546

Esmé didn’t answer her phone, so Jason left her a message.  She’s probly in a lecture, he thought.  He sent her a text message as well.  He wanted all his friends to be together when he told them.

Esmé was old-fashioned about using her smart-phone in lectures.  She turned it to silent when she was in one.  So she only saw the message when she went to get lunch in one of the uni cafés.  She had a prac until 5, but she could walk from the uni to Brunswick Street and get to the café by 5.30.  She texted back her acceptance.

She wondered what he wanted to tell her.  He was special.  She was in love with Keith but Jason was kind and he had a lovely smile and he treated her as a real person.  Keith and Jason and their friends might not be perfect, but they were incomparably better than her father—and her mother, too.  But she thought more charitably of her mother now.  Even though she was still angry at her mother for not protecting her when she’d been abused, she understood intellectually, if not in her heart, how afraid her mother must have been.  She thought back to an article she’d read in the newspaper, about battered women and how they often went back to their husbands because they had no alternative, financially, or stayed with them because they were afraid.  The article said that nearly a hundred women a year died in domestic violence.  She could believe it.

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405

At the hospital they eventually wormed the name of her parents out of her.  When they arrived, they behaved exactly as if they cared.  Her father shocked and manly, covering his alarm with a man-of-the-world bluff taciturnity.  He fooled everybody.  Her mother was truly frightened.  Esmé could see it in her eyes.  Why didn’t you help, she thought.  Surely you knew about it?  The walls aren’t soundproof.  Surely you fucking knew?

The hospital made an appointment with a counsellor.  Her parents took her home.

The day after, her mother stayed at home instead of going to work.  This was unusual enough that Esmé was filled with hope.  Maybe she and her mother could go away together.  Away from him.  When her mother sat on the edge of the bed, she seemed to Esmé to have shrunk.  She’d always been a timid woman, but she appeared even more frightened now. Her eyes darted away from Esmé’s. Her gaze avoided her daughter’s. 

“So are you a bit better now?”

Esmé didn’t know where she pulled the strength from, but she managed to say, her eyes fixed on her mother’s face, “You know why?”

In a light insincere voice, her mother replied, “No dear.  I have no idea.”

“Dad.”

Her mother was silent. 

“You know what he …. What he does … to me.”

He mother stood up and went to the window.  She hummed a little to herself.  “I’ll go and make us a nice cup of tea.  We’ll all feel better after that.”

Esmé was too worn to shout at her.  After, she would run different scenarios through her mind, where she yelled at her mother, forced her to listen, made her understand what had happened.   But at the time, she was too worn to do more than weep.

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Episodes 1 to 260 (without pictures, 10 episodes per chapter

403

"Despair": from this blog

The first time.  She’d gone to the shopping centre and locked herself into one of the cubicles.  It took her a long time to get up the courage to cut the veins in her wrists.  She’d used a Stanley knife.  She bought it at the hardware store in the centre.  The woman at the checkout had smiled at her as if she really cared. 

When she cut, she put the knife against the vein, closed her eyes and sliced.  The burn was much worse than she’d expected.  At first the blood flowed freely, but then it started to clot.  She began to weep.

“You OK in there darl?”  The voice was smoke-roughened, gruff.

She couldn’t answer.  The unlooked-for kindness made her wail even harder.

A face appeared over the top of the cubicle.  Brassy, dyed hair, grey at the roots, lined face, yellow from cigarette smoke, resigned to life’s insults and miseries.  There was blood all over the cubicle floor.  The face took it all in in an instant, and then she heard footsteps going away, brisk, as if to say, I don’t want to know.  “I’m going to be left alone to die,” she thought.  “Good!” she added, defiantly.  “Free at last.”

But the footsteps returned, with others.  The cubicle door was unlocked from the outside. 

While they waited for the ambulance, the woman cradled her in her thin arms.  She smelled strongly of stale cigarette smoke.  “Don’t you worry now love, it’ll all be all right, you’ll see,” her gravelly voice and worn face oddly comforting.

Esmé had shaken her head in despair. 

“What was it, darl?  Why’dja do it?”

Esmé had been too ashamed to explain.  But before the paramedics had wheeled her away, past the goggling shoppers, her saviour had taken her hand gently into her own and bent down and kissed her cheek.  “Don’t give up, love.  I made it.  You can too.”

Esmé never saw her again.  But she never forgot her either.

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Episodes 1 to 260 (without pictures, 10 episodes per chapter

400

When she went back to school the next day and told Sean she couldn’t after all go out with him, she hadn’t told him why.  When she tried to say even something as simple as ‘my father won’t allow it,’ she’d choked up.  She’d almost wept at the way the light went out of his eyes as he realised what she was telling him.  She hadn’t been surprised when he’d avoided her after. 

But it hadn’t stopped her dad.

Her one friend was Luke, a geeky gay loner in her class.  He was fat and embarrassed by it.  No one liked him, and the rugby players and the macho handsome sporty types made his life a misery, plastering his locker with dog shit, cuffing him as he walked past, calling out softly and then in a rising crescendo as he approached, “Beware homo!  Beware homo!  Lukie fagpants.”  She never took him home.  She knew better than that.  But they would meet at the shopping centre, and have an ice cream shake.  Sometimes it was the only thing she ate all day, though it wasn’t the only thing he ate.  Part of her was wryly intrigued that her response to misery was to eat nothing while his was to eat everything, all the time.  Her dad had once found a fold of fat on her while he was fucking her and twisted it hard and called her a fat lesbo fuck and after that she had stopped eating.

Aside from Luke, she had no other friends.

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Episodes 1 to 260 (without pictures, 10 episodes per chapter

398

She’d come home so happy.  His name was Sean.  He was cute, with brown hair and blue eyes and a smile which made her heart flip.  He was shy, and asked if he could walk home with her every day.  She watched him with amused affection as he built up his courage to ask her out.

He’d found out.  She didn’t think she had to keep it secret.  When he found out about it, he’d beaten her, calling her slut and whore and bitch and then he’d fucked her brutally and left her to cry herself out afterwards.  The next day, at breakfast, he’d been quite ordinary, almost more loving and friendly than usual.

After that, their sex had never had even the pretence of love.  She started making up stories about how she’d fallen down the stairs, or slipped on a wet pavement, or tripped over the edge of the carpet and hurt her eye.  She could see the doubt and disbelief in the faces of her interlocutors.  She was too ashamed to tell the truth.  I deserve it, she thought.  I tempted him.  This is what he’d told her.  And when she turned her face from him as he thrust into her, he’d ask, so reasonable, don’t you love your daddy? And then he’d hit her hard.   Smile at me, bitch, he’d say.  Smile, you fucking whore.  You unlovable trollop. Smile.

But she couldn’t.

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Episodes 1 to 260 (without pictures, 10 episodes per chapter

396

She pressed the razor blade into the muscles of her forearm.  The sting brought her immediate comfort.  She watched the blood swell and trickle down her skin.  She was mesmerised by the rich burgundy discharge.  You shouldn’t do this. It’s not healthy.  She didn’t know where the voice came from.  It wasn’t her mother or her father.  But she ignored it anyway.  She made another cut parallel to the first, a little deeper.  She hissed at the pain and closed her eyes.  As always, a kind of peace came over and she floated over the memories.  She always cut herself up in the fat part of her forearm.  It wasn’t really bad, she comforted herself.  She’d never cut her wrists, except the once.

The first time he’d come to her, he’d said it was time to show her how to be a woman.  She’d adored him. It didn’t seem wrong.  Not till later.  When he’d told her it was their secret and she should never tell mum.  With the instinctual insight of children, she’d felt it wasn’t right, though she didn’t know how or why.  Just that it felt off.

The violence had only begun later. When she started going out with a boy from her school.  

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Episodes 1 to 260 (without pictures, 10 episodes per chapter