The Slaughter

Dinner on the evening of Hattie’s arrival was tense, heavy with unanswered questions and the remnants of my sulk – which had only disappeared due to a lengthy stare from my father, whose method of discipline was simply to give me a look which promised retribution if I did not immediately acquiesce and do what I was told. It was simple, and it worked: I was not afraid of my father, but I was afraid of disappointing him.

We ate in silence interspersed with dry bursts of conversation, usually initiated by my mother. Hattie played with her food for a long, pensive while before she answered my mother’s queries, and her answers were short, close to a whisper in volume. Every move she made seemed to be, at the time, exclusively to irritate me, and I demolished my soup and bread far quicker than usual in order to leave the table rather than suffering her presence for any longer than was required.

I was dismayed, then, to find that Hattie would be sharing my bedroom until mother had properly washed the bedclothes in the spare room. My bedroom had always been a place of refuge, and to think that my dreadful cousin would be sharing it, for even the shortest amount of time – needless to say, the only reason I did not burst into another strop was because of my father’s carefully concocted expression.

As I scooped the last of my soup into my mouth, my mother looked across the table at me and said, in an unfamiliarly light and jovial tone, “Won’t this be fun, Cathy?”

I wanted to say that it wouldn’t be. Instead I nodded, and glanced over at Hattie. She was blowing delicately at the soup on her spoon despite the fact that I found mine to be a perfectly respectable heat, and as our eyes met her lips tilted at the corners. A smile.

This took me aback. It had been perfectly sensible to dislike Hattie, for infringing on our house and for infringing on my bedroom, but now that she had shown me a smile, it was decidedly harder to argue with her presence.

I excused myself from the dinner table, my thoughts thick with conflict.


Hattie did not sleep well that night. She lay awake for hours, staring up at the ceiling, hands folded passively over her stomach. I watched her for a little while, wondering how it was that she came to cling onto her sadness with such proclivity.

The moon was at its apex when I decided to stop feigning sleep. I pushed myself up into a sitting position and whispered, my words muffled by the thickness of night, “What’s a divorce, Hattie?”

She remained flat, but I felt her eyes on me. “When a man no longer finds his wife beautiful, and he falls out of love with her.”

It all seemed so desperately, hopelessly sad that I lowered myself back onto the lumpy mattress my mother had dragged out of the attic and fell immediately asleep.


Toby had a habit of tearing up grass.

I always thought it to be terribly cruel, watching him grasp fistfuls of grass and rip it from the roots out of the soil, but it seemed to calm him, and so I never complained. We were sitting by the stream; I was telling him in a hushed whisper about Hattie’s parents and how they were experiencing a divorce and, to my utter surprise, he smiled rather humourlessly and said, “My parents are divorced too, you know, Cathy.”

He had adopted that superior tone he sometimes liked to use whenever he wanted me to remember that he was fifteen and I was not, and so I said, “That’s nothing to brag about,” with such a haughty edge to my voice that he started to laugh. “Don’t!” I commanded, but he ignored me, sprinkling the handful of grass over my skirt to my dismay.

His grin faded to a gentle smile, and he ruffled a hand through his already untidy hair and mumbled, “I wasn’t bragging.”

I scoffed. “Yes you were. You always brag.”

“Only when I have something worthy of bragging about.”

He fell into a rather sullen silence after that, staring at the stream as it dug a lazy path through the countryside. I wanted to say something, to apologise because his parents did not love each other, but instead I picked the grass from my skirt, one piece at a time, and tore each strand into tiny squares, scattering them in the light wind.

I have always rather despised myself for my inability to console people in times of need. People like Toby are adequately supplied with words of comfort, words to uplift and inspire and make the endless days seem like imperfect hours of waiting for one minute of perfection and, more importantly, to make that one minute worth it. But all I could ever do, my whole life, was look on as the person beside me fell apart.

When Toby Whyte fell apart – he did, and often – it only ever made me love him more.