She told herself that whatever was coming, it was going to be worse than a cut hand. She told herself that she didn’t have a lot of time. She had only as long as he took with Lorraine.
She hit the window again, harder this time, and then she really went for it and her hand went smashing through, one jagged peak tearing into her forearm, causing her to cry out in shock and pain. Desperate, she stuffed the bloody T-shirt into her mouth to stifle her own cries. She stood stock-still, listening. Somewhere in the house, she could hear someone moving around, a creaking, a heavy tread on the floorboards.
Miriam held her breath. Listening, praying. She prayed he hadn’t heard her, that he wouldn’t come downstairs. She prayed and prayed, tears seeping from her eyes, the smell of her own blood in her nostrils; she prayed that he would not come for her.
It was still light out. Miriam ran to the car first, but he’d taken the key from the ignition. She ran on. She ran along the winding dirt road, blood dripping from the cuts to her arm and her torso where she’d scraped herself climbing through the window. Blood ran down her neck and her face; it oozed from the wound on her scalp where he’d pulled out her hair.
After a while, she was too tired to run, so she walked instead. She still seemed a long way from the main road; she hadn’t remembered the drive to the farmhouse being this long. She wondered if she might have taken a wrong turn. But she couldn’t remember a turn, couldn’t remember any junction at all; there was this road and only this road and it seemed to go on and on, and no one would come.
It was dark by the time she heard thunder. She looked up, at the cloudless sky, at the bright stars above, and realized it wasn’t thunder at all, it was a car. Her knees buckled with the relief. Someone was coming! Someone was coming! Joy clouded her mind, only for a brief moment before a howling gale of cold fear blasted the clouds away. The car was coming from behind her, not from the main road but from the farm, and she started to run, blindly, off the road. She scrambled over a barbed wire fence, cutting herself again in the process, and flung herself down into a ditch. She heard the car’s gears grind as it slowed, its lights illuminating the space above her. It passed.
Miriam lay in the ditch for a while after that; she couldn’t really be sure for how long. Eventually, though, she got up, and she climbed back over the fence, the flesh of her arms and legs and torso torn, her knickers soaked with urine, her mouth sticky with blood. She started to run, she fell, she got up. She kept going. After a while, she reached a petrol station. The man there called the police.
They were too late.
The One Who Got Away
She has been crying for a while now, this girl, crying out. She calls for help and bangs on the door until her fists bleed. She says her friend’s name. Quietly at first and then louder, and louder still, over and over, she calls her friend’s name until it echoes through the house and silences the birds and silences everything but her pitiful cries.
In this silence, a door slams and the sound of it is deafening, earth-shattering, a sonic boom. Louder than anything the girl has ever heard in her life.
Her crying stops. She hears movement, footfalls, quick and urgent and coming her way. She scrabbles backward, falling, twisting, ferreting into the corner of the room, where she presses her back to the wall, braces herself with either hand. Bares her teeth.
The footsteps slow as he approaches the door. She hears the scrape of boots against the stone, the rattle of the key in the lock, a click as it turns. Her blood is roaring and she is ready. She is ready for him now. She hears him sigh. Hush, now, big girl. Hush, now, ugly girl. It’s not your turn. There is another rattle, another click, and her blood subsides, her insides seem to shift, a wave breaking a dam. Hot piss drips onto the floor.
As he leaves, he hums a tune, and in a voice full of tears, he sings
What I took from her, I won’t give back
TWENTY-ONE
Carla moved through her house, room to room, checking and rechecking wardrobes, cupboards, the backs of doors, anywhere she might have hung the bag with the Saint Christopher in it. Light-headed with exhaustion, she moved slowly and carefully, as if through mud. Every now and again, her phone rang. Every time it did, she looked at the screen and she saw that it was Theo and sometimes she hovered her finger over the green button, she willed herself to accept the call, but every time she wavered at the last minute, either replacing the phone in her pocket or pressing red instead.
What would she say to him if she answered now? Would she ask him the question straight out? What were you doing with my sister? What were you doing at her home? Those weren’t the questions she really wanted to ask, though. She hadn’t formulated the real question yet; she hadn’t allowed herself to do so.