“You listen to me, bitch. I haven’t spent the last five days straightening out your arse to have you come and fuck it all up. I can’t watch you kill yourself, Ivy. So if that’s what you want, if sinkin’ a needle in your vein is more important to you than makin’ sure you see your fuckin’ twenty-second birthday, then you go right ahead, darlin’, but you do it somewhere far away from me. ’Cause I seen a lot of fucked up shit in my time, but I can’t see that.”

“I … I need it … to forget,” I whisper, and close my eyes against the fresh onslaught of tears. “I can’t breathe otherwise. I can’t—”

“Find another way,” he says, and his hand tilts my chin up towards him. Gently, he wipes my tears away with his thumb. “Talk to me. Use me as your fuckin’ punchin’ bag. Let me be your drug. Let me help you forget. I don’t care how you do it, but find another way because I can’t watch you die, Ivy. I seen too much of you nearly checkin’ out, and I can’t do it anymore.”

I nod, because even now with him begging, I can’t promise that I’ll never touch it again. I’ll try, but it wouldn’t be the first time I’ve tried to get clean—and if it doesn’t kill me first it won’t be the last. It’s not that I have a death wish, or that I even like what it does to me, it’s that I can’t be without it. I’m dependant. An addict. And no amount of detoxing can take that away. Maybe for someone else, but not for me. Because without it I’m just some poor little broken girl with daddy issues. With the coke, I’m powerful in ways I never have been before.

I’m invincible.

I’m the girl who can’t be hurt.

Because I don’t feel a thing.

The sounds of the party filter down through the floorboards to my room. As much as my father tried to soundproof this space, it didn’t really work. I still hear him treading the boards above my head, and the dreaded thud of his boots on the stairs like a warning, not that it does me much good. These days I don’t even bother to put up a fight. It’s just easier now and done with much quicker if I let him finish and wait until he’s left the room before I break down.

This isn’t a regular party. It’s just him and a handful of “friends”, likely other sick fucks he met online. I can’t imagine he’d let anyone else in. This isn’t the first time he’s had other men over. Once there was even a woman here, but she just watched and took pictures while the others raped and hurt and touched me as though they had a right to. Some nights, my father doesn’t come home until early morning. And when he stumbles in, reeking of gin and sex, I think that maybe these people do the vile things that he does, offering up their children to monsters who abuse and punish and revel in their sickness as if it were something to be revelled in. I hate those nights—not because I’m left alone, but because I think of others—girls and boys my age and younger—having to live through the things that I do, and I want to die. Or I want to die more than usual.

I long for death. I fantasise about it the way other girls my age dream of kissing boys and magical first times, and what they’ll be when they grow up, and who they’ll be married to. I don’t dream of those things.

I don’t have nightmares, or terrors so vivid and real that I wake drenched in sweat and cry out for the comfort of some parental figure who isn’t there. My life is the nightmare, and when I sleep, I escape. I’m free. I dream soundly of Lochie, the boy who used to live across the road. I dream of the days we used to play in his tree house. I dream of big, faceless men who kill my father and dance with me in the ashes of his bones. Or I dream of nothing at all.

Waking is when the horror sets in. When my body aches and my insides crawl with the sharp stab of knowledge at being invaded yet again, of being taken and made the plaything for a sick dog who spreads his vitriol and leaves behind the stench of his particular kind of death on everything his mangy muzzle touches. That’s when the hate sets in. It floods through me until I’m consumed with it, until it settles inside my belly like a cold and heavy stone. That’s when I long to peel the skin from my body, to slough it like a snake, to be nothing more than rotting meat and flesh and bone, so putrid that no one would ever want to touch me. No one would want to hurt.

When he leaves for work, I scream. Sometimes for hours, but no one ever comes.

Where are the faceless men of my dreams? The ones who slay beasts and dance in the ashes of the fallen? They’re not here. They’ll never come because they don’t exist. Maybe that’s the real nightmare—that I’ll always be down here in this room, alone, save for visits by monsters offering meals, and schoolwork, and wicked touches that punish and bruise.

Maybe this is all there is. Hell on earth. Suffering and pain, and sick twisted guilt that turns my stomach like a rotting carcass left in the sun. And if that’s the case, I have to wonder where God and the angels went. Because surely this makes my father the devil.

Even though those men have been here for close to an hour and my hands have been trembling the entire time, it’s not until I hear the footsteps on the stairs that I start to shake from head to toe. My door is open; it’s rare, but I wasn’t fool enough to question it. He came down two hours earlier and collected me for bath time, as if I were seven years old still and not seventeen, as if I needed him to preside over my washing.

He’d washed my hair and carefully combed through the tangles, and then he’d begun dressing me in a pale pink baby-doll style dress, and all the while he’d peppered my skin here and there with kisses that felt like the burn of a brand.

I knew what that meant. I’d ridden his sick merry-go-round enough times before to know that the snacks and the bottles of booze I saw on the scarred wooden coffee table weren’t for him or me—they were for them. And so was I. A warm, compliant—for the most part—little girl, all wrapped up in pink bows.

Now, I steel my courage, and open my eyes as I hear that last footfall on the bottom step. My father fills the doorway, his large silhouette so commanding. “You comin’, or are you gonna hide down here all night?”

I don’t answer, because I’d really rather hide here waiting for the rest of my life than walk those stairs, with my leaden feet falling, like a traitor walking to the gallows. If I thought there was any hope of escaping, I’d follow him up the stairs and I’d just keep walking right out the door. But as my steps land heavy on the last stair, all daydreams of running flee when my father turns to me and snakes his arm around my waist, leading me over to the couch.

All the usual faces are here. I don’t know their names; they never use any, and I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t remember them even if they did tell me, by the time they’re done with me. And who would I tell? I never have a chance to leave, and outside of the man who raised me, these animals are the only other beings I see.

The one with the greasy shoulder-length hair licks the edge of the cigarette paper he’s holding. There’s a creepy smile on his face as he does this, as though he’s imagining licking my skin. The other man, the one with the horn-rimmed glasses, heavy pant pleats and the just as carefully pressed shirt, scares me more than Greasy-Hair-Guy, though. His touch is so much worse, so much more reverent than the others, and more frightening still is that he never says a word.

My father’s voice, chilling and devoid of feeling, breaks the silence. “We have a present for you, Ivy.”

I don’t want it. Take it back and let me go to my room.

Of course he doesn’t. He just tilts his head to the other man. The one I try not to look at, because if the other three men in this room are animals then this guy is the very worst of them. Built like a bear, with tanned pockmarked skin—as if he works outside and suffers adult acne—shorn hair, and the most horrifying soulless black eyes I’ve ever seen.