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Leslie was the first person to visit and she kept on coming. She worked her shifts at the shelter around visit times, bringing magazines and nice food and spending time with her. But even Leslie couldn’t stop the dreams or the fear or the panicked terror or the screaming at night. Winnie came to visit, sobbing loudly, drunk and drunker, attracting pitying glances from the patients. Una came to visit and brought Alistair. They smiled nervously and left quickly. Marie, their oldest sister, couldn’t make it up from London. Busy time at the bank.
    Maureen had been in hospital for weeks when Alistair came to visit alone. He betrayed his promise to Una and told the doctors that this had happened before. Maureen was ten when the family found her locked in the cupboard under the stairs. Winnie jimmied it open and pulled her out by her leg as Marie and Una stood by. Maureen had a long bruise on the side of her face and when they gave her a bath they found dried blood between her legs. No one knew what had happened but Michael left Glasgow for good, taking the checkbook, and never contacted them again. Winnie didn’t have to tell them it was a secret: the children knew instinctively. No one had mentioned it again until Una took Alistair into her confidence and he took it upon himself to tell Maureen’s doctors.
    It made sense of everything — Maureen’s horror of people stealing into her room when she was sleeping, of the smell of drink in a certain light, of the dreams of prying fingers and hush and fumble in the dark. He had panicked when he saw the blood. She remembered the fist on the side of her head, the blankets of white behind her eyes, being lifted and locked in and left alone with the smell of blood, hoping she would die before he got back. When the fresh horror of the hospital and the breakdown subsided, what hurt her most was that in her memory Michael hadn’t been responding to an uncontrollable urge. The abuse was half-hearted, as if he was just having a go, just road testing a fresh form of dissipation.
    Since the day Alistair came to see the doctors in hospital Maureen had always believed that Michael had made her bleed by ripping her inside with a ragged fingernail. It wasn’t until later, much later, when she attacked Angus and he had shouted it at her, that she considered the other possibility. Angus said that Michael had raped her. The dreams and the signs all pointed to it, and in her heart she knew it might be true. It shouldn’t matter, she told herself — it hurt and she bled and that was all. She was a child, and children don’t perceive sex as centering on penetration. Priests and lawyers and gynecologists do, but children don’t. The possibility that he raped her shouldn’t make any difference but it did, it mattered terribly. The possibility violated her in ways she couldn’t name.
    Winnie had made it clear at the hospital that she didn’t believe Michael had abused Maureen, and Maureen dearly wanted her to be right. It was easier to believe that she herself was wrong and leave the world intact. She slid back into darkness like sand into the second chamber. And all this time Leslie came, as inexorable as a lava flow. She got Maureen to write a list of the reasons why she wasn’t making it all up. She brought books about surviving and articles about families’ reactions to disclosure. She told Maureen that she wasn’t the only one who didn’t want to believe it: no one wanted to; no one wanted to know about abuse.
    Maureen was at a disadvantage because Leslie had seen her at her lowest point. She saw Leslie pity other patients, avoiding them, grimacing openly as Pauline walked towards them in the grounds wearing shorts. She had never once looked at Maureen like that but, then, Pauline was hard not to pity. Admitted to the hospital weighing five stone and aiming for three, Pauline could never bring herself to tell the police what her father and brother had been doing. If her mother found out