Free Nothing Sacred by David Thorne Page A

small and insignificant underneath its weight.
    Heading away from the lights and dramas of my town felt almost as if I was travelling back in time, passing red-brick and clapboard cottages built so long ago that they seemed part of the landscape, formed in some forgotten past. I had heard that there were villages in the farthest reaches of Essex that still blocked up their doors with crossed broomsticks to ward off witches, people who claimed to have seen their forms crossing the night skies, fluttering blackly over ancient village greens. I thought back to Vick, left in a house she believed harboured malevolent spirits; was the best advice I could give her to cross broomsticks over her front door?
    But I was not a superstitious man, and I did not doubt that somebody had done this to her, that somebody had tried to kill her. I did not know who or why, did not know how I could help her, but I knew that I could not cut her loose or give up on her. I turned my car around and headed back to civilisation, and the only family I still had. If I needed any reminder that life was, in essence, base, prosaic and entirely bereft of mystery, an evening with my father would supply it.
    My father ate food as if it was still alive on his fork and it was only through determined and aggressive biting and chewing that it could be subdued and killed; he attacked his plate of dinner as if it was a threat, like it was personal. As Maria and I watched him, his huge tattooed forearms on the table, massive shoulders hunched over his plate, I could not help but think that this was the way he approached life in general: angry, violent and nasty. He chewed agitatedly and I could see the muscles in his jaws working, bulging under his skin, making a cracking sound with every bite down.
    Maria smiled winsomely but I could see in the fixedness of her smile that she was unsettled by my father’s presence, by his animal intensity, the subliminal rage he carried about with him. He had no business around a dining table; he held his knife like a weapon.
    â€˜More wine, Francis?’ she said.
    My father, who everybody else in the world knew as Frankie, nodded, still chewing, took a huge swallow of meat, which made his throat visibly swell. ‘This, Maria, my darling, is fucking blinding.’
    Maria was one of the kindest, most generous and decent people I had ever met. It was true when I told her that I did not believe I deserved her, could not think of anybody who would. My father, on the other hand, was an embittered and uneducated bully who found pleasure in other people’s misfortune, who enjoyed inflicting pain and violence. I had never heard him laugh sincerely, had rarely seen him smile. I had seen people cross streets to avoid him.
    Now, though, he was doing his best to be polite, listening to what Maria was saying, nodding at his plate, agreeing, grunting responses. I had never seen him behave in such a civilised fashion, was astonished. Maria had my father wrapped around her little finger.
    I had not wanted Maria to invite my father to dinner, had tried to talk her out of it; the thought of his presence in my home felt like a violation, as if some of his cruelty might rub off, taint it. I told her what he had done to my mother, the life of humiliation, fear and misery he had consigned her to; gave her details of his constant neglect, the hurt he had subjected me to. But she had not listened, insisted that it was important, that family mattered. Maria’s father, a kind Spanish man who spent thirty years cutting local men’s hair, had recently died and she visited her mother every other day, cooked for her. I had seen them together and they spoke to each other with love and respect and an ease that made them seem more like sisters than mother and daughter. I suspected that Maria simply could not conceive of the levels of dysfunction and resentment that underpinned the relationship I had with my father; though an evening spent with