Free The White Room by Martyn Waites

somewhere. Brian didn’t know what was worse: knowing or not knowing. It didn’t matter. He hated both equally.
    He hated his mother because she was a slag with no love in her body. She would never give them anything of herself, never even tell them anything. Brian didn’t even know whether he and Noel shared the same father. He could never remember his mother looking happy. Always shouting and hitting him. It didn’t matter what he did, whether he was good or bad, the result was the same. He tried to be good, tried to make her love him by doing things to make her smile, make her happy. He would tidy up the house, wash the dishes. But it didn’t work. She would still shout at him, still hit him. After a while he stopped trying.
    Sometimes she would get upset and give him a hug, cry and say she was sorry. That she was going to be good to him and Noel, look after them properly from now on. Brian used to smile and hug her back. Tell her he loved her. Wait for the next day to come, hoping everything would change, life would get better. But it didn’t. Next day would be the same. And the day after that. He cried at first, but after a while even that ceased.
    She had a powerful arm on her. He would carry with him a ringing memory of that for his whole life. She had once smacked him with her open palm on the side of his face for some imagined upset. The blow left a livid, red handprint on his skin that took nearly a week to disappear. It also caught his ear full on, bursting not only his eardrum but causing so much internal damage that his loss of hearing in that one ear became permanent.
    She never apologized: something else to add to the hate list.
    And gradually he became the person she turned him into.
    Then there was his brother. He hated Noel for many reasons. His two working ears, his constant attempts to get his mother’s attention. The fact that he might have had a different, better father. The fact that he knew Brian better than anyone else, knew his secrets, had seen him cry.
    His mother had brought Brian and Noel up alone. Brian knew where the money had come from, what his mother had to do to earn it. And he hated that. His mother never discussed, never explained. Sometimes she would go out smelling of cheap perfume and come back reeking of cheap booze, fag smoke and other people’s bodies. Brian didn’t like that, but disliked it even more when she brought the men back with her. Brian and Noel hated them. All of them. They would stand and stare at them, eyes angry the first few times, but over the years that passion dulling. Eventually they just stared blankly at the men or just ignored them. But they never stopped hating: deep inside the fires kindled, the embers smouldered. At first his mother would send the boys outside, but after a time she stopped worrying about their presence in the house, although she never fucked in front of the boys, not even if a punter wanted to. And she never let the boys join in, even if the punter was offering very favourable terms.
    She always took them through to the back room and closed the door. The boys could still hear through the walls. They would turn the radio up – Educating Archie, Arthur Askey – but the jokes weren’t funny and the laughter made him sick. It was the sound of a world without worries enjoying itself. Brian knew that world existed; he just didn’t have a clue how to get into it.
    The men were all different: tall, short, fat, skinny, hairy, bald, smelly, clean, and everything in between. But they all made the same noises. Grunting, sweating, shouting, begging. Sometimes they sounded funny – funnier than that stuff on the radio. His mother’s sounds were always the same too: quick and sharp, gasping and sighing. Like the men were punishing her and she was taking it.
    The years passed. Brian tried not to be in when the men came calling. He hated them and all that they represented. His mother didn’t