Chapter 15
Dotty
It was in the house in Galway, one evening that summer; it was an evening like any other. Dotty had raced downstairs when her mother called her from the front sitting room in a voice that bordered on an impatient scream.
‘Help your father, will you, there’s a good girl,’ she said distractedly.
‘He’s in the kitchen, sorting out that leaking pipe at last.’ Her mother was hanging wallpaper.
All day long she’d been in there, with lengths of paper and paste and climbing up and down on kitchen chairs and then wiping the sheets into place.
Now, she was red-faced, exhausted probably.
It was her first time doing it and, even though she refused to give in, Dotty knew matching up the intricate pattern was driving her mother to the edge of reason.
Earlier in the day, Dotty had been drafted in to help, but quickly her mother had run out of patience and sent her outside, claiming she was only getting under her feet.
‘Come along, Dotty,’ her dad called from beyond the kitchen door.
‘Best leave your mother to it.’ He was wearing an old pullover, so it seemed he too had been enlisted in this vicious midsummer clean that had grown into an overhaul of the downstairs of their house.
‘I’m fixing that leaking pipe your mother has been going on about for the last few days,’ he said, although he hardly needed to tell her, because the contents of the cupboard beneath the sink lay emptied out onto the kitchen floor.
‘Will you go find me a spanner?’ He nodded towards the door beneath the stairs where her mother kept everything they hardly ever used.
Dotty pushed in the door. She hated this cupboard; it was dark here and smelled of the remains of last winter’s turf bags, which everyone knew were full of earwigs and beetles.
Gingerly, she began to feel along the shelves for something that might be a spanner.
Her fingers traced lightly across each shelf before her, her eyes scrunched up, her breath held, trying not to think about spiders and creepy-crawlies.
‘Dotty, are you coming?’ he called again. ‘I need that spanner now if I ever want to get this job done for your mother.’
She felt beads of sweat race from her palms. She loved her father, she really did, but sometimes she couldn’t push aside the feeling that something was amiss. She’d never felt the back of his hand in punishment, but with his eyes he could undo her in an instant.
‘I’m trying to find it,’ she called back.
‘Oh, for goodness’ sake,’ he said and she heard him struggling out from beneath the sink.
Next she knew, he was squeezing beside her in the tiny cupboard.
Her mother was oblivious to the search for a spanner, completely caught up in matching up the gauzy flower design of the wallpaper across the hall.
‘Isn’t this a tight squeeze?’ Her father’s whisper sounded strange, as if it came from a variation of himself Dotty did not recognise.
Suddenly, Dotty felt herself shoved into the back of the cupboard, as her father behind her pulled the door closed quietly but firmly.
Fear and panic gripped her, it was as black as if her eyes were tightly shut.
She opened them wide, but there was only a sliver of light from beneath the door.
More than that, she sensed a danger in the darkness.
Her father pushed up against her, hard and sweating; Dotty thought she would be sick and then he whispered in her ear, ‘shh, it’ll only take a minute.
’ He was groping at her dress, fumbling with his own clothes.
She was gasping for breath, the air so stale that it was suffocating, she couldn’t breathe.
She tried to scream but found her voice stuck at the back of her throat, panicking she stamped her foot on his, heard him gasp and felt him crumple away from her.
In a flash, she slipped out around him, rushing to her mother in the sitting room.
The devil himself could not have persuaded her to go back into that hallway again until she heard him take his coat from the rack and shout in through the door that he’d finish the damn pipe another day , he was going to the pub.