Her vomit sprays over his neck and denim shirtfront. If only she’d had better aim… The rest oozes down the sides of her sad face, and the bilious chunks splatter and plop into the blood that has soaked and matted her once black hair.
?Dónde está mi mami? She tries to wriggle free and vainly twists her head searching. The startling pain again flares across her neck. His white-knuckled fist, an inch from her eyes, intimidates her even more than the macabre contortion of his scowl and the belligerent purple veins pulsing on his arm that make his wolf tattoo snarl. She can’t think of… down there, but instinct, maybe disgust, sinks her teeth into his arm, just below his fucking wolf tattoo, and she clamps her eyes and her mouth till her tongue recoils from the repulsive taste of blood. His blood. She hopes it is his.
It is his turn to scream.
Good.
His spare hand grabs again for the broken bottle, “I’ll fix you,” he shrieks in her ear.
Bad.
She dares to open her eyes as he pulls himself out of her. He is towering over her, bristling, his penis still partially erect and flailing from side to side and his arm is soaring, brandishing the bottle neck, like a ghoul with a burning torch in a horror movie. His eyes are ablaze and his howl shrieks like a zombie’s. One hand pushes her legs apart and his other arm winds back and round in an underarm so swift and sure that she faints in shock before he hits his target, a small mercy, so she never hears him yell, “You’ll never forget your first fuck now.”
He holds his penis fondly in his hand, the blood streaming from his wrist mingling with hers. He starts stroking. When he is finished and zipped up, he walks toward the door. “Tell your fuckin’ whore mother,” he spits out the corner of his mouth, “she’ll have to get her booze from some other stupid cunt from now on.”
A frayed grey bath towel is limp over the arm of the sofa where Maria Rosa’s head had been resting just minutes earlier. He snatches it up and presses down on the blood on his arm. “Fuck you,” he scowls at her and swipes the rag across his face and his shirt, but it just smears her blood and chuck into a fetid brown sludge. He tears the stinking shirt off and heaves it at Isabel. “Clean yourself up,” he orders her, “You disgust me.”
His foot has almost kicked the door open when he remembers his beers. He swivels back to the gory butcher’s block and leans down to get them careful to avoid any of the red drips. Isabel’s eyes stutter open and, almost instinctively, she pries the bloody shard out of her body, unleashing a venom that impels her to slam it down onto his bare shoulder, just above the wolf tattoo. But the arcing glass discharges a green glimmer of light that alerts the beast and he snatches her wrist just as it goes limp. Consciousness escapes her.
After the swearing and smashing is long stopped—Isabel has no idea how long—her mother steals back inside to discover her daughter almost catatonic, shivering and heaving without sound on the floor. A blood-drenched cushion is gripped between her legs and her once-white shirt is soaking red from the gash across her neck. Screwed up pages of sopping school paper are strewn all around her on the floor, the writing illegible.
ED shouldered the burden of Isabel’s story under a canopy of heavy silence. Like many, he’d heard the words “fifteen” and “assault” and “scar” before, a combination whose hideousness was tempered by its vagueness and so able to be touched on, though in hushed tones, in polite company and prime-time documentaries. He was one of the very few who’d also heard the word “rape” too, but apart from the original hospital and George’s late wife, Annette, Isabel had never till now divulged to anyone how degenerate and degrading it had been.
In the deafening quiet, Ed stared at the wall opposite them, at the oil painting of golden haystacks, an original whose fanatical and intense swirls were now almost jumping at him. He touched his ear. How had she dealt with this… this horror? At fifteen, no less?
He pondered his own experiences; he’d averted his eyes from other fifteen-year-olds… some even younger… a lifetime of combat had taught him that nothing was unthinkable. He too had suppressed horrors and this was hardly the moment for them to arise again. Unlike Isabel’s, his were in times of war. Raw as it still was, his first wife’s adulterous and fatal car smash didn’t remotely qualify, though the ache was with him daily. He tried to keep his own nightmarish images at bay, for a moment even closing his eyes as if to shut them out, Isabel probably thinking it was her story alone he was stressing over.