Fergus Loves Emma-Louise Forever, Steve wade [cat reading book .TXT] 📗

area, and then pushed on to the top of the tree. The closer-growing branches made the rest of the climb less difficult.

Aware of his shaking hands, he clung tightly to the tree’s branches, keeping at all times three points of contact – he hadn’t forgotten.

But where was it? In his temples the familiar staccato rhythm began to beat. And then he found it. Carved on the opposite side of the tree to where his recollection had etched it were the words as he had gouged, cut and scraped them a few years back: FERGUS LOVES EMMA-LOUISE FOREVER OKAY! X X X

What did it matter that they were brother and sister? She loved him too. Being born to the same parents was a mistake. That’s what they told each other. At first Fergus could hardly believe what was happening, was unable to accept it.

Emma-Louise at fourteen was no longer Daddy’s girl. For almost a year her father had been punishing her for her wicked behaviour. This he did at bedtime, while their mother was still downstairs watching TV. Fergus heard everything from the start. Boys were dangerous their father scolded her those nights he went to her room to teach her a lesson. No daughter of his was going to cavort with boys. Not by God while she lived under his roof.

To drown out the tortured screams of his little sister being punished in the next room, Fergus recalled how he used to crank up the volume on his stereo. But even through the solid rock music and strong vocals of Thin Lizzy or Whitesnake on the turntable, it was impossible to annihilate Emma-Louise’s agonised screams; no, squeals, the sound a scourged animal might make – an ugly, sickening dragged-out wailing. A sound his senses found impossible to accept was coming from his little sister.

That same sound, only muffled, sometimes dragged Fergus from sleep late in the night. As he lay there, petrified, in the semi-darkness, he could imagine their father’s large brown hand covering Emma-Louise’s nose and mouth, she, half smothering, unable to escape that sickening cooked meat stink of his flesh.

In his mind, Fergus would picture himself bursting into the room like some movie hero. In his hands his well-worn hurley-stick. What he witnesses is freeze-framed into stills: his father’s great body mantling Emma-Louise’s stiffens, his rumbled face twisted over his own shoulder. The unexpected roar Fergus releases, the bellow of a warrior in full flight, carries him the few steps across the room. His raised up hurley he brings down swiftly, catching their father in the small of his back. Another roar - his father’s. The roar punctuated by another blow; this one into the stomach. Winded now, their father coughs and gasps for oxygen, and moves about the floor on his hands and knees like a creature in the last stages of a crippling illness. Before draping a sheet around Emma-Louise’s naked shoulders and leading her from the sullied room, Fergus points the hurley-stick into their father’s face. He promises him that should he ever so much as let his gaze fall upon Emma-Louise again, for even a second, he will annihilate him.

But, in reality, apart from trying to tell their mother, who never listened, Fergus did nothing. Why? He couldn’t say. Through Emma-Louise’s familiar wailing, he belted out, with conviction, the lyrics of the songs spinning on his record player. Or he’d clamp his hands to the sides of his head; his body shaking with imaginary retribution his head knew he was too cowardly to carry out.

For almost a year the punishment went on. And then one day it stopped. Forever. Emma-Louise, at fourteen, was the one to take charge of her own destiny.

The first time Emma-Louise crept into Fergus’s room, he pretended to be asleep. It was following her lengthy shower after the, by then, nightly punishment from their father. His bed creaked as the cold air rushed beneath the duvet when she lifted it and slipped in next to him. He felt the instant, intimate warmth emanating from her body into his, as she moulded herself into his back.

Her closeness, her trembling body and whispered crying stirred in him a thirst that no liquid draught could ever slake. But most of all her unspoken forgiveness, her understanding that he, as their father’s son, was as helpless as she against their father’s sickness crowded his senses with one desire: Emma-Louise.

She read his signal, it seemed, almost before he shifted on the mattress. She slackened her embracing hold. Fergus rolled over. In one accord, their limbs were wrapped around the other. “I’m sorry,” he said, his eyes tightly sealed, although he wasn’t sure what he was apologising for.

Emma-Louise shushed him. Her soft warm body gave off a cleansed and untainted purity, a mixture of talcum powder and the scent of springtime. The breath from her increased breathing caressed Fergus’s face. Keeping his eyes closed, he slid his cheek gently across hers. His tentative lips found hers already open. Emma-Louise had discovered her sanctuary, her escape from their father.

By early light, when the melodic trilling of songbirds forecast a new day, Fergus had yet to capture sleep. With the steadily growing brightness seeping through the thin curtains, he studied Emma-Louise’s sleeping face. As the quarter light gave way to half, and then full-blown daylight, a skulking and terrifying realisation reached full gestation. No man could resist her face - or that body. It mattered not that she was his daughter or his sister. He, Fergus, knew that between he and his father, besides generation, there was little difference.

For the first days and weeks of their initial encounters, Fergus avoided his own reflection in mirrors. He was repulsed at the prospect of having to behold in his own image everything he despised about his father.

Emma-Louise convinced him otherwise. Didn’t he get it? How could something that made two people feel so happy and content be wrong? Fergus’s reason for existence was to protect her from their father’s illness. While Emma-Louise, in turn, along with fulfilling fantasies Fergus never knew he had, was born to repay his singular dedication to her by bringing him perpetual joy.

Well, he didn’t really get it. Not ever. But the alternative scenario, the return to bedtimes and late nights crowded with Emma-Louise’s perpetual suffering, was unacceptable. The persistent doubts that attacked Fergus’s conscience, that threatened to shatter what he felt more then knew was outrageous self-deception, a way of legitimising what was no more than an excuse, were periodically destabilised. All doubt was cast aside those times he pre-empted planned or opportune attacks on Emma-Louise.

Careful always to ensure Emma-Louise was never left alone with their father, Fergus accompanied her to and from school, walked or drove her to bus stops and railway stations when she visited friends, and collected her on her return. A change of plan on one occasion, and a flat car battery on another, which were quickly seized upon by his father, were countered just as quickly by Fergus. These thwarted attacks bolstered Fergus’s predestined purpose as minder and divine protector, a guardian angel to his sister.

But, like a watchful and wily bird of prey that draws its sustenance from the heart-fuelled, blood-flow of other living creatures, it was only a matter of time before his father alighted on the perfect moment to swoop. Fergus dreaded that day.

“Where’s Emma-Louise?” he shouted at his mom who was staring glassy-eyed at some late-night movie when he arrived home.

His mom’s face, the face of an owl, looked at him through large round lenses.

“Where is she?” he repeated. He could hear himself trying to sound calm.

“Don’t worry,” his mom said. “She called earlier. She left a message. Your father … ”

But Fergus didn’t wait for her to finish. He dashed from the room and bounded upstairs, calling out his sister’s name. Nothing. Nobody.

Back downstairs he learned from his mom that his father had walked down to the stop to meet her.

Not until he had almost sprinted to the bus stop, five minutes away, did it occur to Fergus that he should have taken the car. Perhaps he would have been on time to prevent it.

An old woman walking a tiny dog shrieked and shuffled sideways as he splashed passed her through freezing puddles on the tree-lined road. Up ahead, backing out of a pool of light cast by a streetlamp, he recognised his father’s stooped silhouette. Fergus reached him in seconds. Behind his father, fifteen to twenty seconds back, faltered Emma-Louise.

As in a dream-state, a sense of unreality pervaded Fergus’s senses while his father held up his splayed fingers before him, his grotesque face, open-mouthed and shaking denial against the allegation not yet spoken. But no words were uttered - nothing to be said. No need to speak.

Over the next two decades, Fergus would revisit the scene countless times in his head: no longer his father’s confused teenage son, Fergus, a nineteen year-old man stands and waits in front of the predatory beast who has finally outwitted him, undermined his role as protector of the vulnerable. The beast has re-violated his now sixteen-year-old daughter. The seconds pound by while Emma-Louise, more shadow than substance, slinks forward as though attached to the fortified garden wall. Her downcast eyes never leave the pavement. She, too, remains silent. In the artificial light her face betrays no emotion. Fergus reads, or imagines maybe, resignation in that countenance devoid of everything. Or is it relief, deliverance from anticipated dread now that she no longer fears anticipation?

The first crack of his knuckles connecting with his father’s jaw toppled him like a bowling pin.

“Get up,” he screamed at the young old man scrambling about in the sodden leaves. “Get up! I said.”

Dragging his father from the gutter where he’d crawled, Fergus pulled him to his feet. Using his forearm wedged under his chin, he pinned him to the granite wall. Each time he punched him, he caught him by the lapels and steadied him for the next strike or slug.

Each blow Fergus rained upon his father on that bleak, wind-driven rainy night in late-November in middleclass- suburbia sent electric shockwaves from his hands up his arms and into his brain, which triggered an onslaught that was outside his conscious control. Neither premeditated nor designed to maim or kill, the assault might have done one or both had a Garda patrol car not happened by.

A blinding sheet of white light flashed across his eyes as Fergus’s head crashed into the iron pavement. So carried away had he been with inflicting damage on his father, he hadn’t fully registered Emma-Louise’s warning shouts, nor had he been unaware of the car and the two burly Gardai rushing him. He recalled thrashing about, struggling to free himself from the confusion of serious hands driving him downward, squashing him into the cruel slippery stone strewn with earth-pungent leaves, while heavy legs pressed into the crooks of his knees.

A civil case, brought against Fergus by the State, with the strength of the Gardai as witnesses, and their recounting of the viciousness and severity of his assault on his father, landed him with a custodial sentence.

Before being banged-up for nearly eleven months, Fergus saw to it that Emma-Louise was set up in a flat with a couple of girls. On the life of the child gestating in her womb,