Sobbing.
Because she knows Mark is capable of carrying out his threat and if there’s any chance of getting out of this alive, she needs to try to stall him.
Eyeing the kitchen door, she thinks someone else is out there.
Someone who might be able to help her, but she can’t be sure and she mustn’t give anything away. Because Mark would kill her without warning.
For now, she just needed to keep him distracted.
Talking about Jessica only makes him crazy with anger.
She needs to talk about something else.
‘How did you find out about my mother?’
Bingo.
He smirks, thinking he has one up on her, but Rebecca knows her past wouldn’t have been hard to discover, seeing as it had been all over the newspapers when she’d been a child.
He’s distracted now, so she starts talking. Not even caring if he’s listening or not as it all spills out of her.
All the while her eyes are fixed on the kitchen door, and the shadowy figure moving around on the other side.
****
There are some memories you can never shut out completely, no matter how hard we want to and no matter how hard we try.
Because our brains hold onto our deepest, darkest fears and they lock them away, deep down inside of our subconscious minds. Just far enough away from our everyday thoughts, so they can’t do us any harm.
It’s part of our survival instincts.
There are triggers all around us.
A familiar look, a turn of phrase, a smell. Olfactory memory. That’s what they call it when a scent or aroma triggers sudden memory or nostalgia.
For me it was always that potent sharp stench of whisky as it’s poured neat from the bottle.
Or a lit cigarette.
Or hot milk and cornflakes.
Those memories never really leave you. No matter how far you manage to get away from them, no matter how much your life changes.
They are always there.
Physical and psychological abuse. It never leaves us. It lies in wait. Like a potent poison, dripping from an intravenous drip and slowly spreading through your veins.
Constant and silent, until it’s completely flushed out the person you used to be. It festers there, the poison. Just underneath your skin, bubbling away inside you as it bides its time.
And then one day you wake up and you realise that your past no longer harbours your demons.
You’re not scared anymore.
Because instead, you’ve become the one thing that you used to hate.
You’ve become them.
That’s what they say isn’t it? That one-third of victims of childhood abuse become an abuser.
And for me, my whole life has always been just an act, pretending that’s not who I’ve become.
But it’s futile, because that’s how it works. We mirror the pattern of love we received as a child. That’s our way of coping with how we once suffered.
And I am her.
Because it was always her.
My mother.
So damaged and dysfunctional.
That’s what they said about us later on. When they finally took me and my sister away and placed us in a children’s home. That same fateful night they found my father’s body in the shed. He hadn’t just upped and abandoned us like my mother tried to have us believe.
My mother had taken a hammer to his head in one of her drunken rages and brutally murdered him. She’d kept him there for days while feigning illness and taking to her bed.
That was the night we’d had dinner at my friend’s house when I was just seven years old. That was my last memory of being ‘normal.’ Sitting around the dinner table and watching another family show us how it should be.
I still remember the numbness I felt when our friend’s parents took us home only to find there was no answer when she knocked on the door.
And so, the police were called.
I almost want to laugh at the irony, that the only glimpse of normality I ever experienced as a child happened on the very same night my mother had taken her own life.
They said it was an overdose that took her, that she’d lain in her bed and taken a whole bottle of pills.
And I could picture her for months afterwards, my mother. Every time I closed my eyes. I used to try to remember the familiar smell of her bedroom all the times she’d taken to her bed. Having another of her funny turns that went on for days at a time. I’d often go into her room to ask her for something. Food, more often than not.
That smell, it never really leaves me. Her smell. A bitter stench of stale body sweat, entwined with the smell from the bottles of Scotch she’d discarded on the floor next to her bed.
My mother was wrong about the way we’d be treated in the children’s home.
They treated us well. For the first time in our lives we didn’t need to hide the scars and bruises she’d inflicted. We didn’t need to shrink so small in our beds late at night, in the hope that we’d become invisible. Or lie in the darkness so still pretending we weren’t really there. We were no longer forced to listen to the shrieks and the screams that echoed throughout the house at my mother’s violent outbursts, at my father’s incessant screams and cries.
Because they were gone. They were both dead.
And for a while it was okay. We were fine.
But then we were separated.
Me and my sister, Ella.
They took her away. They said they’d found Ella a family who would love her.
That she’d have the best chance in life.
They took her from me.
She was the younger sister. The prettiest. The softest.
Unlike me. Hardened. Angry. Bitter, even at just seven years old.
No one wanted me. I was trouble.
‘Deeply disturbed,’ I overheard one counsellor say.
From that day on, I tried hard to block out all memories of Ella, because it hurt so damn much.
And I started to blame him. My father.
It’s funny, because when I was younger, I used to feel heart-wrenchingly sorry for my father.
Only as time went on, my feelings towards him changed.
Instead of pity, I began to place the blame on him for being weak and feeble and full of disappointment.
He wasn’t strong enough to stop her.
He just took the pain, took the beatings. The biting and kicking and punches. The constant barrage of verbal abuse she unleashed at him, until there was nothing left. Just a battered, bruised, and broken man.
If he’d have just stopped her, if he’d have just stood up for himself, none of this would have happened. They’d both still have been alive, and Ella would still be here. With me.
Chapter Forty-Two
‘Enough of the sob story!’ Mark insisted, shaking his head, and staring over towards the kitchen door.
He knew what Alex was doing.
She was chatting shit to buy herself some more time, only her time was running out.
‘You can come out now,’ Mark ordered, his gaze following Rebecca’s, laughing maliciously as he stares at the shadowy movement behind the kitchen door. ‘Chivalry isn’t dead. Here’s the cheating, slippery husband. Cowering away in the kitchen, waiting for his perfect moment to help his damsel in distress!’ Mark quips, letting Jamie know that his cover is well and truly blown as he stands up and holds the knife to Rebecca’s throat, nodding his head as he instructs Jamie to join them.
‘Do come and join us, Jamie. The more the merrier.’
Mark had heard Jamie come in, knew that he’d been standing in the kitchen listening to their entire conversation for the last few minutes.