garden furniture, a wrought-iron chair. I sit next to him, my legs outstretched alongside his.
‘Are you feeling better?’ I say to Fin, and he murmurs yes, and I slip my hand in his. He’s very cold, but he squeezes it. He breathes deep lungfuls of the freezing air.
After a while, his breathing is steady and his complexion is a healthy colour again.
I lean my head on his shoulder. He puts an arm round me, his hand holding my waist.
‘Are you ready to tell me whatever it is you’ve not told me?’ I say.
I don’t know where these words have come from – they travel from my subconscious, out my mouth, entirely bypassing my conscious decision to utter them.
‘Yes,’ Fin says, without hesitation.
42
The lipstick-pink hydrangeas I remember from the summers of our youth are still there, their heads now petals of rusted, brittle slate-brown in the depths of winter. There are lights on timers in the flower beds, blinking on in the falling dusk.
Fin starts speaking.
‘The first time my dad beat me I was six. Maybe seven. I didn’t know what I’d done wrong. I remember the sheer confusion, above all. More than the pain, or the shock of the violence. Knowing that people thought I was a clever boy, but for some reason I couldn’t figure out what had led to me being walloped like that. Like a maths problem where I just couldn’t add up. Think, Finlay. After that first time, it carried on once every month or so, until I was eleven, or twelve, I think. When I got old enough to fight back, or to tell people – people who could’ve caused real trouble, like teachers. Before then, I drove myself mad thinking there were ways to avoid it, if only I could adjust my behaviour accordingly.
‘There was also about six months or so when I was ten that it mysteriously stopped, which afterwards I put down to him knocking off a secretary at his firm. My being left alone ran concurrent with heated arguments with my mother, lots of slamming of doors, and someone called that slag Christina by my mum, who got her P45.’
Finlay gives me a wry look but I’m not ready for wry yet.
‘I always knew when a beating was coming, I learned to read the signs. He’d get this malicious glint in his eye, or he’d been drinking. Or he’d come back from the office in a foul mood. He’d pick fault, work himself into a temper with me to justify it. It was like an outlet he allowed himself, but he was fastidiously careful. It was always in an upstairs room with the door closed, it was always as quiet as possible. For the most part, he never left bruises. No belt or anything. No marks. He’d already thought about how he might get caught, and in a really twisted way that gives me peace. I don’t ever need to wonder if he intended me harm, if he intended me to suffer in silence, and be disbelieved if I told anyone. I know for sure he did. It might have been an irrational urge in him but he controlled it in an incredibly rigid, rational way.’
My face is burning hot in the extreme cold. I have to take my hand out of Fin’s and rub it on my skirt.
‘That day, you waited for me on a bike ride,’ I say. ‘When Susie and Gloria rode off. Do you remember that day? He hit you for that, didn’t he?’ My mouth’s dry. Looking back, I can picture the intensity of Mr Hart’s wrath, and the limp, blank acquiescence of Finlay as he was pulled indoors.
I could easily cry but I fight it, I don’t want to, I don’t want to turn this into Finlay having to comfort me.
‘Yes, but that wasn’t because I stayed with you. If I’d left you, the thrashing would’ve been for that. He constructed no-win scenarios for me. Like I said, when he wanted to do it, he always found cause.’
I nod. ‘I see.’ Except I don’t, not at all.
‘Aged thirteen, having not been belted for a while, I found the courage to tell my mum what had been going on. But my dad had established this narrative that I was malign, I was disruptive. If you demonise a child, they tend to get a bit demonic, making it easier and easier. He was clever enough an abuser to have discredited me. I could do no right, Susie