Thrown Down

by Menon, David

  When the first blow came down on her face she stole herself for a split second before the sheer force of his hand stunned her. She’d learned not to scream or to cry out loud. She’d learned over the many years of being the victim of male aggression that they liked her to stay as quiet as she could. If she did try and make a fuss then they only made it harder. She had to let the blows rain down on her until he was finished. Chris O’Neill was only the latest in a long line of men who’d thrown her affections for them literally right back in her face.

  He quickly followed with another blow to the opposite side of her face. She was sitting on the edge of her bed and he was towering over her with one hand holding her wrist so tightly she thought it might break. She was in a short black silk slip with lace stitched around the edges. She’d wanted him to get into bed with her and show his appreciation for what she’d done for him. If she felt like it she could turn him into the police right now and he’d be in very big trouble but he was like all of the others. He was all take, take, take and more bloody take. He didn’t expect her to stand up for herself because she was one of those people in life who didn’t. But she needed something back. She needed to feel like it hadn’t all been a complete waste of her time and that she was at least going to get something out of it to remember him by. Well she was going to get something out of it. But it just wasn’t going to provide her with a fond memory.

  ‘Do you really think I’d soil myself by … with you?’ O’Neill snarled. ‘Look at you! You’re grotesque. You’re not even mutton dressed up as lamb. You’re begging dressed up as desperate and the idea of the two of us … it makes my bloody skin crawl’.

  ‘You were happy enough to accept my roof when you needed to keep your head down when you thought the police might be after you’ Carol snapped back. ‘Oh no, I wasn’t so disgusting an idea to you then, was I?’

  O’Neill swiped her hard across her mouth and then he let go of her wrist. She was stunned and the room went quiet for a moment. She could sense all his anger as he stood over her. She touched the blood beginning to pour out of the wound to her mouth and then started to cry which was never what you should do in circumstances like these. If there was any hope of the man changing his mind and staying then that hope was always destroyed by tears.

  Why would she never learn? Why did she always put herself in this position? She used to go and sit in the bar of the Midland hotel in the centre of Manchester, all dressed up to the nines, and sipping from a glass of tap water that of course had been provided for her for free. Some nights she’d sit there for three or four hours without a sniff and end up going home alone and crying herself to sleep. Other nights she wouldn’t have to wait long before some prize idiot came along, bought her a drink or two and then took her up to his room. She’d have to smile and act grateful whilst they sweated on top of her and didn’t give her anything to write home about. It was alright for them. They’d get what they wanted. She’d leave them sated in the early hours but none of them ever asked to see her again. They’d talk about themselves but never ask anything about her. They’d tell her all about the wife and kids at home and the happy family life that nobody could ever threaten. It was their warning to her not to read anything into what was happening between them other than the here and now. She could remember the family life she’d had when she was growing up and it had all seemed happy enough on the surface. Then her Mum died and it was all over. She sometimes wondered what her father or brother would say if they saw her acting as she does like some prostitute in a swanky hotel bar because she’s desperate for male company. Would they run for the door and hope she hadn’t seen them? Or would they be overwhelmed with regret at the way they’d both left her years before? It was a fantasy she sometimes used to get through the loneliness. A fantasy of half brothers and half sisters, of people she could take care of and people who would take care of her. She would close her eyes on Christmas morning and imagine the room full of laughter and merriment, people with stupid hats on sitting round a long extended lunch table and nephews and nieces fighting to be the first to show Aunty Carol what they’d got for Christmas. Then she’d be snapped out of her dream by the sound of the microwave buzzing to let her know that her turkey dinner for one had finished cooking. The room would be silent except for the television.

  Chris grabbed her by the jaw and held her face up. It was like looking at a bloody clown. ‘If you tell the police that I’ve been here or about anything else you know then I will come back and I will kill you. Do you understand?’

  Carol nodded her head gently.

  ‘I said do you understand?’

  ‘Yes!’ she pleaded. ‘Yes, I understand that once again good old Carol has been there for someone but they’re never going to be there for me. Yes, I understand that you got what you wanted and now you’re just going to piss off as if I don’t matter at all. So why don’t you? Just go and you know full well that I won’t open my mouth to anybody’.

  ‘You’re pathetic’.

  ‘Yes, well I’ve said that to myself a thousand times but all I ever wanted out of life was to be normal and to have people who wouldn’t leave me. Was that too much to ask?’

  ‘Aw I’ve no time to join the bleeding hearts club’.

  ‘Some of us get no choice’.

  ‘Alright, alright I have appreciated your help, Carol. But anything else between us was never on the cards. You’re old enough to be my mother for fuck’s sake. I’m out of here. Don’t follow me and don’t make it possible for anyone else to either or else I might have to come back and that wouldn’t be pretty’.

  After O’Neill had gone Carol sat on the edge of her bed for what felt like hours. She was motionless as she stared into space wondering what might have been if just one thing had gone right in her life instead of everything having gone wrong. She shivered. She was still just in her silk slip. She rubbed her arms and then stood up. She went to where she kept her bottles of alcohol in the living room. Since she’d been seeing Padraig she always kept a bottle of Irish whiskey for when he was there. She quite liked it herself now too. She’d only bought a new one the day before he went over to Ireland and it was almost full. Poor, poor Padraig. He’d let her down. He hadn’t respected her the way a man should respect a woman. So she’d done a deal with the devil and Padraig had paid a high price for all the pain that had been inflicted on her by others. She was sorry now.

  She picked up the whiskey and took it with her to the kitchen. In the cupboard above the sink she took the packets of paracetamol she kept there and pushed out each tablet from its plastic casing. When she was done she counted 33 of them. That should be enough, she thought.

  She then sat at the kitchen table and thought for one last time about the father and brother who’d just walked off and left her when she wasn’t much more than a child getting over the loss of her mother to cancer. She thought about all the men she’d tried to love, all the worlds of happiness she’d glimpsed for a moment before it was all taken away again. She thought about Padraig. She’d so loved him but for that very reason she didn’t expect he’d be waiting on the other side for her. She took as many of the tablets at one time as she could along with ever bigger gulps of the Irish whiskey. She went into the next life hating everyone she’d ever met in this one and hoping that her Mum would be waiting for her with the hug she’d needed for so many years.

  THROWN DOWN TEN

  By the time Dennis returned home there were still several members of the press on the pavement in their temporary camp outside his house but thanks to the solitary police guard he managed to get his car straight up the driveway to the door. He paused for a moment before going into the house. He breathed in deep. He could hear the members of the press pack shouting out their questions to him. When he’d turned up at his son Shane’s place in central Melbourne, Shane had immediately called his mother Patricia to put her mind at rest. Shane, like his sister Phoebe and his brother Michael had wanted to know what the hell was going on with their parents
and Phoebe and Michael had joined Dennis at Shane’s house. Dennis had told them all that he could and though they’d been shocked to the core by the revelations of their mother’s early life, all three of them had agreed that their parents had to sort things out somehow and try to stay together. They realised it was a hard ask of their father in particular and none of them had pulled any punches when they each spoke to their mother about it all. But they had all agreed that it was in the past and that though she should’ve told their father, she didn’t, and they could all understand her reasons for not having done so. But if they were going to stay together then Dennis needed certain things to happen and what he had to talk to Patricia about now could go one of two ways. He didn’t really know if he was prepared for either of the potential turnouts but somehow or other he had to make this effort to get past the current mess they were in.

  He placed his key in the door and let himself in. The house felt normal. He could hear the washing machine in the utility room next to the kitchen in full throw at the spinning notch of a cycle. It looked like someone had been over the carpet too. The place smelt fresh and newly done over. Patricia had told him over the phone that their neighbour Molly had gone out and got some supplies in for her. It was almost as if they were besieged. Patricia couldn’t risk a run to the shops. What the hell was all this coming to? The press were coming after the kids now too. It was getting very, very bad. He was contemplating it all when Patricia appeared from their bedroom.

  ‘I’ve been worried sick about you’ said Patricia. She’d promised herself she wouldn’t cry when Dennis came back but she couldn’t help the quiver in her voice. ‘I imagined all kinds of things’.

  Dennis held out his hand and Patricia came running and into his arms. This was second only to the moment when he asked her to marry him and she said yes.

  ‘I needed some time and space, Patty’ said Dennis as he held his wife tightly in his arms. ‘I needed to get out and think. I’m sorry I made you worry’.

  ‘Well I don’t care about any of that stuff now’ said Patricia who’d started to cry. ‘I’m just so relieved and so thankful that you’re back’.

  ‘We do need to talk though, love’.

  ‘Yes. Yes we do. I’ll make us some tea and we’ll do just that’.

  Dennis wondered if something stronger might be more appropriate considering what he had to say about his wife and her terrorist past. Maybe that will be for later.

  Detective Constable Collette Ryan of the Victoria state police didn’t see what else she could do.

  ‘Will you please listen to me, sir?’ she asked in a firm enough voice to make every head in the police station’s serious crime unit. They were kept fairly busy out here in the eastern suburbs of the Greater Melbourne area but some of her friends who were based in inner city areas had it much worse and they always reminded her of the fact.

  ‘You have my absolute undivided attention, Detective Constable Ryan’ said Detective Inspector Ed Burns as he leaned back in his chair and bathed himself in the existence of an audience. He was decidedly old school. He wasn’t particularly keen on female officers rising up through the ranks and whenever he could he cut them down and did everything he could to undermine their confidence. He was on a warning over a bullying charge that had been made against him by another female officer but he didn’t care. He didn’t care who he upset in the line of what he considered to be his duties. He was on a mission to smash all political correctness. He’d always believed that the way to encourage someone was to constantly criticise their actions and pick on them so that it would make them determined to prove him wrong. Never let them think that they had his confidence. That way they’d get slack. But, sadly as far as he was concerned, his superiors didn’t take kindly to the ‘thoroughly old school’ way he treated people, particularly his junior ranks and most especially his female officers to which he was known for showing absolutely no respect at all. They were after him. He knew that. Well it made a change for somebody to be after him. Even his ex-wife and their two grown up kids had given up, citing the fact that they were sick and tired of the way he spoke to them. It made for some pretty lonely weekends, especially when he thought of his little grandson Jack who he was so proud of and would love to spend some time with. But his son hadn’t even invited him to Jack’s first birthday party and that had hurt Burns more than he’d ever admit to anyone. His son was probably a damn sight better father than he ever was. He’d love to be a part of their lives. But as it was his lonely evenings were sorted out in the pub drinking with a bunch of men whose attitudes were also stuck in the last century.

  ‘Sir, … ‘

  ‘ … yes, come in, Ryan. Flower my consciousness with your pearls of wisdom’.

  Collette breathed in deep to try and quell her mounting anger. ‘Sir, I am trying to speak but you keep on interrupting me’.

  ‘Well I’m waiting to hear that you’ve been doing your job, Ryan’.

  ‘And I would be able to tell you a lot quicker if you didn’t keep throwing so much bullshit in my way, sir!’

  It was one of those moments when time stood still and everything and everyone in the office suddenly went very quiet and still. But Collette didn’t regret her outburst. Burns had had it coming from someone for a long time. She’d stepped up to the brink. She could hear her heart pounding.

  ‘Detective Constable Ryan, my office!’

  ‘With the greatest of pleasure, sir!’

  Collette was so determined to have her showdown with Burns that she was almost at his office door before he was. She marched in without giving way to him first. He followed her and told her to sit down.

  ‘I’d rather stand’ she replied.

  ‘I said sit down Ryan’.

  ‘And I said I’d rather stand!’

  ‘Just you remember who you’re talking you, Ryan’ he warned her.

  ‘Well isn’t that rich coming from you’.

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘Well it may have escaped your attention, sir, but I’m actually a human being but you talk to me like I’m a bloody dog!’

  ‘You show me some respect!

  ‘You show me some and then I’ll think about it! You have to earn respect, sir. It shouldn’t be an automatic entitlement’.

  Collette could see her chest rising up and down. Her breathing was fast. She looked at him. She had no idea what he was going to do now. Had she gone too far? Had she said too much? Her ex-husband said she had too much of a mouth on her at times but damn it, she wasn’t in the wrong here. Burns was in the wrong. He was the one who’d abused the nature of their relationship. He was the one who’d treated her like dirt and no matter the difference in rank she didn’t deserve it and she wasn’t going to put up with it.

  Burns really didn’t know what to say in response so he decided to just press ahead with the business of the day. ‘Okay, Ryan. Tell me your thoughts about Patricia Knight’.

  Collette was surprised that he hadn’t come back and tried to wipe the floor with her. The fact that he hadn’t was almost as unnerving as if he had laid into her again. Maybe his spirit had cracked before hers. He looked like he’d totally capitulated.

  ‘Sir, Patricia Knight has committed no crimes since arriving in Australia in nineteen seventy-six. She and her husband Dennis have had their financial ups and downs and been behind with their taxes on a couple of occasions but none of that adds up to the crime of the century. What came earlier of course is an entirely different matter. Patricia O’Connell was a member of the IRA and therefore implicated in many crimes that we’re completely unaware of down here. But she turned her back on all of that when she came out here and in the absence of any extradition request from the UK on the basis of specific charges then I really don’t see what else there is we can do apart from to provide the basic security around her house and ensure her safety within that’.