The Inescapable Influence of Childhood Trauma and Parental Legacy in Rock Paper Scissors

Defining the Theme: Childhood Trauma as an Inescapable Inheritance in Rock Paper Scissors

In Rock Paper Scissors, Alice Feeney constructs a psychological thriller in which the past is not merely remembered but actively lived. The novel's central thematic claim is that childhood trauma and parental legacy are inescapable forces that shape adult identity, relationships, and choices. The wounds of childhood—whether inflicted by parents, by circumstance, or by a child's own actions—do not fade with time. They resurface in recurring nightmares, in the patterns of adult relationships, and in the stories characters tell about themselves. Characters in the novel are caught in a cycle: they either replicate their parents' failures or spend their lives trying to flee them, and neither path offers true escape. The past is not a closed chapter but a living presence that dictates the present.

Adam: The Boy Who Killed His Mother

Adam's story is the novel's most explicit exploration of childhood trauma. At thirteen, he lived in a council flat with his mother, who regularly entertained male visitors. The night she died, he stormed out in anger, met a girl in the park, and—after drinking, smoking, and kissing for the first time—was persuaded to steal a car. When the girl urged him to drive faster, he lost control and struck his mother, killing her and the family dog.

The consequences of that night shape every aspect of Adam's adult life. He does not drive and never learned how. He suffers recurring nightmares about the woman in the red kimono—the same garment his mother wore when a man was coming to stay. His prosopagnosia, or face blindness, meant he could not identify the girl in the car to police, and it also meant he could not recognize his mother's visitors. Amelia reflects that Adam's condition leaves him unable to know whether someone he knew was responsible for killing his mother. His inability to see faces compounds his trauma: he can never be certain who was responsible, and he blames himself because his mother was walking his dog—a task he was too lazy to do.

The most devastating twist is that Adam later married the girl from that night without ever recognizing her. In chapter 63, he recalls that he never learned the girl's name and was shocked to discover they were married. This is the novel's darkest illustration of how the past inescapably returns: Adam's childhood trauma literally walked back into his life in the form of his wife, and he was unable to see it.

Adam's guilt never leaves him. Even after the nightmares stop following his return from Scotland, he admits the guilt has never gone away. He still thinks about his mother every day. His adult behavior—his distrust of others, his refusal to drive, his nightmares—is a direct inheritance from that single night. His father's abandonment when Adam was a toddler adds another layer: Adam grew up with an absent father and a mother whose attention was divided among male visitors, leaving him with a deep well of anger and need.

Robin: The Daughter Who Fled Her Father

Robin's childhood was shaped by loss and silence. Her mother drowned in a claw-foot bath, and Robin has always believed her father, Henry Winter, was responsible. The world accepted the death as an accident, but Robin never did. Henry sent her to boarding school and removed almost every trace of her mother from the chapel they called home—the bathtubs were the first to go, followed by the kitchen items that reminded him of his dead wife.

Henry's legacy to Robin was twofold: neglect and dismissal. He thought throwing money at the problem would fix it, and he let her know from an early age that he did not think she could write. In her letter in chapter 57, Robin reflects that Henry's shoes were always too big to fill and that his words felt heavier and more permanent than her own thoughts. This is the parental legacy in its most corrosive form: a father's judgment that becomes an internal voice, eroding a child's confidence long into adulthood.

Robin's escape was physical—she ran away as soon as she was old enough and never wanted a penny of Henry's money—but the psychological legacy persisted. She became a writer anyway, and in doing so both repeated and transcended her father's path. Her English tutor sent a copy of her story to Henry, noting that a gift for storytelling clearly ran in the family. Robin's story was about a novelist who committed crimes in real life and wrote about them, always getting away with murder—a direct response to her suspicion that Henry killed her mother and wrote about it in his novel Drowning Your Sorrows.

Robin's adult relationships also bear the mark of her childhood. She took pity on Amelia at Battersea Dogs Home in the same way she took pity on abandoned animals—a pattern of care rooted in her own experience of feeling abandoned. And her revenge plot, tricking Adam and Amelia into coming to the chapel, is a carefully constructed act of agency that mirrors the crime fiction she grew up reading. As she writes in her letter, she spent a lifetime hiding inside stories: reading other people's as a child, writing her own as an adult.

Henry's Legacy: The Chapel as a Museum of Childhood

The chapel at Blackwater is the physical embodiment of parental legacy. It contains the dolls house Henry bought after Robin's mother died—a happy toy family to replace the broken real one, with the same two carved wooden figures in every room: an old man in a tweed jacket and a little girl in red, always holding hands. The dolls house is a lie made tangible: a perfect family that never existed, constructed by a father who could not face the reality of what he had done.

The child's bedroom in the chapel is even more revealing. The wallpaper, curtains, pillows, and duvet are covered in faded images of robins—Robin's namesake, and the bird her father whittled over the years, part of the robin's bird motif that runs through the novel. The blackboard carries the repeated chalk words