Singled Out by Simon Brett Page B

proceedings. As is usually the case when the priest has never met the occupant of the coffin, he restricted his remarks to impersonal platitudes. He emphasized the vague heavenly rewards ahead and concentrated on the generalized good qualities of the deceased. In the second part of this mission, he was more circumscribed than many clergymen in similar situations. What can you say good about a man who abused both his children and was imprisoned for strangling his wife?

Seven
    His hands were hard and she could feel the hairs on their knuckles as they reached for the elastic of her school knickers and pulled them down. She knew the hopelessness of resistance, but still the repulsion engendered by his flesh, by the object that poked through a frill of Aertex from his unbuttoned tweed trousers, was so strong that her body recoiled and her fists rose instinctively to fight him off.
    â€˜Don’t you hit me!’ her father’s voice hissed. ‘I’ll kill you if you hit me! And I’ll kill you if you ever tell anyone about this!’
    She froze as he lifted and deposited her without gentleness on to the sofa. Again she felt the tickle of knuckle hairs as he flipped the pleats of her navy school skirt above her waist. Then the hands took firm hold of her upper thighs. She tried as always to detach herself, move the real Laura Fisher away to stand aside and look down dispassionately on what was happening to the other, anonymous Laura Fisher on the sofa.
    As he brought his groin towards hers, there was a commotion – the door opening, the dull thud of her father being hit over the head with something. A muffled curse as he turned in fury to face Kent.
    The boy in short-trousered school uniform stood his ground while the blows rained into him. Not into his face, nowhere that the marks would show, but hard into the chest and abdomen. Nothing must be seen at school. Nothing must be allowed to make the boy’s mother embarrassed to be seen out with him. The façade of middle-class gentility must never be threatened.
    Kent let out no sound, but stumbled under the onslaught. Richard Fisher grabbed his son by the shoulders and swung him round like a rag doll. Laura just had time to scramble off the sofa before her brother was slammed face-down on to its cushions. She saw a bead of blood on his lip, and she knew it had not been caused by their father’s blows but by the boy’s own determination not to allow any cry to escape.
    â€˜You get out!’ Richard Fisher snarled at her. ‘I’ll deal with you later.’
    Laura did not need a second bidding. She made no attempt to defend Kent – that was not part of their relationship – but, snatching up her knickers, stumbled blindly out of the room. Though she knew the pain it would engender, she could not stop herself from lingering in the hall, the neat middle-class hall with its slightly convex oval mirror, its polished oak telephone-table and anodyne flowered curtains. From inside the sitting room she heard the familiar sounds, the rough accelerating grunts from her father and from Kent the muffled sighs as he bit into his lip to resist the pain.
    This was always the worst bit. The sound was more shocking than the sight. She stood frozen, incapable of escape. Her arms would not move to bring her hands up over her ears to shut out the appalling noises.
    A tremor ran through Laura’s body and she found herself sitting up in bed, nauseous and drenched in sweat. It was a long time since she had had the dream. Since the period of maximum reaction, in her late teens following her mother’s murder, it had come less and less frequently. Sometimes, in moments of erupting confidence, she even thought the dream had gone for good. And when, inevitably, it did recur, she was quicker at rationalizing it, more efficient at limiting its after-shock.
    She knew what had prompted the nightmare’s return. Though nearly a month past, her