Blue and Red

"I didn't know I had those words in me. They'd been building for years, waiting in the dark, and when they finally came out they tore something on the way."

The police arrived first.

I don't know how long we waited. Time had stopped making sense. It could have been five minutes or fifty — just Dad standing by the window, watching the street, one hand pressed against the scratches on his face, and Paul and me still huddled on our mattresses, too shocked to move.

The silence was the worst part.

After all that screaming, all that violence, the house had gone quiet. But it wasn't a peaceful quiet. It was the quiet of a held breath. The quiet of waiting for the next blow to fall. Somewhere outside, in the darkness beyond our walls, Mum was still out there. I didn't know where she'd gone. Didn't know what she was doing. The not-knowing was almost worse than the knowing.

I could hear Dad's breathing from across the room. Ragged and uneven. I could hear the ticking of the clock on the wall— tick, tock, tick, tock — counting off the seconds of this new reality. I could hear my own heartbeat, still too fast, still pounding in my ears like a drum.

And I could hear Paul.

He was crying. Quietly, trying to muffle it, but I could hear the hitch in his breath, the wet sniffling sounds he was trying to hide. My big brother. My protector. The one who was always brave, always tough, always ready with a joke to make things better.

He was crying, and I didn't know how to help him.

I didn't know how to help anyone.

I didn't even know how to help myself.

The blue and red lights came first.

They swept across the ceiling like something from a dream — or a nightmare. Pulsing. Rotating. Painting the familiar walls of our lounge room in colours that didn't belong there. I watched them move, hypnotised, as if I was watching something happening very far away to someone else entirely.

Then came the sound of car doors.

One. Two. The solid thunk of metal closing. Footsteps on the path — heavy, official footsteps, the kind that belonged to people who wore uniforms and carried authority. The crackle and hiss of a radio, words I couldn't make out, the impersonal static of a world that dealt with situations like this every day.

For them, this was routine. Just another domestic. Just another family falling apart.

For us, it was everything.

Dad opened the door before they could knock.

Two officers stepped inside, their uniforms dark against the light from the hallway. They seemed huge to me — tall and broad and impossibly adult, their belts heavy with things I couldn't identify, their faces neutral. Professional. They'd seen this before. They'd seen worse.

But they hadn't seen us before. They didn't know that just a few hours ago, we'd been a family eating fish and chips and watching Care Bears. They didn't know that Paul had made me laugh until I nearly wet myself. They didn't know that this was our home, our lives, our everything.

To them, we were just a file number. A case. A checkbox on a form.

They spoke to Dad in low voices, and I strained to hear, but the words were just murmurs. I could see Dad nodding, see him gesturing, see the way he kept touching his face — touching the wounds Mum had left — as if he still couldn't quite believe they were real. One of the officers was writing something down. The other was looking around the room, taking in the scene: the mattresses on the floor, the tangled blankets, the two small boys huddled in the wreckage of what was supposed to be a fun Friday night sleepover.

His eyes met mine for just a moment.

I looked away.

Then Nan and Granddad arrived.

Granddad's car pulled into the driveway with a screech of brakes that cut through the night like a scream. I flinched at the sound, my whole body jerking, and Paul's hand found mine in the darkness. His fingers were cold and trembling, but he held on tight, and I held on back.

Granddad was out of the car before the engine had fully stopped, his door flying open, his feet hitting the pavement at a run. I had never seen him move so fast. He was usually so measured, so deliberate — a man who thought before he spoke and considered before he acted. But tonight, there was something in his face I had never seen before.

Rage.

Cold, controlled, terrifying rage.

Nan followed more slowly, climbing out of the passenger side, her jacket clutched around her, her face pale as milk in the porch light. She looked scared. Nan never looked scared. Nan was the one who made everything better, who kissed scraped knees and baked biscuits and told us stories about when Dad was little. Nan was safety and warmth and everything good.

But tonight, even Nan couldn't fix this.

"Where is she?" Granddad demanded as he strode through the front door. His voice was hard, clipped, nothing like the gentle grandfather who snuck us lollies and let us stay up past bedtime.

"Outside somewhere," Dad said. "I don't know. She ran off when she saw the police car."

"Good. Keep her out. Don't let her back in the house."

"Dad—"

"I mean it, Noah." Granddad's jaw was set like stone. "Whatever she says, whatever she does, you don't let her back in. We need to get the story straight. We need to protect—"

"The boys," Nan interrupted, her voice cutting through the men's conversation. "Where are the boys?"

They found us still huddled on our mattresses.

Still wrapped in blankets that had been part of our fort, our castle, our safe place. Still frozen in the positions we'd been in when the screaming started, as if moving might somehow make it all real.

Nan's face crumpled when she saw us.

I watched it happen — watched her expression shift from worry to horror to something that looked like her heart breaking. She pressed one hand to her mouth, and I saw tears spring to her eyes, and for some reason that was the thing that almost undid me. Not Mum's screaming. Not Dad's blood. But Nan's tears.

"Oh, my darlings," she said, her voice thick and wobbly. "Oh, my poor, poor darlings."

She knelt down beside my mattress, her knees cracking as she lowered herself, and reached for me. Her hands were gentle on my shoulder, soft and warm, the hands that had held me as a baby, that had taught me to tie my shoes, that had stroked my hair when I was sick.

But I couldn't bear it.

I flinched away from her touch, pressing myself back against the couch, pulling the blanket up around me like armour.

"Don't."

"Luke, sweetheart—"

"Don't touch me."

The words came out harder than I meant them to. Nan's face flickered with hurt, and I felt a stab of guilt, but I couldn't help it. My skin felt wrong. Everything felt wrong. The thought of being touched, of being held, of being comforted — it was too much. It would break something inside me that I was barely holding together.

"Come on, sweetheart," Nan tried again, her voice gentle but insistent. "Come sit at the table. I'll make you some warm milk. You need to—"

"I don't want warm milk."

"Luke—"

"I don't want anything."

But eventually, somehow, she coaxed us up.

Paul and I moved like sleepwalkers, our legs stiff and uncooperative, our bodies heavy with shock. Nan guided us to the dining table — the same table where Mum had been sitting and smoking just hours ago, the same table where we ate breakfast every morning, did homework every afternoon, celebrated birthdays and Christmases and all the ordinary moments of family life.

It looked different now. Everything looked different.

Paul's hand found mine again under the table. We sat side by side, our shoulders touching, our fingers intertwined. He was still trembling. Or maybe I was. Maybe we both were. It was hard to tell where he ended and I began.

The adults moved around us like we weren't there.

Granddad and Dad talking in low, urgent voices by the front door. The police officers conferring outside, their radios crackling with static and distant voices. Nan hovering, wringing her hands, not knowing what to do with herself now that we'd rejected her comfort.

I caught fragments of conversation. Words that floated through the air like debris from an explosion.

"...not well... hasn't been well for a long time..."

"...the pills, the gambling..."

"...assault... this is different... this is serious..."

"...protect the boys... can't let her..."

The clock kept ticking. Tick. Tock. Tick. Tock.

And then everything stopped.

Because Mum was back.

I heard her before I saw her — her voice rising from somewhere outside, getting closer, getting louder. Hysterical. Shrieking. Words tumbling over each other in a torrent of sound that didn't even sound like language anymore, just raw noise, pure emotion given voice.

The front door burst open.

She was there.

Mum. But not Mum. Something that looked like Mum, sounded like Mum, but wasn't Mum at all.

The police officers had her by the arms, one on each side, trying to restrain her, but she was fighting them with a strength that seemed impossible for her thin frame. Her dressing gown had come undone again, hanging open to reveal the nakedness beneath. Her hair was wild, a tangled mess with leaves and twigs caught in it from wherever she'd been hiding. Her makeup was smeared across her face — mascara running down her cheeks in black rivers, lipstick smudged beyond the lines of her lips — making her look like a clown. A monster. Something from a nightmare.

"Don't touch me!" she was screaming, thrashing against the officers' grip. "Get your fucking dirty hands off my breasts!"

"Ma'am, you need to calm down—"

"I will NOT calm down! This is my house! Those are my children!"

"Ma'am—"

"Let me see my children! Luke! Paul! Mummy's here! Mummy loves you!"

My name in her mouth. The word "Mummy" in that voice.

Something lurched in my chest. A horrible, twisting feeling that was part fear and part longing and part something else I couldn't name. Despite everything — despite the screaming and the blood and the horror of the past hour — part of me still wanted to go to her. Still wanted to believe she could make it better. Still wanted my mum.

Before I knew what I was doing, I had slipped past Nan's grasping hands.

My feet carried me into the lounge room without my permission, drawn by some force I couldn't understand or resist. I needed to see. I needed to understand. I needed to know if there was anything left of the mother I remembered, the mother I loved, somewhere inside this screaming stranger.

I stopped in the doorway.

The scene before me was a tableau of domestic horror, frozen for just a moment like a photograph.

Mum, wild-eyed and dishevelled, held by two police officers who looked like they were struggling to contain her. Dad standing in the centre of the room, his face pale beneath the dried blood, his hands hanging at his sides like he didn't know what to do with them. Granddad beside him, his jaw set, his eyes hard. Nan frozen in the kitchen doorway behind me, one hand pressed to her mouth as if holding back a scream.

And then Mum saw Dad.

Her face changed.

The manic desperation drained away, replaced by something else. Something cold. Something calculating. I watched it happen — watched her eyes narrow, watched her lips curl into something that wasn't quite a smile, watched a new kind of madness settle over her features.

"He raped me."

The words exploded into the room.

For a moment, nobody moved. Nobody breathed. The words just hung there, suspended in the air, too monstrous to process.

"He raped me," she said again, louder this time, her voice rising towards a scream. "He raped me! That man raped me!"

She was pointing at Dad. My dad. The man who played LEGO with us, who had carried me on his shoulders at the zoo, who had never raised his hand to anyone in his life. The man with blood still drying on his face from where she had clawed him.

"Ma'am—" one of the officers started.

"He raped me! Why aren't you arresting him? He RAPED me!"

I didn't fully understand the word.

I was eight years old. I knew it was something bad — something adults whispered about, something that happened in the news to people far away. Something terrible. Something shameful. Something that destroyed lives.

And she was saying Dad had done it.

"That's a lie."

Granddad's voice cut through the chaos. Hard as iron. Cold as ice. I had never heard him sound like that before — never heard such absolute certainty, such controlled fury.

"That's a bloody lie and you know it."

"It's true!" Mum screamed. "It's true! He raped me!"

She kept saying it. Over and over. The words pounding into me like fists, like hammer blows, each repetition driving them deeper into my skull.

He raped me. He raped me. He raped me.

I knew it wasn't true.

I knew it with every fibre of my being, with a certainty that went beyond logic or evidence. I had been in this house all night. I had heard every word, every scream, every moment of the fight. There had been no rape. There had only been Mum — attacking, accusing, destroying.

But the words were poison.

And they were spreading.

I could see the police officers exchanging glances. Could see the subtle shift in their posture, the way they looked at Dad differently now. Could see the seeds of doubt being planted, taking root, beginning to grow.

Dad's face had gone white.

All the blood seemed to have drained out of him, leaving him pale and hollow, a ghost of the man he'd been just moments ago. He looked like he might be sick. Or faint. Or simply crumble into dust and blow away.

"Heather," he said.

Just her name. Just that one word. But it carried everything — disbelief, hurt, betrayal. The sound of a man watching his world end.

"Don't you 'Heather' me!" She was screaming now, lunging against the officers' grip, her fingers reaching for him like claws. "You're a rapist! A rapist and an abuser! Everyone's going to know! I'll tell everyone what you did! I'll tell the newspapers! I'll tell the church! Everyone will know what kind of monster you really are!"

Something broke inside me.

I felt it happen — a physical sensation, like a dam bursting, like a wall crumbling, like something that had been holding back the ocean finally giving way. All the fear and anger and hurt and confusion. All the nights I'd lain awake wondering what was wrong with our family, why Mum was the way she was, why nothing I did ever seemed to make her happy. All the times I'd made excuses for her, defended her, loved her despite everything she did to make loving her impossible.

It all came flooding out.

"It's all your fault!"

The words ripped out of me without permission.

My voice didn't sound like my own — it was raw, ragged, torn from somewhere deep inside me that I didn't even know existed. A place of pure rage. Pure pain. Pure, desperate truth.

Everyone turned to look at me.

The police officers. My grandparents. My father.

My mother.

"Luke—" Nan started, reaching for me.

"It's all YOUR FAULT!" I screamed. My body was shaking so hard I could barely stand. Tears were streaming down my face, hot and blinding, but I couldn't stop. The words kept coming, forced out by a pressure I couldn't contain, a volcano finally erupting after years of building heat.

"Everything is your fault! You ruin everything! You hurt everyone! I HATE you!"

The last words tore something in my throat. I felt it — a raw, burning pain as they came out, as if they were too big, too sharp, too terrible to speak aloud.

I hate you.

I had said it. To my mother. I had told her I hated her.

And the worst part was, in that moment, I meant it.

Mum's face changed.

The manic rage drained away like water down a sink, leaving something else behind. Shock. Hurt. Devastation. For just a moment, she looked like my mother again — the real one, the one I remembered from before the pills, before the gambling, before everything went wrong. The one who used to tuck me in at night and kiss my forehead and tell me she loved me more than all the stars in the sky.

"Luke," she said, and her voice was suddenly soft. Broken. "Luke, I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry, baby. I didn't mean— I never wanted you to—"

"I don't care!"

"Luke, please—"

"I don't care! I don't care about anything you say! You're a liar! You lie about everything!"

"I love you," she said, and she was crying now, really crying, tears cutting channels through the ruined makeup on her face. "I love you so much. You have to know that. No matter what happens, I love you."

"Take her outside," Granddad said.

His voice was cold and controlled, but I could see his hands shaking. Could see the tears he was fighting to hold back. Could see the effort it was taking him to stay calm, to be the adult, to hold everything together while his family fell apart around him.

"Get her out of here."

"No!" Mum screamed, the softness evaporating, the madness rushing back in. "No, I need to talk to my son! Luke! LUKE!"

The officers began to move, dragging her towards the door.

She fought them every step, her heels scraping against the floor, her arms straining against their grip. She was reaching for me, her fingers stretched out like she could somehow touch me from across the room, like she could pull me to her through sheer force of will.

"Luke, I love you! I love you so much! Please, baby, please don't hate me! Please!"

I stood frozen, watching her go.

Part of me wanted to run to her. Part of me wanted to scream at her to stop, to come back, to be my mum again. Part of me wanted to believe that if I just loved her enough, tried hard enough, was good enough, everything would somehow be okay.

But the rest of me — the part that had finally broken free — just watched.

"I'll always love you!" she was screaming as they pulled her through the door. "No matter what! I'll always love you, Luke! Always!"

"Get her OUT!" Granddad roared.

The door slammed.

Her screams continued from outside — muffled now but still audible, still calling my name, still professing a love that felt like poison in my ears.

Luke. Luke. LUKE.

My legs gave out.

I didn't decide to fall. My body just stopped holding me up. One moment I was standing, and the next I was on the floor, my knees hitting the carpet, my body folding in on itself like a puppet with cut strings.

The sobs came then.

They ripped through me, violent and uncontrollable, shaking me so hard I couldn't breathe. I couldn't see through the tears. Couldn't think through the pain. Couldn't do anything except curl into myself and cry — for my mother, for my father, for my family, for everything that had been destroyed tonight and could never be put back together.

Nan was there, kneeling beside me, her hands reaching for me.

"Don't touch me," I managed to choke out. "Please. Don't touch me."

The words hurt her. I could see it in her face — the flinch, the flash of pain, the tears that spilled down her own cheeks. But I couldn't help it. I couldn't bear to be touched. Not right now. Not by anyone.

She pulled her hand back.

Paul appeared beside me.

He didn't try to touch me either. Didn't try to speak. Didn't try to make it better. He just lowered himself to the floor next to me — close enough that I could feel his warmth, close enough that I knew I wasn't alone — and curled into his own ball of misery.

We lay there together.

Side by side on the carpet, surrounded by the wreckage of our fort, our family, our lives. The adults moved around us in the background — voices rising and falling, radios crackling, footsteps coming and going — but none of it seemed real anymore. None of it seemed to matter.

Outside, Mum had stopped screaming.

The silence was somehow worse.