HARRY

I am struggling to breathe. My chest feels tight and my skin is tingling, prickling with electricity. The atmosphere feels stuffy and thick. My mouth and my ears feel full of cotton wool. My eyes won't focus properly and the floor could be moving beneath my feet. My only sense of gravity is her fingers around my wrist, holding me steady, stopping me from falling. How long has she been stopping me from falling?

She wants to know what is going on in my head. How do I tell her? How do I speak the words out loud when I have never spoken them out loud to anyone in my life? I am afraid. I am so very afraid of who I am, of who I have become. 

"Why? Why are you afraid?" she asks gently.

I am aware she has let go of my wrists and I am now sitting on my bed while she sits opposite me on her bed, her hands tucked beneath her thighs and her legs crossed at the ankles. She isn't her usual cowering self: she seems to have found strength from somewhere. I take a couple of deep breaths, my lungs rattling. In, and out. In, and out. At first I am not sure why I am doing this and then I realise she is breathing with me, guiding me to take a breath in, and then releasing it slowly.

Her control of this situation is calming me. My vision slowly begins to focus, and my heart rate is decreasing. I am no longer desperate to destroy everything in the room. After a minute of watching me closely, she opens her mouth again.

"What happened to you?" 

"I got angry," I answer, my words sounding thick and muffled, but she shakes her head, holding my gaze.

"I don't mean just now. I mean what happened to you in your past? You have demons, Harry. I don't need to be a psychologist to work that out. What happened to make you so angry, and more importantly, why did you almost pass out just because I told you I wish we hadn't... you know... made things awkward between us?" 

Not this again. I can't let myself think about it. I don't want to go back there.

I close my eyes as the room swims before me once more, fighting a rising nausea in the pit of my stomach and resisting the memory that is materialising slowly, one that I have kept buried for so long. 

"Don't, Chloe," I mumble.

Sounds are rushing through my ears, like wind in a tunnel, loud and echoey and overwhelming. 

"Tell me," I hear her plead, but she sounds faraway and I grip the bedcovers either side of me to steady myself as my mind transports me to a different time and place; one of fear and uncertainty, of pain and violence, of loneliness and isolation.

I see my step dad entering the kitchen, his face like thunder. I hear the screech of the chair legs as they scrape across the tiled floor, pushed aside in fury. I feel the cold seeping through my tshirt from the wall behind my back as I press myself against it in fear, trying to hide from his wrath. I hear furious shouting and hysterical screaming, hateful words and squeals of denial. I watch as he grips my mum around the throat, forcing her backwards and slamming her head against the kitchen cupboard. I hear her rasping breath, and I see her hands clawing at his, desperate to free herself from his grasp. I smell the overpowering stench of the onions that she was chopping for tea and stale alcohol lingering heavily in the air, seeping from the pores of one or both of them. I hear the sickening thud as he releases her neck from his grip and pushes her away in disgust. I watch as she bends over the sink, gagging and choking before finally straightening up, trembling from head to foot. 

I want to run but I am rooted to the spot. I want to look away but I watch helplessly as he advances on her again, undoing his jeans with one hand as she backs away with terror in her eyes. I cry silently as he pulls up her skirt and she begs him to stop. I close my eyes to the image but I can't close my ears to the sound. I hear him grunting and I hear her crying. I want to tell him to stop hurting her, but I am afraid of him.

"Harry." 

I am afraid of his anger. I am afraid because she is afraid. I'm afraid because I don't know how to get away. I am afraid because I should have stopped him and I didn't.

"Harry, it wasn't your fault."

"I didn't stop him."

My voice sounds deep and muffled. I open my eyes.

"How could you have stopped him? Harry please, you have to listen to me. It wasn't your fault."

My face is pressed against Chloe's chest. She is next to me on my bed now. Her arms are around me, and I am clinging to her. "I'm just like him."

"You are nothing like him."

My entire body is trembling, just like my mother's was that in day in my memory. I am shaking so violently my teeth are audibly chattering. I can still smell the onions and the beer, and my stomach churns sickeningly. 

I push Chloe away roughly and stand up, stumbling as I gain my balance. I walk over to the window and lean on the sill, taking deep breaths and gulping in the sea air to force myself to remain in the present and not sink back into the past. I wipe my eyes with my fist, embarrassed at the streaks on my face. I have never broken down like this in front of anyone before.

"Harry, I am so sorry," she whispers. 

My breath is still catching in my throat no matter how hard I try to regulate it. My lungs are in some sort of spasm. My legs feel weak. I watch a seagull attempting to hover over a discarded polystyrene fish and chip wrapper in the street below, pecking at the mushed up remnants of someone else's dinner. 

"Have you ever spoken to anyone about this before?"

I shake my head, my gaze still focussed on the seagull and its relentless pursuit. My breath catches again, and I take in another long breath and let it out slowly, like Chloe showed me earlier.

"Did he ever do it again?" she asks softly after a minute.

I tear my gaze away from the bird and turn to face her in disbelief. "Did he ever do it again?" I repeat, my voice trembling. "It was a fucking regular occurrence."

She watches me, waiting while I force another couple of breaths, in and out.

"When he came home from the pub drunk, when he lost a game of darts, when he lost a bet on the horses, when he'd argued with someone on the estate... he never really needed a reason but there would always be one. There was always a trigger of some sort. He was always angry about something." 

I have managed to get all this out without an involuntary shudder. I can feel myself slowly regaining control of my emotions.

She shakes her head slowly, and as I finally manage to focus on her face I am surprised to see there are tears running down her cheeks. "What the fuck are you crying for?" I ask.

"I just can't believe you went through all that," she weeps, wiping her face with her fingers and looking up at me from her position on my bed. "How old were you when it started?"

I walk away from the window more steadily, and round to the far side of my bed away from Chloe. I can't stomach the misery on her face or the pity in her voice.

"I don't know when it started. I became aware of the full extent of it when I was about ten."

I was so fucking stupid and naïve not to have realised sooner what he was doing to her all that time. All those nights of shouting and whimpering from their bedroom, of muffled crying that continued long after the snoring started. 

"Do you have any brothers or sisters?" she asks timidly from behind me.

"No." 

There is silence for another minute, but I know her well enough to be sure she hasn't finished probing yet.

"Does your step dad... is he... I mean... where is he now?"

I twist round to look at her. "Is he still doing it, you mean?" She blushes and looks down at her lap. "He's in prison," I tell her. "He stabbed someone."

I feel almost gratified at her reaction. Her eyes widen and her mouth falls open a little bit, and she stares at me as though expecting me to elaborate but I don't. I have talked more about my step dad in the last hour than I have in my whole life. I want to bury it all again, and go back to ignoring that part of my life. It's the only way I can function.

"And your mum?"

"She's a fucking drunk. She barely knows what day it is. I don't know if she started drinking when the abuse started, or whether she was already an alcoholic. Either way, she was a fucking mess from the minute she woke up to the minute she went to bed." 

"You said... the other day, when we were walking and you mentioned him, you said... you said he used to hurt you too..."

"He knocked me about, the few times I dared to try and intervene. But he only ever hurt me with his fists, if that's what you're getting at."

"Harry... what I said before, about... about us..."

"Forget it." 

I can't talk about that. I can't even bring myself to think about what happened between me and Chloe. I can't bear to compare myself to that monster. A knot of panic is beginning to form in my stomach again.

"I just -" 

"I said forget it."

I feel a sudden exhaustion, so powerful that my entire body starts to relax involuntarily. I lean sideways into a horizontal position on the bed, drawing my legs up into the foetal position and tucking my hands under my chin, my back to Chloe.

"I can't forget it," she persists. "Harry, there's stuff I need to say -"

"I don't want to hear it," I mumble. 

I'm so tired. I just want to sleep. Why can't she understand that?

"I know you're upset with me," she wheedles, but my eyes are closing. Is it even tea time yet? I know it's nowhere near bedtime but I just can't stay awake. I am mentally and emotionally spent.

"Harry, please don't ignore me... this is important... I'm worried about you..."

"Don't bother," I try to say, but it comes out as a grunt. 

"I wish you would just talk to me." 

I can't answer her. I don't have the inclination, or the energy.

I hear someone moving around the room. I feel the bed dip behind me and a moment later a blanket is placed gently over my shoulders, bringing with it immediate comfort and familiarity, before the bed rises again and she moves away.

Sleep envelopes me, but not before a voice from somewhere outside my subconscious sighs, "You're not the only one with issues in your past, you know."