When you wish upon Venus

Venus shone with such a magnitude of purpose and light at this time of year, I couldn’t help but wonder if this was the star the three wise men followed to find Jesus. If only my poor brother had realised the truth as a child, that Venus was not a star but a planet. The number of wishes he’d placed upon her, hoping against hope to avoid one week of having to go to school hiding a fresh bruise or cigarette burn. But they were all wasted. Planets do not give birth to wishes.

Before closing the curtains, I decided to talk to my daughter about Venus, to point her out in the sky. An angry planet of clouds and storms, I wanted her to know that no one’s wishes could settle there. I didn’t want her to grow up as miserable as my brother.

“Scarlet,” I gently shake her leg. Come see the stars with me.” Without hesitation, she rose from her fluffy white chair and climbed onto it to press her small face to the window. Stargazing had become one of our shared loves, turning even the bleakest winter weeks into moments of wonderment and curiosity.

Scarlet, ever patient with my boundless space enthusiasm, had long since learned to humour me. She allowed spaceflight manuals and stories of the Mars rover engineers to slip into her library pile without complaint. She was interested in learning about the planets and had accompanied me to the Leicester Space Centre more times than we could recall. 

“Which star do you think is the brightest right now?” Scarlet’s face lit up, eager for the challenge. Scanning the sky with her fingers, suddenly, she stopped.

“That one!” 

I squinted, following her pointed finger. 

“Hmm… are you sure?” She tilted her head, considering, but her finger stayed steady. 

“Yep.”

“You are both wrong and correct.”

“Huh?” She tilted her head playfully. 

“You’re right, that she’s the brightest. But she’s not a star. That, my little explorer, is Venus.” Scarlet’s eyes went wide, her mouth falling open. 

“Mum? A planet? Really?”

“Really.” I nodded. 

“But… can we see planets from Earth?” she challenged me. 

“We sure can, kid. And that is Venus. Look at her, burning so brilliantly. Lighting up the night.”

She pressed her nose against the glass, the fog of her breath forming tiny galaxies of her own onto the pane. I scooped her up, placing her back in bed. 

“You have to promise me one thing.”

“What?" she asked, clutching her velvet-purple teddy bear.

“When you wish upon a star, don’t pick the brightest one.”

“Because she’s Venus?”

“Exactly. You’re a fast learner!” I tapped her nose gently, earning a giggle as I tucked the blanket around her. “Your wishes will just get lost there. Planets gobble up wishes. So, always choose a star!” I brushed the wisps of hair from her face. What wishes, I wondered, were forming in that little head of hers tonight?

#

“You’re lucky you stay out of the way, girl.” Mum thrust her face into mine, bending me right into my bed frame. All I could smell was alcohol.

 “You get off lightly now, but if you end up gobby like your brother, you’ll feel a smack too.” The slipper in her hand tapped against my cheek. I bit down on the lump in my throat and closed my eyes waiting for the intimidation to be over. 

As soon as she left, I crept to the door and pushed it shut. I clambered to my window. My chest heaved silently as I pressed my forehead to the cold glass, scanning the empty streets below for any sign of my older brother. The dark clung to everything, broken only by the faint off-glow of street lamps and moonlight. Which way had he gone? Where would he sleep tonight? Would he be warm enough?

These questions were far too heavy for an eight-year-old to carry. As heavy as the sickly, burning medicine they forced down my throat to make me sleep early. But unlike the medicine, the questions never faded. They pressed on into teenagehood. Like wondering why my father shattered a vase against my face on my thirteenth birthday.

Or the questions that sliced my mind as I lay awake at night, paralysed by visions of the rapture, ‘God collecting his bride.’ I would stare at the ceiling, waiting for trumpets to crack the sky and for the world to split apart. Or when I was twenty-six when sympathy and comfort were replaced with blame when my cat was hit by a car. I had invited the devil into my home simply for carving pumpkins with my children and had brought this curse onto my poor, hopeless cat. 

This wasn’t the first time my parents had thrown him out. But it was the first time they’d pushed him down the stairs, my father’s blows waiting for him at the bottom, so relentless, so vicious, there was no blocking out the sound of his cries. Each thud, each broken sob, carving into me like a blade. I was scared that his ribs were broken. The aftermath emotional wave surged through me, so hot and fierce that I wanted to burn the place into the hell it had become. 

It was also the first time they’d kicked him out at night. He was wearing nothing but a T-shirt. I felt so small, so powerless against the monsters who raised us. Even the thought of calling the police sent terror through me. I knew that if they turned their fists on me, I wouldn’t survive. My body would break. I wasn’t as strong as him. 

The tears stung. I searched for Venus, the only thing I could focus on. Brother, where are you? I whispered. I hope you can hear me right now. I love you. I’m so sorry. I didn’t see him for the next thirteen days. 

#

“Did you hear that?” I bolted upright in bed, tapping the underside of my brother’s bunk. “Oi!” Liam dangled his head down. “What did you hear?”

“A bump. I think Santa’s on the roof.”

“Listen for any bells,” he whispered, his eyes lighting up with excitement. I barely ever saw him like this, his face alight with something to believe in. It made me feel giddy for a second until sadness crept in just as fast. I barely got to see him like this. Soft, childlike, forgetting the bruises, forgetting the pain.

My stomach knotted. What if Mum and Dad had told him all the bad things we’d done? They kept track, after all, in that little yellow book with its red-dotted stickers marking out our naughty moments. My pages were just as full as my brothers of all the bad things I’d done. Mum always said if we got too many, it meant people would come and take us away. It terrified me. Some days, when left alone, I would sneak into the brown cabinet, pull down the brass clasps and quickly count up how many red stickers I was on. I had to make sure I put it back in exactly the same location so Mum didn’t know I had been looking. 

“I think I heard it too,” Liam said, sticking out his tongue before flopping back onto his bunk.

“I’m scared,” I whispered. We never had any curtains on our windows so all I could see was an abyss of black with a piercing solo star. 

He scoffed. “What, of some bloke who comes to leave you toys?”

“No, I’m scared of being on the naughty list.”

“You’re not going to be on the naughty list, sis.”

“Then why did Dad send us to bed again without any dinner? Said we were too naughty because we were arguing again?”

“Cause Dad hates us. Santa doesn’t hate us.”

I wanted to believe him, but doubt crept in. What if Santa caught us awake? What if he saw how bad we really were?

Liam climbed down the ladder silently. He switched on the Sega Mega Drive and tossed me a controller.

“Come on,” he said. I shook my head. 

“No. If Santa catches me awake, I’ll get into trouble. He needs to know I’m good.”

He fired up a motorbike racing game. The screen flickered, throwing fractured light across the room. I burrowed deeper under my blanket, my eyelids growing heavier with each tree the bike zipped past. Pixelated trunks blended into a blur that carried me to sleep.

#

Cooking up a batch of pancakes, we used an abundance of sprinkles and syrups to transform our breakfast into golden circular-planets. 

“Tell me more about Venus,” Scarlet said, as she piled sprinkles across her second serving.

“Well, Venus is almost the same size as Earth, but it’s waaaaay hotter. The hottest planet in our solar system. So hot in fact, it would turn these pancakes to ash. And melt our knives and forks while she is at it.”

Scarlet laughed, sending a cascade of sprinkles out of her mouth.

“And, Venus spins sooooo slowly, one day on Venus lasts 243 Earth days! Imagine how long that day would drag out for!” 

My thoughts drifted to my brother, crumpled on his knees, bent double in pain. Struggling to breathe, his fists knotted tight. I’d thought he was praying. Later, he told me he was wishing. Wishing to be rehomed. Wishing never to see my parents again. If only he knew. Venus, unhurried and indifferent, takes her time, turning only once in a year of our suffering. One slow, blistering rotation.

Instead, the moment my brother turned sixteen, he escaped, packing his life into a bag and leaving home. I was relieved that our Auntie and Uncle took him in, giving him a fresh start, and a loving home far away from my father’s fists in Edinburgh. But I was left behind. Things got harder for me. 

“What else?” Scarlet pulled me back to the present. 

“Hmm. It is thought that Venus is named after a beautiful Roman goddess!”

“A goddess?” Scarlet’s eyebrows raised with intrigue. 

“What is a goddess?” I laughed, caught off guard. How to explain that?

“What do you think a goddess is?”

“An angel?” she offered, her big blue eyes alight with certainty. The answer stung. Venus was no angel. She was just a bystander.

“That’s nice,” I said, forcing a smile, determined not to let the tangled threads of my childhood unravel into hers.

That night, I found myself staring out at the sky again. Venus gleamed, steady and unfeeling, as if mocking all those childhood wishes she got to watch go to waste. But now as an adult, I realise planets can’t intercede, they can’t save. They simply exist, spinning on their slow, endless orbits, while lives like ours burn and rebuild in their shadows.

It wasn’t Venus’s fault. We just got dealt a bad childhood, a losing hand from the start. Maybe it was Venus’s persistence that mattered most. She had always been there. A constant, unwavering light against real, suffocating darkness. And now I realised, she wasn’t just a witness to our suffering, but also our survival.

I thought of Liam, now a father of three boys. He still carried his struggles, still bore the weight of things that should have been lifted long ago. He’d turned inward, and most times, impossible to reach. 

But, I understood. I was a living reminder of everything he wanted to leave behind. Without meaning to, I always seemed to trigger a drunken argument or a debate about whether our parents needed intervention, not redemption. He told me I was too forgiving, and that I should cut immediate contact like he had. For control. For peace of mind. 

But peace had never lived in his mind.

Forgiveness had never come to us. To forgive, you need an apology and the acknowledgement of damage or hurt. But it never came. And maybe it never would. Our parents had found a new life in Jesus, born again with sins wiped clean, seeking forgiveness from someone far greater, far holier, than their children. With the shield of salvation, they had no reason to look back. But how could we escape from looking back? 

We’d visited Liam for his 40th birthday recently, and for the first time, I didn’t just see him as a victim. I saw him as a survivor. To most, he’s irritable and short-fused. A man who keeps the world at arm’s length. But to me?

He is a supernova.

Over a cup of tea, he shared stories of his new job working in a foster care home for children and teenagers. It sounded hard. I couldn’t do it. I wasn’t as strong as him. Now, kids placed their hopes and dreams on his shoulders and he was trying his hardest to make them real. Despite a childhood devoid of love, attention or carefree days, he used that void as a bridge to connect, to better the lives of others. Damn, I admired him. A true trooper. I hope he knows that. He just needed to work on his temper. But he knew that and he was trying. Always, trying. 

“Goodnight, Venus,” I murmured, raising my glass of wine to the sky. I let myself cry.

 #

“Please, be a good girl at Nanny and Gramps for me,” I pleaded with Scarlet. My anxiety ran like a fever beneath my skin, hot and restless. I pulsed with the unshakable fear that something—anything—might go wrong the moment I walked through their door. 

As an adult, I’d gotten far better at defending myself and not letting my parents emotionally abuse me. But the anxiety never left. 

Scarlet scooped up her toys from the car floor and trailed after me into their house. It always felt wrong here. Everywhere I looked, the past loomed.

Through the window, I could spot the garden chair where my dad had kicked the footing out from under my great-nan because she wasn’t wearing her hearing aid, and he wasn’t in the mood to repeat himself. The same tatty hoover, still there, its stinking nozzle once dragged across my scalp in his bizarre attempt to keep me lice-free. The humiliation seared deeper than any itch. 

I kept my eyes on Scarlet, letting her delightful, innocent presence drown out the ghosts. Her grandparents barely acknowledged her. No questions about school and no interest in her toys. Just the news. Always the news. More conspiracy theories about ‘the end times.’

Like an immune system detecting a threat, my body responded to protect her. My shoulders arched and my frame closed in around Scarlet as if I could shield her with my presence alone. I tried to change the subject, to steer the conversation somewhere lighter, somewhere safe. Her delicate, beautiful ears shouldn’t have to absorb this madness. I tried to make my point clearer. 

“Maybe we can talk about something else? This isn’t really a—”

“What?” My dad’s eyes widened. “Don’t you talk to your kids about God?” His breath was heavy, thick with something I recognised too well.

“Of course I do.”

“Then why do I need to be quiet?” I swallowed.

 “It’s the way you’re saying it, Dad. It might scare Scarlet.” I pleaded silently with my mum, hoping for some backup.

“She’s only young, Darren,” she said. “Maybe save it for another time.” It wasn’t often she intervened. That only made him worse.

My father’s face darkened. He leaned closer to us, his lips curling.

“You think she’s too young for the truth?” His voice rose, thick with righteous anger. Scarlet shrank against me, clutching her toy tight. I stood up.

“Scarlet, please get your coat on hunny, we’re going home.”

“No, please. Em. Stay.” My mum pleaded. 

“No. I want her gone. I don’t know who she thinks she is anymore.” His teeth clenched as he hurled my bag at me.

I didn’t wait. I scooped Scarlet into my arms, getting her away from both of them and out of the front door. My hands trembled with so much fear and rage that I fumbled with the car charger, unable to unplug it properly. The alarm blared, a shrieking siren announcing my panic to the entire street. I’d spent years absorbing their emotional and physical abuse. But there was no way, absolutely no way, I would let it continue through to Scarlet. 

I wrenched open their heavy metal gates—a nasty relic of the first thing my dad built when he got out of prison for road rage a decade ago—and finally yanked the charger free.

As I pulled away, I caught sight of my mum. She stood there, eyes sullen, watching us go. The black gates swung shut in front of her like the bars of a prison cell. I never knew if she was trapped inside or another bystander to our suffering. 

But I knew one thing. I was done. Never coming back.

I thought about Liam. How he’d reached this point six years before me. He said it happened during his eldest son’s parents’ evening when our parents didn’t show up to celebrate their grandson’s achievements, but instead turned it into a sermon about Jesus, warning the other parents about the antichrist. The whole thing was a spectacle of humiliation. That was when Liam finally snapped. 

“Sorry about that, Scarlet. Mummy and Gramps don’t get along. We never have, and we never will.” I laughed again, the sound raw, untethered. “Shall we put your favourite song on?” Scarlet nodded, unbothered, as if the whole scene had already slipped from her mind. Or maybe, like me, she was just relieved to escape that haunted house.

I laughed again. A real laugh this time.

I was free.