The Fall

(domestic violence and swearing)

“I’m home!” came the voice from the hall.

Oliver dropped his comic, rushed from the living room, sprinted along the hall, and jumped into the arms of his father.

“There’s my Ollie,” his father said, giving him a big hug. Ollie hugged him back, breathing in the smell of sweat and coal-dust. This was his favourite moment of the day.

“What you been up to, son?”

“I won a race at school. Miss Jones said my story was good. Pete Wood had a fight with Benny Henderson, and he won. We had gym – I climbed a rope right to the top. And I painted a monster. Then—”

“Whoah, there! That’s an awful lot to be packing into a single day. You’ll have to tell me all about it later. Let me just go and say hello to your mother.”

The father carried the son through to the kitchen, where Oliver’s mother was stirring something in a saucepan on the stove.

“All right?” the man said, lowering Oliver to the floor.

“I’m all right,” the woman said, not meeting the man’s eyes.

Oliver stayed in the doorway, looking up at his father as he approached his mother, touching her on the shoulder. She shrugged off the touch.

The man stood with his hand in mid-air, then turned and smiled thinly at Oliver.

“I’ll get cleaned up, then,” he said and left the kitchen, ruffling Oliver’s hair as he passed.

Oliver frowned. Something was different in the house, but he could not have said what.

“Mum,” he said, going over to his mother and tugging at her skirt.

“Not now, son,” she said. There was a crack in her voice.

“But mum, I—”

“I said not now!” his mother snapped, pushing Oliver away from her. She corrected her tone immediately. “Go and read your comic, there’s a good boy.”

And that’s what Oliver did, but not with the same enjoyment as before. His mother was never unkind to him; the outburst in the kitchen had hit the little boy hard.

After a while, his father came in and sat next to him on the sofa.

“What you readin’ then?”

Oliver showed him the comic: The Red Rocket’s Revenge. He explained what the story was about.

“And in the end,” Oliver concluded, “the Red Rocket sends Dark Matter – he’s the baddy, remember – into space, so the world is saved!”

“Good ol’ Red Rocket!”

“Yeah! I love him,” Oliver said, gazing up into his father’s eyes. “But he’s not…”

He trailed off, embarrassed.

“He’s not what?”

“Nothing.”

Father and son sat for a few moments, son leafing through the comic, father apparently interested in the pages that flipped over before his eyes. He had his arm around the boy and lifted his hand now to stroke his hair.

“Dad?”

“Yeah?”

“How many lorries did you fill today?”

“Ooh, that’s a good question. Do you remember how many it was yesterday?”

“Course. Twenty-three, you said.”

“That’s right. Today it was four more than that!”

“Four more?!”

“Yeah. So how many does that make?”

Oliver tried to use his fingers, but the number was too big. He screwed up his face, making the fiendishly difficult mental calculation. After a few moments, his face lit up.

“Twenty-seven?”

His father squeezed his ear and the boy scowled, disappointed that he’d got the sum wrong.

“That’s exactly right!” his father said, grinning. “Clever clogs!”

He pushed Oliver down on the sofa and began tickling him under the arms. Oliver screamed with laughter and tried to force his father off, but he was too strong.

“Uncle! Uncle!” Oliver squealed; that was the safe word.

His father retrieved the comic that had fallen on the floor and handed it to Oliver, who went to hug him; they were interrupted by a call from the kitchen.

“Dinner!”

It sounded different from other evenings. It was usually said in a sing-song fashion, the ‘din’ pitched slightly higher than the ‘ner’. Tonight it was a monotone, a statement, rather than an invitation. Oliver noticed this but would not have been able to put the difference into words. His father noticed, too.

“Hmmm,” he grunted.

Oliver searched his face for some kind of explanation. He saw a weight there, wiped away – when the father saw his son observing him – by a forced smile that made Oliver uneasy.

His father lifted him up and carried him through to the kitchen, where the table was set for dinner.

They sat in their normal seats, ate their normal Friday night meal – corned-beef fritters and mashed potato – washed it down with their normal drinks (tea for the adults, milk for the boy). But the meal was far from normal.

The woman spent the whole time staring at her food, pushing it around the plate, not eating a thing. In between mouthfuls, the man looked hard at her but could not get eye contact. Both of them ignored Oliver, when as a habit they would take it in turns to grill him about school.

After a while, the woman got up sharply and dropped her plate in the sink with a clatter, food and all. The man and boy watched as she stomped out of the room, then they heard her heavy feet clomping up the stairs.

“You finished, son?” Oliver’s father said, taking his plate without waiting for an answer. “Time to get ready for bed.”

“But dad–”

“Do as I say, son!”

The tone was the same as his mother’s from earlier. Oliver knew better than to argue, so he got up from the table, went to his father at the sink, and hugged his leg.

“Off you go, boy,” his father said, without a hug back, or a ruffle of the hair, or a squeeze of the ear.

Oliver sloped away, through the hall and up the stairs, wondering what he’d done to make his mother and father act like this.

He took less time than he usually did on his ablutions before going to his room, changing into his pyjamas, and getting into bed. His father would normally come up to tuck him in and tell him a story, but Oliver knew now that this was far from being a normal evening. He turned the bedside lamp off and listened in the darkness to a strange snuffling sound coming from his parents’ room. And that was the last he remembered.

Until he woke up. It was still dark and he lay on his back, getting his bearings. Then he homed in on what he imagined must have woken him.

It was a noise he’d never heard in the house before – voices raised in anger, coming from downstairs.

He slipped out of bed and tiptoed along the landing, down the stairs.

The voices were coming from the living room. They belonged to his parents, but they didn’t sound like his parents. He crept along the hall and up to the door. He couldn’t make out what was being said because the voices were overlapping each other. But then he caught one word as clear as a bell, a new word for him. It was the woman that said it, half shouting, half sobbing.

“You bastard!”

Oliver pushed the door open, just in time to see the man slap the woman so hard that she fell to the floor, holding her face.

Time stood still. Oliver stared at the man, looming over the woman with his fists clenched. His father saw him and shook his head. His mother saw him from her position on the floor and screamed.

“Ollie, nooo!”

Oliver turned and ran back down the hall, up the stairs as fast as he could – skinning a shin when he slipped – along the landing, into his room, and into bed, pulling the covers over his head.

He was trembling now and near to tears, trying to process what he’d just seen, but it had been so alien to him that his thinking was nothing more than an avalanche of questions and doubts.

He heard a footfall in the doorway, felt the weight of someone sitting on his bed. A hand pulled the covers off him.

“Ollie, I can explain.”

The man’s hand searched out his hair, gave it a ruffle, but Oliver recoiled and flailed out with his fist.

“Go away!” he sobbed, the tears coming fast now. “I hate you! I hate you!”