Girl A

by Abigail Dean

I had long abandoned Father’s God, but still I closed my eyes, and prayed to older, wilder deities.

Sometimes he had returned home in the early morning, his mind crawling with hatred for the human race, and he had contemplated packing a bag and driving to the loneliest place he could think of – Ben Armine, perhaps, or Snowdonia – and spending the rest of his days as a hermit.

To them, the past was a sickness which my siblings still carried; you could catch it from a conversation.

Here was a new sister, who was just like me, and one day I would read to her.

in the way that children say that they’re frightened as an excuse for being cruel.

Here were the meek, ready to inherit the earth.

She was convincing, Delilah. If you spent long enough listening to her, you could appreciate how she had convinced herself.

‘We each believe what we want to believe,’

The poverty crept into our lives like ivy on a window, slow enough that you don’t notice it moving, and then, in no time, so dense that we couldn’t see outside.

You can endure an awful lot when you know that you’ll be fed at the end of it.

A village station on a Sunday evening: it was the loneliest place in the world.

When I looked at my siblings, frailer around the table, it seemed like they’d taken a little flesh from each of us, and made something new.

I had loved JP in all of the ways that it’s unwise to love another person. Dido on the pyre. Antony in Alexandria. Bitch in heat. Before I left for university, Mum sat on my bed and tried to explain some matters of the heart, one of her hands stroking the cover over my legs. She seemed confident that I would already know about the sex side of things. Love, she had decided, might be a different matter. I was hot beneath the bedding, and aware that I couldn’t kick it away without her thinking that I was embarrassed.

‘The key thing,’ she said, ‘is that you never lose your self-respect.’

Despite the showers and the CK One, I stank of somebody who might need saving, and men liked that best of all.

I sat on the train in the same seat – one hour and seventeen minutes – with butterflies battering around my belly. They had claws; they had teeth.

The past was one of the few foreign countries which neither of us wished to visit.

That was JP: walking away from me, with his forward-lean and a light pack, towards the skyline.

than anything I’d ever requested. His words spread under my skin and into the tissue, so that later, when he watched me undress, I was surprised that he couldn’t see the mark of them. That to him, I was unchanged.

How will you feel at the thought of them unpacking their lives in your empty rooms, with the plant stirring beneath them?

But my past wasn’t something which could be left behind us on a footpath, or in a cluttered house in a distant city. The facts of it lived inside me, and if he was going to take me with him, he would need to bear them, too.

In the winter, he plays video games and runs cross-country. He doesn’t think about money or God. He moves easily through the school corridors, and he walks into each classroom knowing exactly who he’s going to sit next to. There’s a five-tier bookcase in his room. I think of you on Sunday evenings, having dinner together, and some nights – I see it – you stay at that table when the meal’s over, talking about the cricket club, or the week ahead. I won’t search for him, any more. I already know.

It had been a few years since I had shared a bed, and there had been times when it felt like my whole body craved the comfort of it. To sleep, I would twist my limbs together, pretending each belonged to another person.

It was the kind of indulgence which I allowed myself: the only person to witness the humiliation of it was me.

An intimidation of men passed, bare-chested, and looked at me curiously.

‘Your father,’ Bill said. ‘Did you ever think about what he did to her?’ ‘You know,’ I said, ‘there was always so much else to think about.’

down between my legs, where there was always a mess, an embarrassment, my body unable to stop its attempts to be human.

There are things that your body doesn’t allow you to forget.

‘Oh, Lex,’ she said. ‘Do you really think I ever left this room?’

For me, that was the worst part of it. The last thing she could have known was that room.

That was the problem with coming home: you also had to come home to the self which resided there.

The body is notoriously efficient at forgetting pain, I said. Is it any great surprise – with a little encouragement – that the mind can do the same thing?

In the destitution of those early hospital days, you offered me a lie, and I staggered inside it and closed the door behind me. By the time you told me the truth, I was already living there. I had unpacked, and changed the locks.

Still, then: friendship eluded me. I studied the students at lunchtime and in our breaks, trying to understand this particular form of magic.