2660 words (10 minute read)

Chapter 2

 For months after Frank’s death I wouldn’t go anywhere alone, wouldn’t sleep in my own bed, woke up screaming about monsters in the night. Some nights the antagonist of my nightmares was Frank, other nights it was the monster.  

After months of counselling I came to understand that it hadn’t been real; that my mind was running from the trauma of Frank’s attack on mum, trying and failing to make sense of everything I witnessed that night. What had finally caused me to part ways with reality was Frank’s death at the jaws of our placid labrador, Bounder. The psychiatrist talked at length about all the contradictions at play that night; how I could hate and fear Frank but still be horrified by witnessing his gory demise, how I was both grateful to and terrified by Bounder (who had been taken away and destroyed, just to put some vile icing on an already maggoty cake) I’d always seen Bounder as a protector and friend, a soft but solid anchor in a world of cruel unpredictability, but that night I’d saw him as a dangerous animal, a predator. Yes, he’d saved my life, they told me, but he could never be trusted again. 

I fought the counselling, of course. At first it was out of conviction that the monster was real. Even back then I wondered how the police could look at Frank’s body and come to the conclusion he’d been ripped open and drained of blood by a slightly overweight labrador. Even after I accepted it couldn’t have been some kind of monster, I still denied Bounder’s involvement. The dog would comfort us after Frank had gone on one of his rampages, but during he would huddle in a corner, whining. He was kind but cowardly, and I’d always been glad of it; if Frank could beat his wife and kids for no good reason what would he do to an animal that attacked him? 

In time I came around, mostly because I was tired of the cognitive dissonance. I came out the other side of my trauma and even started doing well at school, making friends, even dating. 

Mum had a harder battle. A broken nose, four broken ribs, a detached retina, and heavy bruising just about everywhere. Those were only the physical wounds. Much deeper and more painful were the psychological ones. As a child they were also the hardest to understand. Bruises and bones healed and after an operation and some time, her eye did too. The mind is infinite in scope and capable of suffering dimensions of pain the body will never even touch. 

Frank had isolated her from friends and family, as abusers do. Mum’s parents lived in Ireland, her one sister not far away, in Liverpool. The last time I’d seen them there’d been a terrible argument, everyone screaming, crying; Granny and Granda begging mum to leave him. Aunt Sonya stormed off and sat in her car, also crying. That shocked me most. Sonya was sharp tongued, straight talking, seemingly fearless. 

I wanted Mum to leave him and go live with Granny and Granda or Aunt Sonya. Our rare trips away (which I couldn’t believe Frank still allowed, although that was soon to end) were periods of bliss for me, road-trips to heaven. Mum and I listened to whatever music we wanted to in the car, usually David Bowie or Queen, which he called ‘queer music.’ We bought custard creams and Hob-nobs for the road and Mum actually put two sugars in her tea (Frank never let her have anything sweet, he said she was fat enough) 

On the ferry we’d watch the white foam churning behind us while the wind whipped our hair about. I can still feel the way the ferry rose and fell, hear the gulls, smell the sea, see her smile. Always a sad smile which her eyes seemed to disapprove of. 

When we got to Grandma’s it would usually be dark. Our feet would crunch over the gravel yard, towards golden- glow windows and the scent of burning turf. 

The problem with heaven is never wanting to leave. 


The day after Frank died, Aunt Sonya arrived at the hospital. She found me sitting by Mum’s bed.  Her face was a mosaic of emotions, and I watched her trying to pick one. In the end she crossed the room and embraced her sister as gently as she could. Relief. 

“I’m sorry,” Mum said, struggling to form words around her swollen lips. 

“Don’t. Ever,” Sonya replied, eyes sheathed in a slick film of tears.

Granny and Granda arrived later that night and it was decided that when Mum was well enough we would move to Ireland for a while. Sonya had two weeks to take off work, so she was coming too. 

Mum struggled for a long time. She blamed herself for staying with Frank all those years, for covering for him when neighbours called the police, for defending him when family tried to help. I didn’t understand why she was still so sad. We were free, weren’t we? One night I overhead her telling Aunt Sonya, 

“I hate myself.”

“No you don’t.”

“I do. For staying too long. What if he’d killed me, what would’ve become of Lincoln, then? I was a fool, a stupid, afraid little fool.”

“Don’t you see? Those are his words, you’re right back under his boot, blaming yourself for everything. That man was a monster, Anna, he fucked with your head, and if he wasn’t dead I swear to God I’d kill him myself… but he is dead. He’s gone, but you’re still here. You’re still here.” 

There is magic in words. I’m not saying Mum suddenly picked herself up after that night, no, there was a long struggle ahead, but little by little ever since then, she began to fight her way back. We stayed in Northern Ireland, mum started teaching in a school in Belfast, and soon we had our own place. It wasn’t all roses though; both of us still had nightmares (although mine featured a tall, pale man with sharp teeth) and Mum remained on a regimen of pills for depression and anxiety. She had something called Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, which made her jumpy, tense. Sometimes I’d find her crying for reason. 

Three years later she met Michael through a mutual friend. Michael Robert Barnes; owner of an incredibly successful tech firm. Five years her senior, lanky, balding, but still boyishly handsome at forty five. He was also, to put it bluntly, rather wealthy. He didn’t tell her for a while, until he was sure she was interested in him rather than his money. I’ve never had that particular problem as I’ve always started off on the sure footing that they’re absolutely interested in my money because I’ve just set a stack of it on the nightstand. After he told his secret, Mum told hers, not that they were remotely comparable. I doubt having millions of pounds in the bank has ever given anybody PTSD. 

I didn’t like him, of course. I didn’t like any man who so much as smiled at her, and she was cautious, so cautious. She hadn’t planned to remarry, or ever even date, I think. She was nervous around strange men, and never went anywhere without a friend. 

Mike though, he was a good guy. She saved him from life as a selfish CEO, and he saved her too, from a life of barely controlled depression and PTSD, at least for a while. Life has a funny way of lulling you into a false sense of security.  

Mum had been relatively good for so long, taking care of us both, teaching, meeting up with friends. A year after they first met, Mum and Michael got married. They moved to Michael’s estate in the Scottish Highlands. Despite his wealth she kept teaching, got a job in a local school. I got into a University in Aberdeen so I could be relatively close. Her nightmares went away, she came off her pills, my nightmares went away; it was a jolly old time… until it wasn’t. 

I wish I could say I spotted the signs, you know, the signs people talk about? Had she been irritable, withdrawn, over- tired? Did she try to tell me something was wrong when we spoke over the phone? I was in my first year of University at the time, English Lit, coming home on the weekends. We spoke a few times through the week leading up to it and she seemed fine. What else can I tell you? I wish there was more, but there just isn’t. 

She’d been off her pills for over a year, seeing a therapist who charged more per hour than she earned in a week teaching. She had good days and bad days, but Frank was surely forgotten, a page in our shared history-book, never to be revisited. 

I came home one weekend to find two police cars sitting outside the house.  

I can still feel the cold from that night in my bones. It was late November, a few degrees below freezing, and you could see every star in heaven. The driveway was half a mile long, winding through green fields, but I didn’t mind. I liked the walk, it gave me time to unwind after a long train and cab journey. It wasn’t long before I saw blue and red lights through the trees. 

I tried to run into the house but an officer got out in front of me, practically tackled me to the ground. Lying there with my face in the grit, tears running down my face, I screamed myself hoarse calling for her. I prayed, actually prayed to God, ‘Please let it be Michael, let him be the one,’ but of course out he comes, red eyed, pale, stinking of puke, practically carried by two police officers. I hated him in that moment as much as I’d ever hated Frank.  


Judging by her diary, Mum’s slide back into full blown depression and anxiety had been rapid and overwhelming. Maddeningly there was no indication what triggered it. I now know there doesn’t have to be a trigger. 

She waited until Michael went out, having taken the keys to the gun cabinet off his keyring earlier in the day. Inside were two double barrelled twelve gauge shotguns, an over- under and a side by side. She found a few cartridges in his hunting jacket. She’d never fired a gun in her life, but anyone can figure out how to load a shotgun. 

I’ll always be haunted by the choices she had to make that night, the obstacles she had to overcome. I assume she chose the over-under because it would be easier to get in her mouth. Did she fumble with the breaking mechanism when opening the gun? Was the safety catch still on the first time she pulled the trigger, and how long did it take her to find and release it? 

Imagine pulling that trigger and… ‘click’, then having to start searching for the safety catch, not wavering in your resolve, because your pain is greater than your fear. 


The night mum killed herself, part of me died with her, the part that believed in happiness, or love, or the good guys winning. Seven years since Frank’s death. The person those years made me slipped away, shed like snakeskin. Emotion was the enemy. I would not feel it. People were pain. I would not let them in. 

I stayed on at University to avoid Michael, heartbroken wreck of a man that he was. His grief was an insult; I had lost her, me. He would never fathom the depths we’d risen from together, this pretender come lately. Poor man. He must have been so alone, not that his loneliness lasted long.

Pancreatic cancer took him a year and a half later, 2014. By the time they found it he was a dead man walking. I hadn’t seen him in a few months, not since the Christmas. 

He’d tried talking to me then, hoping I might find something of a father figure in him I think, but I was done looking for father figures, or mother figures, or anybody. In my nuanced world- view people either beat the shit out of you, or they died. Either way the pain was worth the investment. 

What I didn’t figure into that enlightened equation was Michael leaving me every penny he owned. We knew he was rich; his massive house, the cars, that interminably long driveway with it’s looming oaks. But neither of us imagined he was that rich. 

The will was a revelation in more ways than one. The only words I heard, through the fog of a blinding hangover, were; 



‘… to the son of my beloved Anna, Lincoln Sayer, I leave everything I own. I have no children of my own. My every waking moment before meeting Anna was filled with business and the pursuit of wealth. I was obsessed with getting far enough away from the squalor I was born into to feel safe. 

Now I know we are never safe, not in the way we think we’ll be. There’s no one moment when we ‘arrive’. The absolute best we can hope for is someone who gives us a million little moments. 

Forgive an old man some mawkishness, Lincoln, I am dead, after all. 

I know you never trusted me and we were never close. I’ll be straight- I know you’re drinking too much, snorting mountains of coke and sleeping with every pretty smile in a skirt. As a dedicated former connoisseur of all three I can tell you, you can’t kill your pain that way. All you’ll end up doing is piling brand new pain on top of it, until one day the whole damn thing comes crashing down on your head. 

I hope I’m not sealing your fate by leaving you this wealth. Use it to save yourself, if not for me then for your mother, who saw so much potential for greatness in you. 

Sincerely, 

Michael Barnes’ 



The money was more than I’d ever dared imagine I’d see in a lifetime, and at the beginning I tried to make Mum and Mike proud, better myself, travel, meet new people. I even dabbled in learning new languages or perhaps enrolling in university to study literature or maybe physics. I had a pretty electric range of interests. I read widely in those days, fantasy, science fiction, a little history, the classics. I realised in the internet age I could educate myself, although I knew I’d need uni if I ever wanted to pursue a serious career (Ah, didn’t we all believe that once?) 

Books let me escape from reality, and science helped me imagine that reality could be deeper and more fascinating than all the fiction in the world. But- there’s always one of those- no matter how far I travelled, my demons caught up. They came to me hooded and shadowed, with twinkling eyes and gleaming teeth, hungry for mind-flesh. The nightmares started to come back, Frank’s death, a death I now knew had merely delayed my mother’s, splashed across my sleeping consciousness, a vivid, HD horror movie, curiously silent, as if all the bandwidth had been taken up by the clarity of the visuals. 

A great nihilism rose up inside me, an immense darkness, black-winged and hungry to fill every space in my soul. The loathing it engendered felt good. I liked the certainty.