‘That STARING all the time like I’d done something wrong.’
It can be the case that teenagers can be unruly or insolent in nature and can push people to levels beyond what is natural.
However, as the story progresses, the attitude of the reader is also developed. We see his punishment of Kimberly becoming more extreme and we begin to lose sympathy with him. We can still see that he is apparently being provoked and now we see Frank as a decent man pushed beyond his patience.
We see Frank trying to portray himself as reasonable:
‘I’m not an unreasonable man.
I argued’
However, by his decision to ‘argue’ the point, we see, in fact, that it is not a ‘reasonable’ thing to do. A reasonable person does not argue – they discuss or debate on an issue.
We see Frank’s reaction to what is perceived as Kimberley’s bad behaviour. Our first sign of his disciplining is when he tells the reader:
‘I only hit her when she’s naughty’.
That seems an incongruous statement, as you would not normally call a teenager ‘naughty’. He seems to be taking the punishment too far when he tells the reader:
‘She’ll COME ROUND QUICKLY ENOUGH WHEN SHE’S HUNGRY’
This seems a draconian thing to do. To begin with, we can still somewhat sympathise, although we recognise that he may be pushed beyond his limits.
His next punishment begins to show how unreasonable he actually is. When he puts Kimberley in the corner, all she does is ‘just stood there’. Frank’s expression is one of despair but the reader is beginning to wonder what else he expected her to do. She is simply doing what he told her to do and he is finding fault with that. We are beginning to see that Frank is not necessarily the man we originally thought he was.
His next punishment is where we really start to see him lose control. He puts Kimberley in a cupboard. At this point, Kimberely’s mother, Linda, seems to intervene, as Frank says:
‘I AM NOT LOCKING THE DOOR LINDA’
but he does turn out the light and when Kimberley reacts in a perfectly natural way and is distressed, Frank takes this as further defiance and started whining. The imagery used to describe the noise she makes is truly distressing:
‘like a collared bitch’
He sees her as an animal, like the ‘spaniel’ referred to earlier in the story. He thinks people ‘sentimentalise children and animals’ which shows he brackets them in the same category.
When Linda is obviously in distress, Frank’s aggressive nature is seen again. Although Linda does not actually intervene, we hear Frank saying:
‘LINDA I SAID DON’T MAKE ME SHOUT I said. I don’t want to have to force you. BUT SHE’LL STAY IN THERE UNTIL SHE’S SORRY’.
We see now that Frank is obviously abusive to Linda also as he is threatening her with force. The lack of punctuation and the use of capitalisation shows that Frank is ranting and shouting. The reader has now lost complete sympathy with Frank and sees him as a bullying abuser. We have, as yet, no idea as to the true horrific lengths to which he is prepared to go.
Frank directly addresses the reader with a statement that he finds shocking. He tells us that Kimberley started scratching the door. His aghast expression is continued:
‘I swear with her SCRATCHING DO YOU KNOW WHAT SHE DID? She CLAWED THE CUPBOARD DOOR with her NAILS SHE CLAWED THROUGH TO THE WOOD.’
The during this particular rant, the reader is horrified and stunned by the next revelation:
‘you can’t tell me that’s NORMAL scraping her NAILS on the PAINT till they bled you can’t tell me that is NORMAL FOR A SIX-YEAR-OLD CHILD’.
Up until this point, although the reader is horrified by the punishment meted out by Frank, we have been able to see why he might have behaved in this manner – he may have been provoked and overreacted in the extreme, but when the final revelation about the girl’s age is given to us, we see him for the horrific monster he is.
He continues his abuse, burning her with cigarettes, wondering at how she doesn’t cry out, until his final punishment.
At the end of the story, we are left with the scene of Frank holding Kimberley over a bath of boiling water. The horrific image is left incomplete – we don’t know if he throws her in or not. The final lines of the story tail off down the page:
“Those big blue eyes still staring up like butter
wouldn’t
melt”
The imagery implies that although butter wouldn’t melt, Kimberley certainly could in a bath of hot water. The spacing of the words shows the length of time they spend staring at each other and the lack of a full stop at the end shows that the action continues. We, the reader, are left shocked, devastated and ultimately hoping that someone will intervene, someone would stop the cruelty. The reader knows that ‘someone had to’.