Tag: poverty

This is a companion piece to Blank, though it can be read independently.

~

It was a misty, chilly, miserable day, and the Donovans Four, blanket-bundled, sat in a row with their backs to the radiator. Its warmth was anemic, but it was better than nothing — certainly better than either bedroom, both of which might as well have been meat-lockers.

They were safe enough for now, given Da was gone; whether he was at the pub or some half-arsed attempt at a job was anyone’s guess, but it didn’t really matter. He wasn’t home, and Mam was actually making breakfast — proper breakfast, sausage and eggs the quartet had lifted from the local VG. Mam never asked where they got half the things they brought home, and Lorna suspected she didn’t want to know.

The scent of frying sausage was wonderful; it overlay, for now, the odor of stale cigarettes, cheap whiskey, and general sourness that had permeated the home as long as Lorna could remember. She had no name for the sourness, and none of her siblings did, either — it was something unique to their house, its genesis lurking somewhere beneath the threadbare carpet. Shiv was convinced it was some kind of exotic mold found nowhere else in the world. Lorna neither knew nor cared; unpleasant though it was, it was the smell of home.

She picked at a bit of frayed, plastic thread that had come loose from the edges of a hole in the carpet. What the original color had been was a mystery, because fifteen years’ worth of stains had turned it into a strange, blobby patchwork in shades of brown and grey, dotted all over with penny-sized burns. Da had a nasty habit of passing out on the sofa with a lit fag in his hand, and Lorna was fairly sure that one day he’d burn the house down like that. She could only hope he’d not wake up when it happened.

Mam hummed a little as she cooked, and Lorna watched her curiously. Like them, Mam rarely dared make noise when Da was home — she was a gaunt ginger ghost, pale and hollow-eyed, but at times there were glimpses of who she maybe ought to have been. Who she might actually be, if only Da would do them all a favor and drop dead.

You could make sure of that, you know.

The thought had crossed Lorna’s mind so often it had left grooves. Yes, she could indeed make sure of that, and on one exceptionally dark night, she very nearly had. It was so, so tempting, but not tempting enough to turn her into a murderer at ten years old. The cleaver had been huge in her tiny hand, which had not shaken as she regarded the useless lump of humanity that was theoretically her father.

No, she countered. No, that’s not me.

The answering thought was hard and ice-cold: Yet.

She shook herself. Right now there was sausage, there was her Mam acting like an actual mam, and her siblings all in a row. They sat as they always did, with Pat on one end and her on the other, with Shiv ready to grab Mick and run if she had to. It was instinct, and it had served them well so far.

“Come on over here, the lot’v you.” Mam’s voice was soft, and her accent softer; she hadn’t grown up in Dublin, though she never spoke of her childhood. “Come on and get this while it’s hot.”

They needed no second urging. In this house, you snatched your food and you ate it in a hurry, unless some of it could be saved for later. Whatever was left would get hidden in an ancient plastic shopping bag beneath Lorna or Shiv’s mattress.

The sausages were greasy, and so hot it burned their fingers, but there was no point in bothering with utensils if you didn’t need them. Meals were an uncertainty in the Donovan household, and hot meals even more so. There wasn’t really time to savor.

For some reason, Mam always looked terribly sad when they fell on their food like wolves. None of them understood it, and dismissed it as one of the many incomprehensible vagaries of adults in general, and their mother in particular.

Scrambled eggs did need forks, but they still gobbled their portion — and it was a good thing they did, because the telltale creak of the porch heralded the arrival of their much-hated father.

He came in stinking so badly of booze that the reek reached the kitchen long before he did, red-eyed, his complexion an odd but familiar shade of grey. Da wasn’t a large man — Mam was actually a touch taller — but he was so much bigger than his children that he didn’t need to be in order to be a threat. Lorna hated that they all looked so much like him, though not nearly so much as she hated the man himself.

As ever, all of them tensed. A trace of sick, liquid fear traveled through Lorna’s gut — not for herself, but for her mam. For Pat, the eejit, who insisted on taking the brunt of their father’s wrath no matter what anyone said to him.

“Save me any’v that?” he asked. He might have been half off his face, but his hazel eyes were sharp as knives, assessing and searching for any sign of weakness.

In point of fact, nobody had saved any for him; the last portion should have been their mam’s, but of course the wretched woman would give it over to this worthless gobshite without a word of protest. Why? Why? Sometimes Lorna wanted to shake her mother, to scream until something like sense pierced whatever fog shrouded Mam’s mind. What little light had entered her blue, blue eyes always went out when Da came home, and yet she never just fucking left.

“Of course, Niall.” Mam’s voice was quiet with defeat.

A surge of molten rage passed through Lorna, from the crown of her head to the tips of her toes. Jesus fuck, Mam, WHY?! WHY DO YOU ALWAYS BLOODY DO THIS? Someday, the words would actually leave her throat, but for now she was silent, while loathing seethed and bubbled within her mind like some kind of boiling poison.

Da said nothing at first, but something ugly and cruel passed over his expression, so minute that somebody less hyper-aware than his daughter wouldn’t have caught it. “No you didn’t,” he said. “You were going to eat that all, and leave a working man to starve.”

Lorna wasn’t quite sure who snorted at that, but somebody did, and it wasn’t her. Working man, my arse, she thought. Working at ruining your liver, maybe. 

For such a small, ossified man, her father could move remarkably fast — he was across the kitchen with jarring speed, but before his hand could connect with his wife’s face, Lorna plowed into him like the world’s tiniest rugby player. She was small enough that the crown of her head barely reached his ribs, but that just meant his stomach bore the brunt of the impact. 

Had he been sober, it might have done fuck-all; as it was, it sent him staggering back out of the kitchen. This time, his slap actually landed, so hard with the side of Lorna’s head that for the briefest of moments, dark stars bloomed behind her eyes. Some dim part of her registered the pain, but in that instant the white heat of her wrath kept it a distant irrelevance.

He hit her again, harder — hard enough to drive her backward, and nearly knock her off her feet. It only fed the hatred-laced fury that surged through her veins, through her mind with all the force and heat of magma. Mam might not have a spine, but Lorna bloody well did — oh, she’d pay for this later, but she didn’t care. Not now, when the resignation of her mother’s voice still rang in her ears. 

Fuck you and the horse you fucked in on, you walking skip fire. The thoughts were there, and mostly in order, but all that left her throat was a snarl that bordered on inhuman. Her ears would not make sense of whatever idiocy spewing from her da’s mouth, because it was as irrelevant as he was. Eyes sharpened by rage bent on his face with a malice so intense it felt as though it might rend her apart.

So fixated was she that she didn’t — couldn’t — dodge the next thing that connected. It wasn’t his hand, it was the heavy glass ashtray that sat atop the scratched and ancient kitchen table, and it struck her temple with such force that it blinded her for half a breath. Ash rained down through her hair, and with it the warm wetness of blood. That hurt, so much so that it lanced down her neck even as it exploded through her head.

She faltered one step, then two; her vision dimmed to a faded grey as consciousness fought and barely won. Her head throbbed in time with the thunder of her pulse, and it sent nausea churning in her stomach.

Her next uneven, agonized breath sent a blessed chill into her veins. It woke now, the thing behind her eyes, a leviathan dormant no more. Lorna herself never remembered what it did when it stirred, but it never forgot. Its malign, proto-awareness never forgot a thing.

Lorna — and everyone else — assumed the Blank was a form of mindless rage so intense there was no room for rationality, but that was not quite accurate. The Blank passed through the valley of wrath, into some strange serenity on the other side. Unlike Lorna, it was, in an odd way, at peace — at peace with what it meant to do, untroubled by things like guilt or hesitance. It saw the fear that rose in her father’s eyes, an echo of the terror he’d felt of his own green-eyed father. It wasn’t rational — not with how tiny his daughter was, how much weaker — but it was a relic of which he would likely never be rid.

The Blank could take no satisfaction in it, for the Blank took no satisfaction in anything. He froze, if only for an instant, and that was enough for it.

It had no weapon near to hand save the ashtray, but that would work. Her da was fast, but it was faster; the ashtray was honestly too big for her small hands, but no matter. It was only in them for a moment before the Blank hurled it at his face with the speed of a striking snake.

Had he been sober, he likely could have dodged, or at least fended it off. He was very far from sober, however, which meant the ashtray made full contact with his face. The Blank was not really much stronger than Lorna herself, but the thing was heavy enough to make up for the relative lack of force. Something went snap, but it was scarcely audible over his sudden bellow. 

There was blood — so much blood — but the Blank watched it with dispassion. It would dye the carpet, as it had several times and several places before now, and there it would stay, testament to Niall Donovan’s inability to learn.

It never spoke, the Blank, for it didn’t need to. Once upon a time it had witnessed its own reflection — its eyes were black, iris swallowed whole by pupils blown wide. That stare seemed to be enough, and indeed Lorna’s hapless father half-walked, half-stumbled out into the misty morning.

Someday, when the opportunity came, the Blank would kill him. Someday, when the time was right and the circumstances such that he would stand no chance of defending himself. Until then, it abided.

~

This one was somewhat grueling to write, but write it I did.