Her red hands

The routine was the same every night. He collected them from school, drove them home, prepared their supper as they changed, and then he and the girls sat down to eat at the big wooden table. He’d quiz them about their day, revelling in their learning and their achievements. And afterwards, the girls would sit around the table to do their homework, diligently, before their goodnight kisses.

“Would you pass me the salad bowl, please, Kaitlyn?” His second-eldest had been strangely quiet this evening, he thought. Had kept them waiting at the school gates, too: most unlike her. He took the dish from her, happening to glance down at her hands. Worried: “They look sore. Are you OK?” Red, slightly swollen: some strange inflammation – a bite, an allergy perhaps?

Silence, all-enveloping. Her sisters, round the dinner table, knew, of course: willed her to be brave. Knew too that she couldn’t, wouldn’t lie: “I got the cane after school, Daddy.”

The tears wouldn’t stop: she absorbed his next words through her sobs. She’d rehearsed them so often, over and over in her mind, that she didn’t need to hear them clearly to know what he was saying. She would go to her room immediately after dinner, and they’d deal with it then. (He’d deal with it, she’d cope with it. Or not cope, as the case might be).

Heather threw her a sympathetic glance, her older sister the only one of the girls to know first-hand how Daddy saw through his promise, his threat. Yet her private correction last year had been all too publicly audible to the others, trembling downstairs.

And after Kaitlyn had struggled to clear her plate (for they always cleared their plates), his “Five minutes, your room” started the countdown. The countdown to his, “I’ve always told you that I would thrash you at home if you ever had to be thrashed at school.” The countdown to his question as to what she’d done, and her shameful confession of having copied Jodie’s woefully-incorrect answers in the French vocab test. The countdown to his expression of astonished disappointment in his girl.

The countdown to the stark instruction to take down her jeans and her knickers. The countdown to the wooden foot of the bed cold against her thighs and midrift as she bent over in the position he’d told her to assume. The countdown to the sound of his thick belt unbuckling, and to the first stroke of her whipping falling with an intensity that her imaginings could never have imagined.

And then the count up, lash by relentless lash, until he was satisfied that his writhing girl would never, ever let him, herself down again. And then the cuddle, all-embracing, wrapping her protectively in an embrace as loving as could be, before the warmth of her duvet and the night-night kiss and the premature darkness and the lonely, lonely tears.