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When I finally climb over the top, I look around in surprise. This is not what I expected. It looks like a very small living room that you’d imagine a troll would live in. There’s no couch, but the far corner has pillows placed carefully on the polished wood floor. The walls are painted grey; the paint is peeling in places but that’s to be expected.
I was expecting it to look like the inside of a shed. Instead it’s like a little boys’ dream. There are shelves with torches, matches, little tool kits and a few old toys. A trunk sits by the pillows and there’s a radio on an upturned bin. Other than that it’s clean and empty.
“Wow,” I say as I stand to full height, moving out of the way so Nathan can climb up after me.
I have to duck under the rope attached to the ceiling and ladder as I make my way over to the trunk. My curiosity gets the better of me.
“Don’t open that,” Nathan says, placing his hand on the curved top. “Not yet.”
“Why didn’t you ever bring me here when I lived here?”
“Could you have climbed the ladder in your condition?” Point well made. He looks around, his lips pinched together. I wonder if he’s embarrassed. I’m about to tell him he shouldn’t be, but he starts talking and I’m not sure whether or not I like what I hear. “This was my safe place.” He sits on the pillows, patting the spot beside him. It’s then that I notice the window opposite is longer than the rest. I imagine at one point you’d have been able to see above the trees. This tree is a lot larger and a hell of a lot wider than all of the others, but they’re quickly catching up in size. All I can see through the window is the green leaves and pink blossoms of the closest tree.
I’m amazed this place has survived for so long. Surely the tree it sits upon should have crushed it by now as it grew? It just seems to have grown around it more than anything.
“Safe place?”
“Yes, I learned to kind of…” he waves his hand in the air as if searching for the right word, “sense when my grandfather would be in one of those moods. I’d come here.”
I gulp, keeping my eyes straight ahead and keeping my emotions bottled. He needs me to listen, not to interfere and start crying all over him.
He continues. “He’d leave me alone, but I’d have to go down eventually.”
The thought of a small boy cowering in the corner with nothing but a torch and his gloves for comfort almost breaks me.
“My safe place.” He raises his hands. “The only place in the world I could truly be myself.”
Still silent, I place my hand over his between us and rest my head on his shoulder.
“I haven’t been here since I was about twelve.”
“Why?”
He shrugs, his cheek against the top of my head. “That’s when it stopped.”
Six years… for six years he went through that alone. “What made him stop?”
“I got too strong for him.” Do I really want to hear this? No, I don’t, but he needs to tell his story and I’ll be damned if I’m going to give up on him. “For a while I didn’t fight back. It became normal.” He gives a little laugh. “And then I learned sex education in school. I knew what sex was, but for some reason I never put two and two together. Don’t get me wrong, I knew what we were doing was bad and I hated it. I hated the pain, I hated… I just hated it.” He lets out a breath and shudders. “But I never truly realised what it was we were doing. I’m not making any sense, am I?”
“You actually are.” This is all I say as I want him to continue.
“I fought back. I probably could have fought back before then, but like I said, I didn’t know that I should. He was shocked that I’d pushed him to the ground when I usually made it so easy for him. We never spoke about it, not until the day he died.” His eyes narrow and his lips form a sneer. “He apologised. He actually had the gall to ask me for my forgiveness.”
Holy crap. “Did you give it to him?”
“I told him to rot in hell.”
“I hope that’s exactly what he’s doing,” I sneer with him. “Why didn’t you tell anybody? Your mum? Your dad?” He gives me a look that answers my question. I’ve met his parents, but do I really believe they’d have allowed something like this to go on? No matter how cruel they are I believe they would have done something. It’d ruin them if Nathan started telling people. None of it makes sense. “Caleb?”
