‘Just one more won’t hurt, darling. Go on, it’s Christmas. You can always stay the night. The bed’s made up.’ Ted hovered with the bottle.

‘Arthur can have the spare room.’ That was my mother speaking, making the assumption that Amber wouldn’t want me in her bed.

‘We can all go walking on Boxing Day, like last year,’ Ted suggested.

I didn’t speak. No one noticed my brittle façade, my clenched jaw. I let the actors play their parts. My time would come.

Amber seemed inordinately happy. It took a while for the penny to drop that her good humour had absolutely nothing to do with us. It had nothing to do with Christmas either. For a brief time I’d forgotten what she’d been getting up to.

I played along and pretended to myself and to my mother that Amber and I were a normal couple embarking on a bright future ahead.

19

Arthur

The room was very dark, lit only by candles placed somewhere out of my line of vision. I’d been in my den for at least two hours hunched over some boys’ magazines which Connor had sneakily passed my way earlier in the day. I’d seen my mother naked before but there was nothing sexual or untoward about her body when I recalled her bony outline. I heard a faint slap, followed by a yelp. Then there was a harder slap, followed by my mother’s persistent pleas to tone it down. Tone it down seemed too polite. I held away the pictures of voluptuous exotic women and instead peered through my peephole.

It was Terry Flynn, Connor’s father, beating my mother with a belt. She was tied to the bedpost and even in the dim light I could make out dark stains on my mother’s upper thighs; black bruises. As the screams grew from playful pleading to outright terror, I feared for her life. I wet myself, stuffing some old material in my mouth to stop from crying out and to halt the sobs from escaping.

Later on, I became confused by the normality of supper. Mother had cooked my favourite cottage pie with peas and carrots; bright happy healthy vegetables. She had walked into the back door apparently, which explained the black eye. That was her story.

We pretended nothing was amiss and because my mother didn’t show any outward signs of distress following on from her violent session with Mr Flynn, I started to consider that this might be acceptable behaviour. However, from that day on I went to Connor’s after school rather than hide in the vile darkness of my secret hidey-hole.