Chapter 55

chapter fifty-five

Valentine’s Day

Stan Delaney had always known that women had the power to draw blood with their words. It was his mother’s favourite hobby: to knife the soft stupid defenceless egos of her husband and her son.

Don’t tell the boy he’s going to play at Wimbledon one day, he’s dumb enough to believe it. The two of you are as dumb as dog shit.

Not every day, just most days. Not when she was drunk, when she was sober. That’s when she got nasty.

She’d jab her finger at the side of her head and smile her beautiful smile at her husband and say, The lights are on, but nobody’s home, isn’t that right, my love?

Stan’s father had no arsenal of clever words with which to defend himself. He quailed and recoiled. He smiled stupidly as if his wife had made a joke that was too clever for him. He shut down and went silent. He took it and took it.

He took it and took it until one day he didn’t take it anymore.

Fourteen-year-old Stan ran to his mother where she lay crumpled and still on the floor, and it was good that he did that. He could always tell himself that his first instinctive response had been to run to his mother, to put his body between her and his father, but he also could never forget the first tiny, terrible, traitorous thought that came into his head:

She deserved it.

So faint, so tiny, he sometimes pretended he’d imagined he thought it. It happened so fast, but it also happened so slowly, and it was so long ago, who knew what he’d really thought at that moment? You couldn’t rely on memory. It was an unreliable source.

*

Stan was just like his father. He’d always known it. Not clever and quick like his mother. Not clever and quick like his wife. Not good at school. Thick as a brick. Not the sharpest tool in the shed.

*

At the age of seventy, he felt his wife’s flesh beneath his hands as his father’s colossal rage and humiliation, his pain and hurt, ballooned within his chest and exploded behind his eyes.