Ghosts in the Morning (5 page)

‘So, where
have
you been?
And w
hat’s for dinner?’

I sighed
. I didn’t really know where I had been.
I had driven around in a fugue state, the car radio softly playing the latest pop drivel. I wasn’t
really
sure
where
I’d driven,
nor of the route I had taken. I had probably driven around
in large circles, it’s not like Jersey was that big
, but I couldn’t be sure, there was a blur on my recall
. I had been to the shop though, I knew that
.
I remembered the tinny, soporific music –
songs I used to like destroyed in cheap cover versions by singers who couldn’t sing -
and I lifted up the
Marks & Spencer
bag, and showed
Graham the boxes within. Chicken dinners,
sweet and sour sauce,
microwave only, nice and easy.
Separate boxes for the rice.
I had planned to go to the fish market, some salmon perhaps, or some fresh king prawns, but I
must have changed my mind. Perhaps my unconscious mind has steered me away from the prawns -
I remembered from school that prawns were the scavengers of the ocean
. They hovered up all of
sea’
s detritus, all
of
the dead bits, and I
Imagined
that would include rotting corpses.

‘Daniel phoned,
he
said he was going for a pizza with the boys, so...’
Graham said, realising that I wasn’t going to answer.

I shook my head clear, and reached into the nag.
‘Okay,
okay, no problem,
I’ll freeze one
of these dinners
, I think they can be frozen,’ I said, then set about preparing dinner.
I slipped the c
ardboard sleeves off two boxes
and grabbed a fork, clutching it like a dagger. I
pierce
d
the film – I liked to stab the film hard and fast with the fork – then
I jabbed a
t
the buttons on the microwave. Minutes later and
p
ing!
I didn’t ask Graham if he wanted anything else with his dinner, I couldn’t be bothered, and the
egg fried rice had a few peas mixed in anyway. Maybe not enough to count as one of his five-a-day but what did I care?

‘Will you pour me one of those?’ Graham asked, as I filled a glass with white wine.  ‘Make it a large one.’

He sounded tired.
‘Bad day?’
I still cared, a little, and it annoyed me.

‘Yes,
yes,
it was. Well, bad week, really
,’ Graham sig
hed. ‘
There
has been som
e new Auditing Standards issued earlier this year and
they’re a complete pain in the arse. I mean, I know we’re auditors and it’s meant to be our job and all that, but there must be a point when enough is enough...
’  He bit into a piece of chicken, and the juice squirted on his chin. He wiped his chin with the palm of his hand, and then wiped his hand on the tablecloth.

I ground my teeth together. The tablecloth was white and the sweet and sour sauce looked like it stained.

‘And, well, those new Standards mean even more controls over us, as auditors, I mean it’s probably going to take us longer to satisfy the requirements for the audit file
itself
than it is to do the actual fieldwork of the audit.
’

I poured another large glass of wine and Graham raised his eyebrows at me.  ‘You going to leave some for me?’ he said.

I topped his glass up to halfway
, then
the bottle ran dry. There was another
bottle
in the fridge but I wasn’t going to tell him that.

‘So, anyway,’ he continued, ‘here I am, spending most of my time trying to justify the increase in next year’s audit fees due to these new Standards. I’m getting loads of flak from our clients, I’ve got Finance Directors queuing up to kick my arse.’

Graham
             
sucked and smacked his lips together, the greasy coating dribbling again on his chin, reminding me again of Uncle Peter, how he used to drool like an overexcited boxer dog, before sucking the saliva back into that mouth with its broken
yellow
teeth and
its
sour
alcoholic
breath and
...

‘Anyway, I guess that’s enough of my boring work talk, I guess you don’t want to hear about
all of that
audit stuff. So, how was your day, did you do anything exciting?’

Well,
I killed a man –
in fact, it was
the second
person I’ve killed in l
ess than a week
– was that classed as exciting? I mean, I would call it u
nusual, certainly, but exciting?
I don’t know, Graham, what do you think?

‘No,’ I replied.

Chapter
5

Uncle Peter wasn’t
related to me, he wasn’t
my real uncle.
But
I was expected to call him
“‘
U
ncle
”’
though,
I was told to call all of my Mum’s boyfriends ‘Uncle’.
I should always respect grown-ups, my Mum said.

I was ten years old when he first raped me.
He told me not to tell my mother or he would kill her.
And me, too. I
was sure he would, too
, he was a large, ugly, strong man, and quick to anger
.
There was a permanent aura of violence around him, like an
evil s
mog.
Sometimes at night, I would hear
Uncle Peter and my Mum
arguing, then there would be the sounds of blows, fists on flesh. Then the arguing would stop.

The first time he raped me was the worst. He hadn’t been living with us for long then
, a few weeks I think, but it seemed like longer
. Mum had had quite a few boyfriends since Dad left, but none had been serious, none had come close to moving in.
A lot of
them didn’t even stay the night.

Mum was asleep the first time he raped me. They
had
been out,
had
left me alone in front of the black and white television, while they went to the pub.
Mum had wagged her finger at me as she went out –
‘now, don’t be staying up too late, Andrea, watching that box all night, and remember don’t open the door to any strangers. And don’t answer the phone. I know you’re big enough to be alright on your own, but some of the nosey bastards round here don’t see things the way we do, right?
’.

As soon as I heard the key in the lock, I
flicked the television off and went
upstairs
to read my book. Mum never let me read much, there was always some washing-up I had to do, or some cleaning. Besides, it was safer to go to my bed, I didn’t want to risk falling asleep on the sofa,
it was best to be out of the way when they’d been drinking.

A few hours later,
I had
woken up with my book across my face. I
heard
my Mum and Uncle Peter shouting at each other
in the kitchen,
so I hurriedly turned off my bedside light. T
hen I heard Mum stomp upstairs,
tripping over some of the stairs and
cursing.
Another t
en minutes
or so
passed, then I heard Mum snoring
. T
he walls were
paper
thin in that house.

Every house has its own set of creaks and groans that
emanate
at certain points of the night
,
sometimes it’s as
if the house itself is rolling over to go to sleep
. But when you have lived in the same place for a while,
there are always certain noises that you know for sure aren’t just the house resting. One of
our
stairs – the third one from the top – was loose. Whenever you stepped on it, it would creak and then slap back down like a muffled clapboard. I always
stretched my legs and
missed
out
that step when I went up or down the stairs.
It was habit. Even Mum had done it when she had stomped up the stairs earlier.

I heard the
third step creak and then the
dull slap
as the wood fell back down. I closed my eyes tight, and felt the air shift. My nose twitched as it was hit with the
pungent smell of alcohol
, laced
with tobacco.
I tried to force my eyes to stay
closed, tried to will my breathing to sound relaxed, to simulate sleep, but a creeping fear grasped my eyelids and slowly prised them open.

Uncle Peter was standing at the edge of my bed.
‘You alright, love,
you had a good night in front of that telly?’

His body was swaying slightly, but his eyes remained still, staring at me. The hint of moonlight that sprinkled through the curtain made them yellow, matching the teeth that were visible in his ugly attempt at a smile.

Everything happened really fast and really slow then.
I remember scrunching up my eyes as tig
ht as I could, willing myself to
unconsciousness
,
so I could
pretend
it
was all a dream, but I couldn’t, it hurt too much. Like a freezing fire
between my legs
.
He told me not to scream, but I couldn’t help it. His hand was over my mouth the whole time, though, so the scream stayed silent. His moustache was the worst, its bristles scraped my face, my neck, my back...

After
wards,
I
didn’t cry much -
I’m sure some tears fell, but mostly I remember hugging my knees to my chest and r
ocking back and forth, and wondering what my Mum would make of the blood on my sheets.
I didn’t go to school the next day, I told Mum I didn’t feel well. I think she saw the sheets and assumed that my periods had started, so she gave me some
sanitary towels and asked i
f school had explained about ‘
that monthly stuff
’. She hadn’t waited for an answer.

From then on I didn’t sleep very well. Uncle Peter would rape me at least once or twice a week. It was almost worse on the nights that he didn’t come to my room.
Almost.
I would lay wide awake all night, staring at my bedroom door, shaking with fear. I would clasp my hands together so tight, praying to God to make it stop. After a few nights I stopped that, and I have never prayed again. I wanted to tell my Mum, or someone, but I was too scared. E
very
single
time before he did it,
no matter how drunk he was, how slurred his words were, he would hiss the words again at me, the words he had said on the first night.
‘
Don’t tell anyone, love, yeah, you know what will happen, don’t you? I’ll kill your mother. And then I’ll kill you.’
Sometimes as he said it, he would pinch
the sides of
my throat between
his thick, gnarly fingers. He would stare at me as I struggled for breath, and a terrifying panic would overwhelm me.
Spots
of light would dart across my vision
. When I was smaller, I used to think these flashes of light were fairies, glimpsed infrequently in our world, but I think then I understood they weren’t fairies at all, and I used to dread seeing them. There would be a strange smile across Uncle Peter’s face as I fought to breathe and I wondered if one day he would just forget to let go, and would kill me by accident.

It was worse when he was really drunk, it would take longer.
That’s when I was the most scared by the choking. He would squeeze until I began to scratch at his arms with my nails, trying to dig into those greasy, hairy arms. Then he’d stop squeezing and stroke my hair as he forced his brutish penis into me. For a while
I
thought
about killing myself, or running away, but I
didn’t know where to go, I knew I wouldn’t survive on my own. And I
didn’t want to leave Mum
with him, I was sure he would kill her
.

But s
uddenly it
all
stopped. It stopped because Uncle Peter had a
nasty
accident. It was a
few days after my t
welfth
birthday
.
Mum
had gone out to see her sister to do some shopping or gossiping or both, I wasn’t sure
. Maybe she just wanted to get out of the house.
As she left and the front door slammed, I spotted a nasty glint in Uncle Peter’s eye. I had gone up to my bedroom and clenched my eyes
shut
.