Page 1 of In This Iron Ground
PART ONE
CHAPTER ONE
The full moon was a ghost in the deepening blue. Damien paused a moment to look at it. He could almost breathe out here. He’d stayed too late in the public library, and knew there was a scolding waiting for him at the McKenzies’, so a few more minutes in the autumn air wouldn’t make a difference. For now, the sky was clear and filled with colour.
The McKenzies were his seventhfoster carers in four years. The first few were protocol, he was told. Short-term carers, starting when he was nine and his parents had disappeared amidst the broken glass and warped metal of a crashed car. His social worker had tried to sugar-coat his last few carers, but Damien knew each time he was passed on was his fault. He had learnt what words like “exhausting” and “troubled” and “a bad apple” really meant. It was the last one that stayed with him the most. At night, he would imagine himself being sliced open from one point of his soul to the other and finding everything inside was mealy and bruised and ruined. Every time he overheard that conversation, the “I can’t do this anymore” conversation, it got a little worse in that place inside.
Damien tried to be quiet as he finally reached the house. He opened the gate to the front garden carefully, but it announced his arrival with a whine. He cleared his face of any expression as the front door opened and Mrs. McKenzie stepped out. He looked at her immaculate brown hair, her immaculately painted face, her immaculate sleeves and collar and skirt hem. She was beautiful like a painting was beautiful. Something you could look at but couldn’t reach.
“What on earth happened to you?” Her voice was deceptively quiet.
“Sorry,” he said. She was looking at his dirty clothes with a hawk’s stare. Some kids in his class had pulled a prank on him, and it had ended up with his jeans and sweater covered in mud. It had dried, caked into cracked segments that flaked off when he walked. He’d been surprised when the librarian had let him in, but she was probably used to Damien by now.
“Come here,” Mrs. McKenzie said.
It defied every animal instinct to approach her, but he couldn’t do anything else. As soon as he was within range, she snatched his arm, yanking him forwards. That was something adults seemed to love to do: force you to do things you were already doing. Damien clenched his teeth and didn’t make a sound at the pain that lanced through his shoulder.Thirteen was old enough to weather that sort of thing, he thought.There’s no use complaining about things you’ve brought on yourself.That was something he’d heard a lot.
Mrs. McKenzie was talking as she dragged him to the backyard. It was a familiar wave of acidic water. “Look at you,” and “Why do I waste my time?” and “Can’t leave him alone for a minute,” even though Damien was always alone.
“Stand there,” she said, setting him firmly against the garden shed. “Don’t eventhinkof stepping onto my white carpets looking like that. Take off your clothes then, come on!” she snapped, as if it were obvious. Damien looked down at himself incredulously.
“But it’s cold,” he protested, dread curling in his stomach.
“You should have thought of that when you were covering yourself in dirt. Don’t make me ask again.”
She picked up the hose lying on the grass and looked at him expectantly. They stood like that for a moment, silence and cold air between them, before something went unnaturally still inside Damien.
He started stripping methodically. His mind was blank like it got sometimes, as if he couldn’t look at himself inside. When all his clothes except his boxers were on a pile beside him he grabbed at his elbows as the cold air bit into him, managing to swallow his yelp whole as the water was turned on suddenly, the hose directed at him. The water was so cold that he couldn’t breathe for a moment. The chill permeated his skin and went straight to his lungs. Even when he managed to catch a breath, it came out short and pained as Mrs. McKenzie covered half of the hose opening, so the water hit him sharply, slicing away at him.
“There we go,” she finally said. “Stay here.” She disappeared into the house.
Damien tried to clamp his jaw shut, but his teeth were chattering wildly, his whole body shivering. He tried to keep that white stillness inside, but it was trembling out with the cold.
By the time Mrs. McKenzie reappeared with a towel, Damien was bent over in half with his arms around his waist to try and keep some of the warmth in.
“Damien, don’t be dramatic,” Mrs. McKenzie said as soon as she saw him, handing him the towel. “Dry yourself and go straight to your room. No dinner. You can spend that time thinking about your behaviour.”
Damien grabbed the towel with stiff fingers, not bothering with a reply. Going to bed without dinner had happened too many times to count. He used to keep some cans of food under the bed before they had been found, sparking another round of the popular game adults liked to play:What’s Wrong With Damien?
“Can I take a shower?” Damien managed to say through his chattering teeth. He didn’t have to look at Mrs. McKenzie’s face to know she was frowning.
“What for? I just washed you!”
“I’m cold.”
“Just go upstairs and put some clothes on, Damien. Come on, it’ll be nice and warm in your room.” Mrs. McKenzie ushered Damien inside, shooing him up the stairs with a warning to be quiet and not “stomp all over the place” like Damien tended to do.
He stumbled upstairs, shutting the door of his room softly behind him. A vicious part of him wanted to slam it sometimes, wanted to break the windows and punch the walls and…but it wasn’t worth thinking about that.
He put on three layers of clothes and hid under the covers with the towel around his head to protect the sheets from his still-damp hair, letting his own breath warm the burrow he had made himself. He tried to hold on as long as he could in the stale space made more and more of his own breath, but had to burst out after a few minutes, gasping the cool air into his lungs.
He lay there for as long as his restlessness let him before rolling out of the bed. He grabbed one of the comic books he’d gotten at the library out of his backpack, along with the round pin he always carried with him. He crawled under his desk with his treasure and rubbed the pin with his fingers. His first foster carer had given it to him for talking to the social worker that first time after the three-week-long silence his parents’ death seemed to have cursed him with. You Are Super! the badge proclaimed cheerfully in reds and blues and yellows, the ‘S’ stylized in Superman fashion. The plasticky colours were chipping at the edges, the back rusting into a diseased looking black. Damien tried to look after it, but he wasn’t great at taking care of things, even if he loved them.
He’d liked that foster carer. She’d been nice and quiet, not shouting at Damien when he was bad, even when his throat and lungs choked up and his head filled with an odd sound like the static of a police scanner. Not even when he started talking and couldn’t stop, coming out of him in retches, filling up all that dead space between him and everything else. Not even when he started crying and couldn’t sleep and kept everybody up with all the noise he was making, like he was in pain but in a place too deep, where even he couldn’t quite reach.
He stared at nothing for a while. He liked the nothingness. It was safe.
Damien had discovered there were lots of ways to escape the world. His favourites were comic books and fantasy stories. He liked to imagine himself in the adventure, in a land where good always triumphed. He’d tried drawing his own stories, but Mr. McKenzie had found them and taken them away. Both Mr. and Mrs. McKenzie had sat him down and asked him why he would draw something like that, with so much blood and gore. “There’s something wrong with the boy,” Mr. McKenzie had muttered.
