Free Stay Dead by Jessie Keane Page A

Mum, but Edie’s eyes remained resolutely on the floor. What was he talking about, the box room? The tiny room was a tip, everything went in there, all the shit in the
entire world it seemed, so why was he talking about sorting it out? Dad never bothered himself with stuff like that.
    ‘I said come on – you deaf?’ Dad snarled at Dolly from the bottom of the stairs.
    Confused, Dolly followed him up. But instead of going left to the box room, he went into the bedroom he shared with Mum. Her heart suddenly in her mouth, Dolly hesitated at the door and he
took her hand, pulled her inside, shut it. He passed a hand over his face and she thought she saw a flicker of something like despair there before it was gone, quick as a flash, and then he was
smiling.
    ‘You’re my best girl, ain’t you, Doll?’ he said, and his voice was almost whining, almost pleading, as he led her to the bed.
    ‘What about the box room?’ Dolly blurted out in terror, her face red with shame because she knew what he was going to do, he was going to do the man-and-woman thing to her, she
knew it . . .
    And Mum knew it too.
    That thought cut into her, sharp as a knife. Mum was sitting downstairs letting him do this, because it kept him away from her.
    ‘That’ll keep. Lay down there, Dolly, there’s a good girl.’
    What could she do? This was wrong, but it was Dad, and she loved him, of course she did. So she lay down on the bed and when he lay down next to her she didn’t bolt for the door. It
took willpower not to, but this was her dad. He loved her. She had to keep reminding herself of that, she had to.
    Down in the kitchen, Edie heard her daughter’s piercing scream.
    ‘Oh Christ in heaven,’ she said, and as Dolly screamed again she put her hands over her ears and rocked backward and forward in her chair, crying. ‘Forgive me,’ she
moaned. ‘Please forgive me.’

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    After that first time, it happened again and again – so many times that Dolly lost count, and she tried to count, to think that some day she might reach the end of
this, that it might stop. But it didn’t.
    Mum knew.
    That was the bit that really choked Dolly. Mum knew about this, and she didn’t intervene, didn’t give a monkey’s. She was just relieved that Dad’s attentions were
elsewhere. But maybe this was normal? Maybe this was just one of the adult things that Dolly hadn’t previously known about, and which she had to learn? She didn’t know.
    Time and again she thought of the angels in the little church, of how stupid and innocent she had been to think that there was beauty in the world. She remembered the sweet-faced old priest
with his fine words about God and redemption. But the priest had been wrong, so wrong. There was no beauty. There was nothing in this world except filth and degradation.
    Beauty?
    What a laugh.
    It didn’t exist, not in her world. Nothing worth a flying fuck did.
    Mum wouldn’t look her in the face any more, Dolly knew that much. And more and more they carted Edie off to the hospital to get ‘zapped’, as Nigel
mockingly called it. Nigel thought Dad could do no wrong, but Mum? He’d grown critical of her, aping his father’s attitude. When Edie got home, it was Dolly who had to put her to bed,
clean up the sick, deal with her vague, mad statements. It always took a day or two for Edie to come back to herself, and in between she was lost to them. Not a mother at all, really, just a thing
in a bed, babbling nonsense, poor cow. Dolly saw how Edie cringed away from her husband whenever he came near, and she didn’t wonder at it. She felt rage and bitterness toward her mother, no
love at all now, but in the cold logical core of herself she could see Edie’s viewpoint. She could see that Edie had chosen to sacrifice her eldest daughter and save herself.
    So it went on, months and months of endless torment. Dolly ate chocolates, the guilt-gifts she got from her dad, and she grew fatter, comfort-eating. Home was a