Asking for It

by Louise O'Neill

  ‘I’m not really in the form for the theatre tonight,’ I tell him now, still curled on my side facing the wall. He reaches out to touch my shoulder, and I can feel my breath clotting again, getting shorter and tighter. It’s only Bryan, I tell myself, but I can’t, I can’t, and I have to shrug him off me.

  ‘Everyone is always looking at me,’ I whisper, the words breaking from my throat.

  ‘People have always looked at you. Remember when we were kids? Mam couldn’t take us to the park to feed the ducks without twenty different people stopping her to tell her you should be a child model.’

  I had liked it before. I had encouraged them.

  (Maybe I had been asking for it.)

  ‘I’m not going, Bryan. Just leave it.’ I close my eyes again and start counting silently. I only reach five when I hear my bedroom door close quietly behind him.

  *

  ‘Where’s Dad?’ Bryan asks my mother when we’re having dinner. ‘Shouldn’t he be home at this stage?’

  ‘He’s gone to the pub for a few drinks.’

  With who? I want to ask her. Who does he have to drink with any more, since Ciarán O’Brien declared war against him? (My fault.)

  ‘Maybe you could go meet him for one,’ she says. ‘I’m sure he’d like that.’

  ‘No, I’m grand,’ Bryan says. He smiles at me. It’s a collection of teeth, all the better to eat you with, my dear, and I have to remember to breathe. Bryan is safe. Bryan is good. Bryan would never hurt me.

  ‘You sure?’ she asks, and Bryan nods. Does he want to go out for a drink?

  I count the things he could do if it wasn’t for me.

  1. Hang out with Jen.

  2. Remember what a genuine smile feels like.

  3. Have a good time.

  4. Be normal.

  He could be happy. They could all be happy.

  ‘OK, then. The two of you go on into the TV room, and I’ll just clear up here,’ my mother says, reaching for her glass. Bryan raises an eyebrow but I shake my head. It is funny how quickly we have become accustomed to this new life, and this new mother.

  ‘What do you want to watch?’ Bryan throws himself on the sofa, opening up the Doritos he took from the cupboard. He holds the bag out to me as I sit next to him, curling my feet underneath me. I shake my head.

  He changes channel again and again. Mam and Dad finally gave in and got a satellite dish after years of saying it would only be a distraction, and it’s unhealthy for growing teenagers. You should be outside with your friends, getting fresh air.

  ‘What do you want to watch?’

  I don’t reply, and the silence expands, yawning like a chasm between us.

  ‘Emma,’ he says again. ‘Emmie. I’m trying, OK? Can’t you just try too?’

  But I don’t want him to try. I don’t want him to have to try all the time.

  He reaches over to take my hand. The sound of our breathing filling the room. His breath, then mine, his breath, then mine, just a beat out of sync.

  ‘Emma?’ He needs me to say that I’m OK. He needs to know that I won’t do anything stupid.

  ‘I’m going to bed.’

  ‘But you slept for most of the day . . .’ he protests as I walk out of the room.

  My mother closes the fridge as I come into the kitchen. ‘Oh, it’s only you.’ She puts her hand over her heart and reopens the fridge door, draining the last of the wine bottle into her glass.

  ‘I want to take my sleeping tablet.’

  She nods at me. She doesn’t say, But it’s so early, or Why do you want to go to sleep already? or Is there anything that you want to talk about, Emma? She takes the small key off the necklace around her neck, standing on tippy toes to reach the cupboard that used to contain homeopathic remedies and plasters and vitamins and out-of-date cough syrup and now looks like a mini-chemist, countless clear bottles with ‘Hennessy’s Pharmacy’ emblazoned across them.

  ‘What the . . .?’ she says, when she finds the cupboard open. She gives me a sideways look to check if I’ve noticed and I pretend to be innocent. She takes down the small yellow bottle, and I can feel myself relax just at the sight of it. She counts them.

  ‘I thought there were twenty-six?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I say as I grab the tablet off her.

  ‘Tongue?’

  I show her my empty mouth gladly.

  Sunday

  ‘Morning.’ Bryan takes an exaggerated look at his phone when I walk into the dining area. ‘Or should I say, good afternoon?’

  I make myself smile at him. It seems to mean so much to him now, that he can make me smile.

  I wonder if he knows I’m pretending. I wonder if he prefers it that way.

  ‘It’s a nice morning,’ he says. The rain has stopped and the entire room is bathed in sunshine, but it’s too bright. The sun shows up all of our messiness, the streaky smears on the window panes, the sprinkling of dust like ashes over the counter, the small piles of crumbs gathering in the grooves between the floor tiles. Precious is licking at the ground. When was the last time she was fed?

  My brother is sitting at the dining table in the same outfit he was wearing yesterday, tracksuit pants and an old Ballinatoom jersey, flicking his unruly curls out of his face while he eats a breakfast roll, the Sunday papers spread across the table. He should shave.

  ‘Yuck.’ He fishes out a tiny piece of tinfoil that he accidentally chewed and removes the rest of the packaging from the roll before taking another bite. ‘I got you one too,’ he says after he swallows. ‘It’s on the counter. It’s vegetarian, just eggs and mushrooms in a wholegrain roll.’

  I remember when I used to worry about being healthy.

  ‘I got them to put Ballymaloe Relish in it instead of ketchup. You like that, don’t you? It’s better for you than ketchup. Right, Emmie?’

  Stop calling me Emmie, I want to say. I am the Ballinatoom Girl now. I am That Girl.

  ‘Thanks.’ I pick up the silver-wrapped roll and brandish it at him like a baton. He pushes his chair back and walks into the kitchen area, takes a key from his pocket and unlocks the medicine cupboard.

  ‘There you go.’ He gives me the tablets, picking up a glass from the draining board and filling it with water. He watches as I swallow.

  ‘Show me?’ His face relaxes when I stick my tongue out at him. He believes that each tablet I take will cut away at the fog that is obscuring me from him. He wants Emmie. He wants his real sister back, not this imposter.

  ‘Hey, did you see this?’ He picks up a magazine section of one of the papers. ‘Karen Hennessy is covering Sunday Life magazine.’

  ‘She always does this time of year,’ I say. Karen is wearing the bottom half of a gold lamé bikini, a waist-length wig covering her naked breasts as she sits on top of a huge horse. ‘The new Lady Godiva’, they’re calling her. Ali will be embarrassed. ‘Oh, thank God you’re here,’ Karen had said last year when she opened the door to see me, Jamie and Maggie on the front porch. ‘She’s in a terrible state. I don’t know what to do with her.’ Ali had texted that morning, begging us to come rescue her as quickly as possible when the photos of her mother styled as a topless Marie Antoinette started to flood her Instagram feed. The other two girls went ahead of me, but Karen put her hand on my shoulder, holding me back. ‘What did you think of the photos?’ she asked me. She pulled out her iPhone, scanning through the camera roll. Her body was perfect. I wouldn’t be so afraid of getting older if I thought I would look like that. ‘They’re unreal,’ I told her. We looked at one another. Did she feel the same way I did? Did she think that Ali was a changeling, that it was really me who should have been her daughter? It should have been me living here with her, sharing clothes and make-up, and never having to hear, It’s too expensive, and, Do you know how much that costs?

  That was the last weekend before everything changed.

  I read a little of today’s interview. They asked her about the Ballinatoom Case. It’s heartbreaking, Karen s
aid. My daughter is very close to the girl involved so I can’t say too much. I’ve tried to give her and her poor family space. I don’t want to be in her face, you know?

  I push the magazine away.

  ‘Do you not want your breakfast roll?’

  ‘I’m not hungry.’

  He sits next to me. Clots of black pudding and tomato ketchup are oozing on to the plate, and something turns in my stomach, like a live thing. Before I would have wailed about the smell of pigs’ blood – You’re, like, so disgusting, Bryan – but I don’t have the energy.

  ‘Where are they?’

  ‘Mass.’ He takes a gulp of his milk, turning the page of the paper. ‘Should be home soon.’

  They never ask me to go to Mass any more.

  ‘What time are you leaving for Limerick?’

  Soon, I hope. At least my parents just leave me alone now, the silence pouring around us like water, covering our mouths and our ears, muffling the noise outside.

  ‘I think I might stay around for a bit.’

  I want to tell him to go back to Limerick, to escape from here and never return. There is no need for him to drown in the silence too.

  The front door is thrown open with a clatter, and I jump, my heart starting to race.

  ‘Jesus Christ, Nora,’ my father says once the door is slammed closed again. ‘Would you just calm down?’

  ‘Don’t you dare tell me to calm down, Denis. Don’t you dare.’

  ‘Well, what am I supposed to do about it? No, go right ahead and tell me exactly what you think I should do about this?’

  ‘She’s your daughter and I’d like you to be a fucking man and—’

  ‘Hey!’ Bryan calls out to them. ‘Emma and I are in here, you know.’

  Your daughter. No, your daughter. Your daughter. No one wants to claim me. I understand. I wouldn’t claim me either. I would give myself away to the first person who wanted me. (No one would want me now.)

  There’s a sudden hush in the hall, as if they had forgotten that Bryan and I might be in the house.

  ‘We’ll be in in a minute, dear,’ my mother calls out. ‘We’re just chatting about something.’

  They continue their argument in heated whispers. Then we hear the front door open, a hoarse, ‘No, Denis, come back, I didn’t mean it, I’m—’ and a loud slam. The rev of the car engine outside, tyres screeching as it backs down the drive. Something soft hitting the carpet in the hall, so quietly you could almost ignore it. (Easier to ignore it.) Moments pass. Then slow, soft footsteps on the stairs. Isn’t it funny how you can tell your family members apart just by the sound of their footsteps on the stairs? Bryan’s are usually sluggish in the morning, bounding later in the day, two steps at a time. My father’s are more deliberate, taking his time with each step. My mother’s always used to be quick and light. Cheerful, I guess. They used to sound cheerful.

  One hour later. Two hours. Five hours. And my father still hasn’t come home.

  *

  I am hiding in my room, waiting until it is time to take my sleeping tablet. I watch movies on Netflix, darker and darker fare, a fist to the face, a knife to the throat, blood and blood and blood. But it’s not enough. I start looking at porn. I go for new channels these days. I watch videos filed under Reluctance and Non-consent. (They don’t use that word either.) I watch for clues. Is that what happened to me? Is that what I looked like? (Pink flesh.) (Splayed legs.)

  I want to see these girls cry too.

  I can do this for hours and hours. The videos are something to hold on to, something to ground me, to make sure I don’t float away. (I wish I would float away. I wish I could cut myself up into so many pieces that there would be nothing left of me.)

  I promised Bryan I would try. (I don’t want to try.)

  I read the magazines Beth sent over in her latest care package, Grazia and Vogue and Elle, accompanied by Lush bath bombs wrapped in floral printed paper from Liberty, six bags of Percy Pigs and salted caramels from Marks & Spencer, a tin of Darjeeling first-flush tea from Fortnum & Mason, two BADgal eyeliners from Benefit and a tube of Elizabeth Arden Eight Hour Cream. For my darling goddaughter! she wrote on one of those Papyrus greeting cards she buys when she’s on a business trip in the US. Hopefully this will cheer you up! Much love, Beth xxxxxx. It doesn’t look like her handwriting. She probably gave her personal assistant a credit card and told her to go buy stuff that a ‘normal nineteen-year-old’ would like.

  I try to remember what normal felt like.

  I turn each page with care. I want to sear these new images into my mind to replace those photos and those comments but . . .

  I am pink flesh.

  I am splayed legs.

  I am a thing to be used.

  I pad downstairs as softly as I can. I don’t want to attract any attention. They will want to talk to me, and there are no words any more, there is only one word, that word, and I cannot say it out loud. I fill up a glass of water to soothe my mouth. I pull at the handle of the medicine cupboard, but it’s locked. I curl my hands into fists and practise my deep breathing like the therapist showed me, but something is throbbing in me. It is a yawning mouth in my belly, sharp teeth, and it needs, and it needs and it needs. I have to make it stop.

  Breathe in. One. Two. Three. Breathe out.

  In the silence I can hear the faint echo of music seeping out underneath the door to the TV room. I strain to listen.

  You fill up my senses . . .

  My mother’s tuneless voice croaks along to that old song she and my father love so much. They used to laugh every time it came on the radio, and they would dance in the kitchen, while Bryan and I groaned with embarrassment. ‘No one waltzes any more,’ I would say. ‘You are so lame.’

  ‘Just you wait,’ my mother told me. ‘Some day you’ll have a special song with your own husband and your children will say it’s “lame” too.’

  I had believed her.

  I will never have children now. I would not allow them to grow inside me, where I could infect them. I would not allow them to grow up in a world where bad things could happen to them, such very bad things, and I wouldn’t be able to protect them.

  My father used to grab my hands and pull me to my feet and twirl me around, telling me that ‘Annie’s Song’ was the song they played at their wedding. ‘Your mother was the most beautiful girl in Ballinatoom.’ He would blow a kiss at her.

  ‘It was the best day of my life,’ he would always say.

  I look out the window, but only my mother’s car is in the drive.

  I walk into the hall. My mother’s voice is thick, choked. She stops singing every so often to hiccup.

  ‘. . . Let me die in your arms . . .’

  Her head spins when I push the door open, the hope in her eyes dying when she sees it is me. She is curled up on the sofa, the coffee table pulled over near her, a glass of wine placed precariously near the edge. No coaster.

  ‘Emma!’ I remember her saying when I put a glass of her home-made lemonade down on the wooden table. ‘A coaster, please. That table was expensive and I don’t want any watermarks on it.’ Ali and Maggie had looked at the ground, but I could see Jamie smirking. ‘Cool, will do, Mam,’ I said, grabbing a coaster, pretending that I didn’t care.

  She has an old biscuit tin full of photos on the seat next to her, most of them the yellow-tinged prints of the seventies and eighties, and their wedding album is open on her lap. I used to love looking at it before. The thick wooden sleeves, a love-heart cut into the front of it, the date of their wedding swirled underneath. I would turn each page, laughing at the mullets and drop waists and padded shoulders. They all looked so young, standing outside the cathedral, waving at the photographer.

  I should ask my mother why she’s crying but I don’t want to know. I am afraid. (I am always afraid now.)

  The song comes to an end, pauses for a second and then starts again. You fill up my senses . . .

  ‘Look at this one,’ my mother says to me,
but I don’t move closer. I don’t want to be near her. She holds up the album, pushing back a thin layer of tissue paper, and points at a photo caught in the thick cream board. ‘Look at that. D’you see that? Do you?’ She doesn’t wait for my response, just drops the album back on to her lap, knocking the glass over, wine slopping on to the pages. She wipes at it with the edge of her dressing gown, hissing shit under her breath. ‘Old Jimmy Fitzpatrick, how are you, boy?’ she asks the photo album. She looks back at me. ‘He was our best man, do you know that? Do you, Emma?’

  Of course I knew that.

  ‘Some best man,’ she snorts, and turns the page. ‘Oh, and there you are.’ She raises a glass in mock salute at the photo. ‘My dear, darling Father Michael. Man of God. Man of the cloth. The fucking prick.’

  ‘Calm down.’ I don’t know what else to say.

  ‘Calm down? Calm down! Don’t you tell me to calm down.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I say. And I am.

  ‘You’re sorry,’ she says in a sing-song voice. ‘Little Emma is sorry. Poor little Emma.’

  I want to leave. What is she going to say? More words that can never be unsaid, more images that will never leave me.

  ‘Where do you think you’re going?’ she says when my fingers are on the door handle.

  ‘I just . . . I just came downstairs for my tablet. The cupboard was locked.’

  ‘Oh yes. Your tablets. Have to keep them under lock and key, don’t we? Can’t trust you not to do anything stupid. Again.’

  She doesn’t mean this, I tell myself. She doesn’t mean any of this.

  ‘Maybe I’m sick of having to keep my medicine cupboard locked, did you ever think of that? Maybe I would like to be able to relax in my own fucking house without worrying about what you’re up to in your bedroom. Whether I’m going to go upstairs and find you lying in a pool of your own blood. The mess of it.’

  ‘Please.’

  ‘Selfish, that’s what you are. Don’t care about upsetting your brother, or your father, or me and—’