Heller (26 page)

His face was a
mask and his body was still, except for his hands twisting
compulsively in his lap for the rest of the drive home. He didn’t
say another word, despite my agonised glances over at him. We
unpacked the car and walked up the stairs from the basement, Niq
rabbiting on the entire time. I asked Daniel in a low voice if he
still wanted to come over for a dinner chosen from one of my new
cookbooks.

“Maybe another
time,” he mumbled, not meeting my eyes.

Damn
, I
thought.
What have I done to him?

As we climbed
to the ground floor, the door to the security section flung open
and Heller and Clive emerged. Heller’s eyes immediately narrowed as
he took in Daniel’s empty expression, Niq’s uncontained
over-excitement and my scuffed appearance. Well, you can’t roll
around in a carpark having a tussle with a few men without
suffering some sartorial inelegance. Not to mention receiving some
new injuries and having all your old injuries begin complaining
again.

“What
happened?” he demanded.

I heaved a
huge sigh, my shoulders slumping. In my vain stupidity I had
honestly believed that I’d take on those guys and win hands down
and that everyone would think it was a bit of a lark, and
congratulate me on being such a tough chick. I was The Capsicum
Kid, after all! I’d been an irresponsible idiot and I knew I had no
choice but to confess to my further capsicum spray shenanigans. I
waved Daniel and Niq upstairs and followed Heller and Clive into
the security section where, being as light-hearted and humorous as
I could and in my most charming manner, I told them what had
happened. When I finished, I smiled at them sweetly and sheepishly
asked for yet another canister of the spray. But far from laughing
good-naturedly at my high jinks, they both remained stony-faced and
distinctly unamused with my actions. Heller grew increasingly angry
with me as he listened.

“Matilda, you
cannot go around spraying people whenever you feel like it.
Capsicum spray is a weapon and has to be treated seriously. It’s
also very expensive. It’s not to be wasted on pranks,” Heller
reprimanded in a loud and livid voice, his accent prominent in his
fury. Every man in the section was holding his breath, listening
intently though pretending not to be. I squirmed under his
accusatory blue glare and the very public bollocking. He could at
least have taken me into Clive’s office to tear strips off me, not
do it in front of everyone.

“I didn’t
spray them for fun, you know,” I protested. “They were insulting us
and threatening us.”

His jaw
tightened as he spoke. “You should have done what Daniel suggested
and driven away without engaging with them. You escalated matters
when you should have left the scene.”

“But they were
. . .”

“
Don’t you
talk back to me!
” he yelled, shooting ice daggers at me with
his eyes and looming over me intimidatingly with his body. “
I
don’t care what they were doing!
” I flinched backwards,
quavering in my shoes, tears pricking my eyes, afraid he was going
to slap me around like he’d done to Lily. I’d never been shouted at
like that before in my entire life. “This is about
you
and
your
judgement and how you handle situations such as this.
And it’s also a matter of your safety, which is important to me.
What in God’s name were you thinking?”

He paced up
and down the room angrily, kicking a chair that was in his way,
sending it flying across the room. Several men had to jump aside to
avoid a painful collision with it. When he returned to me, he
stopped and glared down at me again. “Did you think that you could
take on the whole bunch of them yourself? You’re not a superhero,
you know. And did you stop to think that you had Niq with you? He’s
only a child. In
my
trust! I’m going to seriously reconsider
letting you take him anywhere if you’re going to drag him into such
unnecessarily dangerous situations.”

“I’m so sorry,
Heller. I won’t do it again, I promise,” I said, my voice trembling
with genuine contrition, beseeching him with my eyes not to follow
through with that warning. He had threatened me with the one thing
I didn’t want to happen – that I couldn’t take Niq out anymore. I
would hate it if my over-inflated confidence meant that Niq was
shut off from the real world.

He stared down
at me fiercely and almost unwillingly, his face softened and his
anger dissipated.

“Okay then. As
long as it doesn’t happen again,” he said, much more mildly.

I knew the men
present thought I’d been let off the hook lightly, barely a smack
on the wrist. Their faces gave them away. Heller even went to the
cabinet to give me a replacement canister himself, handing it to me
with a wry comment about saving it for emergencies next time.

“Heller’s
little pet,” I heard one of the men say scornfully to another in a
carelessly loud voice.

“His little
fuck-buddy is what I’ve heard, half his luck,” replied the other in
a disparaging tone. They shared a dirty little snicker as they
walked out.

Well, that was
a harsh slap on the face for me. I hadn’t realised that was what
the men thought about me and I could see I had an uphill struggle
to gain any respect around this place.

Later that
night I couldn’t stop thinking about the stricken expression on
Daniel’s face and how quiet he had been on the ride back to the
Warehouse. I decided that I had to apologise to him and left my
flat to knock on his door. Niq opened.

“Hey sweetie,”
I said. “Is Daniel around?”

“Nah, I think
he’s gone up to the roof-top. He said he needed some fresh air. I
wanted to go with him ‘cause I thought he looked a bit sad or
something. But he got angry and told me to stay here.”

“Oh,” I
replied, noticing the hurt in his eyes. “I think I’ll go and find
him. Maybe I’ll have more luck. You okay by yourself, Niq?”

“Course I am!”
he said scornfully and closed the door on me.

It was dark
and cool on the roof-top, lit only by moonlight. It took a while
for my eyes to adjust. I could make out the shape of Daniel sitting
on one of the sun lounges. As I approached I noticed the
quarter-empty bottle of whiskey and shot glass on the small table
next to him. He was staring ahead at nothing, all his thoughts
turned in on himself. His face was bleak and desolate in the
half-light, his shoulders hunched protectively, hugging
himself.

I took the
seat next to him and poured myself a shot into the glass. He turned
his head to look at me.

“Be careful,”
he said bitterly. “You might get some freak germs drinking out of
my glass.”

I slowly and
deliberately raised the glass to my lips and swallowed the burning
liquid, grimacing in the darkness. I hate the brown spirits.

“You might get
some from me,” I said offhandedly and poured a double, placing it
carefully between us. We shared the drink and sat in silence for a
while, punctuated only by the occasional sniff from him, hinting at
his current emotional turmoil. I waited patiently until he was
ready to speak.

“They were
right,” he finally said, his tone brimming with self-hatred. “I am
a freak! An ugly, repulsive freak. I should hide away forever.” His
head slumped down, his arms dangling between his legs.

I stood up,
stepped over and kneeled in front of him, taking hold of his hands,
trying to look into his eyes. They were full of tears, the
moonlight glistening off his wet cheeks.

“Daniel,
listen carefully to me. You are
not
a freak. You are a
beautiful person in every way. I think you’re beautiful. I think
every part of you is beautiful,” I said urgently, trying to get him
to look at me.

He angrily
wrenched his hands from mine and turned them over, savagely pushing
up his sleeves. He thrust his wrists in my face.

“Are these
beautiful
to you? Is this something someone
beautiful
would do?” he spat out angrily, revealing the jagged scar tissue
that ran across each wrist.

I took his
wrists in my hands and tenderly rubbed my thumbs across the
scars.

“Oh, Daniel.
Yes, these are beautiful to me,” I replied softly. “They tell a
story about a sensitive and wonderful person who was nearly
destroyed by whatever terrible things happened to him, but who was
strong enough to pick himself up afterwards and keep going.”

I gently
pressed my lips to each scar in turn. We stayed like that for a
moment, his breathing ragged and uneven. He took his hands away,
stood up suddenly and pulled off his shirt. I stood up as well.

“How about
these? Are these beautiful to you?”

“Oh my God,” I
gasped involuntarily, clamping my hand to my mouth to silence
myself as he exposed his torso. It was covered in hundreds and
hundreds of thin scars, spread over his pale skin, so many that
they criss-crossed each other. I lightly ran my hands across his
chest, feeling the raised humps of his ruined skin.

“Yes,” I
breathed, “these are so beautiful to me, because they’re part of
you.” I leaned in to kiss each collarbone.

He shuddered
and gave a small groan. I gently turned him around and ran my hands
over the equally disfigured skin on his back.

He didn’t
do this to himself
, I thought. What in God’s name had he been
through? I couldn’t even begin to imagine. I softly kissed each
shoulder blade.

He slowly
turned around again, leaning forward towards me so that his
forehead touched mine.

“And,” he
whispered, “what about this?” His fingers grazed his facial
scar.

“Yes, that is
beautiful to me too,” I whispered in response and with a trail of
small kisses, travelled down the scar from the corner of his eye to
the corner of his mouth. When I reached his mouth, he turned his
head and our lips met hesitantly. I could taste the alcohol on his
breath. We slid our arms around each other and drew together as
closely as possible, kissing each other tenderly.

That
infinitely sad and sweet kiss ended and we hugged each other.

He started to
cry, huge heaving sobs racking his body. I held him tightly,
murmuring what I hoped were soothing remarks, stroking him, until I
felt his body relaxing and his breathing becoming even. My heart
was aching with tenderness for him. At that moment, I experienced a
depth of feeling for him that surprised and frightened me. I
realised that I loved this vulnerable and fragile man in a way I
had never loved anybody before. I wanted to protect him from his
demons. I would deal with anyone who hurt him and then understood
how that feeling had been responsible for my stupid actions earlier
that day. And for the first time in my life, I knew what
unconditional love meant. I loved Daniel.

Reluctantly, I
pulled away and looked at him. He was exhausted and emotionally
drained. I led him back to a sun chair and sat next to him, holding
his hand. I ran my other hand gently over his chest, over his
hundreds of scars.

“Who did this
to you, sweetie?”

He took a deep
breath. “My mother’s sadistic fuck of a boyfriend. It took a long
time. Day after day. Every night, when my mother had passed out in
her own vomit, which was every night, he would cut me. With a
Stanley knife. After he had done other things.”

“Other
things?”

“Yes. Other
things. Sex things. These slices were his way of counting how many
sex things he did to me. I usually got two or three fresh ones each
night.”

“How old were
you?”

He shrugged.
“Eight, maybe nine. He wasn’t the first to do those things though.
There were others, for as long as I could remember. But he was the
first to mark me.”

“Your
mother?”

He breathed in
deeply. “She was a drunken junkie who should never have been
allowed to have any children! She let men rape me in exchange for
drug money. What kind of a mother would do that to her only child?
I hope she rots in hell!” His hatred was vehement and so unlike his
normal placid personality.

“What did you
do?” I asked, blinking away my hot sympathetic tears.

“I ran away
from home when I was eleven. After that sick monster did this,”
touching his face. “I refused to . . . participate . . . in a group
activity he had arranged with six other monsters. He became angry.
The others held me down while he used one of those old-fashioned
bottle-openers to teach me a lesson. They cheered him on until I
was . . . subdued . . . and then they took turns with me. Over and
over again, so roughly, until I couldn’t stand. I ran away that
night.” He gave a sharp bark of laughter that held no amusement at
all. “Well, I guess I should say more accurately that I crawled
away that night. I wasn’t able to run for a while.”

I slipped my
arms around him, and wondered whether Daniel was the gang-rape
victim that Heller had spoken about in the car with Lily. He laid
his head on my shoulder and I stroked his hair. “No wonder you had
to look away when I had my stitches. Where did you go? Eleven is so
young. Too young.”

“The street.
Where else? I scrounged, stole, sold myself. Whatever it took to
survive. When I fourteen, I picked up a very rough man. He left me
badly injured, crying and bleeding in a dirty alley and I decided
that there was no point in continuing my life. So I bought some
rum, drank half of it, smashed the bottle, slashed my wrists with
the broken glass and lay down to die. I wanted to die, was looking
forward to the peace of death. No more beatings, no more rapes, no
more disappointments. No hunger, no pain, no shame. No more
loneliness. No more life without any love or friends. No more
predators. No more wishing I’d never been born.” He was silent for
a long moment, rubbing his eyes. “Blissful nothing. I knew nobody
would care. Just one less street kid to worry about, right?”