DADDY LOVES YOU

Below is the beginning of my free short story download.
I hope it touches you emotionally. I want you to remember it. to be challenged. DADDY LOVES YOU. The child lay in her bed half asleep. She kept her eyes closed, while she listened to his drunken shufflings. Her mother begged, "don’t go in. . .she’s asleep". She heard him push her mother aside and open the door. He sat by her bed in the moonlight. “You’re awake, aren’t you Princess?
 You’ve been waiting for Daddy to come home.” The child groaned and the mother protested. He got up and slammed the door shut in her mother’s face, and sat down again in the darkness. The child lay there afraid, she hoped he would still think she was asleep and leave. She could hear his heavy breathing, hear his mutterings and could bear it no longer. She had to see what he was up to, he’d been known to urinate in the cupboards before, but that was when he was totally drunk. He seemed only a bit drunk this time... She switched on the bedside light. He was taking his shoes and socks off. Her mother was still outside begging to be let in. He dismissed her in his rough fashion and said, “Go away. I want to talk private to my little girl. Hear me! he yelled. Get away with you. Get going or I’ll give you what you’ve got coming. Now!” he yelled. He bloated with power as her mother slithered away. He was the head of the house. He’d beat it into her if he had to. He’d done it before. His voice echoed the violence they both knew only too well. It was the lightning before the storm. Sudden and unexpected. A flash that would disappear with a benign smile as if he had never said it. He patted her. He touched her hand as if she was the most important person in the world. ‘How’s my little princess? What did you do at school today.?” “Nothing” the child said. “Nothing”. She turned her head toward the wall. He started talking on the same old track. He talked about the war. Places like El Alamein. New Guinea. The trenches, the desert and the bombs. A German General called Rommel. He seemed to admire Rommel’s brilliance, his tactics, his war games. The woman in the child thought that war games were just killing games. She thought of school and the boys playing cowboys and Indians. Playing war games. Practising. “I used to be called Lucky, you know why?” Her dark hair shook from side to side. “Well, when the planes dropped their bombs, I would watch where the last bomb was dropped, they blew up instantly, I would run over there and jump right into that same hole. I reckoned the chances of another bomb landing in the same hole was pretty remote. I never got a scratch, well apart from the bit of shrapnel in my eye. But that’s nothing”. He paused. His head bowed in deep thought. When she looked at him he continued as if one cue. “One day I found my brother jack... You know uncle Jack.?” The child nodded. “Jack was shell shocked” “What’s shell shocked, Daddy?” It was safe to speak now. Her father replied, “He sort of went a bit mad, Christ knows we all did, but this was worse. He was always pretty wild, but the shell shock turned him into a raving lunatic. Anyway I got him into my tent, and hid him for three months. I washed him, fed him, looked after him like a baby. By the time the MP’s found him, he was on the way to recovery. No brother of mine was going to a madhouse.” The child remembered Jack. Her thoughts strayed while her father raved. Last year they had gone on their first holiday. They had camped down the coast, near the heads of the bay. It took all day to get there, and they were all so tired. The next day, on the way to Nowra, they passed what mummy had said looked like a blacks camp. An old truck among the trees with a lean to and one tent. Her mother had noticed it first, and daddy had said that it was the sort of camp Jack would put up. “and come to think of it. . . that looks like Jack's truck”. He pulled over and it was Jack, with Nanna and a woman in a black lace dress, with red satin underneath. They all thought it was amazing, except her Dad. He reckoned they always knew where the other was. They could always find each other if they wanted to. The woman tottered in her high heels, the black lace dress over red satin and a man’s cardigan wrapped around her shoulders. The child thought she looked old. Her blonded hair and her red- red lips made her look much older. Mummy said she looked like she had just come from Kings Cross. where ever that was. The child stared at the woman who showed so much flesh, and asked her name. “I’m Barbara, I just come here with your Uncle Jack. He told me he was taking me somewhere special. On a holiday, would you believe? He didn’t say it was a humpy out in the bush. We’ve been here two days already.” Next thing Barbara was asking for a lift into Nowra to the nearest pub. Her mother did not look pleased. Red lips reminded the girl of other women. Women outside her family, outside her world. Like Mrs Prittle, from around the corner. The one with red lips who waited at the end of the lane for a bus into town. She worked as a saleswoman at DJ’s, the neighbors said. Somehow that put her a cut above the rest of the women in the housing commission block. The child often passed Mrs Prittle on her way to school. This morning she had been given a pussy cat smile from the red-red lips, a sudden insincere smile, which preyed. A predatory smile purely for effect. A smile which never lingered long enough to make you want to smile back. Quite unexpectedly the red lips spoke. Words gushed out at her, “How is your father child? good? Tell him I asked about him, wondering how he was going.” The child nodded a promise she had no intention to keep. Meanwhile her father was still talking about the war. About Egypt. “It was a stinking filthy place. I hate the Arabs, The things they force their women to do, I can’t describe it.” He went silent, after a while he changed the subject. You remind me of my sister Joycie. She had black hair and dark eyes. She was a Tahitian beauty. She must’ve got it from my grandma. My Grandma was a Maori princess you know. Grandfather brought her to Sydney. He was well educated. A professor and all. The child wondered what a Professor was. He went on. “Joycie was so beautiful., she looked just like you, maybe a bit taller and a bit slimmer.” He studied her form in the bed and she felt afraid.
“She’s dead, you know. Joycie, lived a wild life. I couldn’t stop her. She’s over there, calls me sometimes. She talks to me”. His voice was now a whisper. In a little while he would go to bed.
The woman in the child knew they were on a journey, and the destination was now in sight. “Did you know the spirits can communicate with you?” The child shook her head, She pretended not to know. “Do you ever think about death?” he asked soberly, sincerely. “Yes” the child answered, waiting to see the effect. His eyelids dropped. In his stupor he didn’t listen. He was in his own world.
The child was merely someone to talk at, not talk with. The child thought of herself as a section of the wall. Things happen to a wall. Sometimes a wall gets hit, punched and kicked. Walls get bruised and scratched and sometimes written on. She had written her new initials on the wall next to her bed.
She had given herself a right royal middle name. ELIZABETH Just like the real Princess. The child knew that walls can’t fight back.
Walls can’t protest. They can’t run away. Walls are just stuck there. Walls know their place.
“I found her once”. His voice trailed back thirty years, “Joycie was down in the paddock with a couple of tramps. They did things to her. You know what boys do.. .don’t you?” The child’s eyes widened in fear and trepidation. “Well, I can’t say they violated her, she gave her consent all right.., she was only 13 years old. I nearly killed them both, and later I gave her such a beating for it.. My beautiful little Joycie, that she should turn out like that.”
His voice faded.
Then he broke his reminiscence by suddenly shouting.. “Look me in the eyes when I talk to you. I’m your father you know. I demand respec.. respect.
He hiccoughed and the words dribbled from his mouth. He almost chocked on them.
“Well, say something.. .don’t just look at me like that.”
The child lay silent. She blinked fitfully.
“How did she die?” she asked, but he didn't respond. He didn't listen.
“I used to be a feared man once. I worked up in Queensland, cane cutting, that’s where I hurt my back... I used to box in the ring. I had a pretty good right hook. “You hold your fists like this, close in to protect the chest, when the other fellow swings a right you counter it and come in quick with a left into the guts. Then a right. You’ve gotta be quick .. It’s the old one, two, three
Try it.. “Daddy,.. no. I’m too tired” The child said. It was safe to say no now.
“Eric what’s going on?”
Her mother called from the other side of the door.. He ignored her.
“Come to bed,” her mother suggested. “In a minute, in a minute” he responded, obediently, almost compliantly. “Two years on your back, you learn to think.” He said. The child knew that his back brace still hung behind the door. "I even learnt to knit", he said, with a chuckle. He would sit in front of the kerosene heater, watch TV and knit. Sometimes they would spend evenings winding the wool into balls.
The yarn came in big twisted bundles. One person would hold the wool looped on both hands and another would wind it into manageable balls. When no one was home, he looped the yarn bundle around the top of a chair, but it would tangle more often than not. It kept him sane he said. He mostly knitted fair Isle. Her favorite jumper was pale green with white prancing deer leaping across the chest, and the upper arms. She was too big for it now, She was growing breasts. “When I told the teacher you knit better than anyone else, she wouldn’t believe me," she announced. “Well, you should’ve known better than to tell her. " He hissed some curt remark about the teacher. The teacher was another one with red-red lips “You don’t tell nobody, nothing. Hear Me? Keep things to yourself, I don’t like people knowing my business. You know that.
Never tell the right hand what the left hand is doing, that’s what I always say.”
The woman in the child kept him talking. His voice softened now that the crescendo of violence had gone. It was as if the waves of anger had to emerge,like the waves in the ocean. Small at first and the seventh or eighth wave was the biggest. You had to count them to be able to get out of the way. It didn’t matter what the choice of words was, the violence had a mind of it’s own. It had to run it’s course.
Like some sort of fever. The woman in the child knew it had to ridden skilfully, cleverly until it ran out it’s fiery breath. She heard her mother leave the door, and tiptoe up the hail. He believed in loyalty. He talked about blood being thicker than water and belonging and possession. She was his possession, she knew that. “No one will ever harm my little girl,” he announced. I would track them down and kill them. You know that don’t you? Just remember it.” He patted her hand in a loving caring way. His voice droned on, gradually she slid further down under the bedclothes. Sleep snatched her and he left the room. The woman and the child in the girl's body were one. They slept a fitful sleep on the tortured pillow, waiting for tomorrow, for events to resurface and repeat themselves. They were burdened peacemakers, they had nowhere else to go, besides he needed them. They were their father's keeper, until death. The child-woman awoke in the middle of the night. Death called her. Death was an escape. Death was a revenge, Death was a rebellion. Death might change things. Death could be a weapon. Maybe Joycie called her now. She decided in an instant. She flung on her coat and slippers and fled as fast as a firefly. They lived close to the beach, she ran to a spot where the waves surged and smashed on the rocks below. Where the water foamed and frothed. She stood watching the sea, her sea, mesmerized by the quite peace and tranquility. She wondered if she was really ready to die. Maybe if she died, her mother might find enough anger to leave him. She hesitated, slowly realizing how sorry he would say he was, and her mother would keep forgiving him. Her mother kept saying that she was too fat, or too old and that she would never get a job, and that she had nowhere to go. The burden of it all held her there too long The sound of footsteps approaching caused a sense of alarm. She turned and recognized him as he grabbed her. He tore at her pyjama top, while all the time he held her with one hand. She couldn’t escape, even though she struggled. She pleaded. She begged. He ripped her trousers with one stroke. The child in the woman cried. The woman in the child tried reasoning as he dragged her toward his car. “What about your girlfriend?.” She knew he was to be married next Saturday. “So what?” he muttered. Nothing helped. He didn’t care about the police. He said they wouldn’t believe her. He was so strong she couldn’t get away. Eventually in one last gurgle of gasps, she blurted out.
 “I don’t care if you kill me. Do whatever you like, but my dad will get you. He will hunt you down. He’ll know.”
“I’m tougher than him, I could beat him to a pulp.” Stan, the neighbor said.
She continued to struggle. “He’ll get you when you’re not looking. He won’t care if it takes his whole lifetime.”
 “I’ll say you let me. you encouraged me.”
“He won’t care. He’ll still get you.”
The grown boy nodded in agreement.
“Yeah, because he’s a ratbag all right.
 He's a real ratbag.”
Suddenly and unexpectedly he let go.
He pushed her out of the car onto the ground.
“Get going and if you tell anyone. I’ll get you next time.”
He spat the words at her as she ran off.
“You Hear me?.. Bitch.”
Bitch echoed after her, Bitch put the blame on her.
Somehow it was her fault. She ran home as fast as she could, crept inside still puffing and panting.
She flung herself on her bed.
She knew she wouldn’t tell.
Death had no claim on her now.
Right now, she did not want to know death.
The woman in the child knew she had escaped a fate worse than death.
She knew she was lucky to be alive.
Death could wait.

 **end** Copyright Megan A Sampson