other side of the wall, in my living room. A soft thud.
The first thing I thought was the guys, Dec sneaking in to mess with me as revenge for the hair-plug thing, one time in college Sean and I had woken him to our bare arses pressed up against his bedroom window, but Dec didn’t have a key—my parents had a spare, maybe some surprise but surely they would have waited till morning—Melissa? couldn’t wait to see me? but she hated being out alone at night— But some animal part of me knew; I had sat bolt upright, and all the time my heart was laying down a grim relentless beat.
A brief murmur from the living room. Pale swish of a torch-beam past the crack under the bedroom door.
On my bedside table was a candlestick that Melissa had brought over from the shop a few months back, a beautiful thing made to look like the black wrought-iron railings outside old Dublin homes: barley-sugar-twist stem and graceful fleur-de-lys swoops at the top, the center prong sharpened to hold the candle (stub of melted wax, a night with wine in bed and Nina Simone). I don’t remember getting up but I was on my feet with both hands wrapped tight around the candlestick, testing the heft of it and feeling my way softly towards the bedroom door. I felt like an idiot, when obviously nothing bad was happening, I would terrify poor Melissa, Dec would never let me live this down—
The door to the living room was half open, a beam of light wavering through the darkness inside. I smashed the door back with the candlestick and slapped the light switch, and the room flared into brightness so that it was a blinking half-second before I could see.
My living room, espresso cup from that morning still on the coffee table, papers strewn on the floor beneath open drawers, and two men: both with tracksuit tops pulled up high over their mouths and baseball caps pulled down low over their eyes, both frozen in mid-motion to stare at me. One was turned towards my open patio door, hunched clumsily around my laptop; the other was stretching up behind my TV, reaching for the wall mount, his torch still poised in the other hand. They so clearly and utterly didn’t belong there that they looked ludicrous, superimposed, a bad Photoshop job.
After the first stunned instant I yelled, “Get out!” The outrage slammed through my whole body like rocket fuel, I’d never felt anything like it, the sheer nonchalant audacity of these scumbags coming into my home— “Out! Get the fuck out! Out!”
Then I realized they weren’t running for the door and after that things get a bit confused, I don’t know who moved first but all of a sudden the guy with the torch was halfway across the floor to me and I was launching myself at him. I think I got in a pretty good crack to his head with the candlestick, that at least, but our momentum threw us both off balance and we grappled at each other to stay standing. He stank, body odor and something strange and milky—I sometimes still catch a whiff of it in a shop and find myself gagging before I understand why. He was stronger than I had expected, wiry and twisting, he had me by the candlestick arm and I couldn’t get another swing— I was jamming short furious punches into his stomach but I didn’t have room to get any force behind them, we were pressed too close, stumbling. His thumb stabbed into my eye and I yelled and then something hit me in the jaw, blue-white light splintered everywhere and I was falling.
I landed on my back on the floor. My eyes and nose were streaming, my mouth was filling with blood and I spat a mouthful, my tongue was on fire. Someone shouting, stupid cunt you— I was up on my elbows and pushing myself backwards away from them with my feet think you’re fucking great and trying to pull myself up by the arm of the sofa and
Someone was kicking me in the stomach. I’ll fucking burst you— I managed to roll away, retching in great raw heaves, but the kicks kept coming, into my side now, solid and systematic. There was no pain, not exactly, but there was something else, worse, a hideous jarring sense of wrongness. I couldn’t breathe. I realized with a terrible detached clarity that I might