ROUGH CUT
Gary McMahon
Published in electronic format by Hub Fiction
First published as a limited edition paperback
by
Pendragon Press
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for my father:
closure
Acknowledgements
This story was written under the influence of many great works of horror. Most prominent among them are the following: Session 9, Dust Devil, the films of Pete Walker and Norman J Warren. Intoxicating childhood memories of The Omen, Race with the Devil and Rosemary's Baby. The wonderful books of Maurice Sendak. And finally, the mental residue from endless adolescent hours spent goggle-eyed in front of Hammer House of Horror, the greatest TV show of all time.
Rough Cut is my humble and unapologetic love letter to them all.
***
I’d like to take this opportunity to thank a few good souls. Firstly, Dr. Gary Fry, Adriana Capozzi, "Lord" John Probert and my wife, Emily, for suggestions during early drafts. Next up are Joel Lane and Ramsey Campbell for general inspiration and generously agreeing to read the work in manuscript form. Then there’s Vincent Chong, who provided the extraordinary cover art and design for the book you now hold in your hands. I’m also indebted to the urbane Simon Strantzas, who kindly (and brilliantly) maintains my website. And finally, I must thank the mighty Chris Teague for having enough faith to publish this very personal story.
“And
what rough beast, its hour come round at last
Slouches toward
Bethlehem to be born?”
W.B. Yeats
The Second Coming
ROUGH CUT
PROLOGUE
1983
Zed had been in the north-east of England for just over six weeks, but had seen none of the famous Northumberland countryside. All that his hungry eyes had feasted upon was the dank and inhospitable (to some, at least) interior of the crumbling Daleside Institute. It was all he wanted, and certainly all he needed. Zed was blind to all sights other than its thick mould-encrusted walls, dusty bare-board floors and high cobwebbed ceilings.
When he’d first stumbled upon the imposing building he had felt a vague sense of homecoming, of returning to his origin – even though he’d never been here before in his life. It was as if all the years of concentrated agony and insanity that had transpired here had created a retreat specifically for his complex state of mind.
Strolling through the old patients’ quarters on the first floor, he’d experienced a kinship with all the people who’d ever lived and died and cried here. A bond with the long dead, mad souls who had whittled away their lives in badly lit cells back when the place was an operational and fully functional mental institute.
But now the cramped rooms and narrow halls were empty of all but the most distant echoes of screams; yet still he felt comforted by the proximity of so much madness. And sometimes he even heard them, careering through the corridors of the Daleside, looking for a peace in death that they had never found in life and calling out the names of those who had abandoned them so very long ago.
He’d set up his rough bed in the cavernous basement, near what he considered the heart of the living darkness that beat deep within the shell of the building; spreading out the old sleeping bag on the cold concrete floor had felt right somehow. And now, as he leafed slowly through a stack of hardcore porn magazines from the 1950s that he’d found in a filthy corner, his feelings remained the same. He considered masturbating, just to kill some time, but the urge passed before he could act on it. Instead he curiously examined the creased monochrome images of naked flesh from a bygone era: pale, wide thighs, pendulous breasts, stiffly permed and set hair that crowned blandly smiling faces. It wasn’t even erotic, just disturbing in a cold and empty kind of way that he could barely even categorise.
He added some pages from the skin mags to his beloved Totem, carefully tearing them into strips and hanging them like streamers from the rotting carcasses of rats and hedgehogs, the half-sucked candy bars and sticky animal skulls. A mouth or a vulva – he couldn’t be sure which – seemed to gape and attempt to speak to him from one of the thin, faded slips of paper, but the movement only lasted a second. Yet again he was too confused to hear, not focused enough to understand; but very soon his creation would speak to him in a loud and clear voice and tell him what he needed to do. It was just a matter of time. A question of patience.
A couple of carrion crows watched him from their perch near the stairs; he smiled at them, and they blinked coldly, waiting for whatever came next.
Zed had begun the construction of the Totem on his second day in the basement, using whatever items called loudest to him from the rubble-strewn space. Steel tubing from a discarded child’s pram, the husk of an old wasp’s nest, desiccated mouse and rat parts, an old tin bucket with the base punched out. It was a work in progress, an objet d’art that would never truly be finished, at least not in his lifetime. But as the thing took shape it attempted to communicate to him through the many parts of its sum – the twitching leg of a deceased feline, the subtle vibration of a spider’s web, the slow shifting of some other hidden aspect buried deep within the tall mass of matter.
Of course he had a rough idea of what it was trying to tell him. He’d heard them clumping and stamping above his head, and had even seen one of them scribbling notes on a clipboard when he’d crept stealthily as a fox through the chilly upper storeys. Builders. Surveyors. Someone was examining his beloved building, planning and plotting to redevelop these beautiful layers of pain into office space, or apartments for middle-class wage slaves who knew nothing of real suffering – the like of which was stained indelibly onto the surface of these ancient bricks and timbers.
It was wrong that they were here, defiling the purity of the Daleside. They had no right to force themselves inside these time-soured spaces, or to walk these jaded floors. If there were any justice in the world the ghosts that remained would carve them up, spit them out, and serve them up as a warning to others with similar plans. But there was no justice: his life had taught him that single truth. There was only despair, followed closely by death.
Yes, that must be what the Totem was telling him. And soon, when the time was right, after he’d finally added the correct component, it would show him how to rectify the situation.
After his release back into the community he’d travelled far and wide to find somewhere exactly like this – a place to call home, a sanctuary from the clamour and vapidity of the modern world – and he was not about to give it up meekly. The ghosts of the insane were his brothers and sisters, and the atmosphere in this place was like that of a womb to him.
Within these walls Zed could even hear the tortured laughter of the parents who had treated him as a doll – or a puppet – so many years ago. They had taken away his birth name and re-christened him Zed in a baptism of blood and other less wholesome bodily fluids. Zed: the first letter of zero.
And he had called himself nothing but that hated/cherished nickname ever since, his long ago real name now almost forgotten.
He could vividly recall how they’d hired him out to friends so that they could stub out their cigarettes on his tender skin, or insert blunt objects into his small, still developing orifices. He realised that they would never be sorry, but it sometimes calmed him to hear them calling from some hidden hell, suffering for what they’d done to him in another life.
There was no way on earth that he could turn his back on all that, not now that he’d found it here waiting for him.
The fact that he had killed his parents long ago barely even registered: their voices were here where they belonged. Home.
His attention was drawn by a sound from upstairs, on the ground floor: clumsy movement in the reception area. They were back. The intruders. Suddenly he knew what was required to complete the Totem. The missing element had been here all along. It was him. It was Zed.
So he stripped naked, placing his torn clothing on the floor at the foot of the tower that was finally beginning to jabber to him in a language that he could almost comprehend. It was the same word over and over, a phrase that he could not quite place.
The crows listlessly flapped their wings and hopped over towards him, then sat and watched as he prepared himself. He’d found five or six of the birds nesting up in an attic room during one of his silent tours of the building and they had befriended him, following wherever he went like small winged shadows. He felt a connection with the birds, and was sure that they understood him on the frequent occasions when he spoke to them.
He climbed the huge funnel-shaped monstrosity and found the hole that he’d left at the top: the entrance to the hollow crawlspace that ran down the entire length of the edifice that he’d so lovingly fashioned.
He slipped easily into the mouth of the Totem, feeling it shift and massage him as he eased into its hot depths. Skeletal paws, chipped black teeth and cool liquefying remains brushed against his face as he slid down towards the thickened base. And waited for whoever it was moving upstairs to come down here, to his floor, to find this monument to madness and depravity that rested upon the bloodied foundations of the only place Zed had ever called home.
Then a deep, purring voice began to speak directly to him for the first time, one of many that were produced by the entity that lodged here. It lulled him deeper into his own mind as it whispered that same single word over and over again. But no, not a word…a name. A name that also sounded like a thing, or even a place: Reef.
The body of the woman he’d discovered hiding in the basement just under six weeks ago felt soft and spongy beneath his bare feet. Her wounds were beginning to smell and her flesh was rapidly turning to pulp on her bones in the heat that was locked up tight beneath the old building.
He sang to her. Cooed, as if comforting an upset baby. She was another runaway, just like him: someone seeking solace, looking for a place in which to house her own fractured psyche. He reached down, patted the soft wet spot on her head with his callused fingertips. Promised her that they would soon be joined by more of their own – so many that they might even start a family down here in the long dark night of his soul.
He recalled how she reacted when he found her there, cowering in the corner like a trapped animal. He’d stroked her head then too, and whispered comforting words. Then he’d cut her down like a young sapling, tearing her up by the roots.
It was inside her that he had found inspiration for the Totem: her rich warm blood and innards had shown him what he should build. Her corpse was the first brick; the cornerstone of what now stood proud and defiant, like a representation of some ancient god waiting to be worshipped anew.
And that was when he sensed the opening above him slowly pucker shut, sealing him within the warm womb of his own damaged mind and preparing him for his first lesson.
Zed smiled, and then slept. Finally at peace. The last sound he heard before the dreamless dark flooded in was that of madly flapping wings.
UK Film Director Slain
At Lennon Murder Site
A man was arrested yesterday for the shooting of Derrick Reef, an English film director most famous for his series of grisly horror films made in the 1970s. Mr Reef moved to New York City only last year, after a series of break-ins occurred at his mansion in northern England.
The murder suspect was found at the scene, sitting on the steps of The Dakota Building – famed mostly in recent times for being the place where ex-Beatle John Lennon was slain by crazed gunman Mark Chapman – and chanting in what a bystander called “a distinctly foreign tongue”
The suspect has not been named, however a police source has informed us that he will answer only to the bizarre title of “Lord of the Lonely Places”.
(From the New York Times, 11th October 1984)
2004
ONE
Even if you fail to recognise her name, my mother’s ageless face may well be familiar to you, especially if you’re a fan of a certain brand of low budget British horror film. You may have seen her famous doe-eyed smile and pneumatic chest gracing posters, VHS video cases, and even the garish covers of a handful of specialist magazines devoted to this strange and cultish sub genre.
Back in the mid-to-late 1970s a company called Tiger Stripe produced a short series of very bloody gonzo thrillers directed by the late Derrick Reef, and my mother appeared in every single one of them. Reef’s name is now synonymous with that kind of rough-edged quality wrought by young guerrilla filmmakers on shoestring budgets, and he is even revered by film students across the globe in a supposedly ironic and very self-conscious form of inverted snobbery. But back in the day he was merely a jobbing director catching his first and last big break, an art school dropout with a couple of television adverts under his belt who was striving to make a name for himself in an already overcrowded marketplace.
I know now that he and my mother were lovers, but in those somewhat less intrusive days, the press had her pegged mainly as his leading lady, or maybe even his muse. Each of Vanna St Clair’s roles in Reef’s Tiger Stripe productions was written specifically for her, and she played them all with obvious relish (even though they were, essentially, the same character – a once sultry sex kitten well on her way to becoming a well-fed house cat).
Vanna excelled as the broken-hearted psychic whore in Chill Thrill, and her turn as the haunted novelist’s murderous slut of a housekeeper in Terror Type remains to this day a joy to behold and an object lesson in restrained ham. By the time the team made the justifiably renowned Flowers for Flora’s Grave (and who can ever forget that notorious sequence involving the enforced demonic abortion?), her screen time was limited, but still she stole the show as the nymphomaniac aunt who seduces her own possessed nephew in a sweaty greenhouse before throwing herself into a lake.
She had that bruised sexuality, my mother; an air of needy, damaged carnality that played extremely well on camera.
A few short years after Reef’s death in 1984, she gave up acting for good. She found God and invested heavily in (of all things!) a religious magazine called Faith to Faith, running the title from a distance, using telephone and fax. My mother was fiercely protective of our privacy – an obsession that was only intensified by Reef’s subsequent murder – and not one single person on her staff ever got to meet Vanna in the flesh. The magazine became a considerable success, but to hundreds of film fans she will always be Vampish Vanna, the Hostess of Horrors.
To me she was simply mother, and now, as her biographer, I find her more of an enigma than ever.
*
Spring felt more like early summer that year, and the city moved as slowly and sluggishly as a dying elephant. The heat was a palpable presence, a major character in the soap opera of people’s lives. It skulked like a thief in the mouths of litter-lined alleys; hovered and shimmered above the denizens of the city as they jogged and power-walked through parks; squatted on the rooftops and sent down withering heat rays onto their unprotected heads.
Women fainted on Tube trains, men’s shirts stuck to their torsos like sheets of shrink-wrap plastic, and I moved through them all unnoticed, like a wisp of cool air trapped in heat haze.
I’d received a call from a man at a company called Rhinestone Books, who claimed to be interested in publishing a biography of my mother, and who had read some of my stuff in an obscure style magazine that folded a month after releasing its premier issue.
I had my doubts about the meeting, but the mention of decent money had me putting on a suit and walking out of my front door at 8am sharp, looking for all the world like just another power hound on his way to a breakfast meeting in the big city.
Rhinestone’s office was somewhere along Caledonian Road, so I had to ride the Northern Line to King’s Cross and walk from there. It was rush hour and the platform was jam-packed. People jostled for position on the supposed safe side of the painted yellow line that ran the length of the platform, and the smell of sweating bodies was almost overpowering. My natural paranoia had gone into overdrive, and I felt watched from all quarters.
I didn’t usually take public transport that early in the day, preferring to schedule my appointments for later, when the lemmings have cleared off into their cramped little offices to push paper and talk about last night’s artless chat shows and unfunny comedies.
As I stood there trying not to scream, something caught my eye. A young Asian woman was standing far too close to the edge of the platform, and her head swayed from side to side like a balloon caught up in a soft breeze. She was dressed like a bicycle courier, in a tight Oakley T-shirt and those second-skin Lycra cycling shorts that only look good on the very slim and the very young.
It was a hypnotic sight, but I seemed to be the only person to have noticed it; everyone else was too busy peering impatiently along the tunnel, reading broadsheet newspapers and paperback books, or just staring at the posters advertising new film releases that clung to the opposite wall.
The Asian girl had her eyes closed, and the expression on her face made me suppose that she was listening to some mellow music on a Walkman. But there were no headphones in her ears, no wires hanging down from her shock of short gelled hair. She looked to be in some kind of a trance, or perhaps she was so tired from whatever she’d been doing the night before that she’d fallen asleep on her feet.
Just then, the wind-sound of a train approaching started to build in the air, and the commuters began to push forward, subtly fighting for a spot that was directly in line with the doors of the train.
The girl just stood there, the expression on her face beatific, like that of a Buddhist statue in some garden of supreme spirituality.
The train shot out of the tunnel, bringing with it heat and noise and that sudden feeling of stress you have when you know you’re about to fight your way onboard.
And the girl stepped off the edge of the platform, one slim, firm leg kicking out into dead air and pulling the rest of her after it. But just before she left the earth to hover in front of the tonnes of flying steel that had erupted into the station, she opened her eyes and smiled.
Since that day I’ve thought about her smile many times, and each time I imagine it the same way: she smiled at me, directly at me. She turned her head and let her mouth curl up into the saddest smile I have ever seen in my life. I’m convinced that she registered, or recognised something in me, perhaps a certain kind of bleakness that she knew intimately within herself.
Then she was nothing more than a powdery red vapour in the air and a bundle of sticks and meat in the suicide pit that was being dragged along pitilessly under the rapidly braking train.
I managed to get out of the station before it closed, and took a cab to my meeting. I was going to be late, but was sure that my excuse would hold water. By that time I didn’t give much of a shit anyway; all I could see before me was the girl’s wan face seconds before it was turned to mush by the force of impact.
The office I wanted was quite a way up the Caledonian Road, near Holloway Prison, and the taciturn cabby turned his nose up when I didn’t give him a tip – it’s my policy: if they chat, they get a gratuity; if not, fuck them for being so miserable.
The building was new, with a decorative formal entrance and huge picture windows on every one of its four floors. I told the receptionist who I was, and that I’d come to see Irvine Dowey and she made me sign a leather-bound guestbook before telling me which way to go.
Dowey’s office was on the top floor, and after that morning’s excitement, I was in no mood to climb the stairs so pressed the button for the elevator. It was now 9:15 am. My appointment was for 9 o’clock, but I didn’t let that stress me. To be honest, I still wasn’t sure if I wanted to take the assignment.
When the lift arrived it was empty, and there was no one else in the lobby, so I got to ride alone. It was one of those cramped compartments that are covered in mirrors as a design trick to make it seem bigger. The plan didn’t work; I was getting more and more claustrophobic the slower the thing rose through the storeys.
I checked my face in the mirrors: not bad, if a little ruddy. My tie was crooked, so I retied it straight. It was only as I was smoothing down the legs of my trousers that I noticed the fault. Due to some bizarre flaw in the mirrored tiles, there seemed to be more than one of me in there. I was reflected twice, like twins. It was an odd sight, seeing two of me staring back from the glass, and when the doors opened, I got out of there in a hurry.
I walked along a short corridor with bland landscape paintings hanging crooked on the walls, then knocked on the door marked “Rhinestone Books” and waited impatiently to be summoned from within.
When no such invitation proved forthcoming, I pushed open the door and entered unannounced, to be greeted by the sight of a woman bending over to access the lower drawer of a filing cabinet. Her large, firm buttocks strained beneath the thin fabric of her skirt, and I could see the delicate outline of a thong beneath the garment.
I coughed quietly and politely to signal my presence in the room, then examined the framed magazine and book covers that decorated the walls with more interest than they actually merited.
“Oh,” said the woman, turning to face me. She was pretty in a bleached-blonde-council-estate kind of way, and her cheeks had reddened. “I’m sorry, I didn’t hear you knock.”
“Well I did,” I said, smiling to show that I was an affable enough guest. “Next time I’ll hit harder.”
She flashed me a genuine smile, then put back on her professional mask and hurried over to her desk. She opened a diary and moved her index finger across the page.
“St Clair,” I said, trying to help her out.
“Oh, yes. Jude, isn’t it? Irv – I mean Mr Dowey is expecting you, isn’t he?”
“Yes, I spoke to him a couple of days ago. It’s about a book.”
“Well, it would be wouldn’t it?” she said, recovering very well from her previous embarrassment. I didn’t like this new sassy version of the girl; I’d preferred the one who’d clumsily shown me her backside.
“Sorry, but I’m a bit late,” I said, shrugging.
“No worries. I’ll just ring through.”
She picked up the telephone receiver and pressed a button, then told someone that Mr St Clair was here to see him.
“Please, go right in,” she said to me when she’d hung up the phone. “Can I get you anything?”
Yes, I thought. Another flash of your arse. “No, not for me thanks,” I said, smiling.
TWO
“Sit down Jude. Make yourself at home.” Dowey stood up and pushed back his chair. He was a big bloke, standing a couple of inches over six feet tall, but his hand was soft and doughy when I shook it. If the man had participated in some kind of sport, or kept fit in any way, he would have cut a formidable sight; as it was he just looked like an overfed kid squeezed into his dad’s cheap suit.
“Thanks, “I said, lowering myself into a padded chair opposite his, the large, tidy desk between us. “Sorry I’m late, but there was a suicide on the Tube.”
“Bloody hell, another one? There seems to be one every week at the minute.” He fiddled with his tie, not really interested.
“Yeah. This one happened right in front of me. It wasn’t pretty.”
His head shot up, eyes widening; at last I had his interest. Car crash syndrome: if you were there, you’ll be able to pass on all the gory details. “Really? Was it…you know, bad?”
“Pretty much. It was a mess. A regular bloodbath.”
He pondered this for a while, a smile playing at the corners of his wet mouth. People love to hear stuff like this, it’s life reaffirming; rather them than me, is the basic coda.
“Well,” he said at last. “To business! Thanks a lot for coming here today, Jude. I really appreciate it.” His chubby hands played with a pencil sharpener on the desktop, and I had a sudden urge to slap him. He seemed far too disinterested for his own good.
“That’s fine. Although I must admit that initially your offer didn’t appeal to me. But then I got thinking about what would happen if someone else were to write the book. After all, she was my mother.”
“Exactly,” said Dowey. “And who better to chronicle her life.”
Just then, the secretary ghosted back into the room, carrying a tray of coffee. She asked me again if I’d like one, but I refused the offer. I was still fired-up after what I’d seen that morning, and caffeine would only have made things worse. What I really needed was a nap, but I doubted it would go down too well with Dowey if I lay flat on my back on his desk and started knocking out the zeds. I asked for a glass of water instead, and she fetched me one with a tacked-on professional smile, our brief connection from earlier obviously forgotten.
Dowey’s offer was a generous one; he wasn’t shy in putting a hefty advance on the table. In exchange, he wanted me to write my mother’s biography, not sparing any of the juicy details. He was a fan of her films, and judging by his manner I think he secretly wanted a single paperback volume depicting all of her illicit exploits, just to keep handy for bedtime reading when he was between girlfriends…or if his secretary was otherwise engaged. He probably had plans to market it with a free box of paper tissues accompanying each copy.
I knew that if I turned down Dowey’s offer, he would merely commission some other writer to do a hack job, concentrating on the less salubrious aspects of my mother’s life prior to her finding God. At least if I wrote the book, it would be honest, and present her as a more fully rounded person.
Or that was how I justified it to myself when I said yes.
The truth was that I was down to my last loose change, and I desperately needed some cash. Plus, the way I had it pegged was that the old bag owed me. It was time for her to repay some debts, to be there when I needed her in a way that she’d rarely been when she was alive.
Vanna St Clair died in the winter of 2001. She’d suffered for years from a congenital heart condition (exacerbated, she claimed, from years of hard living), but that wasn’t what got her in the end.
She and my dad had divorced in 1982, when I was still a young child. She never told me exactly what went wrong between them, but I got the impression that she was somehow to blame; whenever I mentioned him, a look of remorse would cross her face and she’d get this odd faraway look in her eyes. I did know that the old man had fled to Mexico to run a bar with an old sparring partner from his days spent working on the oilrigs moored off the coast of Scotland, but I haven’t heard from him since. For all I know, he could be dead too.
When I buried her, hardly any members of the press turned out for the occasion. Vanna’s name was no longer even a slight draw; she didn’t shine in the firmament of homegrown stars. She was less than a has-been: more of a never-really-was. Also, her obsessive quest for privacy meant that most people who’d known her in her old life had assumed that she was already dead.
I wept at the graveside, of course, but my tears were purely perfunctory. The love between us had always been strained, fraught with tension because of her inability to truly give of herself unless she was performing: but in a way, she always was. Pretending to be a good mother, playing the part of a real human being with a heart and feelings.
She didn’t leave much money behind, enough to bury her and set me up in a small flat in Camden Town that she’d bought a long time before the place became the fashionable haunt for the studiously trendy that it is today. Living rent-free, I managed to pursue my interest in becoming a freelance journalist. Her name got me a few jobs on showbiz desks at tacky little magazines, and even made me one or two valuable contacts – young, easily impressed editors who, like Irvine Dowey, had no doubt whacked off to Vanna’s on-screen antics in their early teens.
It was an inheritance, of sorts. The only one she could ever give.
I went away from Rhinestone Books feeling very ambiguous. I was pleased that I had another paying job, but the prospect of it felt like the rape of my mother’s memory, or, at the very least, the prostitution of her career.
I stopped in at the grubby little Wendy’s franchise opposite Kings Cross Station for a quick coffee, and stared out at the bustling travellers, drug dealers, prostitutes with skin conditions and yawning policemen suffering from selective blindness.
A man stood in doorway of WH Smith, his small, monkeyish features partly hidden by a combination of distance and the layer of carbon monoxide that always hung like a gauze camera filter in the polluted London air. He was wearing a long coat, which looked incongruous in the heat, and as far as I could tell his head was shaved bald. He didn’t move, just stood there and stared at me across the busy road. By the time I’d finished my coffee and walked outside, he was gone. I wasn’t sure if the man had been watching me, or if I was just being typically jumpy.
*
Starting the book was easier than I’d imagined. I already knew a hell of a lot about my mother’s work in film, and the rest of the information I needed was readily available if I looked hard enough. So I began to haunt film archives and Internet chatrooms, scouring the web for any mention of Vanna St Clair.
I frequented shady little backroom video libraries, pitiful collectors’ fairs, rundown home cinema outlets (unsurprisingly, none of Reef’s titles were available on DVD at that time) and esoteric mail order companies for alternate cuts and obscure documentaries that might contain even the briefest clip of her acting.
My own collection grew as my interest waned, and I began to fear that I’d taken on too big a task. My mother’s early years were sordid and lurid, filled with cheap sexual encounters and ill-fated trysts. I’d never really had much respect for the woman when she was alive, and even that was diminishing as I trawled through the tawdry history of her past relationships.
She slept with casting agents, production assistants, up-and-coming writers and television stars. Anyone would do, as long as they advanced her career in return for what she could do for them. Eventually she met Derrick Reef and sparks flew. By all accounts, the flamboyant would-be director was attracted by her gaudy pier-end glamour like a fly to a rotting carcass - if you’ll excuse the turgid B-Movie imagery.
Quite where my dad stood in any of this was anyone’s guess. I was actually amazed that he’d hung around for so long, and that alone spoke volumes about Vanna’s allure. Perhaps, after she fell pregnant, he’d simply shrugged his shoulders and accepted the responsibility like a Good Man, to hell with the consequences.
I knew all about the botched amateur abortion. The night she threw herself down a flight of stairs in a drunken attempt to be rid of me as I developed inside her womb. She told me about that particular incident when I was only seven years old, her way of demonstrating to me the harsh cruelties of life.
Reading this, it sounds as if I hated her. I didn’t. I don’t. She was damaged goods from the start, raised in a very poor family and abused by her father and uncles. She’d been sent out to work in a clothing factory as soon as she was physically capable of managing the manual labour. Her own mother neglected her, and her drunken father beat them both.
Vanna never stood a chance in the world, and success became a Promised Land, or a way of taking revenge on her estranged parents, who both passed away before she was out of her teens.