[we'll stand forever this way]

[2005-04-01] - [6:23 p.m.]

[i feel these four walls closing in on me...]

[My life, crumbling around me, as I stand here alone. I spin around, desperately looking for a way out of this prison cell I am forced to call home by the man who stands before me. He glares down at my shivering form, and I feel a wave of despair wash over me. He reaches up and brings down his hand, and I tremble in fear of his fist. I scramble away, cowering in the corner as he bellows drunken abuse at me again.
‘Please?’ I beg, my own voice sounding pathetic in my head.
It’s just like he always said it would be, I’d be at his feet begging for my life. He said it would end one day, please don’t say this day has come already. For only fifteen years I’ve been here, but it’s already been fifteen years too long for him. From the moment the woman he calls his wife gave birth to me, from the moment I was part of his twisted world; that was the end for me.
She’s outside the door now, the one I called mum for the whole of my short life. The one who sheltered me from his blows time and time again has gone now, no longer here to protect me. She lies alone in a puddle of red liquid. Her face is broken, the life beaten out of her. She’s like a fragile piece of glass, shattered on the floor.
He steps closer to me, his figure blocking out the sliver of light coming through the blocked up window, and I cannot stop myself from shaking visibly anymore.
‘You’re pathetic!’ he whispers to me, in a voice that sounds so insane, I back further and further away til I can move no more.
My back is pressed against the hard, cold wall, and I can feel the paint peeling. A million stupid thoughts rush through my head, anything to take my mind off the situation I’m in. His face is looming ever nearer to mine, and I turn away from him.
‘Scared of me, are you?’ he shouts, suddenly angry with me again.
It’s just the drink, I tell myself. He wouldn’t really hurt me, would he? Then I see the trickle of blood seeping under the door, and I know. He would hurt me; he’d kill me he’s so out of it. Why did I never realise before, why did I never leave when I had the chance?
‘Dad, please!’ I scream, terror evident in my voice. ‘It’s me, Vicky! Come on Dad, stop it!’
‘Don’t call me Dad!’ he shouts, saying it over and over again til it echoes all around. ‘I don’t have a daughter, you slut! No daughter of mine would behave like this!’
‘Behave like what?’ I ask, trying to remain calm and appear curious to him.
Mum always told me that if you act calm around him, then he’d calm down and become the man he is when he’s not drunk or stoned. But this time, this time he’s too far-gone for talking to work. He’s irrational, completely insane again. He punches the wall, but there’s nowhere left for me to run to this time. I scream, so long and so loud that I think my throat is going to explode but there’s nothing. No one runs to my rescue, it’s not like in the movies when the hero always rushes in at the last moment, there’s no super man in tights coming to save me. It’s just me, him and four walls constraining me to my fate.
‘It’s over my dear,’ he mutters to me, raising his fist yet again.
I brace myself for the final blow; brace myself for the curtain falling on my short life. I don’t waste my breath on begging for mercy anymore, I know there’s no mercy left in him now.
‘Aren’t you going to beg me to stop?’ he croaks at me in a voice hoarse from shouting and screaming at me.
I shake my head, and I feel his fist connect with my skull. I fall to the ground, blood gushing out of a cut on my head from his ring. I let out a final whimper, before I succumb to the pain and lie motionless on the floor.
I glance around, and it seems as if the walls are closing in on me as I lie here. These four walls, in here I shall meet my death; they close in around me.
And so this is the end, Victoria Jane Smith will never smile again.
]

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