Karen gets up. She intends to go upstairs, because she knows what will happen next, but she isn’t fast enough. “Come on,” says Uncle Vern. He pats his huge, hairy knee, and Karen goes reluctantly towards him. He likes her to sit on his knee. He thinks it’s fatherly. “You’re our little girl now,” he says fondly. But he isn’t really fond of her, Karen knows that. She knows she is unsatisfactory to him, because she doesn’t talk to him, she doesn’t hug him, she doesn’t smile enough. It’s his smell she doesn’t like. That, and his greeny-brown light.
She sits on Uncle Vern’s knee and he pulls her higher up onto his lap and encircles her with one of his red arms. With the other hand he strokes her leg. He often does this, she’s used to it; but this time he moves his hand up higher, between her legs. Kukla, Fran and Ollie continue to talk in their made-up voices; Kukla is some sort of a dragon. Karen squirms a little, trying to move herself away from the enormous fingers, which are inside her shorts now, but the arm tightens around her stomach arid Uncle Vern says into her ear, “Hold still!” He does not sound hearty, wheedling, the way he usually does; he sounds angry. He has both hands on her now, he rubs her back and forth across himself as if she’s a washcloth; his sticky breath is all over her ear. “You like your old Uncle Vern, don’t you?” he says furiously.
“You two!” Aunt Vi calls gaily down the cellar stairs. “Suppertime! There’s corn on the cob!”
“Be right there!” Uncle Vern yells hoarsely, as if the words have been expelled from him by a kick in the stomach. He shoves one finger right up inside Karen, and groans as if he’s been stabbed. He holds Karen against himself for another minute: the energy is leaking out of him and he needs a bandage. Then he lets her go.
“Scamper upstairs,” he tells her. He’s trying for his fake voice, his uncle voice, but he hasn’t got it back; his voice is desolate. “Tell your Auntie Vi I’ll be up in a minute:” Karen looks behind herself, to see if the back of her shorts is browny-green, but it isn’t; only wet. Uncle Vern is wiping himself off with the bar towel.
Uncle Vern lurks, he lies in wait. Karen evades him, but she can’t evade him all the time. The strange thing is that Uncle Vern never comes looking for her when Aunt Vi isn’t in the house. Maybe he likes the danger; or maybe he knows that with Aunt Vi there, Karen won’t dare to make a sound. It’s unclear how he knows this, or why this is so, but it’s true. Karen’s fear of Aunt Vi’s finding out is greater than her fear of Uncle Vern’s sausage fingers.
Soon one finger isn’t enough for him. He stands Karen in front of him, facing away so she can’t see, a big knee holding her on either side, and puts his hands up under her pleated school skirts and slides her panties right down, shoving something hard in between her legs from behind. Or he uses two fingers, three. It hurts, but Karen knows that people who love you can do painful things to you, and she tries hard to believe that he does love her. He says he does. “Your old uncle loves you,” he tells her, scraping his face against hers.
When they are having dinner afterwards he laughs more, he talks louder, he tells jokes, he kisses Aunt Vi on the cheek. He brings them both presents: boxes of chocolates for Aunt Vi, stuffed animals for Karen. “You’re just like our daughter,” he says. Aunt Vi smiles thinly. Nobody can say they aren’t doing the right thing.
Karen loses her appetite: the effort of not thinking about Uncle Vern, both when he’s there and when he isn’t, is making her weak. She becomes thinner and paler, and Aunt Vi discusses her on the phone—“It’s the loss of her mother, she’s the quiet type but you can tell she feels it. She just mopes around. I wasn’t expecting it to go on this long. She’s almost ten!” She takes Karen to the doctor to see if she has anemia, but she doesn’t.
“Tell me what’s wrong,” says Aunt Vi. “It’s better if you talk about it. You can tell me!” She has that solemn, avid look on her face, she’s expecting to hear about Karen’s mother. She urges and urges.
“I don’t like Uncle Vern touching me,” says Karen finally. Aunt Vi’s face goes slack, then hardens. “Touching you?” she says suspiciously. “What do you mean, touching?”
“Touching,” says Karen miserably. “Down there.” She points.
She knows already she’s done a wrong, an unforgivable thing. Up to now Aunt Vi has been willing to tolerate her, even to put on a show of liking her. Not any more.
Aunt Vi’s lips are white, her eyes are sparkling dangerously. Karen looks down at the floor so as not to see. “You’re exactly like your mother,” says Aunt Vi. “A liar. I wouldn’t be surprised if you went crazy, just like her. God knows it runs in the family! Don’t you ever say such an evil thing about your uncle! He loves you like a daughter! Do you want to destroy him?” She starts to cry. “Pray to God to forgive you!” Then her face changes again. She wipes her eyes, she smiles. “We’ll just forget you ever said that, dear,” she says. “We’ll both forget it. I know things have been hard on you. You never had a father.”
After that, what can be done? Nothing at all. Uncle Vern knows Karen has told. He is nicer than ever to Aunt Vi. He is even nice to Karen, in front of people; but sadly, as if he’s forgiving her. When Aunt Vi isn’t looking he stares across the dinner table at Karen, his eyes in his face of uncooked beef shining with triumph. You can’t win this fight, he’s telling her. She can hear the words as clearly as if he’s spoken them. For the time being he’s-avoiding her, he no longer tracks her through the house, but he’s waiting. He’s itching to get his hands on her, but not with any pleading whispers. Now he won’t ask if she likes him, now he’s more like her mother used to be, before she would start screaming and reach for the broom handle. That ominous lull, that softness.
Karen sleeps with her head under her pillow, because she doesn’t want to hear or see; but she’s sleepwalking again, more than ever. She wakes up in the living room, trying to get out through the French windows, or in the kitchen, shaking the back door handle. But Aunt Vi locks all the doors.
Karen is sitting straight up in her bed, holding her pillow against her chest. Her heart is beating with terror. There’s a man standing in her dark bedroom; it’s Uncle Vern, she can see his face in the light that comes through from the hall, just before he eases the door shut. His eyes are open, but he’s sleep-walking; he has his striped pyjamas on, he has a glazed look. Don’t ever wake a person sleepwalking, said her grandmother. It breaks their journey.
Uncle Vern sleepwalks quietly across the floor to Karen’s bed. With him comes a smell of stale sweat and rancid meat. He kneels and the bed heaves like a boat, he pushes and Karen falls backwards. “You’re a little bastard, that’s what you are,” he whispers softly. “A sly little bastard.” He’s talking in his sleep.
Then he falls on top of Karen and puts his slabby hand over her mouth, and splits her in two. He splits her in two right up the middle and her skin comes open like the dry skin of a cocoon, and Charis flies out. Her new body is light as a feather, light as air. There’s no pain in it at all. She flies over to the window and in behind the curtain, and stays there, looking out through the cloth, right through the pattern of pink and orange roses. What she sees is a small pale girl, her face contorted and streaming, nose and eyes wet as if she’s drowning—gasping for air, going under again, gasping. On top of her is a dark mass, worrying at her, like an animal eating another animal. Her entire body—because Charis can see right through things, through the sheets, through the flesh to the bone—her body is made of something slippery and yellow, like the fat in a gutted hen. Charis watches in amazement as the man grunts, as the small child wriggles and flails as if hooked through the neck. Charis doesn’t know she is Charis, of course. She has no name yet.