Crash Into Me

Brian’s fingers danced across the fretboard with ease, rocking a solo that most other seventeen-year-olds could only dream of playing. His brow was creased in concentration, his eyes on the strings as he worked, and he was so engrossed in what he was doing that he didn’t seem to notice that even Matt’s dad had briefly stuck his head into the garage to see what was going on. The speed with which he moved his fingers would have seen weaker men crumble, but to him it was second nature.

I was a weaker man.

I looked down at my own guitar, a shitty right-handed-turned-left-handed Fender that my dad had bought some ten years ago when he’d dreamed of leaving his job as a grease monkey. He’d played it a grand total of four times before setting it aside—with three kids to feed, he didn’t have time for dreams. It had gathered dust in our basement for years until I had dragged it out and taken on the dream for my own, and now here we were. I could play rhythm well enough, but I was nothing special compared to Brian’s shredding.

Sometimes I thought I never would be.

I almost wanted to growl at him to stop, that he was making me and Matt look like we knew fuck all, but it wasn’t his fault that he had a guitar-genius for a father.

Lucky bastard.

Matt was looking at Brian like he’d grown an extra head. ‘Jesus, man. How long did it take you to come up with that one?’

Brian stopped playing and looked up in surprise. ‘I just made it up now.’

He wasn’t even bragging; he was just stating a fact. That was the only reason that I never called him out when he was making the rest of us look like idiots—he genuinely didn’t know how good he was. Probably because he was always trying to measure up to his father. If he kept it up, one day he’d end up the greatest guitarist in the world. Me and Matt would be lucky if he let us tag along for the ride—him and Jimmy, who was already the best drummer that I knew, even if he never showed up for our jamming sessions.

They were going places; I would be lucky to make it through high school.

Matt was shaking his head. His guitar sat off to the side, up against the wall of the garage where he’d abandoned it several hours earlier. He had the excuse of only being the singer in our makeshift not-quite-a-band, but I was determined not to be so easily intimidated. I flexed my fingers in preparation, ignoring the painful jolt it sent through them. They were still sore from the fight I’d gotten into the day before, but I would be damned before I used that as an excuse.

I was saved from having to humiliate myself when Brian glanced up at the clock.

‘Fuck, is that the time? I gotta go. Dad’s probably up already.’

Brian’s father had been gone for two weeks, off visiting sunny old Sydney, Australia—which would have been cool if it hadn’t been because he was attending his sister’s funeral. Brian had wanted to go with him in case his father needed the support, but his mother had put her foot down and said no, he wasn’t going to miss two weeks of school to attend the funeral of a relative he had never even met.

Now that his father was back, Brian was eager to get a read on how he was doing—and be his support, if he still needed it.

I glanced at the time myself and winced. It was half-past six—already half an hour later than I had promised Mom I’d be home. Not that she’d be surprised, since I was late all the damn time, but this time I had wanted to keep my promise. Brian’s father wasn’t the only one who needed support.

‘I’d better head off, too,’ I told Matt apologetically. ‘I told my mom I’d be home early tonight.’

Matt shook his head, unfazed. ‘It’s cool, man. We can pick up again tomorrow. You guys gonna be here?’

‘Of course,’ I replied without delay. ‘Midday?’

‘Sure. Bri, you up for it?’

‘Depends on how Dad is,’ Brian said, ‘but I’ll probably be here.’

‘Give him our condolences again, huh? And again, sorry about your aunt.’

‘Thanks, man.’ Brian zipped his guitar back into its gig bag; I did the same with mine, hoisting it onto my shoulder carefully. ‘See ya tomorrow.’

Me and Brian didn’t have far to travel together—once we hit the end of the street he went left and I went right, making the same goodbyes and ‘see you tomorrows’ that we’d just exchanged with Matt. I liked to think that one day I would go left too, into the richer part of Huntington Beach, to my big house and my five cars and my sexy-as-hell girlfriend…s. But I still had a long way to go before that.

One day, Zee.

My house was only four blocks from Matt’s, but it couldn’t have looked more different. Where his was freshly painted with a well-kept yard, mine was shabby and in serious need of a landscaper. Mom had once attempted to brighten the front yard up by planting a line of rosebushes, but a warm summer and a lack of watering them had left them dead and blackened—like a barbed wire fence that ran along the redbrick and held a few old toys captive.

My little brother’s bike was still dumped in front of them, exactly where he’d dropped it after school the day before—meaning he probably hadn’t left the house all day. Too busy playing his stupid videogame. Kid needed a life.

The smell of cheap beer hit me the second I walked through the door, and I had to glance at the clock at the end of the hall to make sure that I was right about the time. It wasn’t even seven year—my father wasn’t supposed to be home until at least then. But that smell could only mean one thing. I took two more steps and looked into the living room.

Sure enough, there was my father—sprawled out on the couch, his feet up and a beer in his hand, with the TV spewing sport scores at him. There were a number of empty beer cans already dumped on the floor beside his chair.

I’d meant to beat him home.

But how long had he been there already? Would getting home at my promised time have meant I would have beat him? Probably not, if the number of cans was anything to go by. What time had he skipped out on work today?

I ducked past the living room, praying he wouldn’t hear me, and headed for the room that my brother and I shared.

Mattie was sitting on the end of his bed, just like I had assumed he would be, with a game controller in hand and his eyes glued to the TV screen. Ten-years-old and he already preferred the company of pixelated characters over flesh-and-blood friends. High school was going to kill him.

I had to step over a pile of his dirty laundry to get to my own side of the room. It might have been cluttered and the bed unmade, but at least I kept my dirty underwear in the hamper where they belonged. I shoved the pile back over to Mattie’s side of the room with a grimace. He didn’t even look up from his game.

I left my guitar on its stand in the corner, kicked aside an empty crisps packet, and headed back out into the house to find my mother.

It wasn’t hard. I found her where I had expected to: in the kitchen, preparing dinner. She’d gone all out like she did most days, preparing an entire roasted meal by the looks of things. Roast pork, roast potatoes, roast pumpkin…

Her left arm gave out as she was trying to pull the roast out of the oven. The tray fell back onto the metal rack with a loud clang!

‘Keep it quiet in there, woman!’

She flinched at the sound of my father’s voice, and I stepped forward quickly. ‘Here, Mom. I can get that.’

I was considered short among my friends, but Mom was even shorter. We used to joke that I’d gotten the gene from her. It was probably the only thing I’d gotten from her, sadly—because she was blonde where my hair was dark, and blue-eyed where my eyes were green. Those I’d gotten from my grandmother, thankfully. I didn’t like to think I’d gotten anything from my father.

Lately Mom had been looking much older too, and that scared me.

She smiled at me now, but it almost looked like a grimace as she said, ‘Thank you, sweetie. It’s just a little heavy for me today.’

She stepped back to give me room. Out came the roast, and with it the mouth-watering scent of pig cooked to perfection. I took a moment to bask in it as I set everything down on the stovetop, and my stomach growled appreciatively.

‘Smells amazing, Mom.’

I turned to give her a smile, and that was when I saw it: the redness of her arm, and the way she held it close to her stomach. She was quick to angle her body away from me when she caught me staring, but not quick enough to spot the pieces from connecting in my mind. Rage flared up in me like wildfire.

Failure! it screamed at me. You’re a failure!

‘What happened to your arm?’

It came out more like a demand than a question, and Mom flinched away from my tone. I immediately felt guilty—there was already one monster in her life, and I didn’t need to start acting like another. I took a deep breath and then a tiny step closer to her, holding up my hands as if I were approaching a cornered animal.

‘Sorry,’ I said quietly, mindful of said monster being in the next room. ‘But seriously, Mom. Let me see that.’

‘It’s nothing,’ Mom said quickly—her usual answer—as she moved another step away, not out of fear, but so I wouldn’t have a chance to examine her arm. ‘Just a little accident.’

‘Yeah?’ I snorted. ‘Did he cause this one with his feet or his fists?’

Mom was silent. Without her saying anything, all I could hear was the sound of my own angry breathing and the irritating chatter of sports reporters drifting in from the living room.

‘You should go for an x-ray,’ I tried instead. ‘It looks pretty bad, Mom. It might even be broken.’

Mom shook her head, but not before glancing wearily towards the living room—towards my father, the warden of her own personal hell.

Seeing that made me angrier still, and before I knew it I was marching into the living room to confront my father.

He didn’t look up as I entered, too busy reliving last night’s football highlights as if he hadn’t sat in that very seat and watched while the game aired live. His eyes were glazed as he stared at the screen, so even if there hadn’t been a tiny mountain of cans on the floor beside him it would have been obvious that he’d had one too many to drink already. One can was still trapped in his greasy grasp, sweating like it knew it too would soon end up in the aluminium mass-grave.

After several moments of growling ‘Dad!’ at him to no end, I realised that I was going to have to stand between the television and my father before he would acknowledge me, so I did just that. He turned his pissed off expression on me then.

‘Get out of my way, boy. You’re blocking the scores.’

Like I gave a shit. ‘You hit Mom. Again.’

‘Move, Zachary.’

‘She needs to go for an x-ray. You might have broken her arm.’

My father gave me a scathing look. ‘Move.’

‘Jesus fucking Christ, do you even give a shit?!’

Beer practically exploded from the can as my father pelted it at my head. The action had been so sudden that I barely had time to move out of the way, and half of the liquid ended up soaking my shirt as it sailed past. The can hit the wall above the television with a thud before settling on the floor, where the rest of the liquid seeped out into the carpet.

In the time that it took for this to happen, my father was already upon me.

I was on the floor in less than a second, taken too much by surprise to attempt to defend myself, and then he was laying into me.

Steel-capped boots landed several blows to my stomach before I was able to curl in on myself in defence, and then with a growl he was on me with his fists, hitting and punching and tearing at hair and clothing. Spittle flew from his mouth as he called me every name from ‘Fucking pansy!’ to ‘Ungrateful little bastard!’, and I squeezed my eyes shut at the onslaught.

In the background, the sports reporters switched the topic to baseball.

A fist to the shoulder. Another to the lower back. The next to the side. Again and again the blows fell, strong and sharp and full of drunken rage. A couple of times I tried to switch to offence, but my father was always ready with another fist—always to somewhere that the bruises wouldn’t show. Even drunk, the asshole knew how to hide what he was doing.

His beatings were ferocious, but it was a small mercy that they never lasted very long.

He was huffing and puffing by the time he finally pulled away. He stomped out of the living room without another word, no doubt heading to the kitchen for another beer and his dinner. I could already hear Mom working on it again.

I lay on the floor in a heap, my focus solely on breathing through the pain.

The first few times my father had laid into me, Mom had come running to try to stop him. I could still remember the panic in her eyes and the way that she waved her hands around frantically, scared that he was going to do more than just hurt me. It hadn’t worked, but I’d appreciated the effort all the same—especially since I’d sustained the beating after sticking up for her. It was like we were a team: I took the beatings so my mother didn’t have to, and she acted as my saviour and comforted me afterwards.

But somewhere along the line she’d given up on trying to stop him. I still made sure that he took out the majority of his anger on me instead of her, but she spent most of her time pretending that it wasn’t happening. I knew without a doubt that if I walked into the kitchen now, she’d only have a smile for me.

No comforting hug. No offer of pain killers. No thank you.

I’d spent all of two days resenting it for her once before deciding that I was done being her protector—but the moment my father went after her again, I knew I couldn’t let it happen. Even if it meant broken ribs and a mother pretending she had a perfect family, I would never let him lay a hand on her again.

Tonight had been the first slip-up in a long while. I was going to make sure it was the last.

Matt, Brian and Jimmy would have called me an idiot for picking fights with a man I clearly couldn’t beat. My father was more than a head taller than me, with muscular arms and legs that stood at great odds with his giant beer-belly, but I couldn’t not pick fights with him. If he didn’t take his anger out on me, he turned it on my mother instead, and I couldn’t have that. That was what they would never understand.

And that was why they could never know.