Unicorn, Part 1 (M/f, M/F)

[flora.weston]

This is my first story under this username. I have been absent from Spanko for some eight years (!) but am hoping to re-establish myself if you'll have me. Any and all feedback welcome. There will be probably seven to ten parts to this (it is all written but I haven't worked out where the breaks go).

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There comes a point where you can no longer concentrate on your breathing: a point where your mind needs more distraction. In an interrogation room there is very little to look at, let alone be distracted by. I suppose I should have been glad I was not hooded, as I had been in training. In a hood all you have is your own increasingly stuffy breath and your own discomfort to consider.

I had reached the point of desperately wanting distraction, and had allowed my mind to drift into the past. Remembered pain, fear and isolation are somehow consoling in comparison to present agonies, since one has also the memories of having overcome or at least outlived it.

I don’t remember a great deal from before my parents’ death. I don’t know if I have chosen not to remember, or if subsequent events were simply more intense and therefore more easily retained in the memory. Nonetheless, at twelve I was suddenly alone and adrift in the world. I as put into temporary foster care whilst the authorities decided what to do with me, during which time I attended the joint funeral, along with very few others.

Then at last my foster mother helped me pack up my things and said I was being collected. I suppose I had visions of a new, loving family for whom I would be the daughter they had never had, with siblings to squabble and grow up with. Children’s dreams are rarely attainable and still less realistic.

Certainly I had not envisioned being picked up from the foster home in an unremarkable black car with blacked-out windows, by an equally unremarkable and unmemorable young woman in anonymous dark clothing. Certainly I had not expected to take a long drive apparently into the middle of nowhere, to be let out of the car in silence, to be led inside a large house, pushed through a door and left alone. And in none of my imaginings would I ever have foreseen that the lights would then be put out.

You probably think it strange that I should find this memory consoling. It was the single most traumatic event of my life – nothing before or since comes close. But I know I survived it, I know I succeeded where others failed, and I know that some of the best experiences of my life also result directly from that trauma. So remembering that car ride helped me in my current situation. I could remember that I had been frightened (but that I was later not frightened), that I had been cold (but that I was later warm) and that I had been disorientated – but now I am getting ahead of myself. It is not possible to explain how I came to understand my surroundings or even my own life without telling the rest of the story. You will just have to trust me that this is the memory I return to when I need reassurance, or consolation, or contentment.

I do not know how long I was left in the dark; I was never told and never asked. I know that at first I cried and pleaded; that presently I gave up and stood still; that a little later I groped around to judge the dimensions and furnishings of the room. I judged it to be around eight feet square and entirely empty apart from my wretched self. Eventually I had to empty my bladder, doing so in the corner I judged furthest from the door. I wept a little more as I did so, and afterwards, before lying down by the door and sleeping for a spell on the hard, cold floor.

After some time the door opened, and someone came in, closing the door after himself, but bruising my senses with the explosion of light. He exclaimed at the mess in the corner – at that point I was so confused I did not question how he could see it – and proceeded to beat me for it with some kind of stick or baton. I screamed, I think, and will certainly have cried that first time. When I finally gave in and simply slumped on the floor, helpless and weeping, he stopped abruptly, and left me again in the silence and dark.

I slept again, although whether through exhaustion or despair I am not sure. I awoke to a noise outside. When the stranger came in he simply barked at me to stand up, and then beat me again.

I was a fool not to be standing the third time; the fourth time, although now faint with hunger, thirst, exhaustion and pain, I was at least scrambling to my feet.

After that I was left alone for a far longer time. I slept for much of it, enough to satisfy my exhaustion, but awoke stiff, sore, hungry and thirsty.

The door rattled; I jumped to my feet; this time a light was turned on. I screwed up my eyes and put my hands up against the bulb. The voice barked at me to keep my hands over my face, before the blows began to land as I had come to expect. I staggered a little, but did not protest, or remove my hands from my face.

Almost immediately, I heard another voice, and I will remember these words until the day I die: “All right, she’ll do. Leave the light on.”

At once the beating stopped, and a pair of feet shuffled away. The second voice told me to drop my hands and open my eyes. I of course complied, but was still blinking as my saviour left, closing the door behind him.

Is it any wonder I loved him instantly? He ended the indiscriminate torture; he turned on the light. The first time I saw him he was bathed in a halo of light, as my eyes struggled to readjust to full light after so long in the dark,

Waiting in a dark cell and waiting in a lit cell are quite different. In the former your imagination plays tricks on you; in the latter you have only reality to contend with.

For me the reality was a small, white cell, with a small wet patch in one corner. There were hunger, thirst and fear for companions. There was uncertainty. But now there was hope.

When I next heard the door I stood and covered my eyes. A voice – my voice, my angel – told me I could look, and I beheld him for the first time. Not unusually tall or short, or striking to look at. Dark hair fashionably but not trendily short. Sharp blue eyes. Yesterday’s stubble. I had seen him at my parents’ funeral but had not recognised him then.

He smiled as if amused by my scrutiny, and then passed me a tray.

“Put it down.”

When I had done so he looked me straight in the eye, told me not to eat it, and then left.

I can still picture that tray. There was a sandwich on white bread, a red apple, a biscuit in a red wrapper, and a bottle of water. For a good while I just stood there looking at them, then after a time I sat down and tried not to look.

At last it was all too much. I was too hungry and too thirsty to ignore the tray forever. So, reasoning that I had been told not to eat, but not told not to drink, I picked up the bottle, opened it, and drank a small amount. I could feel the cool as it trickled down to my stomach; I could taste the flavour of it, although I would never previously have considered water to have any flavour at all.

The next time the door opened, the bottle was around half full. He looked it, and then shot me a look of pure loathing.

“You drank it.”

“Yes, I -”

“I told you not to eat anything.”

“But I didn’t eat –“

Wham! He hit me hard across the face.

“Don’t you ever answer me back,” he spat out. “Pick up the bottle.”

I picked it up, and then at his direction poured it out all over the floor. I was biting back tears as he left, still berating me, but it was not until the door was closed again that I dared lift my hand to my face to touch where he had hit me.

And this is the man I worshipped? Even at this distance I can sense my reader’s incredulity and disapproval. I can understand both: this is not how children should be treated; this is not how abusers should be regarded. But at the time I was vastly disorientated, both geographically and psychologically, and I soon learned that it was all just a test, and that I had passed. Now do you understand why I recall it with such pride and fondness? It was the fire that forged me.

Left alone in a room where I would not sit down or lie down – the floor being now wet nearly everywhere – and with food I could not eat, I was passing the test. When the door next opened I was called through it to my new life.