She fights every morning to keep those memories away, when she looks in the mirror, lipstick ready in hand, that last final touch before leaving for work. Her drawn countenance, its expression wary, as if any minute her face behind its mask might disintegrate: every morning, such a bad moment to be pushed away.

And now, finally, someone is asking, a person who is willing to listen, someone she can tell who will not invalidate her; how final is finality?

A low-slung bungalow with running wooden verandahs surrounded by a huge garden filled with lush green trees and shadows; on the back verandah a chair, Burma teak and Rangoon rattan, a cane lounger to sprawl in during the afternoon’s somnolence, a male cousin around twenty-two, she may be eight or nine. When she is thirteen, the cousin is suddenly stopped from coming home to meet any of the sisters. All that time: she on his lap, his finger from his lap gently guiding itself through her panties as he read her stories from her favourite storybooks.

Another low-slung bungalow, another huge garden around it filled with the glistening shadows of the night and a great silence which emanates on such nights; inside the house she furnishes her own silences, transfixed on a cane easychair in her bedroom, the door closed, on the other side, another closed door. On the other side of that door, the momentary gleam of an eyeball from the motionless figure on one of the four beds, three of them tense in their impersonation of sleep, on the bed tucked away in a corner small but womanly breasts cringing under a crumpled t-shirt as her knees are wide open, prised to open wide as any grave, playtime for a father.

She cannot get off her chair, she twists all her rings on her pink-tipped manicured fingers, she moans, ‘Do something, oh please do something.’

Do what?

She is fiddling with her fingers, appearing to knot them with each other, then to unknot them as they knot themselves again. A low moan, ‘Stop it, please, I beg of you, make it stop.’

Genevieve, it has stopped, it is okay, you are safe now; breathe gently, Genevieve.

She asks, ‘Can I undo that?’

No.

She asks again, a child, ‘Can you make it go away please?’

She can do that herself.

Eagerly, that child again, ‘I can make it go away?’

Yes, but not in the way she thinks. There is no law in this world which can protect adults from their childhood abusers; it is a crime for which there is no punishment.

There is no triumph in anyone’s voice as this is being said.

Her eyes, an adult’s now, cloud over. Her voice is as soft as sand running through an hourglass.

‘Shit,’ she says.

Delicately, elegantly, with gravel now in the sand, ‘Shit.’

It must not be like this, to know and try so hard not to hurt.

It should not be like this, to know and hurt so hard.