Mason
Even though my jaw worked in preparation for me to say it, nothing came out. Bile coated my mouth, and I swallowed it down quickly with a mouthful of whisky. It was warming to the chill that had settled in my bones, and I drew what I could from its comfort. “That day, I was a coward. I didn’t fight back. I couldn’t.” Forcing back the shame, I closed my eyes. “I was so tired of fighting, Ava. Battling between the right and the wrong, my son and my daughter, you and your demons. All I have ever done, since my early teens, is fight one bastard or another. I just didn’t have the strength to do it any more. I wanted George to take the choice away for me.”
Keeping my gaze on the fire, I allowed the dance of the flames to take me back to that day. As though each flare of red and yellow was a conduit to the past, emotions flooded me, and horror bled behind my eyes and into my heart. It was so vivid that I felt the quake of terror liquify my bones.
“For the first time in my life, I was scared.”
Ava didn’t answer, nor did she touch me. She remained silent but completely focussed on me. Each of her breaths tickled my ears, the slow sequence of her lungs working mocking the short, shallow toil of my own. I felt the ripple of goosebumps skip along her skin and the steady throb of her heart beating alongside the quickness of my own. I could smell her expectancy in the air, the sheen of perspiration hugging her cold skin and the hunger for truth in the pit of her belly.
“His eyes never left mine as he watched them rape me. For four hours they tore me apart. My face, my body. My arse. I know I should have felt agonised, Ava, tortured, but all I could feel was numb. Throughout the whole ordeal, my body felt nothing. Even when they each took a blade to my skin.” Involuntarily, my fingers stroked along the ridge of the scar that ran the length of my face. “I know I bled, a lot, yet I felt like my veins were swollen to bursting.”
A slight stutter in Ava’s heartbeat. A fresh layer of sweat on her brow.
“I made a promise to myself. And I kept it. I never wavered from allowing him to see the pain he bestowed on me. I never shut my eyes once. I know he needed to see it, see how he destroyed me.”
A faint flutter in the regularity of her breathing. The rustle of her toes curling inside her socks.
“At one point I remember wishing he would take his knife and plunge it through both of my eyes, so I was blind to his smile. And, yet, a part of me was glad that he smiled. That, finally, I gave him reason to smile.”
The subtle sound of her heavy swallow. The scent of copper when her teeth ruptured her bottom lip.
“It was cowardice that allowed them to take me so violently. It was cowardice that kept my stare locked on George like he could give me a breath of courage. It was cowardice that, in the end, made me cry.”
The smell of salt as tears ran down her face. The sound of each one slipping off her chin and plopping on to her shirt. The echo of her heart breaking within the comfort of her chest.
For the first time, she spoke. “Maybe it wasn’t cowardice. Perhaps it was love.”
“Love,” I echoed as though that single syllable was foreign, the first time my ears had heard such a word. “Is love supposed to hurt this much?”
Without missing a beat, she answered softly. “Yes.” I turned to look at her. She wasn’t smiling, then she wasn’t sad either. “What’s the point of love if it doesn’t hurt? It would be so easy, otherwise. And maybe a little unworthy. The heart can withstand so much, the soul even more so. As people, we always think that if it’s easy, then it’s meant to be. But what happens to the strength in us if we no longer have anything to fight for? If we didn’t feel sadness, then how could we know happiness? If we didn’t ache with want, then how could we appreciate the enjoyment of experiencing? If we didn’t fight for it, then would love still be as powerful?”
“Love and hate,” I mused the words over. “Perhaps it was a little of both.”
“How do you mean?”
Refilling our glasses, I settled back down. My mind was a chaos of questions, and I wasn’t sure how to interpret the clash of emotions and knowledge.
“Maybe it was both that made him say stop.”
Ava didn’t speak, but I sensed the slight bafflement surround her, so I once again turned to her.
“At the end, he told them to stop. Just as I was about to give in.”
“Give in to what?”
I stared at her as though she was stupid, and I couldn’t keep the small bubble of laughter from bursting free. “To death.”
She gulped, and her skin blanched. Yet, she lowered her eyes and nodded. “You wanted to die?”
“Yes.”
Reaching out, I held her jaw and forced her eyes back to mine. “But only because I wanted to give him one final gift. It was the only thing I had left. My life.” I blinked, my head full of the image of George’s confusion. “I granted it to him, I told him to take it. I begged him to snatch it for his own. But he denied me. I wanted to give him his peace, Ava. So very much. Yet, he couldn’t take it. Maybe he was the coward after all.”
“Or perhaps it was love,” she repeated.
“I’d like to think he loved me. But, how could he?”
Ava didn’t have the answer for that one, so instead, she asked a question I hadn’t ever considered. “If you could go back to that day, do you think you could have changed the outcome if you had fought?”
I couldn’t answer that either. “I don’t know.”
“How many men raped you?” She was so blunt, so unguarded with her query that my reply slid easily off my tongue for the first time.
“Four.”
I caught the way her body flinched ever so slightly.
Nodding, she inhaled at length. “So, as hard as you are, you really think you could have taken on four men, five including George, without any form of weapon?”
“Maybe, maybe not. It’s something we’ll never know now.”
“Oh?” she said firmly but quietly. “I think you do know, Mason. It’s admitting it that you’re struggling with. You seem to think you’re impenetrable. But you’re just a human being. You feel, think and hurt like every other person.”
“Have you any idea what it’s like, Ava?”
She glanced towards the fire, then took a long drink and swallowed before facing me. “No. Although I’ve been abused and raped, I know there’s this stigma attached to male rape.”
Suddenly I was so bloody angry. No matter what I said, Ava never listened. No one did, come to that. Everything I said to her she seemed to jostle all the words around in her head and rearrange them into a different sentence.
“Not the rape!” I wanted to grab her and shake her until she understood. “You think this is because I was raped?”
Her eyes widened, and she reared back, stunned by my outburst. “I don’t understand.”
“I didn’t cry because they took me without my consent! I cried because they took me with his consent! My skin doesn’t crawl with the shame of what those men did, it crawls because George commanded my shame! I don’t relive the feeling of them inside me! It’s only George’s laughter that I hear over and over in my dreams, only George’s cold smirk that I see in the dark, and only George’s hatred of me that has turned my soul bitter!”
“Mason.”
It was as though someone had cracked open the padlock and it all burst free, the rage, the turbulence of emotion. All the hatred that stuck to my bones like tar. The memories, each one as sickening as the reality.
‘You say you hold Mum’s heart, that you protect it and keep it safe. But who holds yours? Eh? If my mother loves you, shouldn’t she be the one that saves you now?’
Every single fibre of me recoiled and surged at the same time, my heart exploded as my mind shrank away from the revulsion. Tears rained down my face as disgrace parched my veins of blood.
‘Where is she now, huh, Dad? She’s not going to save you. She never will. You’re on your own…’
She wanted me to let it free, yet I knew she couldn’t handle the truth when I beat her down with it. I’d warned her though, so many times. But, as usual, she never fucking listened. “Why weren’t you there?”
Her head shook as she stared in shock. “I…”
“Why didn’t you save me, Ava? Why? WHY?”
Words became weapons as I grabbed her and assaulted her with every bit of my misery. My little warrior held firm as I brought down my fury upon her and shook her, demanding an answer.
“You took his life before I had the chance to make it right. You took that from me, and nothing can give me the peace I need. Nothing!”
“I’m sorry. I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” she recited over and over as if those two words were the official soundtrack to our story. “I’m sorry, Mason. I’m so, so sorry!”
“I want to go back, Ava. So much! I want to hold him in my arms and tell him I forgive him.”
She nodded so wildly that her tears flicked from her face on to mine, her distress becoming mine as I tasted the sour tang of her sorrow on my lips.
“Because I do forgive him. I am the one to blame, not him, not my little boy. Not my little Georgie…”
Grief has a funny way of sneaking up on you when you least expect it. I hadn’t anticipated it, nor did I want it. It hurt. It hurt so fucking much. It felt like my heart was ripping in two, invisible hands sinking inside my chest and clawing at me. I was choking on my own despair, and my lungs squealed as I forced out the words that haunted me.
“He didn’t hear it, Ava. He didn’t hear it.”
The desolation on her face was as disturbing as the memories of that day. Yet I couldn’t exorcise her guilt either. “He didn’t hear what?”
The pain inside me was unreal. Throughout the shit of my life, I had never experienced anything as agonising as lost hope. No matter what I did from now on, I could never make it right. For the first time in my life, I had no control over my own emotions, and they bled from me in a tidal wave so fierce that I felt my soul shift inside me.
“He didn’t hear.” It was all I could say. “He didn’t hear me, Ava. I needed him to hear it because now he won’t ever hear it again.”
“Mason! What? What didn’t he hear?”
Again, as though she was a mere fool, I shook my head angrily. “That I loved him. He didn’t hear me tell him. He was laughing so loudly, and I tried to shout. I tried to yell it, but it came out so quiet, on the wisp of my broken breath. Why didn’t he hear me, Ava? Why?”
Stumbling, clumsily, she clambered onto my lap and took my face in the palms of her hands. Her skin was cool against the flare of my wet cheeks, and the fire behind her eyes spread heat into the ice that cocooned my soul.
“He heard. And he knew. Since he was born, he was never a crier. He was always such a quiet baby. You said I cry too much, but if George had been able to cry, release it all through tears, then maybe the noises in his head wouldn’t have been so loud.”
“I never told him, you know. I wanted to, but I just couldn’t.”
She shook her head, once more struggling to understand my feverish garbling.
“That he was made from our own spite,” I said bluntly so she could grasp what I was saying.
Her brow furrowed, and her hands dropped from my face. “What?”
I scoffed. She didn’t remember. Then again, Ava was selfish. Maybe that was the trouble, maybe she didn’t want to see it.
“Don’t act like you don’t understand, Ava.”
“But I don’t.”
My teeth trembled as I locked her gaze, refusing her anywhere to run when I said the words. “We both know when the twins were conceived you were fucking Kade. At first, I refused to see it. Not my Ava. My Ava wouldn’t be so cruel. But we both know that you were. The sex between us became a game. Don’t you see that? It was furious and selfish. Angry and nasty and greedy. And it was that concoction of hatred and frenzy in the both of us that created our babies.”
Horror had seeped into her eyes, and very slowly she climbed from my lap, stumbling backwards. “You’re wrong.”
I couldn’t help but laugh at her. “There you go again, my little warrior. Hiding in the dark depths of denial. You know I’m right. Our children were spawned from our rage. Is there any wonder they’re both as messed up as we are?”
She looked like she was going to puke. Her skin glowed with an unearthly paleness, and she clamped her hand over her mouth, her head still shaking from left to right. “No.”
And once again, my little warrior ran. Ran from me and ran from the truth.