What Good Girls Do

by Jonathan Butcher

  I feel the Girl from the bed’s hand on my shoulder. I turn her way because I don’t want to look at the other Girl in the mirror. I don’t want to look at me.

  What I want is for the Girl from the bed to kiss and hug me, and to tell me, “Sssshhh, everything will be okay.”

  “I’m Serenity,” the Girl from the bed says. “And these two are Phillip and Lilith.” She points at the little ones in the thing filled with water.

  “Serenity,” I say.

  I look down at the little Daddy and the little Girl in the water. Serenity rubs my back. I want her to kiss me again, but I also want to cry and lie down in a ball and kill all the Daddies, or maybe just go back to My Room and fall asleep and never wake up.

  “You don’t have to hurt anyone else,” Serenity says, as she touches my shoulder.

  The little Girl, Lilith, starts to cry, too. I turn around. Her little body shivers.

  The little Daddy, Phillip, reaches up towards my knife.

  “No, sweetie,” Serenity says, and pushes Phillip’s hand away.

  “I don’t know what to do,” I say.

  “There are people who can help. Not everyone wants to hurt you. Not all men are Bad.”

  “All the daddies … the men … want to fuck me. They want to fuck you, too.”

  She stops rubbing me. “Stuart and Declan were Good men.” Her face looks like it’s going to break. “Phillip, here, is almost two years old,” she says, pointing to the little Daddy in the water. “If Lilith falls over, Phillip strokes her hair and kisses her better. He is innocent – do you know what that means? It means that he’s … that the world hasn’t corrupted him. Broken him. All he wants to do is play with his sister, and laugh when she cries, and cry when she laughs.” She coughs. It sounds like crying. “If I keep teaching Phillip how to behave, how to be a Good man, then Phillip will grow up and be a Good man.”

  I don’t understand every word, but I understand most of them. I understand enough to know that she’s wrong, so I turn to her, run my fingers up her arm, and then lock them around her throat.

  Serenity’s eyes go really, really big when I lift the knife up to her tits.

  I say, “I’m sorry, Serenity. But you don’t know Daddies like I do.”

  18. Serenity

  When the girl grabs my throat, I realise the courage that it would take to resist her. I don’t want my children to watch me die, so I stand stock still and hope that she doesn’t push the knife any harder against my breast.

  “You don’t believe me about daddies,” the girl says, and yanks me through the doorway by the neck. “But you will.”

  I let her drag me into the hall, noticing a strange animation touch her face for the first time. Despite the fact that she’s still holding the blade, her urgency reminds me of a child pulling a classmate towards somewhere new and exciting.

  At the top of the stairs, I bat her hand away and stop following her. “Don’t make me leave the twins.”

  When she turns, the playful child in her has vanished. Her brow slants downwards, her eyes narrow and she bares her teeth. I almost dive sideways and slam the bathroom door, just to put a sheet of wood between myself and this child-girl, who is clad in my mismatched clothes and smeared with my family’s blood.

  “You’re a bad girl,” she hisses, but when she pushes the knife point against the swell of my left breast again, I stand firm.

  “Please,” I pant, matching her stare but striving to remain passive, unthreatening. “This can’t just go on and on. It has to stop somewhere.”

  Her face does not alter and the knife does not move.

  I ask, “If I go with you, are you going to…make me go to sleep?”

  “If you’re bad.”

  “Then where do you want to take me?”

  “To my daddy’s big place. Down to my room.”

  “For what? To teach me about men? About ‘daddies’?”

  She nods. “They tell us that we like it, don’t they?”

  She flips the blade around and lifts it higher so that it is aimed, handle-first, towards my face.

  “They say, ‘You like that, don’t you?’ And then they hurt you.”

  Before I realise what she is going to do, she rams the handle into my cheek. A silver streak of pain lances through my skull. It’s a restrained blow, though, like a pulled movie-punch, and in some vague manner it reminds me of Stuart spanking me.

  “They say, ‘Good girl’.”

  The handle falls again, slamming into my chin. It smarts, but does no real damage.

  From the bath, Phillip and Lilith wail in unison.

  “They say, ‘Show me that tight asshole’ and, ‘Show me your nice smooth cunt’. Then they burn you, or break you.”

  The girl hits me with the handle twice more, once on either cheek. I suspect that if I were to flinch or fight back, she would turn the blade on me.

  “And then they fuck you and make you say that you like it, even when you don’t. Or, worse, they make you like it.”

  The knife handle collides with the centre of my forehead. The sting tells me that this is a different kind of blow, and has broken the skin. I brace myself for more.

  “You’re a good girl, Serenity,” she says. “But girls should only like other girls, and you still don’t think that your daddy was like mine.”

  My head reels from the pain of my weirdly consensual beating. When I picture Stuart bleeding and lying flat against the girl’s back, I let out a sob.

  “I’ll show you, though, Serenity,” the girl says. “I’ll show you what daddies do.”

  She pulls the knife back again, and I say, “Please.”

  She holds it there, ready to strike.

  “Please,” I repeat. “Tell me that if I follow you, you won’t make me go to sleep.”

  Something flickers across her face.

  “Promise me,” I urge. “Promise me that afterwards, if I’m good, I can come back here and take care of my babies.”

  “Promise?”

  Absurdly, I raise my fist with the pinkie extended, as if making a deal with a child. “Yes, promise. It means that you mean it and you can’t lie.”

  She lifts her empty hand, mirroring my gesture, and I wrap my pinkie around hers. Something subtle in her face tells me that she understands.

  “Okay,” she says.

  For a long moment, her eyes are no longer the empty wells I’ve become used to. I wonder if she’s going to embrace me, but she doesn’t. Her eyes shimmer, gazing out from a face defined by scabbed blood. For a second she is almost beautiful.

  “Promise,” she says, and releases my finger.

  19. Girl

  I didn’t want to hit Serenity so much, but she needed it. Now her cheeks are rosy and cute, and there’s a thin line of red stuff running down her nose.

  “Can I put on some clothes first?” she asks.

  “Good Girls don’t wear clothes.” I take hold of her neck with one hand and say, “Open your mouth.”

  When she does, I stuff her lacy cunt-clothes between her lips. I don’t think she is going to scream or try to run away, but I want to make sure.

  My Daddy and some of the other Daddies like tying me up, and sometimes I practise knots on my bedclothes. I tie some of Serenity’s see-through leg-clothes around her face. Now she can’t spit out the cunt-clothes.

  “Follow me,” I tell her, and lead her down the stairs.

  Walking downwards is harder than going up. I feel like I’m going to trip and fall and break my head.

  Serenity comes slowly down behind me. I keep looking back at her and she keeps looking back up the stairs, back towards the room with the little Daddy Phillip and the little Girl Lilith. We get to the bottom and I feel confused for a second, but then I turn and walk into the big room. There are chairs that look like beds, plus tall wooden things and a big TV. The room’s screen doors are still open, their long white screen-clothes flapping in the moving air.

  We step through the screen doors a
nd onto the square of tickly green stuff. I don’t want to look up at the blue ceiling, with its white patches and the really bright light. I take Serenity’s wrist, even though she is already following me, but then I slip my fingers lower and hold onto her hand.

  The little thing with four legs and yellow eyes, which I think is a dog, looks out from one of the big green things beside the wall.

  “Murph,” Serenity says.

  Murph the dog disappears.

  Serenity makes a whiny noise, like the ones that I sometimes make when I’ve had enough biting or hitting. I lead her across the tickly green stuff and push open a big wooden wall-door with my knife hand. I think that this will take us round to My Daddy’s big place.

  I squeeze Serenity’s hand and she squeezes mine back, but when I look at her face she’s got narrow eyes, like a Bad Girl. I look around the corner of the wooden wall-door into the long room that smells like piss, the one where I’d found the little Daddy playing with his yellow car, which is lying on the floor upside down. I can see real cars at both ends and patches of the little Daddy’s red stuff on the ground. There are also more buzzing bugs, and two little black things that jump up towards the blue ceiling when they see me, twitching their arms as they go.

  A big Girl’s voice calls from somewhere close, “Martiiiiiiin! Martiiiiiiiiin!”

  My belly goes, SQUISH.

  I don’t want Serenity to see the little Daddy covered in red stuff, so when I push open the wall-door that I hope will take us to My Daddy’s big place, I let go of her hand and hold mine over her eyes, leading her with my knife hand pressed against her lower back.

  Some bugs, black and twitchy, have landed on the little Daddy’s face. He must have opened his eyes while I was away. It’s like he’s staring at me, and even though he’s little and I’m wearing Serenity’s clothes, I feel like he wants to fuck me.

  I pull Serenity towards the door made of screens at the side of My Daddy’s big place. I feel like I’m going to puke again, but I’m better once we get the screen door open. I take my hand off Serenity’s eyes and we step into the room filled with shiny metal things.

  Serenity looks around, blinking. I pull the see-through leg-clothes up off her mouth and reach two fingers between her lips. She coughs when I take out her cunt-clothes, and makes her lips go, PUH, PUH, PUH.

  “You live here?” she asks.

  I shake my head.

  “Then why are we…”

  I go to the door that opens to the really, really small room, open it and point inside.

  “In the cupboard?” Serenity asks. She wipes some red stuff off her nose.

  In the really small room there are glass things that smell like food, shiny papery things, long pieces of wood, and small metal things that are different to my knife. I step into the dark and push the back wall. It opens a bit.

  Serenity breathes in behind me.

  I start to walk inside, but then I think that I should point the knife at Serenity or she might not follow me.

  “I … don’t want to…” Serenity says. Her face is puffy and her lips are shaking.

  “I want you to see,” I tell her, but now I’m feeling shaky and different, too. “Then you can tell me if Daddies are Bad or not.”

  In the Other Film, the two Girls never, ever hurt each other. They just kiss and they hug and make red stuff come out of all the Daddies. I look at Serenity and I wonder, do I look like she looks when Daddies fuck me? When they hit me, does my face go puffy? And do I look at their cocks the way that Serenity looks at my knife?

  Serenity stands there shaking her head, with her eyes wet and shiny. “I’m worried about Phillip. And Lilith.” She lets out a horrid, “BLUH!” sound, and a white bubble pops at one side of her mouth.

  I say, “After you come down here and see My Room, you can go back to them. Promise.”

  She looks me in the eyes. I can smell her sweet fruity skin as she steps past me into the really small room, pushes the moving wall all the way open, and steps inside.

  20. Serenity

  My face still throbs from the beating that the girl had given me.

  She had covered my eyes as she had led me into what I assume was her back garden, and when she took her hands away I was standing in a homely, old-fashioned kitchen, with plain white cupboards, metal cooking utensils hanging from the walls and a square wooden clock. It had smelled like freshly baked pastry.

  Mr Crisp’s kitchen.

  Or, our kindly old next-door neighbour, as I had called him just an hour or so ago.

  The kitchen’s walk-in cupboard is filled with jars of herbs, brooms, sweeps, DIY tools, and things encased in plastic wrapping, but beyond these there is a fake wall. When I push it all the way open, it reveals a set of downward steps, bordered by walls padded with a foam-like substance no doubt to make them soundproof. A strip-light is mounted above the staircase, illuminating walls dimpled with humps and hillocks.

  As I descend, I’m half-convinced that I am never going to see daylight again. The stairs through the fake wall are carpeted, and as I progress I hold my hands against the bannister that leads along the padded left wall. At the bottom there is a thick door, the kind that I imagine could secure a bank vault. It stands ajar. When I push, it opens with a sound like whirring cogs.

  Inside there is a room of about 20 by 30 feet. In contrast to the care with which someone had ensured that the outer staircase remains protected and hidden from the house above, this room smells dank and uncared for. The ceiling is a mesh of bare pipes, while the red-brick walls are a looped riot of crayon scrawls. There is no carpet; only kitchen-style floor tiles.

  I’m about to step inside when a disturbing new thought hits me: the girl sealing me inside. I gesture for her to lead the way, and she does so without hesitation.

  I test the heavy door to ensure that it is unlikely to swing back of its own volition, and then step into the room.

  The first thing I notice is the prostrate body lying beside a shattered TV. Its half-demolished face is pin-cushioned with splinters of glass. Its head is surrounded by a bloody moat. The zipper of its light brown chinos is open, a morsel of red meat poking out. Scraps of what could be muscle or flesh sprinkle the hard, blood-dotted floor to the body’s side. One of its hands stretches towards me, its smallest finger curled back on itself, like the opposite to a pinkie promise.

  Kindly Mr Crisp.

  A long bookshelf on the wall behind the bed reveals titles such as “Branded For Daddy”, “Cry For Me”, and “A Whore and a Virgin”. Piled like book-ends at either end of the row are two stacks of pornographic magazines. The cover at the top of the left-hand pile shows a close-up of the face of a crying teenage girl wearing pigtails. A black-gloved hand clutches her throat. A white gobbet hangs from one of her cheeks. On the right-hand pile, the top cover shows a spread vulva, each labia pierced three times by hooks on thin chains. They tug the lips apart in a way that makes me wince, revealing the tender, glistening pink inside.

  I follow the crayon scribbles along the wall to a desk and a chair, where there is a notepad and a colour-coordinated line of crayons in an oblong pencil tin.

  I open the notepad and read the first page’s four-word title, handwritten in blue crayon in surprisingly neat script: What Good Girls Do.

  I feel the girl watching me as I flick through the pages. An artist – presumably the girl – has used pink, red and brown crayons to depict the same naked girl on each page. She has long dark hair, detailed breasts and genitalia, but she does not have a face; only a pink, featureless scribble. Black silhouettes penetrate the crayon-girl’s scrawled body with their shadowy fingers and penises, or choke her, or push her against the floor. The further into the notepad that I flick, the more frequently the red crayon replaces the pink of the crayon-girl’s body.

  I let the book close and glance at the girl, whose usually-blank face has softened. Her eyes seem more curious than I’ve seen them before, perhaps measuring me up.

  Next alon
g, at the foot of the desk, there is a pink yoga mat.

  The girl says, “My daddy showed me a film where a girl is doing what my daddy called exercises, and then a daddy comes along and slaps her face and fucks her tight ass and makes her taste the shit off his cock. I asked My Daddy if I could have a mat to do exercises on, and my daddy said okay.”

  There are two waist-high DVD cabinets to my left. I can barely stomach reading them, but I’m left in no doubt as to the discs’ content. The side of one states “Broken Girls #5”, while another simply reads, “Raped”. For some reason, the hand-scrawled title of “Tina” on one black, picture-less case makes me want to vomit.

  I notice another DVD on the floor beside the bed. While its cover of an abused, naked woman is aesthetically similar to the filth lining the walls, this is a movie that I’m actually familiar with. It’s a low-budget, ultra-feminist revenge film, in which two abused women launch an all-out assault against the male gender. “Raw, emotional, and cathartic”, declares a critic’s quote on the cover. I’d thought that it was exploitative trash.

  The girl says, “My Daddy comes down here and shows me the films and fucks my nice smooth cunt and brings me food and reads the stories with me.”

  “Those?” I ask, pointing at the books beside her bed.

  She nods.

  “Did…your daddy…ever let you out?”

  “This is my room,” she says, emphasizing the two words.

  She stares at me, her face finally revealing something raw, perhaps truthful. “Good girls let their daddy’s keep them safe. ‘Don’t be silly’, my daddy always said. ‘Be a good girl’. And then he would fuck me and choke me and let my other daddies fuck me and hit me and feed me their hard cocks and…” She bites her lip. “That’s what daddies do.”

  Again I experience that dreadful Orwellian “doublethink”. For one part, I want this girl to suffer for what she did to my son and my husband, and how dare she act upset and hurt when she’s a fucking murderer? But another side of my brain wants to reach out to her. If what she tells me is true – and all I have seen suggests that it is – then perhaps she is simply a product of all she knows, and has never been shown an alternative.