of blood inside my mouth, felt a numbness building up around my lips. I touched the blood with a fingertip and looked at David in horror.
He stared down at me, his big shoulders hunched up around his ears, a vein throbbing on the side of his head. It was incredible how quickly this quiet, spiritual man could turn into a raging monster. ‘You have no right to talk about these things,’ he growled. ‘You know nothing about anything. You are an infant.’
‘But he’s my father. And ever since you came you’ve just treated him like shit!’
His hand came back, this time across the other side of my face. I had always known this was going to happen. I had known from the moment I first saw him that David Thomsen would strike me if I confronted him. And here it was.
‘You ruined everything,’ I said in a nothing-to-lose-now rush of emotion. ‘You think you’re so powerful and so important but you’re not! You’re just a bully! You came into my home and you bullied everyone into being what you wanted us to be. And then you made my mum pregnant and now she’s sad and you don’t care, you don’t care at all. Because all you care about is yourself!’
This time he hit me hard enough to throw me across the floor.
‘Get up!’ he yelled. ‘Get up, and go to your room. You are in isolation for a week.’
‘You’re going to lock me up?’ I said. ‘For talking to you? For telling you how I feel?’
‘No,’ he snarled. ‘I am locking you up because I cannot bear to look at you. Because you disgust me. Now, you can either walk or I can drag you. What’s it to be?’
I got to my feet and I ran. But I didn’t run to the stairs, I ran to the front door. I turned the handle and I pulled and I was ready, ready to fly, ready to flag down a stranger and say, God help us, we’re trapped in a house with a megalomaniac. God help us please! But the door was locked.
How had I not known this? I tugged and tugged and then turned to him and said, ‘You’ve locked us in!’
‘No,’ he said. ‘The door is locked. That is not the same thing at all. Now, shall we?’
I stamped up the back stairs to the attic floor, David following behind.
I heard the sound of the lock on my bedroom door turning.
I wailed and I cried like a terrible pathetic overgrown baby.
I heard Phin shouting at me through his bedroom wall: ‘Shut up! Just shut up!’
I screamed for my mother but she didn’t come.
Nobody came.
That night my face ached from where David had hit me and my stomach growled and I couldn’t sleep and lay awake all night staring at the clouds passing over the moon, watching the dark shapes of birds in the treetops, listening to the house creaking and gasping.
I went a little mad, I think, over the course of the week that followed. I scratched marks into my walls with my fingernails until my nailbeds bled. I banged my head against the floor. I made animal noises. I saw things that weren’t there. I think David’s idea was that I would emerge from my imprisonment feeling subdued and ready to start afresh. But this was not the case.
When the door was finally unlocked a week later and I was once more allowed to roam around the house, I did not feel subdued. I felt monstrously consumed with righteous ire. I was going to finish David off for good.
There was something else in the air when I finally got my freedom back, a huge secret wafting about in the atmosphere, carried along by the dust motes and the sun rays, stuck in the strands of the spider webs in the high corners of the rooms.
As I joined everyone at the breakfast table that first morning out of isolation I asked Phin, ‘What’s going on? Why is everyone acting so weird?’
He shrugged and said, ‘Isn’t that how everyone always acts round here?’
I said, ‘No. Weirder than usual. Like there’s something going on.’
Phin was already ill by now, it was clear to me. His skin, once so smooth and flawless, looked grey and patchy. His hair flopped greasily to one side. And he smelled a little off, a little sour.
I mentioned it to Birdie. ‘Phin seems ill,’ I said.
She replied prissily, ‘Phin is absolutely fine. He just needs more exercise.’