Catharine? The door knob turned.

There had been a birthday party for her sister. Suddenly she saw a table with bright coloured toys and she ran up to the table. Her movement caught his eye. He was talking to someone else’s father. He placed his hand on her head. She had Chinese hair. He liked its texture. He ran his hand through it, feeling the hair. She was four. From the other rooms, children came running. She watched, unable to move, as they took the toys. Eventually, he let go of her hair. She threw herself at the table. There was one present left, the small metal model of a tank. She gave it to her sister.

The door opened. Catharine?

Her father’s voice, the voice of a military man, a war hero, pleading.

“Catharine.”

His fingers in her hair, the fingers which had urged men into battle and squeezed triggers and fastened about throats until his own men had to hold him back panting. His hands, enormous like a god, descending from her head. Smelling of cigarettes, like her toys, her hair. His massive fingers wettened by his tongue. His breath coming louder, smelling of peppermint because he had brushed his teeth.

“Catharine.”

The stairs she would climb when her mother was away. The bed she occupied. The flesh she made swell in her mouth. The stickiness she felt on her face, could smell in her matted hair. The woollen balaclava that smothered her face so all she could see were the polished caps of his brogues. The father she loved at all other times because he was sweet and funny; whom she missed with an untranslatable longing when he died, having buried within herself everything that passed between them at the age of four and five and six and seven, until suddenly in her eighth year, when her mother took her daughters away to live in another house, his demands ceased.

Her lips trembled. She explained herself so badly. This happened before she could articulate. Her first language was this. This touch, this pain, this pain mixed with love, this intimate terror. “For thirty years I didn’t remember, I didn’t remember. It had faded to blank, gone underground, been thrust into the pit.” Until the moment in Lisbon when through the mask she had seen Wavery and screamed. Because what she saw was not Thomas, but another man and what she felt was herself under him, his hands over her mouth, his body pressing down on hers, the massive nose between his legs between her legs, reaching up to her throat, her father whom she loved, shushing her, saying nothing had happened, her father whom she hated as she would hate Wavery because they were the same, indissoluble, and there was nothing that could ever in her mind separate Wavery’s face from his. Whenever he touched her she would scream.

“I tried to deny it, Tom. I tried to tell myself this had never taken place. We were a good family. ‘No, it’s never happened,’ I’ve said over and over. It’s just me, inventing. But it’s not an invention. It happened, and each time I think of it I need a day to recover.”