Though the lambs are faded, the same flannelette pink sheets adorn the bed I’d called mine. The same posters are on my walls. Not the ones of boys in bands that I’d wanted, because he didn’t let me have those. Instead, I had My Little Pony pictures and stuffed animals strewn around the room, right up until the time I was seventeen. It’s as though he hasn’t touched this room since, but has instead made a shrine out of it. Just waiting for the day I would return and occupy it again.
The horror of it becomes too much and I scream again, choking out a gruesome wounded animal sound as he slaps his hand over my mouth and shoves me up against the brick wall. My head smacks off the cinder block and my mind swims, the room sways, and the last thing I see is the wicked red scar trailing his face. The scar I gave him when I left him bleeding out in this very room.
He’d been a strung-out junkie then too, and he’d been careless. It’s funny then that it took me getting clean to become just as careless.
This time when I wake I’m strapped to the chair. Pain sears through me and my father kneels at my feet, between my legs. I’m naked and he’s holding a scalpel to my tattoo. Blood trickles down from the wound he’s creating. I scream around the gag in my mouth, and tears stream down my cheeks.
“You know, if you hadn’t covered this up I wouldn’t have to do this all over again. You’re mine, Ivy. You belong to me.”
I whimper and shake my head, attempting to squeeze my legs together. My thighs slip on the slick chair beneath me and I jolt forward. The scalpel sinks deeper and all the breath is squeezed from my lungs.
“Damn it. Look what you made me do,” he says, and picks up a wet washcloth that’s already soaked with blood. He pries my legs apart and cleans the blood from off of my thighs, the chair, and my lower abdomen. It hurts like a bitch, and I let out another gasp of pain. “Now, open your legs for Daddy and let me finish this. Afterward, if you’re a good girl, I may let you have ice cream.”
I close my eyes and roar my frustration behind my gag, but my father just stares up at me as if I’m three years old and throwing a temper tantrum over not being allowed a new toy. I never threw tantrums. I was always too afraid of the punishment.
He shoves my legs wider and bows his head, blowing on my burning flesh. I flinch and attempt to move my hips further away, but he reaches up and slaps my breasts. The sting is tempered slightly by the bloody handprint left in its place.
“I do love what you’ve done to your body though, Ivy. It really is a fucking masterpiece now that you’re a grown woman. I love it all, but this …” He trails off, tracing his fingers over the tattoo on my lower abdomen. It’s a skull, cracked open at the crown, and all around it are roses shot through with arrows. It spans from one hipbone to the other and then down to my pelvic mound, covering the scars that he made years ago—or it did. He edges his index finger across the ruined image, playing with the freshly tortured flesh. I sob. He’s not finished. Not by a long shot, but he sets down the scalpel and admires his handy work.
“Shh, Daddy’s here,” he says, and he buries his face in my groin.
When it’s complete, he wets the washcloth in a bowl sitting nearby. Blood taints the water, creating swirling patterns, like the licking flames from a bonfire warring with the first few drops of rain before a downpour.
My skin is on fire. My body is on fire, and I’m spent from both pain and fear.
He unties my hands and I shoot up from the chair, adrenaline bursting through my bloodstream. I lash out at him, but I make it three steps on shaking legs before my head swims and I hit the floor, hard. He stoops over and lifts me, as though I weigh nothing, and then he carries me to the bed and lays me down. My father ties the rope around my neck as I struggle, yanking it so tight that he cuts off my air supply, and my efforts turn from fighting him to fighting for breath, clawing at the rope with slick bloodied hands that do nothing.
“When you can behave, I’ll remove the rope,” he snaps, and when I still he loosens it a fraction. Not enough to get out of, but enough so that I can breathe again, and then the thing that occurs to me—as he ties it off in several knots and then leaves the room without another word—is that I could have ended all of this. Right then and there. I could have fought harder, and he might have choked the life right out of me. I would have been free.
But I didn’t. My instincts kicked in. I fought to survive.
And I hate myself for it.
I think of Tank, and I know that he’d be proud of me. But for what? For staying, surviving? Chained up down here like a dog?
I wonder what Tank will do when he finds the gory signs of our struggle. When he finds that Butch was another casualty of my father’s determination to get me back. I wonder if he will come looking for me, or if he’ll simply decide that he’s better off. That last thought twists my stomach. Will he look for me? Will he avenge me? I don’t know. But I know without a doubt that I won’t be walking out that door again.
When I was little, my father worked as a courier, though from the muffled snippets of conversation I’d overheard through the floorboards above my head, I’d suspected for a long time that he’d gone from delivering packages to a much more expensive and precious form of cargo.
The first time I’d escaped I was fourteen. He’d been called away on a job and left me alone for two days. It had taken me a good twelve hours to bust the lock and flee this room. I’d stuffed my face with as much food as I could find in the house and then I’d climbed out the window of my old bedroom upstairs, because the rooms downstairs had security screens and the front and back doors were dead bolted and locked with a key I didn’t have. Lochie had found me and hid me in his tree house.
I should have run. I should have stolen someone’s purse and taken a bus to anywhere. But I was scared and alone, and Lochie had seemed to think that no one would find me there.
Lochie was wrong.
He found me.
And he’d dragged me home and locked me in the basement again, this time ripping down the boards and the soundproofing foam covering the roller door of what used to be our garage and walling it up from floor to roof with grey cinderblocks. He’d replaced the door I’d broken with a new one, and added more locks, sealing me in my prison. Ensuring I couldn’t escape again.
Lochie had been found in his tree house days later, surrounded by the contents of his stomach, an empty box of paracetamol lying beside him. He’d died from a drug overdose. My father had told me this. He’d found delight in my tears as he told me how he’d waited until Lochie’s parents weren’t home, and he’d climbed into that tree house, finding the boy with a set of binoculars pressed tight to his face as he looked across the street at my empty room. My father had laughed when he’d told me how he’d held a knife to Lochie’s throat, handed my friend—the only friend I’d ever had—the pills and forced him to eat them all. He’d watched as Lochie had foamed at the mouth, and his body had convulsed, and eventually his brain had switched off. That was the price of getting too close to me.
The last time I’d escaped I was just two months’ shy of my eighteenth birthday. This time, I had stolen someone’s wallet. And I had hopped on a bus to Sydney. I’d turned tricks for money, I’d lived on the streets, and then I’d found Gwen. She’d made living under a bridge bearable. Gwen and heroin were good friends, and she’d been kind enough to reintroduce me.
A couple of months after that, I’d met Tank. Even then, he’d been a gentleman. Sure, he’d had me suck him off, and he’d fucked me over the back of his bike a handful of times, but he was the first guy to bring me food and pay me well for my services. You’d think he was handing me the keys to a fucking Lamborghini what with the way that Gwen had raved about him, and I’d given her shit about her crush on him, but inside I’d been dreaming of the fairy tale right alongside her. It wasn’t so much Tank that I’d fantasised about—it was what he represented, what the cut he wore represented. Protection. If I could get him to see a future with me, more than just having me suck him off once a week, I’d be safe from my father. I’d be protected not just by Tank, but by his club too.