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1
Right now, I had to wonder how I got here.
“You stupid fucking bitch!”
Rick, my husband of eleven years stormed across the room at me. He’d only just got home. I’d flinched when I heard the door slam, heard the too loud roar of the car as it pulled up in the driveway, my body freezing at the sound of the handbrake being jerked up. I hadn’t even said a word to him yet.
I got to my feet—never a good idea. Standing meant a greater surface area to attack. It was only good if you could stay on your feet, dodge or counter his attacks, and I was never any good at that. But the adrenalin that shot through my veins like electricity, the tremble in my muscles as they activated, meant my body was ready to do something, even as my brain knew whatever I tried would be useless. He was on me before I could even react, fingers wrapping themselves around my arms, digging in harder and harder as my teeth clenched hard, fighting to keep the yelp, then the screams inside.
Don’t make a noise, I thought furiously. Don’t make a fucking sound.
“What have you been doing around here all day? Huh? I work all fucking day, and you lay around here…”
I stopped listening, just feeling his spittle splash my face, breathing in the sour smell of unwashed male and beer that was uniquely Rick. I’d finished all of the housework, as per usual, knowing it would be a bone of contention no matter what I’d done. Before, I’d thrown myself into it wholesale, thinking if I just got the right combination finished…
Right now, the washing was up to date—everything hung up, dried, folded, and put away. I vacuumed every day, cleaned up his mess of empty beer cans and overflowing ashtrays. I scrubbed the bathroom and the toilet, did the dishes, cooked a dinner for our son, Kade, and myself, and even made enough for Rick, just in case. When he hadn’t arrived at his mandated meal time, I’d just sighed with relief and bundled up his plate for reheating later.
Or to smash into his bloated fucking face, grinding the endless slabs of meat accompanied by three vegetables he always insisted we had into his skin. Just beat him over and over with it, until the porcelain was pulverised and ground into tiny vicious shards.
Something I worked hard to keep down rose at that idea. She was a sleek black beast, one who wagged her tail, her green eyes gleaming at the thought of it.
Stop that, I told myself. Keep your fucking head down.
But of course, I couldn’t, not to Rick’s satisfaction. I couldn’t help but flinch away from the mask of a face, the red skin mottled by broken capillaries, much like his eyes, now buried in folds of flesh as he screamed at me. A cry built up in my chest, one I frantically struggled to hold down. But his fingers ground against my bone, my muscle, like my skin was nothing within his hands, compressed and wrenched. And then he shook me.
I didn’t even know what I was being punished for at this point, and I didn’t get a chance to consider it. My head whipped back and forth on my spine. My teeth clacked down on my tongue, the taste of blood filling in my mouth. The world that I knew was completely obliterated, replaced instead by this sickening blur. I couldn’t see, couldn’t hold onto anything as the pain ratcheted higher and higher, kicking my previous apathy to the curb and replacing it with pure unadulterated terror.
I wanted to cry out, beg, plead, and I knew it wouldn’t make a difference, but it came anyway.
“Stop!”
My scream rent the air, which was weird, as he was filling it more than satisfactorily with his incoherent listing of all my faults. Maybe because for once, he did fucking stop. There was a moment of complete silence, his face a ridiculous mask of slack-jawed shock.
I wrenched free, my fingers going to where his grip still burned my skin, tears I’d worked so fucking hard to hold back falling like a waterfall now, until Rick was nothing but a goddamn blur. “Stop,” I sobbed. “Stop hurting me. I haven’t said a fucking thing. I made the dinner you wanted. I cleaned every fucking thing. You can’t keep using me as your punching bag to work through whatever’s pissed you off today. Please.”
And that’s when it happened—a brief flare of hope passed through me when I was met by silence rather than aggression. I could almost hear the seconds tick by, blessed, blessed moments of peace.
“Can’t I?”
His words were uncharacteristic in their perfectly vicious calm. Rick always expressed a ‘hot’ rather than ‘cold’ anger, his screams a great messy vomit of all of the frustrations he held bottled up until he got home. That’s perhaps why his strike was almost surgical in its precision.
He belted me across the face, and my head snapped back, my ears instantly filling with a high-pitched ring and a swollen feeling of fullness. An explosion of pain—familiar, yet no less devastating for it—burst into my face, and my eyes went wide as I lurched backwards. I wasn’t allowed to catch my balance; that wasn’t the purpose of this. It was to beat me down. So he got to work, his fist closed this time as he drove it into my nose, the sound of the crack my only warning before agony took over.
I collapsed onto the floor, blood streaming from my face as I screamed in pain. I was dimly aware that he was dealing more damage, with his fists and his feet, but it all felt muted in the face of this. I sobbed into the carpet, bubbles of blood blowing from my nose, and my head felt like a bomb had just gone off in it. All the while, the crying, the build-up of tears and snot just aggravated things further, but I couldn’t stop. Then the other blows began to register, some dull aching things, others more worryingly sharp. His punches rained down, never seeming to slow, and my screams somehow egged him on. There was no curling up against this, no protection my body could offer. As I thrashed around on the floor, inarticulate cries doing nothing to stop him, it dawned on me. He’s trying to kill me.
“Mummy?”
Kade’s voice cut through the chaos. Rick stopped for a moment, and I could do nothing but just lie there, my breath coming in low, rasping shudders.
Get up, the black beast inside me said. Protect the cub.
“Mummy?”
His voice was higher and warbling as he took in what had happened. Rick was usually more careful than this, making sure to keep the noise down, keep the bruises below my neckline. I rolled my head painfully up and saw my son’s white face, his heaving chest, his little fists balled at his sides, his wide eyes cataloguing every injury.
“What did you do to my mum?!”
I groaned, trying to say something, anything to stop Kade from marching over, hands raised. He didn’t understand this dark otherworld of adulthood. A world of alcohol and violence, where someone can tell you
they love you in the morning and then beat the shit out of you in the evening. With his childlike innocence, he thought he could raise his hands to his father with impunity. I knew differently.
Get. Up, the voice inside insisted. Its growl had an inflection I hadn’t heard before—fear.
I’d seen plenty of action movies where the hero, after getting the snot kicked out of him, is able to summon some superhuman level of strength to rise up and take the bad guy down. I tried something similar. Did they feel like something was breaking inside them when they did so, like I did? Did their body falter as they attempted it, did their mouth stretch into a scream when they realised partway through the lunge that they were going to fail, to not even be able to get upright? Did they have to watch the hands of a monster reach out and fasten themselves around the slender neck of the one they loved most in the world, big, broad fingers digging into pale skin, each one big enough to wreak major damage?
NO!
The roar inside dwarfed my own pathetic attempt to give voice to it, filling my head and driving everything else out. I rose, like a shadow, like pain itself because right now, I couldn’t feel my own. I scanned the environment, assessing each humble part of our décor as a potential weapon. There—the big marble ashtray. I gripped it and left a trail of ash behind as I brought my arm up. I closed the gap between us, hearing my son’s choked cries, and was somehow able to shut this out for the moment it took to bring it crashing down on my husband’s head with all my now considerable strength.
I would never forget the sounds. The crunch, the frantic wheeze of Kade’s throat as he fought to suck air in, the sodden thud of Rick’s body. A strange kind of silence settled over the house, punctuated only by my son’s noisy breaths, and then it came.
His wail, pathetically broken and torn by what had been done to him, rushed into the quiet I’d created. I dropped to my knees, wrapped my arm around my son and held him close. I forced my eyes closed when I felt him struggle, lash out, all that adrenalin that had been pushing him to fight or flight unleashed on me. But I held him until he quieted, until his sobs joined mine.
You need to run. They will not understand. You are not safe; the cub is not safe.
