Broken (45 page)

‘I'll teach you to laugh at me, you fucking bitch!' Jake lunged across the table, knocking his mug flying, and grabbed Mattie by the hair. Then, by sheer force, he dragged her up out of her chair and across the table. Her own mug was pushed over the table and fell to the floor, where it smashed. She felt the spilt coffee and tea saturate her t-shirt as she slithered over the table and then she was pulled up so that her face was inches away from his.

‘You low-life bitch. How
dare
you talk to me like that.'

Mattie stared into his face, which was so suffused with fury that the veins in his forehead were visibly throbbing and the grooves either side of his mouth stood out like wounds themselves. Then she did
something that, if possible, stunned her even more than him. She gathered together every bit of phlegm she could muster and spat, full in his face.

Jake's eyes widened with shock and he pulled back, smacking her full across the face at the same time as he finally let go of her hair. Mattie flew sideways, tumbling straight off the table and onto the floor, where she felt a shard of pottery slice deeply into the palm of her left hand. She stared at the hand as the two edges of her flesh peeled back, just like a ripe peach, and then almost immediately the crimson blood welled up within the cut. And just as it started to spill over and drip down onto her bare legs, suddenly she was being lifted by the hair again.

This time her hands shot up automatically to scrabble frantically at the hand buried within her hair and blood splattered as she clawed. Then she saw, over Jake's shoulder, Max standing in the kitchen doorway. His face was so pale that he looked like a corpse, and his eyes were huge wells of disbelief. Enormous. Mattie opened her mouth to tell him to go, but nothing came out but a cry of pain.

‘Daddy! Daddy!
Stop
! You're killing her!' Max ran behind his father and then Mattie couldn't see him anymore, but she could feel him, in the movement of Jake's body as the boy pummelled at him.

Mattie's scalp felt like it was about to be torn loose, and her forehead was stretched so tightly she couldn't blink. She hit at the hand furiously, ferociously, and when that didn't have any effect on his grip, she pulled her uninjured hand back, made a fist, and shot it forward with all her might, with the strength of years, and aimed it straight for where she estimated his face to be.

She felt it connect with a blunt force that jarred her hand, and then suddenly she was released, falling back down to the floor. She landed hard, and looked up immediately to see Jake reel backwards, clutching his face. As he did, he cannoned into Max, who was still hammering at his father's back, and the boy was knocked flying, landing by the doorway on his bottom with his head hitting the wall behind with a loud, solid crack.

Jake whirled around immediately and was clearly aghast when he realised what had happened. He put a hand out to Max, who was
looking dazed, and then pulled it away again and turned to Mattie, staring at her with such hatred on his face that she drew back. His right eye was already starting to swell.

‘You fucking
bitch
. Call yourself a mother?' Jake, copying her earlier gesture, spat straight at her. ‘You're no mother. You're scum. And you'll pay for this.'

Mattie felt the spittle hit her warmly on one cheek and flinched, but didn't take her eyes off Jake. For a moment, she thought he was going to spit at her again but then he just turned and, without even glancing at Max, walked out. A second later, the front door slammed behind him.

‘Max? Are you all right?' Mattie wiped the spittle off her cheek as she crawled across the floor towards her son, who was still sitting in the same spot.

‘I think so.' Max looked at her and then his gaze dropped to the floor, and the trail of bloody handprints she had left behind. ‘You're bleeding.'

‘I'm okay.' Mattie knelt next to Max and stared into his eyes, trying to remember whether small or large pupils meant concussion. Anyway, his looked normal.

‘Mummy?' Courtney stood in the doorway, staring at her brother, her mother, the blood. Her bottom lip trembled and she started to cry.

Mattie, still kneeling, reached out her arms and Courtney, after a wary look at the bloody hand, climbed into them. She buried her head against her mother's shoulder and Mattie patted her head with her good hand. The other she rested by her leg, where it dribbled blood onto the floor in a puddle.
Needs to be washed. Scrubbed clean
. Mattie glanced at Max and smiled at him, wanting him to know how proud she was. He grinned back, but his face was still pale.

The kitchen looked like a disaster had just unfolded there, which was exactly what had happened. But, to Mattie, it was also a triumph. And, in stark contrast to her depression and lethargy of the past two days, she felt jubilant. Victorious. They'd fought back and won. He was gone. Then, just as her exultation started to warm her, she remembered the words that had preceded the violence and it vanished. In its place were the threats he had made against the children. And she realised that all she had won was a brief reprieve. If that.

 

S
he called the baby Riley, a good unisex name because she would never know whether it had been a boy or a girl. Nor would she ever know if her lifestyle had contributed to Riley's lack of survival. All she could do was give it some sort of identity and then bury it deep, where the tentacles of grief had to really stretch to entrap her. But the questions that surrounded the event could not be buried. Instead, they were added to all the others that, like a child's set of Lego bricks, had been building on each other throughout her marriage. Questions that she was sure would have answers if only she looked a little harder, deeper, longer. Questions like what made someone act that way? Where was
her
Jake when the other one came out? Why couldn't he do battle for her? And protect her? Why would someone deliberately sabotage something he said he held dear? What had she done to deserve it? What could she do to make it right?

There
had
to be answers. Somewhere. Or maybe the questions she was asking were simply the wrong ones. Maybe she just had to sit Jake down, one more time, and try to explain. Try to make him understand. Surely, if she phrased it right, explained herself better, picked the right moment – surely then he would understand
.

O
n Monday Mattie kept the children home again. With Max she had no choice, as he was suspended, but with Courtney she simply couldn't be bothered. She didn't want to have to get her ready, or drop her off, or talk to anyone. Instead, they could all stay home for the day and pretend that the outside world just didn't exist. Drink hot chocolate, watch television, talk about everything except what really mattered.

Her depression gradually returned after Jake left, but surprisingly it was not as severe as it had been. Perhaps because it couldn't be, not when the children were at home and their needs demanded priority over her own. She'd cleaned her hand with antiseptic and then bandaged it, even though she suspected it might well have needed stitches. She had lost quite a bit of hair, again, and despite piling on the foundation, displayed a large bruise that ran down one side of her face and puffed over the corner of her right eye so that it was semi-closed and quite sore. Max, fortunately, had no injuries. No visible injuries anyway.

During the morning, Mattie tried several times to muster the energy to organise a game or something with the children, but each time sheer weariness anchored her to the couch from where she stared rather blankly at the television. Nor did Max and Courtney complain of boredom or demand entertainment. Instead both lay across the beanbag watching cartoons, followed by the preschooler shows, without saying much at all.

Mattie would have dearly liked to block out her thoughts as easily as she was blocking out activity, but they kept filtering through. And chief amongst them was the knowledge that she had to make a choice – either stay here and go on like this, or return to Jake and make the best of it. There was no doubt that, all things considered, she'd been both happier and safer before she moved. Even with the persistence of the pattern and the occasional flare-ups, it had been less stressful, less injurious, less costly, and less physically and emotionally draining. And the predictability of the pattern meant that she could anticipate, more or less, what was going to occur and when. Not like now, when she felt bombarded and totally lacking any control over her situation.

As for Max and Courtney, when she'd been living at home she had been able to hide a great deal of the actual violence, so that although they probably intuited some of what was occurring, they were able to thrust it aside and continue on with it
shading
their lives but not actually colouring it. Now, within a few short weeks, they had become changed children. Alongside the intensification of Max's reserve was an aggression he had never displayed before, and Courtney's effervescent nature had become dimmed. Disturbingly, she'd even begun to copy Max's habit of not maintaining eye contact, so that one minute her eyes would be focused, and the next they would be flitting away nervously.

So it came down to a choice between two evils, with the vote going to whichever was the lesser. And the lesser, it seemed, was for Mattie to return home. It was a decision that filled her with no joy even though, deep down, she still thought she loved him. Or felt
something
for him – loyalty, constancy, affinity, a deep and irreplaceable sense of shared history. Not for the man who had planned and carried out this campaign of ruthless vengeance, but for the other man, the one she'd married. Or thought she'd married.

About mid-morning, Sharon, from Whimsicalities, came to drop off the box of ordered goods and pick up her payment. She exclaimed sympathetically over Mattie's face, and seemed to readily accept the story of an accidental fall. Mattie paid for Liz's order herself, although that left her with only coins in her purse, nothing in the bank, and very little in the cupboards either. This seemed to underline the choice she'd already
made, and lent it a righteousness that almost, but not quite, balanced out the claustrophobia.

But she dreaded telling Hannah of her decision, and Hilda, and, for that matter, the children. She already knew that they would all see her as giving up, whereas she was merely giving in. They wouldn't see that she had no real choice. They wouldn't believe the system was unable to protect her, or that she couldn't live with the likelihood of Jake acting on his threats. They would just see it as letting him get away with it. Rewarding his bad behaviour. And they wouldn't appreciate that every so often her weariness was being pierced by a mental image of Jake's face when he was told of her capitulation – and the smug triumph that she imagined would be written there was enough to cause her dormant anger to flare like acid indigestion, leaving behind only the sour taste of defeat.

Mattie had forgotten Hannah's promise to drop around, so when her sister arrived, shortly after Sharon left, she felt a brief surge of self-pitying irritation.
Why me? Can't I have one break? Just
one? It was another thing to cope with on a day when she felt particularly incapable of coping with anything. She watched, from the couch, as her sister strode confidently up to the front door. Hannah looked every inch the white-collar wife today, with a calf-length layered brown skirt and a baggy cream t-shirt with a wide, low-slung leather-weave belt sitting just below the waist. To complement the bohemian look of the outfit, she wore chunky gold bracelets and a chunky gold chain that was tied in a knot between her breasts.

Mattie took a deep breath and got up to open the door.

‘Hel-
lo
, how are you?' Hannah grinned happily and then her jaw dropped as she registered Mattie's bruised face. She stopped, just over the threshold, and stared.

‘Come into the kitchen,' said Mattie, glancing across at Max and Courtney, who were watching silently.

‘Jesus, Mattie! What happened?'

‘Come into the kitchen,' repeated Mattie, closing the door.

Hannah, following Mattie's gaze, took in the two children lying across the beanbag. She pulled herself together and smiled at them. ‘Hello, you two. Day off school, hey?'

While Hannah chatted brightly with her niece and nephew, Mattie went into the kitchen and put the kettle on, now accustomed to using only the fingertips of her injured hand to manage tasks. She got the plunger ready and was just filling it when Hannah came in. She went straight up to Mattie and took her by her face, putting her hand on the unbruised side and tilting it slightly to examine the extent of the damage.

‘Jesus Christ. That bastard.'

‘Mmm.'

‘And your hand! Look at your hand!'

‘Yep.'

‘When did this happen?'

‘Yesterday afternoon, when he returned the kids.'

‘Did you ring the police? You
have
to ring the police.'

‘What for?' Mattie poured hot water over Hannah's teabag. She felt annoyed that she even had to explain. ‘Then it'd just get worse. And worse. Besides, I'd have had to drag Max into it all, because he was here too.'

‘This is ridiculous.' Hannah thumped her handbag down onto the kitchen table and started rummaging through it. ‘You need to start acting against him, Mattie. But we'll talk about that later. For now, I'm going to take some shots of this.'

Mattie put the two mugs on the table and sat down. For a moment she thought of telling her sister how, at the height of the violence, she'd thought how pleased Hannah would be to have something to photograph. But she didn't, because it would just have been something else to explain. Besides, perhaps it wasn't really that funny.

‘Okay, hold still.' Hannah removed a small digital camera from her bag and leant forward with it in front of her face. It clicked once, twice, three times. Then she bobbed down and took another three photos of Mattie's bandaged hand.