Weeping Lily - 30. Chapter 30

The first thing Jayden became aware of was pain. He almost cried out but for some reason it was really important that he didn’t, so he swallowed the cries and struggled to extend his senses to the room around him. Then he heard the voices:

“It’s taking too long. I think he’s really hurt. Oh God, what if we’ve killed him?” The voice was high, filled with panic and bordering on hysteria.

“Calm down Anya. He’s hurt, but not badly. Don’t forget he’s full of drugs. He’s had enough today to knock out a horse. I have no idea how he was still walking and talking when we threw him down here. Don’t worry, we haven’t killed him yet?”

“Yet? What do you mean by ‘yet’?”

“Anya, were you even in the same room when we were planning this? Did you honestly think there was the remotest chance we could let him walk out of here alive?”

“No but... I mean... Fuck Kelly, you’re talking about murdering our brother. I never thought... I didn’t think...”

The sound of the slap rang out in the otherwise silent room.

“Don’t think,” snapped Kelly. “Pull yourself together. You’re committed now. We can’t back out. Can you imagine what would happen if we let him go? We’d end up in prison. We have to go on with the plan. Just remember what he did. Focus on what it was like for us being torn away from our home, our parents and living through that hell; the separation; those years in foster homes. We went through all that because of him. It was all because of him; all his fault.”

“Was it?” Anya said. She sounded uncertain now.

“What? Don’t waver now Anya; don’t lose sight of what we’re here for.”

“I... I’m not,” Anya sniffed. “I’m trying not to but...”

“But what?” Kelly snapped.

“When we were planning, it was like a game, like it wasn’t real. It helped get me through. It was... it wasn’t real. We built him up into some kind of monster; at least I did. He was evil; he was selfish; he wasn’t like us. But he is like us. He’s just... he’s just a boy; just a boy... like he’s still a child. His eyes are...”

“Anya, stop it! He’s not a child. He’s all grown up and he has everything... after the hell he put us through. He took everything away from us, everything; and now he has it all. It’s not fair. It’s not fair that the monster who destroyed us should be so happy, so –“

“He’s not happy. You said so yourself. He’s not happy and he never has been. He’s as screwed up as we are and it’s not fair...”

“Fair?” Kelly hissed. “None of this was fucking fair. Do you think that Mam was thinking how fair it was when she was dying? Is Dad thinking it’s fair that he’s in that hell hole?”

“But he did wrong Kelly,” she said quietly, so quietly that Jayden barely heard her over his pounding heart and laboured breath. Breathing hurt, it really hurt and for a time he hadn’t been able to work out why. Then, as his consciousness cleared he realised it was because of the burning pain in his side.

At about this point he started putting all the pieces together and panic swamped him. It was an overwhelming, suffocating panic that was as familiar as it was debilitating and it had all started here. He struggled to breathe against the fear bred by the sudden realisation that he was immobilised and that he was there, in that room, in that... room.

He felt the familiar bite of the leather straps around his wrists, upper arms, waist, thighs and ankles, holding him upright and tight against the wall in a cross shape. The panic increased when he opened his eyes to darkness and realised that part of the reason it was hard to breathe was the hood over his head.

Suddenly he was fourteen again; naked, bound and helpless; waiting in darkness for the touch of his father’s hands – sometimes to inflict pain and sometimes pleasure. Shame flooded him at the memory that he had responded to both and he could hear his father’s laugh echoing in his head

Familiar feelings of anger, fear, hatred and shame took possession of him and he began to weep silently, his first instinct to remain silent, still exerting a powerful influence on him.

The voices filtered through to him again.

“But what if someone finds him? What if someone comes?”

“Who?” Kelly demanded. “Who is going to come? No one knows he’s here, I made sure of that. I dragged the stupid bike into a bush and smashed it to bits. I filed off the ID number and got rid of every little thing they could have used to identify it. Even if they do find it there is absolutely nothing to connect it to Jayden or to us. No one is going to know he was anywhere near that place so no one is going to know I picked him up there.

“That fool Cal thinks he drove him away and will be too busy beating himself up about that to spare a thought about where he might be and even if he does he has no idea Jayden has been in contact with me. He hates me and thinks that Jayden does too. It would never occur to him for one minute that Jayden was with me, not in a million years.”

“Luc knows.”

Kelly snorted. “That fool; he’s always been besotted with me. He’s like a little lap dog: he won’t say anything, why would he? Relax Anya, no one is coming. No one knows.”

“But what if someone saw?”

“Anya calm down; no one saw anything.” She paused. “Well only that fool neighbour of mine.”

“Mrs Ratchett?”

“Yeah. If it wasn’t for the fact that Lyndon seems to like her I would have told her to fuck off a long time ago.”

“Did she see you with Jayden?” She sounded panicky again.

“Calm down Anya. Yes, she saw me when I was getting him into the car. He was well out of it by then and it wasn’t easy.”

“Did you tell her you were coming here?” Anya was even more panicky now.

“I don’t know. I can’t remember. It doesn’t matter because even if they do talk to her, which they won’t because no one will ever get that far, she doesn’t know who Jayden is and she probably doesn’t know where you live.”

“But what if Lyndon told her your brother was coming to stay? And what if you mentioned...?”

“Anya stop it. There is no WAY anyone is going to know he’s here. Can we just get on with it now so we can all get away and then it won’t be an issue.”

“I... I don’t know...”

“Anya, listen to me. Just keep in mind all the shit we have been through; the abuse, the pain, the fear – it was all because of him and now we are going to get revenge. This is for us... for Mam and Dad. Remember that!”

“I...”

“Just keep out of the way, Anya. If you can’t help just don’t get in my way.”

“Kelly, he’s a real person. He’s not just some remote figure we barely remember and is easy to hate. He’s flesh and blood and yeah, I’m angry with him. I’m crazy angry, but I’m not sure any more that it’s his fault. Seeing him like this... He was only fourteen.”

Another slap rang out. “Don’t you ever say that! Don’t you doubt for one moment that he deserved it. He was a monster – he is a monster. You were too young to see it but I did. I saw the way he looked at Dad. He goaded him. He made him do it and he all but admitted that he was lusting after Cal, even then. Filthy fag! Do you have any idea how sick it’s made me feel listening to him whine on about that disgusting freak? They sleep together Anya... they fuck each other! Do you wonder that Dad wanted to punish him? Do you see why we must?”

Kelly’s voice was rising and even to Jayden, lost as he was in panic and pain, it was chilling. Jayden heard Anya squeak and gasp. “Yes, yes I see! I see Kelly.”

“Good.”

By now the voices were fading into the distance as Jayden began to sink beneath the intolerable weight of pain from his side and, for some reason, his arm and the suffocating fear that was sweeping aside his resolve to silence and began to whimper and moan.

For a moment there was silence and then Jayden became aware of someone standing close to him. A soft hand touched his chest, running over the slashes which stung from the sweat that was glistening over all his exposed skin. He trembled and twitched under the hand, moaning louder, more from what was happening in his head than reality.

In his mind it wasn’t Kelly who was stroking his skin. The hand was bigger, harder and he knew what it was going to do next. He was breathing so hard that he sucked the thin cloth of the hood into his mouth with every struggling breath, which only added to the panic and sense of cloying suffocation.

Kelly’s hand stroked down over his chest and the tight muscles on his belly then followed the line of the scar down to the waistband of his trousers. Wait! He was wearing trousers. ‘He’ never let him wear trousers. He was always naked, always entirely exposed to...

Confusion bled into the terror and tugged at the ragged edges of his fragile sanity. This wasn’t right. This wasn't like before. This was different. Gradually his sobbing breath began to ease and with it the gnawing pain in his side.

Kelly pressed her body against him and whispered in his ear.

“Welcome back sweetheart. I did tell you not to resist, didn’t I? I did warn you but you were always too stubborn for your own good. Are you feeling comfortable? Do you need anything? Drugs for the pain perhaps? Maybe later.

“You really have hurt yourself haven’t you? You’re so clumsy... first the bike and then the steps.” She reached up and ran her hand firmly over his forearm and he gasped, his body jerking as a spear of pain shot down his arm. That in turn, given that Kelly was pressing against him, caused another, bigger stab of pain deep into his side which almost caused him to pass out again.

Kelly laughed at his cry. “I’m sorry brother dear, did I hurt you? Oh dear.” She stepped back a pace and ran her hand over his side where the shocking pain had changed to a dull burning ache. He groaned but there was something in the pain that felt different, somehow – clean.

Something had been happening inside Jayden, something strange. The panic that had gripped him when he first realised what was happening had driven him to the edge of insanity. For a short time the only thing he could see, hear, touch and feel was his father and he began to relive yet again the atrocities he had suffered under those large, rough hands and had re enacted over and over ever since.

And then little things had started to filter through – like the fact that he wasn’t naked, and the small softness of the hands and smell of perfume. And then there were the voices. Suddenly there had been a sharp and almost painful twist in is head as past and present merged and a shocking realisation hit him.

He was in the same place and the same position that had haunted his dream for so long but it was all different, everything was different. There was no father, no fear of the incredible torment he had put him through and which he was certain Kelly had no capacity to duplicate.

There was no psychological torture; the constant stream of words; vile, filthy words that were hammered into him along with whatever his father had in his hands that day. His father had gone. He would never be here again.

The one thing he had been most afraid of for all of his adult life was happening to him again but it was different. It wasn’t so – big. He wasn’t a child any more – angry with the world for allowing it to happen, with his mother for the same reason, his father for doing it and himself for not fighting. He had never fought, because no matter how much he spat defiance beforehand, as soon as he was there in that room, in that position, he became a screaming helpless child; begging, sobbing, soiling himself with fear and no matter how much it hurt, degraded or terrified him, he could not help but capitulate with the demands to respond.

As he got older and his father’s motive had become less and less about punishing Jayden and more and more about pleasuring himself, the torture had become less brutal and more inventive. He had been helpless to prevent his body from reacting in exactly the way his father wanted it to; commanded it to. And it had always been to the unremitting accompaniment of pain and the constant stream of words... he was sick, he was worthless, he was ugly, he was a freak and most of all he was different and didn’t belong. It had become so much a part of his sexual development that it was the only way he had ever been able to achieve release.

But he was wrong: his father was wrong. He wasn’t sick and he wasn’t worthless and he wasn’t ugly and he wasn’t a freak. Jayden knew this beyond the slightest doubt; he knew it in his heart, the part of it that belonged to Cal... and that was where he belonged.

Click, click... the pieces fell into place. He was not a child any more and there was no way Kelly could make him feel like that. He sensed more and more that, as vile as it was, this torment was more innocent than anything previous had been... than what his father had done to him and what he had done to himself. This was about vengeance, which he could understand and there was nothing sexual about her intent.

Click, click, click. One by one the understandings and realisations dropped into his stunned mind and he was so astonished he almost forgot the pain. It didn’t matter what happened next. Kelly could hurt him as much as she liked, kill him if she wanted to, which he was fairly sure she did, but there was nothing, absolutely nothing, she could do to him that was as bad as what had already been done to him here before.

There was nothing that could make him feel so dirty and sick, nothing that could hurt so much on the inside and outside at the same time. There was nothing anyone could do that was that bad and the one person who could make it that bad was gone and would never come again.

Neither, he realised with a shock, would the terrified child whom he could almost feel there next to him in the darkness, cowering and sobbing. He was surprised when he looked down and found himself staring into the same blue eyes that had looked out at him from the face in the mirror. He’d known that face wasn’t his – not the him he was, but the him he had been.

Jayden wondered briefly how he had somehow split into two and then realised he had always been that way but now, for some reason, he could see it. He stared at the child for a long time and the child stared fearfully back. Eventually he smiled and held out his hand. The boy smiled uncertainly and took it, standing up.

For a while they looked at each other and then Jayden pulled the child into his arms and held him protectively against his chest, hugging him close and letting him weep healing tears onto his shoulder.

After a time he became aware of a growing light and, looking up, he saw an angel walking towards him. That’s when he realised he was hallucinating. As the angel grew closer he saw it had Cal’s face and he was smiling, reaching for him. Jayden reached out his hands, surprised that the child seemed to have vanished. Cal opened his mouth but the voice that came out didn’t seem to be his and when their fingertips touched the light that surrounded him burst into an unbearable glare.

Crying out Jayden tried to cover his eyes with his hands but his hands were restrained again. Blinking, he realised that the glare was the harsh light from the basement room. He blinked again, taking a deep breath of air, freed from the cloying folds of the silk hood. His lungs burned.

Looking around he had a pang of fear. It was all there, just as it had been, just as it had always been. The white walls, the shelves of - implements, the lathe, the power tools. He swallowed hard, shaking violently. Then he realised that there was one thing that wasn’t there and suddenly, almost magically the shaking stopped.

“You disappoint me Kelly,” he said softly, forcing the pain out of his voice. This time... this time he was not going to be the child cowering in the corner.

Kelly took a step back and stared at him, wide eyed and shocked. “What? What did you say?”

“You disappoint me.”

“Disappoint you? How?”

“If you were going to do this then I would have thought you would have done it properly.”

“Properly? Oh don’t worry, I’m going to do it properly alright.” She regained her equilibrium and picked up a scalpel from the table. She advanced on him again turning the blade so that it glinted in the bright light.

Jayden laughed. “You have no idea Kelly, no idea at all, what went on in this room. You haven’t got a clue what he did to me and there is no way that anything you do to me here today could be even half as bad. You don’t have the imagination and you don’t have the motivation, not like he did.

He paused to ride a wave of pain and then laughed again as Kelly lay the scalpel against his throat. He met her eyes steadily.

“Trust me Kelly, you really don’t have a clue what happened in here. You think you do but you’re wrong. Do you know how many times he left me here unconscious and bleeding, not knowing or caring if I’d be alive when he got back?

“He had – he had a friend, a doctor. He came to dinner sometimes, I forget his name. See that table over there?” He nodded over to a long wooden bench at the side of the room which contained an array of tools. Automatically Kelly’s eyes moved to it. “More than once they had me laid out on that like a slab of meat, screaming like a bitch while he patched me up. If you think you can make me hurt more than surgery without an anaesthetic then go ahead and try.”

Kelly’s eyes returned to him and they were wide and shocked. Then they hardened. “Liar,” she spat. “That never happened. Liar!”

“Why would I lie? Go and check it out. Check out the bloodstains ingrained in the wood. There’s no way he would have been able to get them out. Look down at your feet Kelly. What do you think made those brown patches: damp?”

Kelly looked down automatically. The hand which held the knife was trembling uncontrollably.

“Can you imagine what it was like Kelly? To be left here in the dark all alone; sick and hurting so badly I didn’t know if I was going to die... and believe me sometimes that’s what I prayed for. It was always dark; he made sure to turn off the lights; and I would hallucinate twisted creatures in the darkness, but none of them were as twisted as him.”

“Shut up,” she screamed. Jayden still laughed.

“Even when I was hurt so badly he needed to call his friend, he still left me hanging in the darkness. I don’t know how many times I woke up thinking I was dying; wishing I was, begging for it; with the smell of – “

“I said SHUT UP!” Kelly screamed, slamming her fist into his bad side. Despite his prior resolve, he screamed but couldn’t draw breath for a second one. Struggling to fill his lungs and fight off the encroaching darkness he didn’t hear Anya yell.

“For fuck sake Kelly, he’s telling the truth. You know he’s telling the truth. We can’t do this. Goddamit Kelly, we can't do this.”

Neither did he see her grab Kelly’s arm, trying to drag her away.

By this time Kelly was beyond reason. She knew that Jayden was telling the truth. He was right, she hadn’t known exactly what was going on but she’d suspected. She’d seen the tall man, who’d sat at the dinner table with his small cheery wife laughing at her father’s jokes, come and go at strange hours without a word and a face that was set and white. She’d seen the dark looks that passed between him and her father sometimes and noted that Jayden never looked him in the eyes, neither did he so much as glance at Jayden.

Sometimes she’d even heard the screams and had chosen to hide her head under the pillow and pretend they weren’t happening. And she had been asked to scrub the table too, after the visits. Nothing had ever been said and she had never asked what had made the stains or queried the strange smell that reminded her of the butchers in town. She’d just done her very best to obliterate them both with enough bleach and elbow grease to make her hands bleed.

The memory slammed into her mind along with a vivid picture of all the succeeding events which she had been resolutely suppressing for so long. Suddenly a whole flood of memories she had tried to block out rushed into her mind and she wanted to scream. It was unbearable.

She could understand what Jayden had gone through, of course she could. She’d seen so much more than she had ever admitted to anyone, even herself. She understood but she hated him, nevertheless. She hated him for being the cause of her pain; she hated him for being there, in her face, reminding her of it for all these years, grinning at her from TV screens, magazines and billboards, having the life that should have been hers. Most of all she hated him for being a constant reminder of her own weakness. She hadn’t stopped it; she hadn’t spoken up; she hadn’t told the truth even when she could have, when the opportunity had been presented to her. These were flaws in her character she wasn't proud of and every time she saw his face she felt guilt, and here he was doing it again and she hated him. She HATED him.

Shaking free from Anya she hit him again but he was barely conscious and the impact was lost. Anya was screaming at her to stop and suddenly she was angry with her too and she spun round to slap her again – only this time; this time in her anger; her madness; this time she had forgotten that she was still holding the scalpel and instead of her hand meeting Anya’s cheek the scalpel slashed diagonally downwards across her shoulder and throat.

Kelly didn’t hear the loud crash above, followed by more thuds and crashes and then the sound of splintering wood.