Samantha Waesenbach lay a tankard of water beside Boen’s bed. He stared at the ceiling, his left eye lifeless and red.
‘Here you are, darling,’ she said quietly. Boen remained silent. ‘It’s a nice day out, seems as though the summer’s trying to hold on for a few more weeks.’ She spoke as though he was fully reciprocating the conversation, though apart from his tensing when she had entered the room, it seemed as though he hardly noticed she were there.
It had been the same every day since his father had pushed him to the floor and kicked him to unconsciousness.
He had woken with pain searing through him, dew and blood on his face, his ribs and cheek fractured, and a fierce burning in his left eye. His father had left in the boat that he and Eryn had stolen; ordered away by Semilion while his mother and sister fussed over him and dabbed him with ointments and pastes.
Boen had screamed to be left alone, his former drunkenness having all but escaped him, and he was hauled up to the bedroom where someone sedated him before leaving him to hug himself to sleep. He woke again on a different day, the sun on the wall denoting it were morning, and he found himself swathed in bandages and braced with splints. There was nothing to do but dwell on imaginings whilst his bones healed and his hatred subsided.
He spent the long days imagining Eryn sitting beside him, comforting him and her ghostly impression simply being there to pass the time in silence. He conversed with her about their night on Lundy and the stupidity of it, at one point they laughed so hard that he had tears in his eyes and his ribs jarred, reminding him that he was injured. He lay motionless after that, his tears changing to that of frustration.
His sister, Arabella, was the only person he would speak to. She came in the afternoons with a thick soup and pleaded with him to not take out his anger on their mother.
‘She don’t know what to do about him. You know he’s always been like it and Semilion don’t see any wrong in it.’
‘She let him do it,’ Boen said bluntly, though he knew that if he hadn’t received the blows, or if his mother had tried to pull Guliven away, then she would have absorbed them instead.
Everyone was so weak, he considered. His father for succumbing to drink and anger, his mother for cowering in the face of his temper, even himself for allowing it to happen. He found the imaginary Eryn cooing that he had been taken unawares, that his father had crept up on him from behind and pushed him to the floor before he had a chance to react, but he knew in his heart that the result would have been the same however much notice he’d have received. It would simply have been more humiliating to have cowered from him and be punished for being a wimp and a jellyfish, as his father so often liked to call him. The incidents had happened for as long as he could remember. His first memory, although he never knew the cause of the happening, was of his mother crying in another room, her repressed moans turning to screams. He hadn’t seen either of them, but knew without doubt - for all the times it had happened in the intervening years, that his father must have been drinking heavily and taken any or all of his myriad frustrations out upon her.
It had become a way of life in the household, and though it felt as though it had culminated in his being bedridden, blinded in one eye and riddled with fractured bones, his month of constant thought lit an understanding that his life was a long way from culminating in anything. He had an opportunity to change things. He wouldn’t allow himself to look back on his life in decades to come and see nothing but a string of abuse and maltreatment. A torrent had been released in his mind. Like a seed pressed by a rock, the beginning had been tough, but now he had grasped a view of light and was focused on nothing but reaching for it. He considered he should be thanking his father for blinding him. He had never seen more clearly.