“But what if he is hurting her again?”
I had no doubt that he was, in fact, hurting her again.
Problem was, I couldn’t do shit about it.
God knows I’d tried.
The broken nose I was sporting from earlier tonight proved just how little I could do about the animal we called our father.
Thankfully, Tadhg and Shannon didn’t seem to understand the way in which our father was hurting our mother.
I, on the other hand, had been ten years old when I learned the meaning of the word rape.
It wasn't the first time I'd seen him force her down, nor was it the first time I’d heard the word tossed around in conversation, but it was the first time that I managed to connect the word to the action and make sense of what had been happening to my mother.
Make sense of what that animal had forced her to take into her unwilling body.
Repeatedly.
My intervention had been a futile one that ended in my mother – battered, bruised, bloodied and naked from the waist down on the kitchen floor – dismissing me from the room. Blaming me with her eyes for something I had no control over, but not before my father got a few good hits in on my prepubescent frame.
After I registered what rape meant, what it really and truly meant, my resolve to keep my mouth shut about what happened at home only strengthened further.
I knew Darren had been raped when we spent those six months of senior infants in foster care. I’d heard enough about it – had been made feel guilty enough about it – to know that it was bad enough to keep my mouth shut and keep our family’s private business to myself.
“Remember, Joey, remember that no matter how bad Dad gets, it will never be worse than that…”
“You think that’s bad? You don’t know how fucking lucky you have it…”
“You got ice-cream and cake with your foster family, I got ruined…”
“You have nothing to complain about, not compared to me. You had it easy, so stop feeling sorry for yourself…”
“Do you know what happens in those care homes? Do you want Tadhg to end up like me? Do you want that for Shannon? Keep your mouth shut. Nothing is bad enough in this house to merit going back there. Nothing…”
Once I saw it for myself, I knew there was no way I would ever put my siblings in a position where that could happen to them.
I would rather die first and that wasn’t me being dramatic.
I meant it.
For years after that, I didn’t sleep at night. I didn’t dare. The noises – the fucking sound of her – was burned into my memory, repeating over and over on a loop of mental destruction.
And even when it was quiet, I was on edge. The silence unsettled me almost as much as her screams.
Because her screams meant she was still breathing.
Her silence meant that she was dead.
I could remember lying in my room, not unsimilar to tonight, body rigid, as I strained to hear every squeak in the mattress, every disgusting grunt and groan coming from the closed door at the other end of the landing.
Panic would consume me then and nine times out of ten, I would spring out of bed and stand guard outside my sister's bedroom, terrified that she possessed something an animal like our father would eventually come looking for.
At least when we were all together under the same roof, I could protect her, I could protect them all, take some of the pain for them, and let them have some semblance of a childhood.
If I told, we would be put into care. And if we were put into care, there was a good chance we would be separated. And if we were separated, then I couldn’t protect them from the predators that Darren warned me were everywhere.
“You think it won’t happen to you, but it does. It happens all the time…”
“Not everyone lucks out like you and Shannon did when you were placed with the same foster family…”
“I can still feel him inside of my body, tearing me apart, ripping me open, and it makes me want to die…”
The very thought of something happening to Shannon, Ollie, or Tadhg made my skin crawl and my mouth clamp shut.
I could take the pressure.
I could take the blows.
I could handle his whiskey tantrums.
I could take it all if it meant that they didn’t have to.
Like a revered blood oath, I mentally reaffirmed the vow I had made to myself the night after Darren walked out, and that was to protect my brothers and sister with everything I had in me.
I would never allow them to be beaten like I had been, or be abused like our mother, or defiled like our brother.
With whatever I had inside of me, I would protect and defend them from harm.
They would never have to sit behind a barricaded bedroom door with a hurley in hand.
I would be here to do it for them.
I knew what it felt like to have my protector abandon me, and I would never allow that to happen to them.
I would die first.
Yeah, fuck Darren for leaving our brothers and sister to fend for themselves against a monster.
Fuck him for making me our father's number one punching bag.
You've always been that, lad…
Fuck secondary school, too, for that matter. My gaze drifted to my unopened school bag that contained a mountain of homework. I hadn’t the slightest intention of completing shit given by teachers whose opinions on me were the least of my worries.
Yeah, it was safe to say that secondary school was another bust.
Understatement of the century, lad…
According to my new principal, Mr. Nyhan, I was short tempered and unresponsive to authority. If he had to put up with half of the crap I did, he wouldn’t be so responsive to authority himself.
Asshole.
I reveled in pissing him off.
The reason for my blatant dislike of him was simple; he had played hurling with my father back in the day.
Hurling.
A shiver rolled through me.
It was both my saving grace and my living nightmare.
Forced to play by my father from the age of four, and terrified of having that weight dropped onto Tadhg’s shoulders like it been dropped on mine when Darren quit, I pushed myself to keep it up.
And I was good.
I was better than my father or Darren ever were, and I think it made him hate me more – the fact that I wasn’t completely useless like he constantly reminded me.
Dick.
It was because of thoughts like these, and fucked up nights like the current one, that when Shane Holland, a lad a few years above me at BCS, offered my first hit from a joint in fifth class, I took it.
When he promised that it would relax my racing mind and help me sleep, I sucked that shit so deep into my lungs that I almost choked myself in the process.
And do you know what happened?
It worked.
I went home that night and slept like a baby, blissfully unaware of anything outside my locked bedroom door.
After my first night of unbroken sleep in years, I was instantly converted, and decided that weed was for me.
After a smoke, I could relax, better than I'd ever been able to. I could close my eyes at night and not hear her in my head.
I could ignore the burning pain of betrayal and rejection that crippled me every time I thought of Darren leaving me to fend for the family alone, or what would happen if I tried to leave.
I had peace.
Last Saturday after work, for example, I’d met up with Shane and a few of the older lads from school for a few hours.