Free Close Your Eyes by Michael Robotham

crossed and he’d lost even the faintest spark of paternal love.
    When he wasn’t drinking, he pumped iron. He made himself a weight bench in the garage, welding a cradle to take the bar. He made me spot for him. I was only eight and couldn’t have lifted the bar off him had it slipped. All I could do was steer it to the cradle when it rose on his rubbery ink-stained arms, his eyes bulging and veins popping. I know what he was doing – punishing himself, enjoying the pain.
    Afterwards he would make me lift. ‘See if you can beat your old man,’ he’d say, grinning maliciously.
    I couldn’t hope to lift the same weight. It crushed my chest and he bleated in my ear about being a pansy and a ‘nancy boy’. Twice he cracked my ribs, which was before my broken arm and dislocated elbow; before I was taken into care.
    The first few drinks seemed to mellow him and clear his head, but soon he’d be looking to pick a fight with someone – usually my brother, or sister, or me. The slightest thing would set him off: a knife scraping on a plate or a tap left dripping. I felt sorriest for Agatha, my sister. She didn’t get physically abused. I didn’t see my father touch her once – to hug her or hit her – but he punished her in hundreds of other ways.
    ‘Are you on the rag?’ he’d say. ‘I can smell you. Have another shower … You get any fatter I’ll have to widen the doors … If that skirt was any shorter you’d be arrested for selling crack.’
    My father believed that women were to blame for the first sin and all that followed. With shaking hands and drool drying on his chin, he would lecture me about adultery, sitting in his armchair, his penis resembling a turtle’s head, poking from his yellowing Y-fronts. Women were sluts and witches and devious betrayers. A vagina was like a Venus flytrap that could snap shut and trap a man.
    The first time I sat next to a girl at school I was surprised at how sweet she smelled. Her shampoo. Her breath. Her skin. Her name was Sandra Martin and I followed her home that day because she made me feel light-headed and strange. Sandra was one of the popular girls who knew she was pretty and didn’t need to try hard to make friends or turn heads. Other girls who were less attractive seemed to crave affection almost as much as I did. One of them, Karen Basing, who had greasy hair and a runny nose, would pull her knickers down and show boys her slot, but only if they bought her a Mars Bar. That’s what it reminded me of, her vagina, the pink slot in a piggybank.
    We were caught one day by one of the nuns. Nothing happened to Karen Basing, but I was sent to the priest, who said he was very disappointed. ‘How would you feel if that was your mother?’ he said. ‘Or your sister?’
    I wanted to tell him that my mother died with a penis in her mouth and that my sister had left home by then and could do what she damn well pleased. They could all go to hell. My family. The Church. Karen Basing.
    Normally when children go missing people rally around and search, fanning out across the fields and vacant ground from where the bicycle or schoolbag was found. Emotionally they adopt the child, saying prayers for his safe return and wondering what sort of sick pervert would snatch an innocent from their midst. Meanwhile, they eye their neighbours suspiciously, the drifters and single men and midlife pensioners.
    That didn’t happen to me. Nobody bothered to search or to pray for me because I’d been taken by one of my own. I’d gone missing in my own family.

7
    Awake. Bleary. Trembling. For a moment I wonder if I’m dreaming. Emma has climbed on to the sofa bed next to me, dressed in her pyjamas, which are covered in cartoon polar bears.
    ‘When did you come?’ she asks excitedly. ‘Why didn’t you wake me? Did you bring me something? Are you staying? Can we go to the cinema? Will you make me pancakes for breakfast? Do you like my new pyjamas? Mummy bought them when we went to