Cherry

Cherry

I was on my lunch break when I met him. It was early spring and the sun was out. I had stopped at a park, sitting on a bench with my eyes closed, to soak in the warm sun. I sensed him sit on the bench beside me, sighing gently. I’d been in town for eight months, and I craved some new company, but if there was one thing life had taught me in my almost seventeen years, it was not to trust anyone. I continued sitting with my eyes closed, distracted by this stranger’s energy, but still refused to acknowledge him. I sensed him slide closer to me, and he sighed again, deeply. Deliberately. He cleared his throat, and I couldn’t help but smile. With my eyes still closed and face still angled towards the sun, I asked him if there was something in his throat.

We met every day after that. At first we’d talk about the weather, some current news event, what we thought of that lady’s pink hat; general things that gave away nothing. I started to feel comfortable with him. Connected. He wasn’t probing me for information I didn’t want to give, and he never tried to sit closer or touch me. After a while we started talking more about ourselves, like whether we preferred cats or dogs, what our favourite colour was or what music I was into then. He watched me with a strange curiosity as I babbled on, and I never noticed that he was talking less and less about himself. I could see that he was only a few years older than me, though his skin was pale and delicate as if had been untouched by the sun, and the absence of stubble on his chin made his face almost boy-like. I thought that he was educated, well spoken, very old fashioned for someone his age. There was something in his eyes that I couldn’t quite read, like he was trying to warn me not to get close to him. I couldn’t help it.

When he invited me to his house, I went without hesitation. Now I wished I hadn’t.

The outfit is atrocious. It’s torn in places, and the elastic in one leg of the undies has perished. The top doesn’t match the bottom, and enough sequins have fallen off that only a shadow of its former glory remains. I feel naked, exposed. Vulnerable. Though I suppose that’s the point. I don’t know how to dance without music but that filthy animal threatens to punish me if I stop so I have to imagine a song in my head. I don't want to be locked in the box again. It’s hard to imagine music, but at least out here I can see the sun through the thin curtains. I’ve learned that he prefers fluid dancing, soft and sensuous. One morning I tried my skill at rave dancing, imagining a pair of glow sticks in my hands. He threw his fork at me and it stuck in my thigh. I instinctively pulled it out and blood trickled down to my ankle. I wasn’t allowed to stop dancing so I spent the day with dried blood on my left leg.

I’m hungry all the time. The fat old letcher eats in front of me, scoffing his food as though he hadn’t eaten in days. He never finishes the food, and usually dumps the plate upside down on the floor. If he’s in a good mood he might throw a half eaten chicken leg or a baked potato across the room, and lets me stop to pick them up and eat them. At first I wouldn’t dare but my only instinct now is to survive.

I’ve started to feel indifference. I used to feel anger and frustration. I used to try to understand why his Boy brought me here. I thought he liked me. I hate where I am and what I’m doing. I don’t know why this is happening to me. Do I deserve this? I try to escape, in my mind. I try to imagine that I’m at a school dance, and I’m having fun. I can hear the music and see the smiles of my class mates. I see my boyfriend across the room and walk towards him, but as I do a broken wine bottle slices the air in front of my face. I flinch away from it but the broken edge catches my shoulder and breaks the skin. My skin’s been broken before.

Two weeks after my fourteenth birthday Uncle Pete tried to molest me. Unfortunately for him, however, we’d learnt self defence at school the month before. Eyes! Throat! Groin! Nose! Shocked at my response, he punched me in the eye and I fell back, my head making a dull thud against the corner of my desk. Dad heard the commotion, rode in on his shiny white horse, and extricated his brother-in-law from our house, and our lives. Even though she saw my injuries Mum refused to believe what had happened.

I grew up very quickly that night. From the look on Dad’s face I could see I wasn’t the only one who had been hurt and I realised that the blissful little cocoon of my family that had kept me safe all these years was a lie. I knew, then, that things were going to change in a big way. Forever.

When Dad left her for his secretary, Mum turned to the bottle. She was a violent drunk and would throw anything she could lift at me, aiming for my head. When she didn’t have a broken bottle handy, she’d wait until I wasn’t watching and hit me with things like the frying pan or lamp bases. I hid anything that she could lift and potentially use as a weapon, so her words became even more venomous. About six months after he left, I started emailing Dad, asking him to let me live with him. But he’d always say no because his new fling couldn’t handle the ready made family. Neither could the next one or the one after that. I gave up trying after a while.

To fill the void left by my parents, I started to spend more time with my so-called friends. For my Sweet Sixteen they threw a party for me, though I suspected it was more just an excuse to get drunk. Halfway through the night I was lured into a bedroom by my boyfriend’s cousin who told me he had a birthday present for me. I laugh now at my stupidity. The second I was aware of his intentions, I sent him flying down the stairs with his pants around his ankles. My boyfriend laughed as his cousin flew head first and pants-less down the stairs, then turned to me and called me a slut. I gave my (now ex) boyfriend a black eye for his trouble, and left the party and the whole Godforsaken town. I was on my own.

I look up and see myself in the mirror, though I don’t recognise that wretched reflection. That reflection is submissive. That reflection is feeble. That reflection is not me.

I want to escape but I don’t know how. Have I escaped years of lies and abuse to be stuck here? Now I spend the days formulating plans of escape in my mind. When the pig grows tired of me each night and it is time to return to the box, he instructs his Boy to take me who then gently explains that there is no escape and if I try I will just be punished and put back in the box. He promises to look after me. But how can I trust him? I don’t even know his name.

It

The boy’s whistling gave him away. I made him relinquish the reason for this un-deserved happiness. It was not hard. He would not bring me this one for a long time. He brought me other whores, instead. He likes her. He told me her name. I do not care. I win.

Idiots. Both of them. They ogle each other like they think there is hope. There is no hope. Hopeless. I decide what happens with these two. Just like the others. It amuses me. In such a boring world, why should I not afford myself this amusement?

She looks pathetic trying to dance in the middle of the room. She catches a glimpse of herself in the mirror. Sees her scantily clad body writhing about like a fool. She turns away. Ashamed. The dirty mirror shatters her denial.

The boy watches her from the stairs. She sees him in the mirror’s reflection. She smiles. He smiles. Hopeful. Another time, perhaps? Pointless. She is mine now and the stupid boy will not do anything for her. Not unless I tell him to.

Stupid boy. Just like his stupid mother. She was the first. After my mother died.

All I remember of life before my mother died was utter boredom. My father worked a nine-to-five. My mother tended to the house. School was brain-numbing; my classmates were dim and obtuse. When I was seven my mother got sick. It was remarkable to watch. One minute she was sipping tea in the garden, and the next she was retching over the toilet bowl. In the months before she died people were always at our house. They brought us casseroles. They would pat my head and ask me how I was feeling. I would just look at them. My father would make excuses for me, but the fact was: I did not feel. Anything. Ever.

The night she died, my father had the parish priest come to give her the last rights. The priest told me to kneel beside him and pray for my mother. I laughed. The priest glared at me. My mother let out her last breath. A pathetic rasping sound. My father cried. I went outside to play. The neighbour’s child leaned over the fence and taunted me about my mother’s death. I shrugged. The kid told me I was a freak. I did not care.

Then things around here started to get interesting. My father locked the door to the big room upstairs. My mother’s room. All were forbidden from entering. I stopped going to school and my father taught me at home. At least I was finally receiving a decent education. Each night he would beat me and lock me in the damp concrete box before he went out. Sometimes when he got back, too. It was for my own good.

The night of my tenth birthday, six months after my mother died, my father brought a woman home. She always had an idiotic look on her face like she was living in some kind of fairytale. She did not know that this fairytale had no happy ending. After a number of years she had a baby. My father would not acknowledge it. She was so vague that she never noticed my father’s disaffection towards her. And the boy. And me.

When the boy was almost five years old, she went into the room. My mother’s room. My father had told her not to, of course, but she defied him. So she had to go. My father told me to drown the boy. I thought it might be handy to keep him. It has been.

In the following months I watched my father with intense fascination. He would go out and lure a whore to our house. Woo them with glittery baubles. Touch them! Eventually he would get bored and they had to go. This went on until I was twenty three years old. One night he went out and never came back. And now it is my turn.

I do things differently. I have the boy to do my dirty work. I do not touch them. I do not even look at them. In this age of technology I can watch through televisions and camera recordings. This way there is no chance of mistakes.

Boy

I stare at the toothpicks scattered over the kitchen floor. Like thousands of tiny shattered dreams of an ancient tree. I look up just in time to dodge the remote control that he threw at me. I am stupid, like he says: there are no accidents, only stupidity. As I bend to pick them up I catch a glimpse of the sympathy in her eyes. She moves to come and help me, but he screams at her to stay where she is. She is not good enough for him. None of them were.

I do not hate this girl. She is pretty, but they were all pretty. There is something that makes her different from the others. She is nice. She is genuine. She has suffered and yet she lives.

Her name is Cherry. I had read about cherries but I had never seen or tasted one. I do not understand the relevance, or why she giggled when she told me her name and I just looked at her. She said most guys had some lewd remark to make, but I am different from other guys. How right she is.

As I pick up the toothpicks, I see in my mind the faces of the other girls. I cannot remember their names, but I do not care to. They would degrade themselves, gyrating around the living room floor, desperate to make him happy. Occasionally he would look up at them and they would think they had done well, but then he would look back to his televisions as if they were not there. He would prefer to watch them through the cold LCD screen.

He hates me. I know that. He has always hated me, and I have never really been sure why. It is almost like he does not have to like me so he just does not. By not liking me he is proving a point to someone. Something. I do not care though. I do not hate him. Anymore. I used to hate him when he was all I knew as a father and had denied me the love and safety that I had only read about. But now that I know we are not related I do not really have any feelings towards him at all. No, that is not true. I feel pity for him. I feel relief for myself. He thinks he is magnificent, omnipotent, powerful. But he is just pathetic. He thinks he is the ruler of my destiny, of hers. He thinks he is in charge of this operation. He is wrong.

My earliest memory is of being dragged out of bed in the middle of the night and dumped in the box. I used to share it with him, and was never allowed out. He would leave each morning and come back shortly before it got dark, though I only knew about the rise and fall of the sun because he would tell me. Tauntingly. This was how I learnt to grasp the concept of time. He would bring me food that I was to eat in silence, then I would receive my lessons. Sometimes, when we were asleep, the old man would come into the room and beat him. The old man seemed not to notice me there. At first I asked him why the old man did that but I would be answered with a beating of my own. I think he did not know why.

When he was an adult and I was about nine years old, he told me that the old man was not coming back so he was the man of the house now. This meant I was to leave the box and learn my chores. This was exciting at first because I couldn’t remember anything outside the damp concrete walls of the box. But it soon became just a bigger version of the box. I was to prepare his meals and clean the house. I could go outside only to mow the lawn or fetch the mail. Then return to the box. If I did anything wrong I was punished, though I quickly learnt that there was no right way to do anything.

I had been out of the box for less than a year when I read about crayons and I asked him if I could have some. I was punished for my impertinence. A few years later I got brave and pilfered a butter knife while washing the dishes and used it to carve pictures and patterns on the bare walls.

I was fourteen when he introduced me to this way of life. He made me sit in the corner of the living room while he would bring in the girl, make her change into filthy lingerie, and tell her to dance. He would taunt her and throw things at her and if I turned away he would throw things at me. At first I would cry through each session. I cried because the girls cried. Though I did not understand the concept of emotion, the more I showed, the more he would beat me. The girls would watch him in horror and do nothing to help me. After he had put them in the box he would take on a kindly face and sit me down as if to comfort me. I had learnt not to trust these moods. He would tell me how the girls were whores and did not deserve my concern. I was reluctant to believe him but I did not know what to believe if not him.

He had interpreted my carefully developed veneer of apathy as a readiness to accept his plans for me. I was really only protecting myself. I was a teenager when he started to take me out with him to show me how to stalk the girls and bring them back to the house. At first I was so pleased to be out of the house that I paid no attention to his instruction. For this I was punished. This went on for years until he was confident that I could, or would, lure the girls back to the house. And when he is bored I am to get rid of them.

I do not like doing it. Every time I would tell him that I did not want to. But he would just scoff at me and tell me to be a man. Real men do not complain about the jobs they have to do, they just do them. I never questioned why this was the job that I had to do. I did not choose it. There had never been a choice.

When he sleeps, reclining like a gluttonous king, I go upstairs. I used to be afraid of what might lie up there. As a child he told me horror stories that fuelled my fear of that unknown. But I am not a child anymore.

There are three rooms. At the top of the stairs, to the left of the landing, are two rooms that stretch the width of the house. They were once bedrooms, one belonged to a child. They are now mausoleums. The thick layer of dust covering everything smells of broken dreams and tragedy. No one has bothered to cover the furniture, the mirror, the paintings and pictures, the lamps. No one mourns the loss of what once lived here.

On the opposite side of the landing is the door to one large room that is the combined length of the other two rooms. When I first discovered this room, as a young teenager, everything was covered in white sheets, the blinds were drawn, and the air was thick with sadness. I constantly felt called to enter this room, but it took me some months to gather the courage. I was almost fourteen when I went in. I first opened the blinds and windows. The bright moonlight and crisp night air brought a life to the room that it seemed to be craving. Each night when he was asleep I would remove a sheet from one piece of furniture, taking it to the very back of the yard to bury. I would then clean the furniture, using a brush or soapy water. I was careful to be quiet. I would unravel each item as though it were a delicate living object requiring care and nurturing to bring it back to health. These inanimate objects became my family.

Once I had cleaned the room from top to bottom, it came alive. I explored it methodically, discovering diaries, photo albums, scrap books, newspaper articles. I uncovered a deep and wonderful history that was once happy and magical, but eventually became lonely and heartbreaking. That was when I learnt he is not my father.

Every night I wonder if I could just walk out and never come back. I mean, I know I can walk out. I have to venture out into the strange world I know little about to get the girls. I like it out there. But I always come back. I still wonder, though, what would happen if I never came back. For years I have watched him sit in that chair, never leaving, gaining weight as though he had a death wish. Would he come for me? He would die of starvation. In his own filth. I do not care if he dies. He thinks I am too stupid to look after myself. He is wrong.