching in the light from the window, with not even his cock moving inside me.

Perhaps he wants to prolong it, anxious not to come too soon. But I feel he can sense this malaise within me. He appears to wait for permission to continue. The pillow is wet. What a kip, I think, even with damp bedclothes. Then I realise I’m crying. I thrust my hips backwards, I want Luke to move, I want to break the spell of uninvited memories. Luke stirs and I try to focus on his hands or cock. But it’s like an outer layer of skin has been split open and I am shocked to find my younger self preserved within. I feel robbed of the person I’ve carefully become and stripped more naked than I ever wish to be again.

These blocked out memories have been swamping me ever since Luke pulled my sweater over my head while undressing me. It is something I have never let any man do before. It reeked too much of being somebody’s plaything and was too intimate to be allowed, just like I never permitted some men to kiss my lips. But tonight with Luke it seemed less an act of possession than of boyish wonder.

Tonight he seems less sure of himself, as if surprised at my arrival. There has been bad news, he says, but it doesn’t involve him. We are like strangers with little to say, initially as awkward as adolescents. The pretence remains that we are purely here for sex, even if we each suspect there is more to it than that, but are uncertain of what it may be.

There is no sense that we have ever made love before as Luke undresses me. The room is freezing, but he takes his time, starting with my shoes and slowly removing my jeans. I raise my hips, lying back to help and then lean forward, returning his silent smile as I lift my arms to allow him to pull my woollen sweater up. For a second it covers my eyes and, unbidden, the first memory comes. My breath grows faster. I cannot even scream. Luke stops, with the sweater half over my head, disturbed by this sudden tensing of my body.

‘What’s wrong?’ he says.

‘Pull the bloody jumper off!’

He does so and I shake my hair free, lying back on the eiderdown with my eyes tightly shut. Luke pauses, unsure of what is happening. Then he begins unbuttoning my blouse. I feel his fingers but am only half aware of them. The memories are so vivid that if I open my eyes I feel I will be back in Gran’s kitchen.

I feel my school polo-neck being yanked over my face again so that I’m momentarily blinded. I think I’m suffocating as Mammy holds me down and Gran draws my scarred arms from the sleeves. The kitchen blinds are closed against prying eyes. My flesh is goosepimpled. I feel violated, struggling to extract my head from the polo-neck as Gran fingers the scars. I jerk free from my mother and half fall with the polo-neck caught around my throat. I can’t breathe, I’m going to choke. Mammy senses my panic and panics herself, tugging at the twisted garment as Gran shouts at her to pull it off. It comes free and I close my eyes against the questions they keep repeating.

Did a boy inflict these scars? Why had I kept them hidden? Had a man done anything, a neighbour or a teacher who’d warned me against speaking? Was I in trouble? I sense Gran’s fear in this euphemism, her terror of a cycle repeating. Neither of them understand what I need to tell them. I hate them for that as much as I hate myself. A new voice at my ear, a monkey with no face, whispers that I should punish them too.

For three weeks I’ve hidden these bruised arms away, skipping school to avoid swimming and locking the bathroom when I washed. At night I’ve only half slept, promising myself I would leave my arms untouched, even counting the hours I managed to stay this itch. But always I know that at some stage the scratching and biting will begin again. Nothing prevents it, silent pacing or meaningless prayers. Behind the radiator I keep a shattered plastic ruler. This ache only stops when I use it to draw blood and creep downstairs for watered whisky to ease the pain. A map of purple bruising stretches up to my shoulders. The addiction feeds on the fear of discovery. Twice I’ve dreamt my mother has found me in pain and taken me in her arms. Twice I’ve woken disappointed to fret about hiding the flecks of blood where my arm rested on the pillow.

But now, as they stare at my arms in the kitchen, I am suddenly defiant. They are scared of me for the first time in my life. I have stepped beyond their control. The discovery gives me strength. I sit with half my school uniform torn off. I know I cannot explain these scars but now I don’t want to. I hate Mammy for being weak and I’m ashamed of her illness. I hate Gran because I need someone to blame and because no matter how hard I try I can never achieve her dreams heaped on my shoulders.

Even as a baby they had forced me to choose, playing a game where they called from different sides of the playground to see who I’d run to. I remember tottering back and forth until I sat down crying with my arms over my head. Now I stare at their faces, then arch my fingers to scratch my neck with nails I have let grow jagged. I don’t notice whose hand grabs my arm. I call out with what sounds like a shriek of pain but is a cry of freedom.

My cry echoes in this hotel room. I open my eyes, surprised by the sound, like someone waking up. Luke has entered me. He stops, his scared eyes looking into mine.

‘What’s wrong?’ he says. ‘Have I hurt you?’

‘It’s nothing to do with you,’ I say. ‘I didn’t ask you to stop.’

‘Are you okay?’

‘Last week you said you just wanted a fuck,’ I tell him. ‘This is private. My life is none of your concern.’

I close my eyes, feeling Luke hesitate, then enter me, deep and deeper. Once these memories start they will not stop. I even know the sequence they will follow: the rows as Gran forcibly cut my nails, the dark games where the closer they examined my body the more secretively I hid my scars. Then the doctors and specialists, hours of queueing for professional voices to probe why I was asking for help. The ink dots and idiotic tests, folders crammed with pictures of the moon which I sullenly drew in their offices. And the suspicion that fell about our house, the rumours I could set into motion, making my grandparents live in fear until I controlled their lives for the next three years. Yet, even at the summit of that power, I still lacked courage to speak about the man in the moon and nothing could touch the core of pain within me.

That pain should be banished, now because I am twenty-two, a new person with a new life. I open my eyes. I’m in a hotel bedroom, being fucked – like my mother at that age – by an Irishman. I don’t know why the memories have returned, or why my mother seems close, as if watching now. But when I close my eyes an adolescent image returns: dark bogland and sweating leather, grey hairs around a penis jutting out and in. I stretch my arms out, wanting to be held. Can they not see what’s happening before their eyes? Can they not even try to understand?

But Luke doesn’t understand. I feel him withdraw and his arms turn me over. The bedspread is ancient and frayed. It grates against my breasts. He grips my hips, raising them to meet his thrusts. I press my face into the pillow and the ache is as insatiable as it always was, and the gulf between me and the world is like a scar that can be hidden but never healed.

SEVEN (#ulink_19d9ef6b-e512-5350-8cd9-8264d5ec76c6)

FOR THE FOLLOWING nine Sundays I made that journey. I saw less and less of Honor and Roxy, despite only being with Luke once a week. But, although I resented him for it, that time had become increasingly central to my life. The job in Wilkinson’s finished in late October and I was on social security again. I hated the dark evenings, the rain keeping me isolated in my flat and the secrecy of our relationship.

I know it is irrational, but some Sundays I varied my connection from Angel and changed at Euston instead of King’s Cross. I knew no one was following me, but such manoeuvres formed part of a mental foreplay, adding to the illicitness of our encounters. I had done the same after leaving Harrow, convinced my grandparents were searching for me.

At first I had once or twice arrived late, just to let Luke sweat. But recently my anxiety that he mightn’t turn up had grown so acute that I hated the uncertainty. We were crazy to cling to this location, where Luke might be spotted, but we seemed unwilling to initiate any change. The temporariness of the hotel suited us, keeping further commitment at bay. Yet this arrangement couldn’t be indefinite. Eventually one of us would arrive and instinctively know that the other wasn’t late, they had simply ceased coming.

It was early December before we quarrelled. My period wasn’t quite over yet. The receptionist eyed us more inquisitively every week and, although I wasn’t bothered by her glances, I didn’t want her prying at bloodied sheets after we left. Sex had been the reason for our dates and so, although I wanted to see Luke, I almost didn’t turn up that week. Perhaps I was afraid of the vacuum its absence might leave, but Luke said that the sex wasn’t important, for him at least, and it would be nice to talk for a change.

We did so in bed with the light out, smoking and sharing a bottle of gin. I wanted to roll a joint but Luke was old-fashioned about something as harmless as dope. As always, Luke talked while I probed. Our conversations had become a contest of wills where I tried to needle him into revealing more than he wished to. I told him almost nothing of myself and, although Luke initially appeared open, I soon realised how tightly he defined the world he chose to tell me about.

His talk was mostly about childhood in Dublin, yet the younger self he described seemed removed from the Luke I knew. Silences punctuated his stories so that they made little chronological sense, while nothing was said about the current occupations of his two brothers, who populated every story he told, and his own life in London might not have existed.

‘Why did you really come over here?’ I asked as we lay, with the bottle half-empty. Somehow the sensation of being in bed without having made love felt more intimate than anything we’d done before.

‘You get sick of living in people’s shadows,’ he replied, taking another slug and staring at the ceiling. ‘Over here you’re nobody, everyone lives their own life. My neighbour has stupid bloody pillars outside his house with ornate balls on top. Last Christmas I was reversing into my driveway when I knocked into one them. He came running out and it was the first time he’d bothered speaking to me after eight years there.’

‘What did he say?’

‘How dare you reverse into my balls!’ Luke’s English accent was perfect. I laughed.

‘He did not.’

‘No.’ Luke agreed. ‘Nothing as original as that.’

‘What would it be like in Dublin?’

‘Different.’ The humour drained from his voice.

‘Why?’

‘It just would be. People think they have your measure there, they point the finger.’

‘All the same, would you be happier there?’

‘Happy?’ he snorted. ‘What the fuck has happy got to do with it? I came here tonight to forget that shite, all right.’

I knew by his tone that the conversation had steered out of bounds. Luke turned, his hands sliding down my back and probing into my knickers. But I also knew he didn’t really want sex, he just wanted any intimacy kept at bay. It made me feel cheap and I pushed him off.

‘We agreed,’ I told him, ‘so don’t start.’

‘A few specks of blood never hurt nobody,’ he replied. ‘Besides, there’s more ways than one.’

‘Just go and fuck yourself.’ I began to climb from the bed, angered by his deliberate mockery. ‘Fuck off and play with yourself.’

I started getting dressed, as angry with myself as with him. I had helped set these rules, knowing our relationship couldn’t survive beyond these walls. I had never wanted soppy confessions or post-coital angst. But I didn’t know what I wanted any more.

‘Listen, Tracey.’ Luke’s tone was conciliatory. ‘I didn’t mean …’

‘You did,’ I said. ‘Be honest, that’s all you see me as, a tart, a piece of fluff on the side.’

My back was turned. I had just ripped my skirt in my haste to put it on. I didn’t want him looking at me half dressed.

‘Is that how you really see yourself?’