A violent marriage can last for many years without it being noticed by anyone other than the victims involved.  This is the story of one of those violent marriages that ended fatally.

.When all was quiet she slowly opened the kitchen door ajar and saw that Ben was snoring on the bed with all his clothes and shoes still on, filling the whole room with the stench of wine. She passed him quietly and went to the child’s room, still shaking with fear. Tommy was sitting up in bed, wide-eyed and stupefied.

‘What’s the matter with dad, mum?’ Why was he shouting?’ She crept into bed with her young son and held him tight, wiping her face so he would not notice her cry.
‘Hush now, never mind, it’s OK, go back to sleep.’
‘He never helped me fix the old bike he bought for me you know. I asked him two weeks ago and he promised. But every time I asked him again he said he was busy painting.’ Tommy whispered, looking down.

‘I know darling; your father hasn’t quite been himself lately.  He is worried because he can’t sell his work and because we don’t earn enough to pay the rent.  You’ll have to be patient with him.’  Come to think of it, she reflected, Ben had not been involved with his son the way he used to. They had a big book with all of Rudyard Kipling’s stories that he used to read to him every evening at bedtime.  He used to sit Tommy on his lap and be very good at enacting the characters Mowgli and Bagira but all that had stopped now.  In fact, now that she thought about it a bit more, Anna could not recall Ben taking Tommy on his lap since they moved to this attic.  Her head was aching.  With these sad thoughts on her mind she fell asleep, her head leaning against her son’s forehead, her eyes puffed up from crying.

The next morning Anna could hardly walk to the metro station because her knee had knocked against the radiator when he had pushed her across the room. She had looked at her knee when she woke up from the pain this morning. It was all the colours of the rainbow and swollen. The previous night had been the beginning of six more months of wife battering nearly every time Ben got drunk. Anna endured the violent scenes. When she was alone, which was most evenings, she sometimes wrote poetry to release some of her concern and anxiety. She usually threw the poems away, not wanting anyone to know her deep shame.

When Ben wasn’t drunk

On the rare occasions when he did not wake up with a hangover, he sometimes talked about the subject. He had many excuses; one of them was that he blamed himself for the loss of their first child Mary-Anne. Plus not being able to sell any of his paintings. All that had changed him from being a brave war hero to a weak drunk who had lost all self-respect.

That's what made him so angry. He said that when he was drunk he was unable to control his anger and took it out on the nearest person, his beloved wife. He didn’t mean to do it, he said, he hated himself for hurting her and every time it happened he apologised the next day and promised never, ever to do it again. But he continued to beat her up, not quite so often anymore but still sporadically, when he was feeling particularly low. Anna knew how to escape the worst of it now. Whenever she felt an attack of violence coming on, she would lock herself in the kitchen and wait until she could hear him snoring.

In his sober moments Ben was charming and kind. He was dreaming of a better life and promised Anna that he would soon sell his paintings and he still maintained he loved her more now than ever. She believed him, kept giving him another chance because she thought she understood how he felt and because she loved him. From an outsider’s perspective their “love” was not love at all. Ben felt inadequate and dependent on Anna the pig-headed optimist who kept hoping that the situation would ameliorate. Until one night, the bubble, or rather Ben’s wrist artery burst.

As always when the bottle had taken control of her husband, Anna was hiding on the floor in her usual corner in the locked kitchen, shaking with fear. But this time Ben did not quieten down in his usual way. His frantic shouting became louder and louder. She could hear him hitting the walls, slamming objects off the shelves. He banged on the door shouting her name in the loudest scream of despair she had ever heard:

‘ANNAA!’ And at that moment he slammed his fist with full force through the glass panel of the kitchen door. Glass shattered everywhere and then at last the shouting stopped. Anna could not see him through the hole in the broken glass.

‘Excuse me, I’m so sorry to disturb you so late, but my husband has had an accident,’ she panted, ‘Could I please use your telephone, it’s an emergency.’ Mme Goddard let her into the floor-polished room and, without saying a word she handed over the phone, bending from the hips like she didn’t want to get too close in case she might get contaminated with disaster. Anna dialled for a taxi and ran back up the four flights to fetch Ben who was dazed, drunk and looking very pale now. The tea towels were drenched in blood dripping into an increasingly large puddle on the bare floor boards, half a meter in diameter by now.

Tommy, who had woken up from the racket, poked his head out of the children’s room, squinting with sleep.
‘What’s going on? What’s all the noise, mum?’
‘It’s nothing darling, the glass broke and dad hurt his arm. Go back to bed and don’t touch anything. There is broken glass everywhere.’ Anna made sure she stood between Tommy and Ben so that he would not see the blood-drenched tea towel and the puddle of blood on the floor. She guided Tommy back to his bed and kissed him.
‘Don’t worry, dad just needs to be bandaged. We’ll be back soon. Go back to sleep. Night night, don’t let the bedbugs bite.’

She closed the bedroom door and returned to Ben who did not say a word. He stumbled down the stairs leaning on his wife. As they left the house Anna could see Mme Goddard peeping through her semi drawn lace curtains. Anna opened the taxi door and pushed her husband inside shouting:
‘Get us to the hospital, hurry!’ The driver looked back at them, seeing all the blood and shouted,
‘Vous n’allez pas m’ salir ma bagnole, hein? (You better not mess up my car!)’ Ben had lost consciousness by now. Anna had other worries than getting upset by the driver’s uncompassionate attitude. She said nothing back. Holding Ben’s head to stop it wobble from side to side, she only wished he driver would hurry.

I want to thank all of you who voted for this story and helped towards making it a HubNugget.

Sue