‘Please.’
‘There’s not much more to tell,’ I said. I reached for her back again, and watched the gentle massaging motions of my fingers so that I could avoid her gaze. ‘Mum fell pregnant with me when she was sixteen. His name was Mike. He wasn’t around much when I was young, and Mum had no real skills and couldn’t get a job. We lived in one of the worst public housing towers. And Mike was a bastard. That’s about it.’
‘Please, Leo. If it’s too hard to talk about, you don’t have to tell me but I’d really like to know more – if you can.’
I frowned as I looked back to her face. She’d rolled up onto her elbow and she was staring at me. I recognised reverence in her eyes, and it terrified me. Who was the man Molly thought she saw when she looked at me? Did I really deserve such respect? It felt like these moments with her were my reward – the culmination of decades of hard work building a new life for myself. At the same time it was almost too much – like when Brad and I heard that we’d won the Pulitzer and we’d almost convinced each other it was a clerical mistake.
I felt my breathing coming faster, and anxiety rising in my chest. She knew all of my other secrets and she was still here. I wanted to tell her, I didn’t want to talk about it – but I also wanted her to know me. It was the same battle I always faced whenever it was time for new intimacy with her. And just like all of the other times, I waited a while and as the minutes passed, I started to want her to know me more than I needed to hide.
‘He used to beat Mum. I hated him – I still hate him. He’d go away without telling us if he was coming back, and he’d leave us with nothing – no money at all. There were months on end when she’d be begging from welfare agencies for food packages, or we’d be relying on her family to keep us going. Then he’d waltz in as if nothing had happened. Looking back on it, I think he probably had another family somewhere.’
Molly shuffled closer to me and rested her face against my chest. She draped one arm over my torso, and then tightened it. Automatically I held her closer as the memories buffeted me. I would always remember the shame of not being able to protect Mum. I didn’t dwell on it because I would not be a victim of those days, but they shaped me. Some of the shaping was good – because it made me strong. The rest of it I could only hope I’d pushed down deep enough that it couldn’t burst to the surface too often.
‘Did he hurt you too, Leo?’ she whispered.
I didn’t say a word; I didn’t need to. She was close enough to feel the way that I had tensed. I could still hear the sounds sometimes; the creak of the door and the stumbling of his feet and the realisation that he’d drank all our money again. He would be angry to have been cut off at the pub, and he’d be looking for someone to punish. I’d hear Mum trying to defend me, and the tenor of her voice would rise and rise as she grew more desperate, but regardless, Mike would still come closer to my room. I was a magnet to his rage – and while I never really understood why, I was a teenager before it had even occurred to me that I didn’t actually deserve it.
Sometimes Mum would sob at the sickening sound of a fist striking flesh. Other times, I’d hear that same ghastly sound – the crunch, and then the wailing – but then my door would fly open and it would be my turn to cower. He always seemed so immense and his anger and the violence of his rages seemed unstoppable.
Other kids I knew watched superheroes on television, but I felt that even they would be powerless against the vastness of Mike’s power: I was helpless, and I was hopeless.
‘I was always in trouble in those days,’ I said stiffly. ‘I hung around the kids from the building – we’d break into a few houses, steal a few cars – and the older I got, the more I convinced myself that I was just like him. I thought that was who I was.’
‘What changed?’
‘I had a growth spurt after I started high school. Mike did his disappearing act one time and when he came back, I suddenly realised I was big enough to stand up to him. This was years before Andrew’s anti-truancy programme – in those days he just ran martial arts classes at the gym, and I’d heard a bit about him from kids at school. I couldn’t afford the fees of course, and Andrew wouldn’t let me come for free unless I stopped skipping school and came for tutoring twice a week, so I did that too, and I quickly learned that I wasn’t the dumb shit I’d always assumed.
‘The harder I studied, the more classes he let me join and then I realised that I actually did know how to work hard. I trained like a maniac and I studied like a scholar and everything just turned around. The next time Mike tried to hit Mum, I got in the middle of it. I broke his jaw and we haven’t seen him since.’