Sitting at the kitchen table, Cortnée sank as far down as he could into his chair and ate his dinner of shepherd's pie in silence. His parents were fighting again.
"How many times have I told you, woman, not to make pie for dinner?! I don't like it, and I'm not going to tell you again!"
"Well Cortnée and I like it just fine. If you don't want to eat it, you can just cook something yourself,"
"Dammit woman, you'll cook me a proper meal and you'll do it now!" Bartholomew was just about at his wits' end with Rebekah. The woman he thought he'd known was gone, replaced by a vicious shrew. Ever since their son's birth, his wife had turned on him, deliberately disobeying and antagonising him. What had once been her cool but reasonable demeanour had transmutated into an iron shell of wilful defiance; after so many years of marital peace, he didn't think he had the energy left to break her spirit and turn her back into the obedient wife he knew.
"Don't swear in front of Cortnée and don't call me ‘woman', you chauvinist pig!"
Cortnée winced and shut his eyes and ears tight against the sound of his mother falling to the floor. He knew the imprint of Bartholomew's fist would become one more bruise on his mother's thrice broken cheek.
"Don't you ever, ever dare to talk to me like that again, you stupid bitch!!" even with his hands over his ears, Cortnée could hear the kicks his father aimed at Rebekah's body. "You're a useless, good-for-nothing piece of gutter trash!! I've had it up to here with you, worthless bitch!!! You fucking cu–!!!"
"STOP IT!!! DAMMIT DAD, JUST STOP IT!!!" screaming at the top of his lungs, the boy didn't even feel the ginger hair that he unknowingly pulled from his scalp.
Bartholomew didn't notice either.
Bewildered by the silence, Cortnée opened his eyes. Just in time to see the shocked surprise in his father's rigid face.
"Dad?" the boy's slack fingers dropped slowly to the table. His father's knuckles were bloody. His father's hand clutched at his left shoulder.
"Dad?" his father fell against the wall . . . slid down . . . to the floor.
"Dad?!"

- - -
The white poisoned everything.
Into the laboratory, Rebekah led her son. She was dressed calmly, sombrely, only the purple bruise on her cheek marring her visual serenity. Still, Cortnée couldn't help the small distance he tried to maintain, away from his mother. Unlike his father, the only Rebekah he knew was the one who was fierce and defiant, cold to all but her beloved son. His mother burned with ice. But with the leaving of his father, Rebekah had become an emotional see-saw, one minute laughing hysterically, only to break down in tears the next. The woman who'd never had anything but smiles for him now snapped at the slightest invocation.
His parents had always been an enigma, but Cortnée couldn't remember a time when he'd been terrified of both of them.
This was the third time in a week that they'd come to visit Bartholomew. Twenty-seven big white tiles down, turn left, second door. If he hadn't known the body on the wrought iron bed-frame – floating in a white sea – was his father, Cortnée wouldn't have recognised him at all. The body's pasty skin almost blended in with the starched sheets, its black hair spread loose and limp over the plastic pillow, an oxygen mask covered the nose and mouth of its face. A nurse, lost against the disinfected white walls, held Bartholomew's wrist in her fingers.
Rebekah cleared her throat.
"Yes?" this nurse was one of the old school, would brook no nonsense from anyone. "Oh, you must be the missus. Ma'am, your husband's condition is fairly stable, but he's still very weak. I'm asking that you please keep your visit down to fifteen minutes at the most.
"Certainly Nurse," the woman's polite smile didn't reach her eyes, even as she turned them on her infirm husband.
"Well, I'll leave you to it then," clipboard in tow, the nurse walked purposefully from the room. Cortnée didn't join his mother as she sat in the plastic chair beside Bartholomew.
"And how are you feeling today?" his mother's polite questions were answered by muffles he couldn't understand. He hated coming to visit his father. The room always smelled like a closed fish market, and there was nothing to do. If he wasn't always so petrified in his father's presence, he would have brought his trucks. His mother probably would have snapped at him if he had anyway. So he did as he had done the last two visits. He stood by the door and watched for the returning nurse, practising his counting to keep from falling asleep.

"Cortnée?" pardon?
"Cortnée!" he jumped.
"Yes Mom?"
"Come here," he did, hesitating every step, "Your father --" (the words were spat like an insult) "-- wants to talk to you," standing, Rebekah gently pulled the oxygen mask from her husband's sunken face.
"Alone," the word was feather light from the body's parched throat, a still breeze could have carried it away. Cortnée hung back from the anger on his mother's face at hearing that single word.
"As you wish," angry footsteps followed the angry statement out into the corridor.

"Perficere?" pardon?
"Perficere?" he turned back to the body.
"Yes Dad?"
"Come here," he did, hesitating every step. The plastic chair was free, and warm; he stayed standing. "Do you know why I'm sick Perficere?" why his father insisted on calling him ‘Perficere', Cortnée had no idea. The boy simply nodded his head, answering Bartholomew's question.
"I . . . I think so. You . . . hurt, hurt your arm," the body's expulsion of air could have been taken as a laugh.
"Yes Perficere I did hurt my arm, among other things. And do you know who hurt my arm?"
A shake of the head, no.
"Your mother did, Perficere,"
"M--Mom?"
"Yes,"
"Why?"
"Because she's a woman. Women are evil Perficere, never trust them with anything,"
"Bu . . . but Mom's not evil!"
"She's a woman, and all women are evil. They're disobedient and insolent, they're wanton daughters of Satan! Women are the source of every evil in this world, boy! Stay away from them! Evil!! All women are evil!! Evil!!!" tears of confusion and terror slipping down his cheeks, Cortnée ran, cowering in the furthest corner of the room, away from the shrieking maniacal body on the bed.
Gaggles of medical voices surged in the door in a matter of seconds, but it felt like hours to the scared little boy until his mother's reassuring arms wrapped themselves around him.
"Shh Cortnée, it's okay. He won't hurt you ever again. I won't let him hurt you again," The soft words of comfort held no meaning for him. At least, not then.
Later, although he could never be sure, Cortnée would have sworn that when they left, a smirk had played across the woman's lips.

- - -
A few snap-shots in the family photo-albums and the little boy flicking through them were all that remained of Bartholomew Floyd. Even before he'd died – the hospital's fault, somehow they'd mixed up his medication with that of a patient who'd wished to be euthanised – Cortnée had watched his mother comb through the house, throwing out anything that had belonged to her husband. To save them, he'd hidden the photo-albums under his bed. Now the few photos of his father were coming out of the albums, into a shoebox, to be hidden under a pile of dirty t-shirts in his wardrobe.
Cortnée still wasn't quite sure about his feelings for Bartholomew. He'd always been scared of the man, but still, it was his father. He was supposed to love his father, but whenever he thought about him, all he could remember was the maniac in that white laboratory. Maybe if he had things that reminded him of what his father was like before, maybe that would help?
"Cortnée! Dinner's ready!"
"Coming Mom!" he'd lost count of how many times he'd had to hide everything under his bed because his mother had unknowingly interrupted. The door to his bedroom was firmly closed before he ventured downstairs to the kitchen.

Rebekah's bruise was fading, from an ugly ripe purple to a dirty chicken-soup yellow. Mentally wiring his voice box shut, the boy sat down to shepherd's pie. Again. Every night this week, it had been shepherd's pie. It was the only kind of pie his mother knew how to make. He could never understand why Rebekah made shepherd's pie, not when Bartholomew was alive, and not now that he was . . . well . . . not alive.
"Well, aren't you going to eat?" there was a little bit too much sharpness in his mother's voice for his liking.
"Mom?" he was almost afraid to ask, "Could you cut my pie for me?"
"Oh, give it here,"
What had happened to his mother? Why was she angry at him? Had she noticed the missing photo albums?
"There,"
"Thank-you Mom,"
"You're welcome," it certainly didn't sound like it.
"Mom?"
"What?" Rebekah couldn't help the exasperation in her voice. What the hell did the kid want now? His kid.
"Mom, why are you angry with me?" No, not ‘his kid'. Cortnée was her son, her precious boy, who even now needed to be protected from her bastard husband and his hatred of women.
"I'm not angry at you hon,"
"Then who are you angry at?"
"No-one really hon. It's all just bricks in the Wall, sweet, nothing to worry about,"
"The Wall?" now the chauvinist pig was six feet under, who could stop her from telling Cortnée about her dream.
"The Wall is something your – father –" she forced the word out through clenched teeth "-- Never understood. The Wall will save humanity Cortnée, but only if you are strong enough to build it,"
"I. . . ."
"Do you want to help save all the people around the world?"
"I . . . yes. . . ."
"Good, now listen,"
"I –"
"Shh boy!"