The Miracle Maker

TW: sexual abuse, familial abuse

My super-sized face leered at me from the billboard as I sped past it.

Melanie Mansfield - Miracle Maker

She will transform your life.

The billboard had been up for six months now, and up to this morning seeing it had elated me. It was a testament to my success. I was the Miracle Maker. I helped people transform their lives and leave their old selves behind.

Normally, I’d slow down, smile and salute my giant-billboard-self. Thank my lucky stars for my good fortunes and my own miraculous makeover.

Today, I accelerated. I felt the billboard’s mocking eyes on me. The Miracle Maker had been caught out.

I hadn’t always been the Miracle Maker. Or even Melanie Mansfield. There was a time when I was a different person. Far removed from the glamorous and successful Miracle Maker who smiled at people from billboards and told them how to improve their lives on breakfast TV.

***

“I need a drink.” My innards used to twist in a tight knot as I heard those four little words. Words that held so much threat and fear.

I knew what inevitably followed when my mum went out with her boyfriend. The man who insisted I call him dad, but eyed my breasts with hunger when mum wasn’t looking. Once, when drunk, he put his hands on them. I shrank back in horror as he pushed me against a wall. Mum rescued me that time by returning into the room. But I knew it was only a matter of time when he would do it again, and I lived in fear of that day.

I cleared up the remains of our dinner and watched mum and him head towards town, hand in hand, all happy and laughing.

Sure, they were happy now. Later, when they got home, fuelled with beer and whisky, it would be a different story. My mum would accuse him of flirting with somebody else, he would lose his temper and beat her. While she cried and he rained blows on her, I hid, helpless, in my cupboard. I always hid before they got home.

That night, I didn’t have time to hide. They were back earlier than expected, and I was still watching TV and eating pot noodles when they stumbled into the room. He glared at mum who was already crying and cowering. It was only when he raised his hand to strike her that he noticed me.

It was my turn to cower as he threw mum onto the floor and stepped towards me.

“Well, this evening just took an interesting turn.” The stench of alcohol on his breath assaulted me even before his hands did. I tried to disappear between the sofa cushions, but his hands found me and dragged me onto the floor. Fear paralysed me and he knew it.

He laughed. A greedy, psychopathic laugh. I closed my eyes, waiting for his next move.

“Don’t you dare touch my daughter!” My mum, in a surprise attack, launched herself at him. Her viciousness caught him off guard and it gave me all the time I needed.

I realised I was still clenching the fork I had eaten the pot noodles with and in blind rage jabbed it on his thigh. He roared in pain and let go of mum. The look of indecision of whom to deal with first would have been comical if it hadn’t been for the burning rage in his eyes.

I didn’t wait for him to decide, but belted out, yelling at mum to follow. But she didn’t.

I only realised she wasn’t following when I was two blocks away from our house. It was too late to go back for her now.

Once I stopped running, I felt the bitter cold of the night. I was only wearing socks and pyjamas. I would freeze out here. All I wanted to do was to curl up like a foetus and cry, but I knew I would not survive the night outside. My only choice was to find shelter.

“Shelter, that’s it!” I shouted at the empty street. Last time after mum had been in the hospital, a woman from the social services came to see her. She had told mum about a shelter for women in abusive relationships. Mum had refused to hear anything about it, but I had listened. And memorised the address.

They would help me out, and lucky for me, the shelter was only a few more blocks away.

I arrived at the shelter shivering with cold. They let me in without questions and gave me a bed to sleep in. Covering myself in thick blankets, I struggled to get warm and I cried myself to sleep.

“Would you like one of us to come with you to speak to your mum?” one of them, Lena, with the most compassionate eyes I had ever seen, asked me after I’d told them my story over breakfast.

I nodded, grateful, praying mum would be alright and that she would listen to us.

After breakfast, Lena found me some clothes and shoes, and we went over to see mum. It was safe to go in as I knew from experience that he would be out. Drinking to cure his hangover and guilty conscience somewhere. Later he would come back, crying and begging for her forgiveness. And she forgave him every time.

We found mum in the kitchen, nursing two black eyes and a missing tooth. She winced every time she moved.

“You should go to the hospital to get checked over. You might have broken ribs.” Mum just shook her head at Lena’s suggestion.

“I’ll be fine in a few days,” she said, though it was plain that even the simple act of lifting a cup of tea was agony.

“Please, come with us.” But, however much I pleaded and cried, she refused to come. There was nothing else for us to do, but to leave her and pray she would come to her senses before it was too late.

“Maybe she will change her mind when you don’t go back,” Lena said, closing the door behind us.

I nodded, though we both knew it was not likely.

***

After mum chose her bastard of a boyfriend over me, I chose to leave her, and my past behind. With the help of the shelter, I found a part-time job, a bedsit, and enrolled on a part-time college course. I began to reinvent myself.

When I turned eighteen, I legally changed my name to Melanie Mansfield. Melanie after Melanie Hamilton from Gone with the Wind and Mansfield after Jane Austen’s book Mansfield Park. And for fifteen years I had carved myself a life as Melanie the Miracle Maker, thinking my past would never find me.

But I was wrong.

Last night, when it was already late, my buzzer rang. Not expecting anyone, I checked the entrance camera. I froze. All the fears from the past engulfed me.

I recognised the face. It had aged, but without a doubt it was him. Mum’s boyfriend. Somehow he had found me.

This morning I found a note he had left for me. Asking if we could meet. Saying it was urgent he speak to me about mum. I swallowed my tears, crunched up the note and threw it in a bin before dashing back upstairs to my penthouse apartment.

Without focus, I threw some clothes into a suitcase and grabbed my toothbrush and passport. I would not come back here after my breakfast show, but check into a hotel where he could not find me.

Still in turmoil I pulled into the TV studio’s carpark. I took calming breaths and said positive affirmations like I taught my clients and TV audiences. Once sufficiently calm, I walked in, greeted the receptionist and headed for the lift.

“Miss Mansfield.” The receptionist called me before I reached the lift. “There is someone here to meet you. A friend of your mother.”

Everything inside me contracted. How had I not expected this? Of course he would know where I worked if he knew where I lived.

I knew I could not run. But at least I was safe here. He could not hurt me in public. I turned back and despite the storm raging inside me, walked with a calm exterior towards the sofas where visitors were seated.

“Mr Turner.” I gave him my best TV smile and sat down opposite him with the glass coffee-table creating a safety barrier between us. He was the only visitor this early in the morning, so thankfully I didn’t need to take him into one of our private meeting rooms. I checked nobody could hear us. “How did you find me?”

“It wasn’t easy.” He smiled, a semi-toothless, frightnened smile. He fidgeted.

And I waited. And noted how he had shrunk. His before so powerful frame had become weak, and strangely I pitied him. There was no need to fear this man anymore. I relaxed and urged him to continue, just like I would one of my guests.

“It’s your mum, she is very sick. Cancer.” His eyes welled with tears. I realised that despite the way he had treated her, he loved her. “Two years now. She was better. But then it came back. The oncologist thinks she might not make it this time. That’s why I needed to find you. For her.”

He covered his face and sobbed. Loud, painful sobs. I did what I was so used to doing when my clients or TV show guests broke down. I moved to sit next to him, wrapping my arm around him and let him cry against my shoulder until his tears ran out.

“Where is she?” I asked, passing him a packet of tissues. He blew his nose and rubbed his red-rimmed eyes.

“She’s at a hospital. She has her own nurse to look after her. Very kind she is, the nurse.” He pulled out another tissue and blew his nose again. “She thinks it might help your mum to fight the cancer if she could see you. Your mum talks about you all the time.”

I wanted to ask why she hadn’t bothered to come with me then, all those years ago, but I swallowed the question. Now was not the time. It never might be.

“What about you?” I asked, remembering the regular beatings he gave mum.

“I’ve changed. I stopped drinking. Nearly five years sober now. And things had never been better between us until she got sick. Maybe it’s a punishment for all the horrible things I did.” His voice rose to a wail, and he looked on the verge of tears again.

Knowing I was due in makeup, I gave his arm a squeeze. It had withered so much, I could feel the bones under his jacket. I blinked away my own tears.

“Leave the address of the hospital with the receptionist. I will come tomorrow once I have made some arrangements for my show.”

“You will?” His relief shone on his face, and tears rolled down his cheeks again.

Somehow I got through the morning’s show. I usually remembered the highlights of each show, but looking back on that one, I recalled nothing. It was all blank.

My produced gaped at me when I spoke to her after the show, explaining I had to go home for a few days to visit my sick mum. I expected her reaction. After all, I had never mentioned family before. But she agreed to run some highlight shows over the next couple of days.

I didn’t go back home when I left the studios. I headed to the airport and booked onto a flight home. The place where I was born and grew up in, but hadn’t been back to for so many years. I had never expected to go back.

The next morning, after a sleepless night at an airport hotel, I took a taxi to the hospital. I didn’t trust myself to drive. My hands shook and my mind blurred. A fight raged inside me. It had begun the moment I had promised to come back. That promise fought against my wow never to return to my roots.

But I knew what my advice to my viewers and clients would have been. I would have told them to face the past.

I would be a liar and a fake instead of the Miracle Maker, if I ignored my own advice. I checked in at the reception and they told me where I could find mum.

Last moment of hesitation. Inhale, exhale, and I knocked on the door. I waited for a feeble come in and entered.

It was time to practise what I preach.