Author's note: This story is about a mother telling her daughter about the story of how she came to know her father. It develops slowly over time. If you are looking for a fast character fix then this is not the story for you. If, however, you are patient, you will be rewarded with lavish plot lines, beloved characters, stories within stories, and the occasional Studebaker. Please feel free to read and review, just don't comment on the slow nature of the story, I am designing it deliberately to be that way. But all other constructive criticism is welcome.
Disclaimer: I own no one and nothing except for Brita, David, Jill, Gran, Mrs. Harner and Wendell and a few other odd characters. The rest belongs to DC, I make no money off of any of this.
Author's Warning: I would like to a moment to warn my readers that this story is not a light walk in the park. It is, in fact, one of the hardest things I have ever written. In this story I discuss a variety of adult themes in varying degrees of graphic description, from violence to drugs to sexual themes and course language, among a number of other rather harsh historic realities and depravities. This story is not for the weak stomached. The especially graphic chapters are marked for your discretion.
Please note that anything written in italics is present tense.
Sitting in my cave overlooking the North Sea, I clutch a letter in my hands and bear my face against the salty winds, listening to the waves crash against the cliff face below. I was aware of my daughter watching me intently, wondering what the strange missive from Arkham Asylum bore.
Arkham, Gotham, all of that seemed lifetimes behind me. After I had gotten pregnant with Enna, well, I'm getting ahead of myself.
"Mama, what does it say? What does Arkham want with you?" My daughter asks in confusion and I turn my head, staring at my child. She has my wild dark curly hair, my grandmothers figure, and my mothers face, but her eyes, her eyes are her father's eyes.
Her father.
How long has it been since I thought of him? Years? Months? Days? Hours? To tell the truth, I had begun to think of myself as Enna's father, her mother, her brother and her sister. Despite her upbringing in our tiny fishing village on Eysturoy in the Faroe Islands, my daughter sought out her education before getting a scholarship to go and study at a boarding school in Gotham City. It was after I saw my 15 year old daughter off in Edinburgh that I retreated quietly to the caves on Mykines to live out my days.
"Mama, you're thirty four, far too young to live out your days here," Enna points out sensibly. She has always been infuriatingly rational.
"This is my story, I don't have to make sense," I reply blithely.
"Well go on then, tell me how it all started," Enna urges, snuggling under her tartan woolen by the fire.
"I was born in America," I begin.
"No no, not your ultimate beginning," my daughter says, exasperated.
"Your ultimate beginning isn't where the story starts either," I reply, just as exasperated. "Fine, I shall pick a point and begin my story."
"Fine," Enna replies, waiting for me to settle myself by the fire beneath my own woolen.
I grew up in an apartment building in Gotham City, down in the Narrows. My grandmother was raising me by that point, my mother long since passed away from a consumption.
"No one gets consumptions anymore," Enna says.
"Be quiet, this is my story, I will tell it how I choose," I reply. "Anyway."
Above us lived a boy who was a year older than me, his name was Jack. He lived with his father who was a terrible alcoholic. So Jack would often climb down the fire escape and spend time with me and Gran. At night Gran and I would lie awake in her full sized bed, which we shared, staring at the ceiling and listening to Mr. Napier yelling at Jack while he screamed and cried.
To distract me Gran would tell me long, winding folk stories from the Faroe Islands, where she was from, and where I have come back to. Our ancestral home.
In the mornings Jack would sheepishly come down the fire escape and together we would set off for school through the Narrows. We grew up together. I got drunk for the first time with Jack. Had all my bad girl moments with him. From the sideways pony tails to wearing my watermelon lip balm around my neck. He saw it all.
One summer night when I was 13 and he was 14, we were running through the park down by the river, drunk on life when he drew me into his arms and kissed me lavishly, hungrily on the lips and told me that someday he'd give me the world on a silver platter. This was before all the ugliness started you see.
Gran and I were lying in bed together one friday night when I was 16 listening to Jack and his father screaming at each other. More like Jack's father screamed cruel words and Jack could be heard crying. And then, out of no where came a terrible crash and an eery silence. Well, Gran and I were up, she was dialing the police while I climbed through the window onto the fire escape in my night shirt. It was such a hot steamy night the idea of wearing even that seemed unbearable. The metal rungs felt warm and slightly greasy beneath my bare feet as I climbed up the ladder to Jack's living room window.
Heaving it open the smell of blood hit me like a punch in the face and there was Jack standing over him with an old black and white portable television. It's formica casing was cracked and the bunny ears hung sadly from the box. But Jack just stood and stared down at the blood pooling around his father's head. He looked like he was in shock, and I believed it. I had spent my entire life listening to Jack's father screaming at his mother before she took her life and he turned on his son.
Then Jack saw me, a wild desperate panicked look in his eyes and he begged me silently to tell him what to do. But by then it was too late. The police burst in, and that was the last night I ever saw Jack. Later it was deemed that he killed his father in self defense, and Jack was put into foster care, lost to me and Gran forever.
I went into my senior year of high school, I had a boyfriend. David. He was sweet, loved music, believed in Santa Claus. He loved his mother. It was a bizarre combination, and Gran would often laugh at me. Especially when he followed me home from school, sitting out on the fire escape drinking chocolate milk with one of those neon crazy straws, chattering on about "Dr. Who" and that bizarre man who dressed up like a bat and tried to clean up Gotham.
"Batman?" Enna asks, gazing at me out of her father's eyes.
Batman. There's another name I hadn't thought of in days or months or years or hours.
"I met him once," I say, remembering that bizarre night.
"Is he my father?" Enna insists.
"Yes," I say.
"Really?"
"He could have been, now be quiet."
Life went on, with my blissfully lethargic boyfriend and my overly amused grandmother. When I was 18 David and I moved into an apartment together, a small one bedroom apartment that always smelled of curry and pot and started university together. David studied history, I studied music. I worked in a music shop on Hembleton, David smoked pot all day with his friend Wendell and never seemed to make it to class. I thought it was a miracle they hadn't been thrown out of the university. They didn't think much of anything.
Well it was a particularly windy Friday night when I was heading home from work when all of the street lamps on my little corner of Gotham all blacked out at once, and I stood there, stupidly in the dark wondering what to do next. Hearing a crunching of glass on the asphalt behind me, I took off at once, plunging even deeper into the darkness and wondering if maybe I should have followed David's cryptic advice upon leaving the house this morning and "brought the herring". At least then I would have something with which to fend off my enshrouded companion.
And then I ran into a wall. It was a warm wall, soft, but also hard. It slowly dawned on me that it was a person. Before I could back away, a hand snaked out and latched onto my wrist in an iron grip, dragging me back against that bizarrely comforting wall.
"Hello Brita," the voice hissssssed. It sounded darkly familiar.
"Jack?" I whispered hopefully.
"Jack died a long time ago Dollface, my name is Joker," he replied. "Now it's time to go."
I had been two blocks from the apartment when he whisked me off into the darker recesses of the Narrows, down a warren of streets, courtyards, abandoned houses, even an opium den. He never stopped, never slowed down. And the entire time I was following him I couldn't help but stare at him, at how different he had become from the boy who had been such an intimate part of my life.
We slowed in a narrow alley between two buildings, a single lightbulb hung sadly from a light fixture overhead and moths fluttered around it in a trance. I had only seconds to grasp the jarring white black and red make up on his face, only seconds (although it seemed like a lifetime) to come to terms with the hideous scars around his mouth, before he kissed me, deep and hot and hard and I felt a familiar tug between my thighs and relaxed into the kiss, feeling for the first time since he dragged me away from the comforting mass of David that somewhere inside of the Joker was the Jack I had once known.
"I told you I'd give you the world Brita, and I meant it," he said with a scarred smile and then pulled me after him. I had trouble keeping up in my sweater clogs but we finally made it to a seedy old apartment building that had no real residents, just squatters and cheap hookers with their johns. Leading me up flight after flight of stairs I gasped with the exertion and struggled to keep up with him until we arrived on the final landing and I fell to the dusty wood floor, leaning my head against the banister.
"We're almost there," he said almost nervously, wrenching my arm painfully as he pulled me to my feet and over to a door. Opening it he pushed me inside and locked it behind him. The dark wood wainscoting was dirty and the hideous green paisley wallpaper was stained from age and peeling. Through an arch to one side I could see a clean kitchen and Jack-I mean Joker, prodded me down the hall and into the bedroom. The bed was new and had deep purple sheets with an acid green comforter on top of the bed. Through one door I could see a bathroom.
"This is lovely Joker, but I need to get home, David needs me to make dinner and then I have to work on my concerto," I said, turning around to face him.
"Aah yes, David. Your boyfriend," he sneered. "I thought you had better taste than that Brita."
"Oh? And where were you?" I snapped right back. "Jesus, we were supposed to get drunk together, take over the world, lose ten grand in Vegas! And then you get off for what you did to your father and you vanished. Where were you?"
"You needed to stay with Gran, you needed each other. But now things are different." The Joker crowed loudly.
"You don't need me anymore either. David needs me!" I exclaimed loudly. "The boy can't cook, can't clean, barely makes it to class."
"Well um, wouldn't it be kinder to let him learn how to take care of himself? What happened to you Brita? You're disgusting. And what about Gran? Where is she?" He pushed, yelling back at me.
"She doesn't remember who I am!" I screamed back, angry tears slipping down my cheeks.
"What?" He asked, clearly prepared for anything but this.
"Gran's on hospice care Jack-" I started, but he broke in, smacking me hard across the face. I tasted blood as I fell back against the mattress.
"DO NOT CALL ME JACK!" He shouted, licking his lips nervously. "The name's Joker sweetlips."
"Okay Joker, ok," I said shakily, trying to think through my swimming head. "Gran has Alzheimer's, she thinks I'm her daughter, my mom. And I saw her yesterday, and the day before that, and the day before that. Please don't peg me as a bad person for having a job and class in the same day. It's exhausting doing it all by myself."
"Then-ah-let me help take some of the burden," he said. I wanted desperately to believe him, but instinct warned me to be cautious. So I shook my head from where it was cradled in my hands.
"Maybe you don't understand Brita. But you belong to me now. Now, I'm not entirely unreasonable, I'm willing to let you run free, but not tonight. Tonight you'll stay here with me," he said, backing towards the door and locking it. I watched in horror as he came closer, pulling me to my feet and ripping off my clothes until I stood naked in the chilly bedroom. Then he slammed me back into the bed and began carving into the back of my neck, a cut that made me see stars and gasp as my hot, wet, sticky blood welled up in angry defense.
His weight was heavy and absolute against my slight strength and despite my best efforts, I couldn't dislodge him. After the cut though I faded in and out. Time slowed to a stand still. And then the world went dark