Brothers & Sisters - Charlotte Wood [80]
‘Klara.’ My voice came out like a long, high sigh.
Dieter pressed his forearm on my throat and leaned down hard while he wrestled with my jeans with his other hand. I was choking. I punched him with my fists until he slapped my face so hard I thought my head would fly off my body. As I lay stunned with my cheek against the dirt floor, he rocked back onto his heels. He took hold of my jeans and wrenched them off, dragging my sandals along with them. Then he pulled open his own jeans. Now I screamed. His hand came down so fast to cover my mouth that only a peep escaped.
He was too strong for me. I tried to throw myself to the side, but with one hand still over my mouth he caught my wrists and pinned them to the ground above my head. He used his knees to prise apart my thighs and he pushed and pushed until something broke and he was inside me. The pain split me in two. His green face was inches away from mine, sweaty and grimacing. His teeth, still bared, were tipped with foamy saliva like a dog’s fangs.
As everything slowed down in my mind I rolled my eyes from side to side, trying to escape the face leering above me. When my eyes reached their lowest point of vision I saw Klara’s corduroy sneakers. I looked up. She stood, with her arms hanging at her side, watching. She was watching me, my face, and she stared and stared and I stared back, our eyes locked, expressionless, as Dieter pounded into me, grunting and panting. Finally he shrieked and let go of my mouth and my hands. He pushed himself off me, stood up and walked out of the shed, doing up his jeans. The shed door stayed open a crack and suddenly nothing was green anymore, just dull grey, back to dull grey.
Klara stood above me and held out her hand to help me up, but I turned my face away from her.
‘Go away,’ I whispered, the tears starting. Pain in my face, my throat, between my legs, my wrists. Moisture dribbling from inside me onto the dirt floor. I felt the cold on my bare thighs, the goosebumps rising, the hairs standing on end.
Klara moved slowly to the door of the shed. She hesitated there, her hand curled around the edge of the door.
‘Get out,’ I whispered. My throat seemed to have closed. Words could barely escape.
She waited a few seconds more. Then she pulled open the shed door and the light savaged my naked skin.
‘If you tell,’ Klara said in a scratchy voice like an old vinyl record, ‘he’ll kill me. You know he will.’ She pulled the door shut behind her.
Twenty years later that scratchy voice spoke behind me.
‘There are seats at that table.’
A slim hand beside me pointed to a bench seat at my table which was littered with chip packets and a dozen glasses—half-empty, ringed with dried foam, lipsticked and smeared with greasy fingerprints— from the crowd that had headed out to the beer garden. The funeral was over. Everyone had moved on to the informal wake at the pub where the drinking and shouting was getting harder and louder.
‘Natalie?’ the voice said into my ear. Her fingers touched my wrist, light as fairy dust, and twenty years vanished. I was flung back to the days of Klara, the hot sunshine and tickly grass, our special jokes and the purse full of lucky white stones we collected from each corner of the playground, chanting as we went.
When I turned I half expected to see the old Klara, her earnest eyes gazing into mine, reedy brown hair wound into the tight plaits that boys at school felt compelled