Coming Undone by Terri White (bill gates books recommendations .TXT) 📕

forwards until it got bigger and harder in his fist. I held the magazine in front of my face so I couldn’t see. ‘Hold it lower,’ he shouted, gasping for breath. ‘Lower, now.’

Slap, slap, pound, sigh, slap slap.

I did as I was told, inched it down.

‘Lower.’

A little more.

‘I said lower.’

It occurred to me too late that he wanted me to see. Needed me to see. Small white wet flecks shot out of the end of him and sprayed all over the room. I looked at the ceiling, the Artex charmed me like a snake into another reality. I escaped into it, climbed into the other dimension, my arms opened wide.

The next morning, he held a bacon sandwich. She hadn’t trimmed the fat off. We had bacon scissors, useless for anything else, right there in the drawer, but she didn’t take them to the task at hand. Just tossed the white, thick rinds into the spitting, kicking oil. The rinds bobbed now, black and hard and curled, in the shallow pool of shimmering grease. They glistened, strangely beautiful in the sunlight.

The chewy slick was a welcome distraction. From him, from what happened. ‘Pass the red sauce,’ he said. I picked up the ketchup and reached out my fist. The only part of me still whole. Those fingers brushed bone as I met his eyes and smiled.

I can’t remember if he instructed me not to tell, but he didn’t need to. I felt ashamed, complicit, smeared with him and knew that I couldn’t tell anyone about that night ever.

One day I cried at school, the shame and disgust falling out of me. I told the teacher I was crying because of what happened to me before, when I actually wanted to tell her that I was crying because of what was happening to me now. But I couldn’t; I didn’t. It was my fault.

Why would both of them do this to me unless I’d welcomed it, wanted it? Why couldn’t I see what I must be putting out into the world of men? It was my fault; I just had to take it.

But crying at school was definitely a slip. They called my mum and we were referred to family therapy. We sat in a room separated from another room with glass that I couldn’t see through. There were people watching us through the glass.

I looked at the glass, the mirror, saw myself looking back and wondered what they saw, the invisible ones. What did they see when they looked at me? The things that I was trying to hide? The very worst of me?

The woman asked why I was afraid; who and what I was afraid of. He sat two seats away.

‘You’re safe now,’ she said. ‘You know that he wouldn’t ever do anything like that.’

I nodded, nodded, nodded, resisted the urge to shake my head and scream until my voice bounced off the ceiling and down into his throat, cutting off his air. Instead, I sat mute. The shame, the sickness curdled in my stomach and ran down into my thighs and feet, leaving me still as a statue.

I was so alone in my secrets. And so lost. I no longer existed in the world. I was away, away, away, where the birds flew and flocked.

One morning, after I’d escaped the terror of home, I turned up at the door of the local church. Drawn by the singing, the happiness, the open door. I woke up early every Sunday after – the day they would sleep in until lunchtime – got dressed into any half-decent clean clothes, scrubbed my face bright and then turned up at the door again. It was the only place I felt safe, felt beyond their touch. I looked up, told Him it all. It was the only roof that I ever stood under and spoke the truth; where I didn’t feel like I was already dead.

When we did eventually leave him, it was remarkable how unremarkable it was. There had been far worse times. The time he’d discovered Mum drinking a bottle of wine in the middle of the day, dragged her upstairs by the hair, sat on her chest and, knees pinning her arms, took aim and punched until her nose shattered and her fingers snapped and blood sprayed and splattered. The time the knuckles on the back of his right hand had sent me and my brother up into the air in tandem, after my fingers had caught in the kitchen window as we played.

This morning, it began with a crash, a bang and then silence that hung heavier than the thuds that fell in between. Through the wall, I heard the drawers of the dressing table being pulled out. They bounced off the carpet, their contents danced in the air. Angry muffled words flew with them; the quieter responses belonged to her. I sat in my bedroom, hiding in a place where there was no hiding, but at least I wasn’t in the thick of the war. More words, spat. The front door slammed, his heavy foot unsettling the second paving slab that led to the gate that led to the street that led to his car, in which he drove away, tyres screaming.

Immediately, something was different. Mum, wide-eyed, whirled around the living room. The one-sided fight had been about the absence of socks in his underwear drawer. And at the front door, a balled hand and a promise: ‘If there aren’t any socks in that drawer by the time I get home, you’ll be getting some fist.’

We knew that there was nothing my mum could do in the next eight hours to avoid getting some fist, to save the bones in her face. But what Mum said next caught me off-guard.

‘Put some stuff in a bag – we’re going,’ she said. We stood still, didn’t move. ‘I said get a bag, put some stuff in – we’re leaving!’ she shrieked, pulling us upstairs. I dug out my favourite bag – a