The White Room by Martyn Waites

something in there. She drew out her father’s hip flask. She shook it: liquid sloshed inside. She opened it, lifted a shaking hand to her mouth and drank. It burned.
    She stared down at the Tyne, looked to the future.
    And let the tears fall.
    â€˜Aw, no. I’ve pissed mesell …’
    Monica looked at the bare boards. Wetness blossomed from her body, spreading wide, soaking into the wood. The backs of her legs, the base of her spine were wet.
    She began to panic. This wasn’t urine. It didn’t smell right. It was another rebellion by her body, another piece of ignorance about the way she worked.
    She wished Brian was there.
    Another spasm.
    Followed by an urge to push, to confront the pain, the terrible strangeness of her body, and face it down. The urge was overwhelming. She couldn’t fight it.
    She gasped, grimaced.
    And pushed.
    Brian wasn’t the first. But she wished he had been.
    There were all the men in all the rooms, curtains drawn, smelling of enforced loneliness and unhealthy obsession. Her father’s friends and acquaintances. They had used her, hurt her, scared her. Sometimes they had been kind to her afterwards, sometimes cruel. Most times they would just turn away from her, turn inside themselves. Ignore her. In time she had come to accept it.
    Her mother never asked where she had been. Not once. Monica would always go up to the room she shared with her brother and hope he wouldn’t be there, hope she could be alone.
    At night the dreams came. Her daytime experiences relived through a subconscious, nightmarish filter. The men from the rooms would be in hers. Repeating their terrible acts. Starting on her again. She would wake, sometimes screaming. Sometimes her father would be there. Sometimes she would be alone. Never would there be any comfort.
    This stopped when hair and breasts began to appear. Then her father and his friends didn’t want to know her. The rejection was so sudden and so harsh she was wounded by it. She didn’t know what to do. She blamed herself. She felt undesirable, unattractive. She felt spurned.
    She started going out. Hanging around pubs, getting men and some of the older boys to buy her drinks. In return she let them touch or even have her if they were nice enough.
    In back alleys, in other men’s houses while their wives were out. Down by the Tyne, at the backs of the factories. They took her everywhere. She would urge them to push into her hard, to make her feel it, and they would oblige. But the harder they pushed, the deeper they went, they never touched her inside. She would hold on to them, push herself against them, feel their rubber-sheathed thrusts, but it never happened. It never went deep enough.
    Sex but not love.
    In deep, but feeling nothing.
    Until she met Brian.
    He felt like the first.
    He talked to her, wooed her even. Looked at her in a different way from the others. Like he really knew her, what it felt like to be her.
    Love. That’s what it felt like to her. She told him often that she loved him. He just smiled. She expected that. Men weren’t good about saying those sort of things, she knew.
    He took her out, bought her presents. Told her she was special, different. She responded, fell for everything he said.
    After she had moved in with him and had the memory of her father’s displeasure happily lodged in her mind, things began to change.
    The presents stopped coming. The compliments stopped being given. Things began to be expected of her. Duties had to be performed.
    Brian shared a house in Fenham with two others, both like him. She didn’t know what the three of them got up to when they went out, how they made their money, what arrangement they had with the landlord about living there. She didn’t care. As long as he came back to her. As long as he gave her money, kept her. That was the important thing. She was also expected to cook, clean and look after the three of them. She had her