Tank, page 19
“We can’t go back, honey.”
“But it’s Banjo. Grandma gave him to me.”
“It’s not safe for us to go back in the house,” my mother snaps, and then she gives me another of those smiles that aren’t really happy. “I’ll buy you a new Banjo.”
I wail loudly. I don’t wanna leave my teddy behind. Mummy glances back at the house. She’s fretting the way Grandma does when I put my sticky hands on her white couches. Mummy turns and points at me. “You stay here. Do not move. Okay? I’m going to get Banjo and then we’re going to leave.”
“Okay,” I squeak through my tears.
Only she doesn’t come back to the car. And we don’t go on our secret big girl mission. I get scared of being all alone, and I think maybe Mummy needs help finding Banjo. He’s under my covers, right at the very end of my bed tucked between my sheets. I put him there because he doesn’t like thunder, and he doesn’t like it when my mummy and daddy fight, and I couldn’t cover his ears all night because I’d needed to sleep.
I wish I’d stayed asleep.
I jolt awake. I blink my eyes several times and lie quietly on the bed, wondering what woke me.
“Ivy. Babe, wake up.”
Tank.
“Oh my God, you’re alive.” I shoot up from the bed and walk as far as the rope will let me. It’s not far enough; in fact, we’re about a metre away from one another, maybe a little less if he could stretch out his legs.
Tank nods gravely. His eyes are glazed and unfocused, and he wrestles with his cuffed hand, testing the strength of the restraints.
“I’m so sorry. I’m so damn sorry,” I say, and I close my eyes against the fresh onslaught of tears.
“Babe, it’s okay. I’m gonna get us out of here.”
“How did he find you?” I ask. “How are you here?”
“Crazy and I were out on a job. I came back to the van, expecting to find that dumb motherfucker, but he was nowhere in sight. I was just about to get out and go find the little shit when your dad struck me in the neck with some kinda tranq.”
“I’m so sorry. I should have told you this would happen,” I say, and I sink to the floor and curl into a foetal position—or as much of a foetal position as I can muster with my leg tied to a bed. “I thought he’d given up. I thought if he found me he’d just take me, and be done with it. I didn’t … This is my fault, Tank. You’re here because of—”
“Ivy, look at me,” he says. I do. The corner of his lip is swelling where my father nicked it, and there’s a laceration over his cheekbone. He looks pallid and exhausted, but he still manages to smile and reassure me with his gaze. “If you’re here, I’m here.”
“You shouldn’t be. I don’t deserve you. I don’t—”
“Well,” he says, shrugging his huge shoulders. “You could stand to put out more.” He grins, and despite the fear and the pain, a choked laugh escapes me. “Now, where the hell is here?”
“Home. We’re home.”
He looks around, and his expression is one of disgust as he shakes his head. “This isn’t your home.”
“This is where I grew up,” I say.
“Doesn’t mean it’s your home, babe. This is a prison cell, and you’ve spent far too long in it.” For a moment the fierce determination in his eyes gives me hope. “How many men he got workin’ for him?”
I shake my head. “None.”
Tank frowns. “What do you mean, none? He doesn’t have thugs, an entourage?”
“He never needed one, Tank,” I say, and I close my eyes, letting out a deep breath. “Just a needle and the promise of another fix.”
“Motherfucker,” he says under his breath, and at first I think he’s referring to what I just said, and then I follow his gaze.
I’m completely naked, which is preferable to having fabric covering the welts on my arse right now, but I still feel over-exposed with Tank here, not because he hasn’t seen me naked already, but because he’s never seen me wear my father’s marks so blatantly. The scar above my abdomen had been there since I was seventeen, but I’d covered it with a tattoo the first chance I got, and though the skin was still raised with scar tissue, the artist who had done it had a skilful hand and a clever eye for cover-ups. This is the first time Tank is seeing what it really says. I stand, and walk back to the bed. I don’t want to be away from him, but I can’t bear for him to look at me just now.
“What the fuck did he do to you?” His gaze promises violence and revenge, and his voice tremors with it. I sit on the bed and I wince, because the welts on my arse remind me why that’s a bad idea.
“Jesus fucking Christ,” he murmurs. “I’ll string him up by his fucking intestines for this. I’m gonna gut him like a goddamn fish and choke him with his insides.”
“I’m alright.” I stand and look at him across the room, feeling small. Feeling helpless. And while that’s not new for me, I find tears of frustration welling in my eyes. I bat them away with the back of my hand.
“Havin’ your pussy carved up and your arse spanked raw is alright?”
“I’ve been through a lot worse,” I whisper.
Tank’s jaw tightens I can practically hear his teeth grinding together. I wrap the sheet around me and his hard gaze softens with remorse. “I’m so fuckin’ sorry, babe. I never should have left you alone. I wasn’t here to protect you when he did that.” He tilts his chin towards me. “I wasn’t … He didn’t bring me here first; not to this room, anyway. I think I was upstairs though. He’d tied me to a bed and hit me a couple times with some kinda fuckin’ tranquilizer. I think he was afraid I’d break it, because even after he shot me up, I’d thrashed like a motherfucker. And then he punched me in the face and gave that tranq a helpin’ hand. I don’t remember jack shit after that. Only that I woke up here.”
“We’re never going to get out of here, are we?”
“You got out before, didn’t ya?”
“Yeah, because he was high as a kite, and he got careless. He left his pocket knife on the nightstand and I buried it in his face.”
This brings a smile to Tank’s face. It’s a slow twitching of lips that becomes an all-out grin. He’s so perverted.
I smile too, but the sound of the floorboard creaking above our heads makes the smiles vanish from both of our faces. The footsteps are on the stairs now, each one heavy and deliberate. Each one designed to strike fear into our hearts. And it works, at least for me. I glance at Tank and swallow hard.
The words are on the tip of my tongue when the locks slide back and the door slowly opens, and then they’re swallowed by dread, pushed down my throat to settle in my stomach because I can’t say those words here. The walls, the bed, the concrete floor that’s seen too many bloodstains, and my father—they don’t deserve to hear something so pure. No. This room, these walls, this floor and this bed, they’re for overhearing screams, and my father is the conductor, wielding my fear as his baton.
He enters the room and glares at the two of us. His hands are behind his back, and I can’t tell if he’s holding something in them or not, but it makes me nervous. He smiles at me, and his gaze settles on Tank. “You’re finally awake.”
Tank says nothing, just meets my father’s gaze evenly. He doesn’t flinch under the weight of that terrible green stare, not the way I would. The corners of my father’s lips twitch, and then he stalks over to me and yanks me up by the arm. I lash out at him, but his eyes meet mine and in them is the promise of pain, not for me, but for Tank, and I go lax and stop fighting.
“There’s Daddy’s girl.” He tucks a strand of limp hair behind my ear and turns my arm over so that my palm is facing skyward. I yank it back, already knowing what he’s about to do.
“No,” I say. “No, don’t.”
I can’t do this. Not in front of Tank.
I’d been wondering how long it would be before he did this again. I’d craved it. Before he brought in Tank, wanting to die had been all I’d thought about, and now the promise of heroin in my veins overrides that desire. My body cries out for it. I want it, badly, but don’t want it here, not in front of Tank, where I might see his disappointment etched so plainly on his strong features.
“Please?” I beg of my father and he smirks.
“Once upon a time you used to beg me to pump this into your veins,” he says. The sound of Tank’s handcuffs chinking against the iron pipe draws both of our gazes.
“Touch one hair on her head and I’m going to tear you apart with my bare hands,” Tank warns.
My father chuckles. “You’d have to get out of those cuffs first, and I don’t see that happening.”
He pulls a rubber cord from his back pocket and ties it tightly above the crease in my elbow along with a syringe that he pulls the cap off of with his teeth and spits out on the ground. And then he sticks the needle in my vein.
“No!” Tank roars, yanking at his bound hands, trying to wrench them free, but he’s not moving anywhere. He’s not going anywhere. None of us are.
The sweet rush of tar pumps through my veins and I exhale my worries, leaning back into the support of my father’s arms. I close my eyes, and when I open them again, Tank’s gaze is livid and locked on mine. He doesn’t understand why I didn’t struggle. I can see it written all over his face, the question.
Why didn’t you fight?
The answer is simple: him.
I tiptoe through the house, looking for Mummy. I hear Daddy’s voice from the basement downstairs, and I cover my mouth with my hand so I don’t squeak in fear like I want to.
Banjo wasn’t in the basement, so why was my mummy looking down here?
“You think you can take her from me, huh, bitch? Think you can take my little girl?” he shouts.
“Your little girl?” Mummy says, and she’s using her angry voice now. “Let me tell you something about your little girl. You brutalised her. And I’ll do whatever it takes to get her away from you.”
“You won’t be going anywhere ever again, neither of you will. No one loves her more than I do. No one ever will.”
“You’ll burn in hell for the things you’ve done to her.”
“I haven’t done anything but give her love,” he says. I quietly creep down the stairs to hear them better, careful not to be seen as I flatten myself against the wall and peek around the door. Mummy is on her knees on the floor, holding Banjo to her chest as Daddy circles her like a shark. He’s carrying the axe we use to chop wood, and I watch the way the sharp silver blade swings as he walks. “It’s not sick, or unnatural; it’s just love.”
“I’ll be dead before I let you touch my daughter again.”
“Yes, you will,” he says, and he raises the axe in his hand and swings. My mother makes a single keening cry before the sound is cut short by a sickening thud, and her head rolls along the ground towards me as her body slumps forward in a heap.
The screams echo in my head. My screams. Daddy drops the axe. It’s no longer shiny silver, but is painted red, with little gobs of stuff that looks like minced meat. He staggers towards me, his face spattered with her blood, a mask of death. I take a step back, but before I can turn and run, he’s bundling me up in his arms and carrying me out of the room as I stare back at my mother’s head and the blood that oozes across the garage floor towards us.
I’m still screaming as my father puts me to bed and tucks me in. I’m still wearing my blood-stained clothes. He whispers over and over that he’ll never let anyone try to take me from him again, and that we’ll always be together. No matter what. He’ll always find me and bring me home.
And he always did.
I tug at the cuffs binding my hands together. There are a few ways out of this. One, by some miracle Ivy gets her restraints undone, finds a pin, a paperclip, or a fuckin’ bobby pin and I talk her through sliding it into the keyhole of my cuffs and jamming the shiv. Two, she breaks my thumbs. Not ideal, and it’d certainly make taking that fucker down more difficult than it should be, but it’s not entirely impossible—though I would like to avoid it. Three, the fucktard grows a conscious and lets us walk free. Or four, I wind up with a knife in my skull and Ivy’s stuck down here forever.
Also not ideal.
Prez thinks I’m out on a job. If I don’t report back soon, he’ll know something is up, and if he finds Ivy gone he’ll know where to find us, but all this is a really big fuckin’ maybe. The van would have been reported already. The plates are fake, and we’re always careful not to keep anything in there that might lead the Feds to us, but I hadn’t planned on getting abducted and leaving it parked on some rich cunt’s front lawn. Which means if the Russians didn’t already capture that dickhead, Ivan fuckin’ Milat here shanked Crazy in that driveway, and we left evidence behind. They lift a clear print from the steering wheel and I’m goin’ to prison for murder, forced entry and druggin’ an elderly woman and her maid. They’ll likely throw in attempted theft or some shit too, just because I’m bikey scum.
I guess I’ll worry about that shit when and if I get outta here. Prison would be a fuckin’ vacation when compared to being in this room and watching that fuck shoot her up right in front of me. He didn’t even fuckin’ do anythin’ once she was high as a kite, just laid her back on the bed, grinned at me like a cunt who knows he has the upper hand, and left the room. It was a small fuckin’ mercy, but I know he’s biding his time. He’s toyin’ with us, waitin’ for the right moment. And I feel it comin’.
He thinks he’s safe because I’m locked up, and now she’s hopped up on junk. That motherfucker isn’t safe. Right now, he’s lucky. That’s all. But Lady Luck is a bitch and has a way of turning all your best-laid plans into a pile of shit at your feet. Before long, that’s all he’ll be. Shit and guts and blood underneath my boots, and I’ll fucking dance in it. I’ll revel and rejoice and wear his innards like a crown.
I clench my fists. My fingers itch to claw my way into the softest part of him and squeeze until he explodes in a rain of death and blood, until he feels the weight of the pain he caused her over the years, the weight of the grief and the result of what she’s become.
“Tank,” she murmurs in her sleep, and I watch on as she twitches and lashes out at some unseen demon.
“I’m here, Princess,” I whisper back. Ivy jolts awake. Her eyes blink sleepily at me and then they open wider, as if she’s afraid closing them will drag her under again.
“You’re okay.” She gasps, and then covers her mouth because it was far too loud. I can see the soundproofing foam on the walls, but it hasn’t worked, not entirely. I can still hear the sick fuck when he walks around upstairs, and the muted noise of the TV, but best of all I hear it when he leaves.
“I think he’s out. I heard the front door.”
She sags against the mattress with a sharp exhalation and scrubs her hands over her face. “Babe, listen. I’m gonna need you to find something to help me out of these cuffs.”
She just shakes her head and then her tears start, and these great howling sobs echo through the room. She sounds like hell; her voice is croaky from crying and screaming and the drugs he syphoned through her system. She’s likely dehydrated too, and the wound on her abdomen is seeping plasma from its scabs. It’s infected. If the puss and the angry red swelling around it didn’t tell me that, her fever-flushed cheeks and glassy eyes do.
“Ivy, I’m gonna get us out of here, but I need your help.”
Her sobs turn to tremors, and they frighten me more than her infected abdomen. One hit. That’s all it took to undo all of the progress she’s made. It might not be cocaine, but heroin is so much worse, and so much harder to kick. I’ve seen more people die from that shit than I’ve seen buried with bullets. Nothing’ll put you to ground quicker than a bad batch of BTH. And if you’re an addict, there’s no comin’ off that shit. You can fool yourself into thinking you can quit, but she’ll always be there, tempting you.
“Babe, listen to me. Can you stand?”
She draws in a deep breath and exhales slowly. Her whole body trembles as she rolls over and carefully manoeuvres around the rope that tethers her leg to the bed as though she were a dog tied up in the yard. She takes a few shaky steps towards me and almost collapses on her rail-thin legs. “Careful.”
She nods and takes another few steps, and then when she’s almost within touching distance she reaches the end of her tether, and I reach the end of mine. “Fuck,” I hiss, and her face crumples.
“I can’t do this, Tank.” She sinks down on the floor, curling into herself and staring at the wall beside me.
“Hey, we got this, Warrior Princess. You and me are gonna get outta here, and before you know it we’ll be knockin’ back beers on my front porch.” She shakes her head, and in all the years I’ve known her, through addiction and withdrawals, drying out, and hurting so much her body looks as though it wants to shut down, I’ve never seen her look so helpless. I’ve never seen her defeated, but that’s what she is in this moment—defeated. Because of him. The one person in the entire world who is supposed to build her up and love her unconditionally. He tears her apart piece by piece, and then he tapes her back together again, only to slash through the bandages and rent her soul to ribbons.
“I want to die. Why won’t he just kill me already?” she asks, and there’s no emotion in her voice. No light. No pain. It’s inhuman, and it’s heartbreaking. “Hasn’t he done enough?”
And when she looks at me, there’s nothing in her gaze either. I’ve never wanted to hurt someone so bad in all my life as I do right now.
“No one is fuckin’ dyin’ down here. You got me, babe? You don’t get to die down here. You’ll die happy in our bed when you’re fuckin’ ninety-eight, and I can’t breathe on my own any more. You’ll go peacefully in your sleep, holdin’ my goddamn hand, and I’ll follow you. But before any of that can happen we gotta get the hell out of here. I’m gonna need you to help me. You don’t want me to die down here, do you?”
She closes her eyes and shakes her head as saltwater tracks down her cheeks. “I need you to find me something to undo these cuffs with. I can’t help us, I can’t get us out of here without my hands free.”
