The Wildcard

Chapter Eighteen

I knew he was right.

Absently flicking through some marketing concepts for the NME Fundraiser on my company issue Mac, my mind was running his words back through my mind over and over.

I knew he was right, but he didn’t know my mother. She had a habit of pulling me into pieces and twisting everything – making me doubt and question everything I thought I knew.

The day I told her, for the first time, about Alex – after years of hiding my bruises, caging up my shame and fear – I sat down with her at the breakfast table while she smoked her Silk Cut cigarettes, sipping on the strong black coffee that constituted her entire meal. I watched with a detached glare as my brother cheerfully poured milk over his cereal, as he chatted about school, and his friends – I listened to her excited responses – eyes alight in the way that only a proud parent can be. I watched as he hastily threw his plates in the sink, kissing her sunken porcelain cheek, and hurried out of the kitchen door after squeezing my shoulder, laying a kiss to my hair as though he was no more than a protective, loving brother to my sullen teenage self.

I’d worried and panicked over telling her – worried that she’d feel like she’d failed me – panicked over what she would do to my brother. I’d worked up the courage to tell her everything for weeks. What I didn’t expect was the reaction I got – a reaction in which she never even flinched away from the news – never even cast her eyes up towards mine to run them over my face.

She docked out the cigarette in a crystal ashtray, smoke slowly easing from between her pursed, agitated lips as she smoothed out imaginary wrinkles in the pristine table cloth.

“Are there no lengths that you won’t go to?” she sounded bored of me – her voice a cold drawl, “You’ve always been so terribly jealous of your brother, but this is really something else.”

And she’d got to her feet without another word, picking up her dishes and strolling out of the room without a backward glance.

And left me sitting at the table, so confused and isolated that I actually wondered for a moment if maybe I was just fucking deluded, and it was all in my overactive imagination.

Until the sleeve of my school uniform fell down my skinny arm as I’d reached across the empty table for the last of the orange juice, and my eyes latched onto the angry purple bruises that were forming manacles around my wrists – in the shape of his hands, where he’d held them to my stomach to stop me from fighting – not that I ever tried anymore.

I laid my head on my forearms. I really needed to be getting my head into this project, I couldn’t keep procrastinating with this stuff, I was still the new girl – why did she have to be fucking everything up for me already?

I’d heard her voice and I was instantly back there – she’d never been affectionate with me, not like she had been with Alex – our relationship had always been strained. But that was the moment I realised that it went beyond simple complacency – she had to absolutely hate me for the way she treated me that morning.

I had to call Ryan.

Pulling my iPhone out of my bag, I swiped over to his name. I’d had the phone for almost four months now, and he was still the only name on my recent calls list. I tried not to dwell on how pathetic that was.