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One day, when she was clearing up a spill in one of the aisles, she rolled up her sleeves to squeeze out a sponge and exposed a blurry blue six-digit number tattooed on the outside of her forearm.
I knew about concentration camps. We’d done a whole block about Auschwitz in our Social Studies class only the previous term.
‘Marilla lost her whole family in the camps,’ my mother said when I asked her about the tattoo. ‘Her parents were sent to the gas chamber, and her sisters died from starvation in labour camps. She told me once she always keeps a bread roll in her pocket, even now.’
‘But she isn’t Jewish,’ I said. ‘She wears across.’
‘The Nazis didn’t just murder Jews,’ Mum explained. ‘Marilla was a twin, and there was a doctor in that camp who did wicked experiments on twins. It’s why Marilla couldn’t ever have children.’
I burned with curiosity to knowwhat experiments, but I was smart enough not to ask.
My mother’s tone when she spoke about Marilla was filled with pity. But where she saw only a victim, I saw a survivor: someone who’d found the will to keep going, tostay alive, no matter how viciously she was brutalised.
A woman as unlike my mother as it was possible to be.
Marilla fascinated me. She’d been the same age as me when she was sent to Auschwitz. How could she have survived in such a place? So many people older and smarter and stronger than she had died. What made her different?
I started to find excuses to go to the Spar shop, volunteering to fetch my father’s cigarettes and beer. Some days when I couldn’t face going straight home from school Marilla let me hang out in the storeroom or help her stack shelves.
‘Why are you nice to me?’ I asked one afternoon.
She put down the heavy boxes of soap powder she’d been stacking. ‘You think I survived the camps because I was stronger than the rest,kochanie?’ she asked: I knew that was Polish forsweetheart. ‘You think I was smarter or luckier than the others? No, Millie, theworstof us survived: the selfish, the violent, the brutal, the cruel. The best all died.’ She rubbed at her tattoo as if the numbers burned, her expression suddenly bitter. ‘I became likethem. I let them kill my humanity. I need to atone.’
I didn’t understand what she meant: I was only nine.
One afternoon in late December I was sitting at the dining table doing my homework when my father came home. He’d been at the pub all day: he reeked of beer, and his trousers had a suspicious stain at the crotch.
‘Why’s she still up?’ he demanded, jerking his thumb at me.
‘It’s only five-thirty, John,’ Mum said.
My mother was a beautiful woman. Acleverwoman. She had tools she could have used to manage my father, since she clearly didn’t have the guts to leave him. Occasionally, after one of their fights, she’d flee with me and my sister to one of those battered women shelters, with their walls in neutral colours and their rubber mattresses and their giant jars of peanut butter. But after a night or two, she’d call him, and there’d be tears and promises of change, and then she’d go back and drag us with her. I hated her for her weakness. Sometimes it felt like shewantedhim to hurt her.
I fled upstairs as the fighting started. I’d learned a lot since I’d stabbed my father in the back of the knee with a paring knife. I knew better now than to come between them. My mother wallowed in her victimhood. Sooner or later, she’d drown in it, and I wasn’t going to get caught in the undertow.
The shouting intensified. But as bad as the yelling was, the silence that came next was always worse, because that meant he was hitting her. I watched helplessly through the bannisters as he dragged her along the hallway towards the kitchen by her hair. I didn’t hide in my bedroom beneath the covers with my four-year-old sister Gracie because I needed tosee: to remind myself what happened when you ceded your power to a man.
Mum thrashed back and forth trying to get out of his grip, flopping around like a landed fish, her hands clawing above her head. I wondered if he’d kill her this time. I wondered if I was strong enough yet to kill him if he did.
And then suddenly the kitchen door burst open below and Tom launched himself bodily on top of my father: Tom, nine years old and skinny as fuck, screaming and shouting, his small fists beating my father’s back.
Dad brushed him off as if he were no more than a mosquito, but he had to let go of my mother’s hair to do so. She scrambled frantically away on her hands and knees like a feral cat. And then Dad picked Tom up like he was a bag of flour and threw him against the kitchen wall. Tom smashed into it so hard his head punched a hole in the Sheetrock.
I tore down the stairs, screaming at my father to stop.
My mother grabbed my arm as I reached the bottom. ‘He’ll kill you!’
Dad was lurching around trying to find my mother, a blundering bear of a man. A large cut on his forehead bled heavily into his eyes, obscuring his vision.
I broke free from my mother and ducked beneath his flailing arms. In the kitchen, Tom sat up, disorientated but alive.
‘Run!’ my mother cried.
Mum didn’t defy my father very often. They fought like this all the time: what had happened tonight wasn’t out of the ordinary. Sometimes she’d even hit him back, because in my parents’ world, violence masqueraded as passion and a beating meant youcared. So when she yelled, ‘Run!’I seized Tom’s hand and we ran.
We didn’t run to Tom’s house next door, or to the neighbours, whose lights were going off as we passed them because nobody wanted to get involved. We ran to the one place I knew would give us sanctuary: the Spar shop on the corner.
I sped barefoot over broken glass and rough tarmac in my jeans and T-shirt, heedless of the biting December wind as I hauled Tom behind me. My mother was screaming like a banshee, but I didn’t scream. I didn’t cry.
