Because Darren was still gone, and he was still here.
The one person I depended on in times like this – on nights like this – had walked away without as much as a backwards glance.
I should know.
I watched him go.
Dad never hit Darren like he hit me.
He was the firstborn, the golden boy.
I was the spare.
Darren got open-palmed slaps.
I got closed-fist punches.
Darren was diplomatic.
He could talk our father around better than anyone else in the house, and bring him back to his senses – well, most of the time.
Glowering at his empty bottom bunk, untouched since his departure, I felt the familiar swell of bitterness wash over me, taking with it another piece of my childhood.
I had just started first year for Christ's sake, wouldn’t turn thirteen for another month, what hope had I against a man twice my size?
I didn’t, Darren knew that, and he still left me here defenseless.
I was twelve-years-old and a frontline soldier in the war that raged within my family home. The enemy I found myself up against was bigger and stronger, and my ally had abandoned me when I needed him most.
I’d known something was wrong that morning he walked me to school. I could feel it in my bones as I watched him walk away from me – as I called after him like a fucking child.
For the first few days after my older brother’s abrupt departure, I had waited with bated breath, praying that everything would somehow blow over and Darren would walk back through the front door.
The move was completely out of character for me.
I didn’t pray.
But the evening I came home from my first day of secondary school, and discovered he was gone, I found myself whispering oaths and promises to the man in the sky, offering up anything and everything I could think of, in exchange for the safe return of my brother.
My ally.
My prayers went unanswered, and I had lost more ground than I could afford to in the weeks that had since passed.
Disgusted with myself for hiding behind a locked door, I tried to reason with my pride, knowing deep down that going back out there tonight would be the equivalent of signing my own death warrant.
You barely made it out alive...
Loud sniffles filled my room just then, and I bit back a growl, letting my head smack against the bedroom door I was perched against, hurley in hand.
“Don’t listen to it,” I instructed my sibling – which one, I had no clue because the three that still resided in this shithole were currently hiding under my duvet. “Block him out.”
“It’s so scary, Joe,” Tadhg sniffled, appearing from beneath my quilt on the top bunk. “What if he’s hurting Mammy again?”
“He’s not,” I snapped, lying through my teeth to my six-year-old brother. “She’s grand. Now go to sleep.”
“I can’t,” he croaked out.
“You have to,” my ten-year-old sister whisper-hissed. “You know what will happen if he realizes that we’re awake.”
“Shut up, Shannon,” Tadhg wailed. “I’m scared…”
“I know you are, Tadhg,” she continued softly, appearing from beneath the covers with our three-year-old brother, Ollie, curled up on her lap. “That’s why we have to stay quiet.”
“The lot of ye need to go the fuck to sleep,” I ordered, taking on the protector role that I had unceremoniously been thrust into. “You’re grand. Mam’s grand. We’re all grand. Everything’s fucking grand.”
“But what if he is hurting her again?”
I had no doubt that he was, in fact, hurting her again.
Problem was, I couldn’t do shit about it.
God knows I’d tried.
The broken nose I was sporting from earlier tonight proved just how little I could do about the animal we called our father.
Thankfully, Tadhg and Shannon didn’t seem to understand the way in which our father was hurting our mother.
I, on the other hand, had been ten years old when I learned the meaning of the word rape.
It wasn't the first time I'd seen him force her down, nor was it the first time I’d heard the word tossed around in conversation, but it was the first time that I managed to connect the word to the action and make sense of what had been happening to my mother.
Make sense of what that animal had forced her to take into her unwilling body.
Repeatedly.
My intervention had been a futile one that ended in my mother – battered, bruised, bloodied and naked from the waist down on the kitchen floor – dismissing me from the room. Blaming me with her eyes for something I had no control over, but not before my father got a few good hits in on my prepubescent frame.
After I registered what rape meant, what it really and truly meant, my resolve to keep my mouth shut about what happened at home only strengthened further.
I knew Darren had been raped when we spent those six months of senior infants in foster care. I’d heard enough about it – had been made feel guilty enough about it – to know that it was bad enough to keep my mouth shut and keep our family’s private business to myself.
“Remember, Joey, remember that no matter how bad Dad gets, it will never be worse than that…”
“You think that’s bad? You don’t know how fucking lucky you have it…”
“You got ice-cream and cake with your foster family, I got ruined…”
“You have nothing to complain about, not compared to me. You had it easy, so stop feeling sorry for yourself…”
“Do you know what happens in those care homes? Do you want Tadhg to end up like me? Do you want that for Shannon? Keep your mouth shut. Nothing is bad enough in this house to merit going back there. Nothing…”
Once I saw it for myself, I knew there was no way I would ever put my siblings in a position where that could happen to them.
I would rather die first and that wasn’t me being dramatic.
I meant it.
For years after that, I didn’t sleep at night. I didn’t dare. The noises – the fucking sound of her – was burned into my memory, repeating over and over on a loop of mental destruction.
And even when it was quiet, I was on edge. The silence unsettled me almost as much as her screams.
Because her screams meant she was still breathing.
Her silence meant that she was dead.
I could remember lying in my room, not unsimilar to tonight, body rigid, as I strained to hear every squeak in the mattress, every disgusting grunt and groan coming from the closed door at the other end of the landing.
Panic would consume me then and nine times out of ten, I would spring out of bed and stand guard outside my sister's bedroom, terrified that she possessed something an animal like our father would eventually come looking for.
At least when we were all together under the same roof, I could protect her, I could protect them all, take some of the pain for them, and let them have some semblance of a childhood.
If I told, we would be put into care. And if we were put into care, there was a good chance we would be separated. And if we were separated, then I couldn’t protect them from the predators that Darren warned me were everywhere.
“You think it won’t happen to you, but it does. It happens all the time…”
“Not everyone lucks out like you and Shannon did when you were placed with the same foster family…”
“I can still feel him inside of my body, tearing me apart, ripping me open, and it makes me want to die…”
The very thought of something happening to Shannon, Ollie, or Tadhg made my skin crawl and my mouth clamp shut.
I could take the pressure.
I could take the blows.
I could handle his whiskey tantrums.
I could take it all if it meant that they didn’t have to.
Like a revered blood oath, I mentally reaffirmed the vow I had made to myself the night after Darren walked out, and that was to protect my brothers and sister with everything I had in me.
I would never allow them to be beaten like I had been, or be abused like our mother, or defiled like our brother.
With whatever I had inside of me, I would protect and defend them from harm.
They would never have to sit behind a barricaded bedroom door with a hurley in hand.