The Waterhole

By Murray Annals

A heart-rending psychological drama, The Waterhole explores the blurred margins of reality in the life of an abused twelve-year-old girl.

Growing-up in the natural beauty and dramatic volcanic landscape of New Zealands Coromandel Range, school sports star Jolie Overwater has a home life she dare not expose. The intelligent, unloved daughter of violent misogynist Victor and barely-functional rag-doll Ruth, she is desperate for deliverance.

Only at the waterhole does she feel safe; swimming in the cool water, or listening to the stories of her mysterious friends enchanting little Mary and brave taniwha hunter Mahinarangi.

Where do they come from? Can they help Jolie escape her father? What secrets does towering Blood Rock hold?

Enter Jolies world, where time and space refuse to conform to the laws of physics.

Enter the world of the mind!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris NZ
• Release date: Aug 30, 2013
• ISBN: 9781483688978

Murray Annals

After thirty years farming in New Zealand’s dairy heartland, Murray Annals has returned to another lifelong passion – the written word. Murray’s writing reflects an affinity for the natural environment but he is no chronicler of charming rural anecdotes. His adult fiction explores deep recesses of the human mind and reveals dark secrets and hidden treasures to both enthral and challenge readers. With many years’ experience in school governance Murray retains an enthusiasm for children’s education and welfare. Murray Annals is married and lives at Tauwhare, Waikato. He cherishes family time with his five sons and their partners, and his grandchildren. The Waterhole is his first published novel. It is followed by a sequel, Devil Boy. Murray Annals is on Facebook.

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Contents

Chapter One

Man’s Best Friend

Chapter Two

A Wife And Mother

Chapter Three

Two Girls

Chapter Four

The Girl-Child

Chapter Five

A New Life

Chapter Six

To The Victor…

Chapter Seven

A Short Prayer

Chapter Eight

All Grown Up

Chapter Nine

An Unexpected Visitor

Chapter Ten

A Slow Fever

Chapter Eleven

Land Of Opportunity

Chapter Twelve

The New Water

Chapter Thirteen

Mcbrinn’s Creek

Chapter Fourteen

A Month Of Mary

Chapter Fifteen

A Little Pilgrimage

Chapter Sixteen

All God’s Children

Chapter Seventeen

Nebuchadnezzar’s Dream

Chapter Eighteen

A Race Against Time

Chapter Nineteen

A Little Secret

Chapter Twenty

In Search Of The Taniwha

Chapter Twenty-One

Korero Pakiwaitara O Mahinarangi (Mahinarangi’s Story)

Chapter Twenty-Two

Korero Purakau O Maratoto (The Legend Of Blood Rock)

Chapter Twenty-Three

Just Another Body

Chapter Twenty-Four

Ruthless Beauty

Chapter Twenty-Five

Brothers In Arms

Chapter Twenty-Six

An Awakening

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Shadows And Afterglows

Afterword

To The Reader

Chapter One

MAN’S BEST FRIEND

My Girl, thou gazest much upon the golden skies: Would I were in Heaven, I would behold Thee then with all mine eyes.

(George Turberville, ‘The Lover to His Lady’)

Tuesday, 22 November 1988

Nine eyes—four-and-a-half pairs—followed Victor Overwater’s progress from house to shed, instinctively rather than with any particular interest, or cognition even. Perhaps that was not entirely true of Girl, but whoever really knows what goes through the mind of a dog?

To her, Victor’s approach meant possibilities: hopes raised and dashed, joys unrequited, freedom from the chain (sometimes), and food (barely subsistence). More probably it foreshadowed some gruffly muttered cussed greeting, or a quick slap, born of frustration as thick fingers clumsily fumbled with the chain clip. From time to painful time, she received a heavy gumbooted kick to the ribs, born of some deeper, less immediate frustration that forced air from her lungs and left a stinging souvenir for hours or days.

The worst possibility of all, so far as she knew, was that Victor may walk right past dog, chain, and kennel, seemingly unaware of their existence. Experience had taught Girl that barking was an exercise in futility. This day—as every day—the only communication she could muster was a cringing, whimpering, tail-wagging contradiction of submissive attention seeking. This little Girl was a contradiction on four legs.

From birth it was obvious that the pup, the product of surreptitious coitus behind the old wooden hayshed out the back of the Pemberton place, some three farms farther up The Valley, would never match the beauty of her mother. Lady, Bruce Pemberton’s little black-and-white bitch, was the object of covetous admiration by local farmers. Her ability to control stock, be they ewes-and-lambs or rogue Angus ‘bush bulls’, had become a legend that no dog could match, not even Lady herself. Not prone to hyperbole, Bruce paid her the ultimate farmer’s compliment: ‘Yeah, she’s a good little dog, all right’. (Most superior working dogs were accorded a more typical ‘not too shabby’ or ‘pretty good’ descriptor.)

Bruce had resisted lucrative propositions from breeders keen to mate their own favourite Boss, Duke, Fly, Flood, Rock, Rata, Rex, Tex, Toby, Tom, Dick, or Hori with the gorgeous little Border collie. He continued to display a stubborn capacity to refuse each and every ‘offer too good to refuse’.

‘No. Sorry. Yeah, I know it sounds a bit lame, but… not yet. Just want to let her have… y’know… one more year of freedom, I s’pose. I dunno… Maybe next year. I’ll let you know.’

Bruce knew that pregnancies inevitably signal beginnings of ends. Four times, his own young beloved Dot had carried his children. Four times she had miscarried. Each loss—each death—took away a little more of her spirit, and eventually, her mind. ‘Poor Dot’ had acquired a peculiarly impassive and utterly utter-less brand of insanity. She had ceased speaking.

In effect Bruce had lost his family—past and future—before the age of 35. He had tried blaming himself, his wife, doctors, even his God. It was futile; no one was to blame. Nothing he could say or do could change the past. He had almost managed to convince himself that there was nothing he could have said or done to save Dot’s sanity. Her mind and womb were doomed—either by divine prescription or genetic predisposition—to vacancy. Whether God’s will or natural selection, it was meant to be. Time had distanced Bruce from pain, but nothing could deracinate deep-rooted, recidivist recall.

Dorothy Pemberton had been so careful with her fourth and final pregnancy. She had eaten healthily, rested regularly, and exercised gently. Bruce was tender and attentive, ensuring that his wife was neither emotionally stressed nor physically taxed. His mother had died three years before, eventually succumbing to the breast cancer that she had stoically resisted (and fatally denied) for too long. In the final conversation between mother and son, Muriel Pemberton had described her daughter-in-law as a ‘delicate wee flower’.

‘Wrap her in cotton wool when you need to, Bruce. She’s a good girl, and I know she loves you.’

Bruce had never before heard his mother utter the word ‘love’, except in the context of her Christian faith, yet he knew that when she said Dot loved him, an unspoken postscript followed: ‘As I, too, have always loved you’. And it was true that Dot had loved him, never more so than after Muriel’s death.

Five months into the pregnancy, Dorothy began to experience painful cramps, but no bleeding. Her doctor was ‘cautiously optimistic’ that it was ‘nothing too serious’, given that each of her three previous pregnancies had ‘spontaneously aborted’ (the coldly clinical term still jarred in Bruce’s memory) at approximately twelve weeks. Dr Oude had read the fear in Dorothy Pemberton’s eyes.

‘We had better play it safe though. I’ll book you in for bed rest at Thames Hospital. They’ll take good care of you. Will you be able to drive her there this afternoon, Bruce? You can go home and pack a bag first. Don’t worry, Mrs Pemberton, I’m sure you’ll be fine.’

Two weeks hospital rest passed slowly—uneventfully. Each morning, Bruce rushed through his farm chores to spend the afternoon with his wife. Each night, he drove back to The Valley in darkness, exhausted yet confident that one day he would make the journey home with Dot and their healthy little baby. Bruce had no reason not to be confident. Dot glowed with health, happiness, and a pink-and-golden refulgent beauty. The obstetrician was confident. The midwife was confident. The nurses were confident. Dorothy Pemberton was sent home.

Dot enjoyed six peaceful days either resting in the big tan-coloured, cosily enveloping armchair that Bruce had dragged onto the front porch or happily pottering about the kitchen. She spent five blissful nights lying in the arms of the man she loved, dreaming of summer evenings nursing his child. On the sixth night, Bruce jolted awake to muffled sobbing. Scrambling out of bed, he caught sight of an alarmingly large scarlet sheet stain. He found Dot crumpled and quivering on the bathroom floor, clutching a bloodied towel between her thighs. She murmured softly, haltingly, in two of the three languages in which she was normally fluent; her words no longer adequate in any tongue.

‘Je suis… désolé… I’m… so… sorry… désolé… Je ne… peux pas… I… I… can’t… I’m sorry.’

Really there was nothing to say, but (as he recalled) Bruce tried to calm and be calm.

‘It’s not your fault. Please… don’t say that. Shh… shh.’

Dot had been inconsolable, and Bruce weak, powerless, and useless. He remembered almost every detail of that morning. He remembered that when he rushed back to the bedroom and gathered up the duvet to wrap about his shivering wife, the bedside radio/alarm clock showed 3:37. He remembered: sights, sounds, smells; the pounding in his chest; the helplessness. Curiously though, he had no recollection of ringing for the ambulance that pulled up by the front porch at 4:14. The dogs announced its arrival.

His dogs’ barking had served to reconnect Bruce to the world outside: the world where he never panicked but was ever calm, in control, ever practical and sensible. Sensibly, Bruce had not travelled in the ambulance with Dot. Sensibly and practically, he had stripped the bed, put sheets and towels in the washing machine, cleaned the bathroom, let off the dogs, fed the pigs, shifted the heifers, thrown some hay to the bulls and the horse, checked the cows and calves, and cast an eye over the ewes and lambs. An exquisite late spring day was dawning. He remembered it well: sights, sounds, smells, and the lump in his throat. Later—in hindsight—he grew to despise his passionless, sensible self-control. What good had it been to Dot?

In retrospect, Bruce realised that he could not remember the journey; but he knew it was 6:57 when the green Falcon had pulled into the car park at Waikato Hospital, Hamilton. Almost seven o’clock. He was late—possibly too late? The hospital seemed huge—stark. His chest began to pound again. He had to find Dot. For the second time that morning, panic replaced common-sense practicality—probably too late?

A round, smiling face greeted him at the ward door. He guessed the nurse was Samoan, or Tongan maybe; Polynesian but not Māori. She touched his elbow briefly, gently, tenderly.

‘Mr Pemberton? Good morning. Your wife’s been… um… calling… asking for you, poor dear. She’s such a little sweetheart, isn’t she? Right in here. She’s asleep now. It’s all right. You can pull that chair over.’

Dorothy Pemberton lay on her side, barely moving. Her tiny hands cupped her chin as if in prayer. Matted wisps of golden hair were glued to her forehead with now-dried sweat. The nurse was right; she was ‘a little sweetheart’. Bruce placed one large roughly calloused farmer’s hand on her soft, pale, thin wrist. It looked wrong—out of place. He felt as if he had despoiled an angel. He covered his eyes with his other hand and for the first time (but not the last) began to weep silently.

‘I’m sorry… I’m so sorry… Oh, Dot,’ Bruce mouthed.

Bruce wondered what his wife’s life may have encompassed had she not had the misfortune of meeting and falling in love with him all those years ago. She had been the only pleasure of his brief foray into tertiary education. He had never imagined meeting such an exotic beauty, let alone sharing love with her. Everything about Dorothy Elise Sigurdsson had been alluring. The daughter of Danish and French parents, she had spent most of her school years in France before her family migrated to New Zealand. Bruce had never met Dot’s parents; both prematurely and accidentally deceased before she was 16 years old. (She was of course predisposed to loss.) And yet she had been charmingly, wittily intelligent; ebullient and talkative—disarmingly happy. It was Dorothy herself who had giggled at the irony of having been orphaned like the Judy Garland character her mother had so adored. Dot could have done anything, been anything. But she had chosen Bruce.

Sometime later (he had no idea how long) he felt a warm hand brush his shoulder.

‘We gave her something to help her sleep. She’s had a… difficult time. Very upset. But she’ll be okay. You’re here now.’

Bruce had turned to look up into the round, smiling face. He would never forget the brown, kindly smiling eyes that looked at him as if he were family, whanau, or whatever the term was in Samoan, Tongan, Niuean, Rarotongan, or whatever. Later, he would regret never thanking whatever-her-name-was before she went off shift. She had been so kind. She had been too kind. Bruce didn’t even know her name: if she was wearing a name-tag, then he had not noticed it. He felt that he did not deserve her empathy—her love. Yes, it must have been a kind of love. She (whatever-her-name-was) had felt love, even if by association, for the man so loved by ‘poor dear’, ‘little sweetheart’, ‘delicate wee flower’ Dorothy Pemberton (née Sigurdsson).

‘Is she… ? Did she… lose it?’

‘Ah, fa’amalie atu. I should have said. I thought you knew. I’m so sorry. There was nothing anyone could do.’

And there had been nothing for Bruce to say. It was hardly a surprise. He had expected it. Dot had expected it—known it. But it was not an answer. It was not an ending. It was a non-result—a non-start. He had just felt empty—depleted and defeated.

He remembered that the hand had tenderly brushed his shoulder again.

‘I can show you if you like. Some people want to see, and some don’t. Mrs Pemberton, poor dear, she couldn’t look at it. Kept her eyes shut… tight shut. But she’s asleep now. You can see… if you like… Mr Pemberton?’

If there had been something to say, Bruce could not think of it. He simply stood up and nodded ever so slightly. The soft, warm hand brushed his elbow again.

‘Just out here, dear.’

Bruce followed nurse whatever-her-name-was to a small room just across the corridor. It was colder, and darker. There were trolleys, bedpans, boxes of toilet paper. A strong smell of disinfectant overwhelmed other odours Bruce could not identify.

‘Through there.’

The gentle hand waved toward another door that Bruce had not noticed.

‘You can go in. I’ll leave you for a little while. Better get back to work or I’ll get growled at.’

She smiled reassuringly, then turned and walked away. Bruce had pushed the door open. He remembered feeling nervous and expectant, but not afraid.

The room was tiny. Almost all of it was taken up by a sink and a bench of stainless steel. A single bulb glowed above, and a small window was only slightly ajar. He was aware of pale plastered walls, a mere breath of fresh air, and the cooing of nearby-but-unseen pigeons. The stainless-steel bench was bare except for a single item. On a pale blue paper napkin, on a stainless-steel dish, rested Dot and Bruce Pemberton’s child.

Bruce was all too familiar with the vagaries of birth. He had seen many stillborn and aborted calves and lambs, premature and full term, occasionally deformed. His farm ‘midwifery’ skills had been honed by years of assisted dystocian deliveries. He had never before seen a human foetus, let alone his own flesh and blood.

That tiny cold hospital room had become, for some immeasurable moment in time, Bruce’s entire universe. He remembered standing at the stainless-steel bench, transfixed, marooned. He felt as if he had somehow run aground and beached himself where energy, emotion, and even time could not touch him. All he could do—all he had done—was look and stare, and see. And now (and forever) remember.

Bruce remembered the stillness most of all, the lifelessness. He remembered the pale (deathly pale!) skin: not quite grey, not quite pink; almost but not quite blue. More like paper than skin: parchment stretched to contain a tiny frame of bone and tissue. Threads of dry blood traced across the disproportionately over-sized head and tiny chest. If he had to draw a comparison (he did not), Bruce noted the similarity to the skin of an un-warmed newborn piglet. Of course he realised that—unlike the occasional minor miracles of his farm childhood—no amount of fireside time spent wrapped in towels would bring pink, snuffling, mother-hungry life to this too-little, too-soon nearly child.

Reaching out one finger, Bruce brushed a cold porcelain-doll-like foot. He noticed, for the first time, that his child was female, a girl—his daughter. He moved his finger, two fingers, and lightly stroked his daughter’s cheek. The image, the feeling, the moment burned an indelible brand onto his brain. It became an immutable memory that would return at sudden, unexpected times: a toddler gripping daddy’s finger for support, schoolgirls giggling and whispering, the smile of a supermarket checkout girl, birthday parties, graduations, weddings, and even sitting alone under the stars. Time had done nothing to erase the image from his memory.

Today—thirteen years later—Bruce had no more idea than then whether Dot’s condition would improve or deteriorate. Diagnoses had ranged from chronic depression to schizophrenic alogia. She had originally been offered convalescent care, anti-depressants, and even shock therapy had been suggested. She (silently) and he (stubbornly) had rejected medical opinion. Since then the medical fraternity had seemingly lost interest in, or patience with, the ‘delicate wee flower’ and her devoted, doting (‘some might say… um… over-indulgent, Mr Pemberton’) husband.

As a farmer dependent on the re-generation of livestock for his livelihood, Bruce had peculiarly mixed feelings about pregnancies. Nevertheless, free from human qualms and conscience, memories and misgivings, the lovely little Lady had more pressing animal urges, and choice of mate was not a consideration.

Chapter Two

A WIFE AND MOTHER

Be near me when my light is low, when the blood creeps, and the nerves prick and tingle; and the heart is sick, and all the wheels of Being slow. Be near me when the sensuous frame is rack’d with pangs that conquer trust; And Time, a maniac scattering dust, and Life, a Fury slinging flame.

(Alfred, Lord Tennyson, ‘In Memoriam’)

Standing at the kitchen sink (stranded in stereotype), Ruth Overwater could follow Victor’s path with no more effort than raising her eyes. Whilst not designed for panoramic outlook, the single window afforded uninterrupted views across rolling farmland, through the wire-and-batten fences that struggled to separate grass from manuka, to the green forests of matai, totara, rimu, puriri, and occasional kauri that korowai-cloaked the shoulders of the rocky pinnacles and outcrops of the Coromandel Range.

Visitors to The Valley were captivated by its scenic beauty, and most locals lived lives inspired by their natural environment; but not Ruth. Oblivious to the grandeur, she never noticed whether the peaks were accentuated by crisp, sparkling vivacity or shrouded by the grey-white (sometimes faintly pink) clouds of warm, moist sea air that frequently spilled over the tops from the Pacific Ocean. She was blindly ignorant of the more subtle changes that accompanied seasonal, circadian cycles. Ruth’s ignorance was not blissful. Her outlook was more immediate, blisteringly focused.

Ruth’s eyes automatically tracked Victor: from the gumboot/raincoat/firewood-cluttered back porch; through the paint-peeling, once-white wooden garden gate with the bicycle-tube auto-closure; past the dirty cattle-rubbed concrete water tank; across the weedy little house paddock; and to the derelict eight-a-side herringbone cowshed. This November morning (as every morning), Ruth stood with her almost-American-TV-sitcom-soft pink-gloved hands moving in the soapy dishwater—seeing without looking and watching without ever really seeing.

Ruth watched instinctively, and she lived (existed) instinctively. It was as natural as breathing and as the beating of her heart to be aware of her husband’s movements, moods, presence, or absence. She could not remember her life before Victor. Married life, his life, had consumed her life—devoured her. How and where did she meet him? Why had they married? Had there been love? She had no recollection. It seemed unlikely. The questions were as irrelevant as the answers were meaningless.

Some memories (other than television-endorsed-gloved-hand muscle memory) clawed for fingerholds on Ruth’s semi-conscious cranial rock face, not daring to reach for the cord of consciousness that dangled tantalisingly just beyond reach. She could recall an unwanted pregnancy. The tiny life in her belly had delivered unremitting nausea and her mother’s anger, disappointment, disgust, and ultimate rejection. There was some confusing matter of an unknown relative’s inheritance—Great-uncle George’s farm in the Coromandel. It was to be their convenient purgatory, so they were sent away—out of sight and out of their minds.

Ruth did not remember leaving the city but knew that they arrived at this place—Maratoto Valley—in the rain. Whether one of the stinging wind-borne torrential tirades that sheeted up or down the hills, or the cloying sweaty drizzles of humidity that barely settled summer dust, Ruth could not recall. Surely it must have been winter or spring, since they had struggled with cows to milk and calves to feed. If she thought hard enough, she did remember lugging buckets of warm yellow-rich colostrum milk. Victor had been impatient, sullen, frustrated, and violent. Cows, calves, and wife all flinched at his touch. Both she and Victor had been incompetent: at farming, at marriage, and at parenthood. And of course there was a child—there is a child.

Her own life was a mystery to Ruth, both the remembered and the long forgotten. The birth of her girl-child was, like her wedding, something that evidently had occurred but was now lost to Ruth. Neither the loneliness of the Thames Hospital delivery suite nor her reluctance to hold the newborn baby girl now registered in her mind. Had she considered adoption? (Surely that would have been better—for everyone.) She could not recall.

Ruth recognised the faces of neighbours, shop assistants, stock agents who called to drink whisky and argue stock prices with Victor, schoolteachers, and some children, only when she had to. Rarely did names come to mind. She knew it attracted less attention simply to smile and say ‘Good morning. How are you?’ at appropriate times, but real conversation was an ordeal to be avoided whenever possible. To meet another’s gaze was an invitation to communicate, to intrude on Ruth’s cocoon of isolation.

In public, her eyes kept low, constantly rabbit-like, mouse-like, aware of the nearest bolt-hole. Sometimes, at the supermarket, after retreating to the little silver/grey Honda Civic that Victor both allowed and insisted she use weekly, Ruth would sit and watch women, young and old, laughing and chatting animatedly. She realised that such behaviour was normal and that she should at least want to join in, but the idea both terrified and repulsed her, and she frequently exited the car park sweating and giddy.

No one willingly visited the Overwaters, and there had been occasions when Ruth, home alone, had hidden under her daughter’s bed until she was sure some finished-door-knocking, footstep-retreating, car-reversing intruder has safely departed. Desperately lying there with her chin pressed into the dusty carpet and her ears straining, she tried not to breathe and tried not to ponder how great an irony it was that she should choose that room—that bed—for refuge.

Oddly, if there was one aspect of Overwater family life that was in any way normal (as opposed to dysfunctional), it was not the public image they each tried so carefully to portray. Nobody considered the Overwaters normal. No. Functional, mundane, even banal nuclear family ‘normality’ in the Overwater household existed solely in the presence of a television set.

Only TV had the power, the moral authority, and the unstinting allure to hold all family members in the same room for long periods of time. It reassured and consoled, amused and distracted. It connected them to a world beyond The Valley and very nearly connected them to each other. From time to time, all three—mother, father, child—could even share a laugh, courtesy of ‘The Muppets’, ‘‘Allo ‘Allo!’, ‘On the Buses’, or ‘Gliding On’.

For Ruth, TV was real; it was life that was illusory—a nightmare from which there could be no awakening. She ‘lived’ inside her television world. Its characters were her constant companions, her only friends, and her true family. She had her favourites of course (‘The Young and the Restless’, ‘Days of Our Lives’, ‘Coronation Street’, ‘EastEnders’, ‘Neighbours’), but it did not really matter. She was just as happy to watch Victor’s ‘The Dukes of Hazzard’, ‘Magnum, P.I.’, ‘Miami Vice’, and ‘Cheers’ or after-school children’s programmes. And more significantly, Victor was equally ‘happy’ to allow his wife to watch as much television as she liked, provided she was physically available to meet his demands.

At the sink, another memory surfaced briefly. She ‘saw’ her dear father—the only man she had ever loved or would ever be capable of loving. Archer (originally Archibald, but never Archie) used to hug her and whisper ‘Irony is what makes life interesting, sweetie’, so quietly that she had to hold her breath to hear (as adult Ruth would do under the ironic single bed). Ruth was never sure what he meant, but she had loved him for the tenderness with which he had breathed the words into her hair.

Just before lunchtime on 22 November 1968 (the significance of today’s date eluded Ruth), Archer had died a starkly ironic death for such a gentle man, never stirring from coma after being brutally ‘bashed over the head’ (the police sergeant’s insensitive turn of phrase). An unassuming man in life, Archibald Grattan in death assumed front-page status in both the Auckland Star and the New Zealand Herald. Murder was still a rarity in 1968 New Zealand, and even Aucklanders were shocked that Archer had been killed for no more than an old leather wallet containing twenty-one dollars and seventy-five cents plus an ‘old money’ half-crown and two brown pennies, a library card, Farmers Trading Company staff discount card, a worn black-and-white photograph of his young wife holding their first and only baby, and a colour photo of a beaming 9-year-old Ruth in a pale blue jacket and black gym dress, straddling a new red bicycle.

The discarded wallet was recovered, with all its contents intact except for the decimal currency, in a garden less than a hundred metres from Archer’s own. The Auckland Star had even managed to gain access to the wallet contents and included a black-and-white copy of the child-and-bicycle picture as an accompaniment to its headline story—much to Ruth’s horror. She had never mounted a bicycle since.

The memory of the love that father and daughter had shared welled up from some bedrock-deep, death-cold cranial abyss to erupt and reverberate within Ruth’s head. She bit her lip and swallowed it away. Her beloved father had died sixteen days after Ruth’s twelfth birthday, but she failed to notice any ironies associated with her own now 12-almost-13-year-old girl-child. Ruth also failed to recognise the genetically un-ironic lookalike connection between her tall, slim, green-eyed, sandy-haired, loved and loving late father and her now equally tall, slim, green-eyed, flame-haired, lovely but unloved daughter. Archer was wrong. He had lied to her. There was nothing interesting about irony. Irony equalled grief, pain, and unbearable guilt. For Ruth, conscious thought was just another ordeal to be avoided.

The physical pain of Ruth’s existence was subject to scrutiny of neither memory nor rational consideration. It was fact. It was her reality. This was her true being. There had been, still were, and probably always would be bloodied, bruised, cracked, and broken body parts, both hidden and unhidden. She was no longer surprised when, where, or why he did it. She assumed that she deserved it. She had convinced herself that she did not feel the pain of his fists anymore. It was just a matter of holding her breath until he stopped or she passed out—whichever came first. And besides, beatings were less frequent now that Victor… now that the girl-child… now they were… Ruth bit her lip again and drove guilt from her brain.

Another memory surfaced unexpectedly—bubbling up and bursting in her skull. The Easter Show: snorting showjumping horses; white-coated men leading fat beef cattle or sleek honey-gold, black-and-white, or red-and-white dairy cows; rainbow popcorn and floozy pink candyfloss; merry-go-round, Ferris-wheel, and ghost train; shouting and laughing; and Victor! That was where Ruth first met him. She had been flattered by the attention of the confident blonde-haired older man. His seductive bad-boy air of danger and intrigue had titillated the 16-year-old.

The re-awakened memory of silly-schoolgirl teenage naivety rose like bile in Ruth’s throat, and she swallowed again. She dared not believe that the fateful rendezvous had involved choice rather than corrosive predetermination. Worse