SCHOOL HAD STARTED back on 7 January, and I had gone back to being the “other” Saffyre Maddox, the one who showed up in the classroom every morning clean and fresh, hair neatly tied back, some mascara, some lip gloss. It wasn’t so much that I actively wanted to look nice, it was more that if I didn’t look nice, people would worry, they’d ask me questions, the pastoral-care woman would pull me into her office and expect me to tell her what was wrong with me. So I did my schoolwork. I traded in gossip. I smiled at boys but kept them at arms’ length. It was like I was Superman or something, with my two different personas. By day I was Saffyre Maddox, aloof but popular, mild-mannered A-grade student. By night I was a kind of nocturnal animal, like the human equivalent of a fox. My superpower was invisibility. There in the playground at school, or in the sixth-form common room, all eyes were on me, but at night I did not exist, I was the Invisible Girl. Invisibility was my favorite state of existence.
The confrontation with Harrison had been horrific on many levels. The sound of my name on his lips. The same lips he’d licked while he’d done what he’d done to me when I was a child. The size of him, no longer a child, but a man, an adult. The way he appeared in the half darkness, dressed in black. The thought of him out there now, just being able to go where he wanted and do what he wanted. And that was the root of it really. That was what turned my head from self-harm to Harrison-harm. I felt like we were occupying the same territory, the same ground. We were both invisible, but we’d seen each other, like two foxes facing off in the muted streetlight. I thought, I do not want to hurt myself anymore because of what this person did to me. I thought, I want to hurt him.
Now, wherever I went, I looked for him.
I knew it would be only a matter of time until our paths crossed again.
Mid-January. Cold as cold can be. I had fallen asleep in the plot of land across from Roan that now felt very much like it was mine. I rarely slept, and when I did it was fast and immediate and hard and deep, usually for ten minutes, maybe sometimes as much as half an hour. Noises always woke me. Every noise. But this noise didn’t wake me. The sound of a young man entering the empty plot at two o’clock in the morning and sitting behind the digger just out of sight of me and my little campsite.
He didn’t know I was there. I didn’t know he was there. And then I was wide-awake and, with that strange intake of breath that accompanies a sudden wakening, I was upright. I looked up, and I saw a face and it was a face I knew.
“Oh my fucking God.” The boy clutched his heart. “What the fuck?”
I said, “Josh?”
He said. “Yes. Fuck. How do you know my name?”
And I was fuddled by sleep and not thinking straight and I said, “I know your dad.” I pulled my sleeping bag high up around me, suddenly cold.
“How do you know my dad?”
“I was in therapy with him.”
“Whoa,” he said. “Really?”
“Yeah,” I said. “More than three years.”
“So why are you sleeping here?” said Josh.
“It’s a long story,” I said.
“Are you homeless?”
“No. I’ve got a home.”
“So why…? Is it something to do with my dad?”
Where to start with that one? I did not have a clue.
“Yeah,” I began. “Kind of. Or at least, it started off being about your dad. And now it’s about loads of other things. I just like being outdoors; it’s like I can’t breathe with a roof over my head.”
“You’re claustrophobic?”
“Yeah. Maybe I am. But only at night.”
“Do you sleep here every night?”
“Yeah. I do now.”
“So, was it you,” said Josh, “here, on New Year’s Eve?”
“Yeah,” I said. “I was here. I was hiding. In the corner over there.”
I didn’t know what made me so open to his questions. There was something about him, something pure, untainted. I looked at him and I thought he would understand me.
“So you were listening to our conversation?”
“Yeah. You and your friend were going to unmask yourselves. Or something.”
“Ha. Yeah. That’s right. I think we were maybe a bit wasted.”
“I thought maybe you were planning a school shooting.”
“Er,” said Josh wryly, “no.”
“Good. So, what were you talking about?”
“Just how we were going to change it up. You know, stop being invisible. Make ourselves ‘relevant.’ ”
“Fuck that,” I said. “Seriously. Fuck that. Don’t be seen. Stay behind the scenes. That’s the place to be.”
We fell silent for a moment and then Josh came around the digger and sat down with me.
“So my dad? Was he any good? I mean, was he a good therapist?”
I shrugged. “Yeah, in some ways. But in others, no. Like, I enjoyed our sessions and he did stop me from self-harming. But he left something behind. Inside me. It’s still there.”
“Something? Like what?”
“Like a cancer. It’s like he got rid of the symptoms, but he left the tumor.”
“That’s shit,” says Josh. Then he says, “I hate my dad.”
His words stopped me in my tracks. “Really? Why?”
“Because he’s having a fucking affair.”
“Whoa. How do you know that?”
“Because I’ve seen him. He flaunts it. And my mum’s too much of a soft touch to see what’s right under her nose. They nearly split up last year, and I reckon that was because of an affair, too.”
“What do you mean, you’ve seen him?”
“I mean, I’ve seen him. With this girl. All, like, touching her hair and stuff. Not even trying to hide it. And it’s like… My mum is the best person in the whole world. She’s so sweet and loving and kind; she’d do anything for anyone. And he just plays about like he can do whatever he wants and then come home and she’ll have cooked him a nice meal and she’ll listen to him moaning on about how stressful his job is. And I just wonder, you know, how someone whose job it is to look after people, to fix their minds, to nurture and cure, how they can do what he does to another human being every single day of his life. It makes me sick.”
I had so much I wanted to say. But I just tucked my hands between my knees to warm them up and stayed silent.
“And that’s one of the things I want to change this year. Like I was saying on New Year’s Eve. No more Mr. Nice Guy.”
“What are you going to do?”
His head dropped. He said, “I don’t know.”
“She’s called Alicia Mathers,” I said.
His head shot up. “What?”
“The woman your dad’s having an affair with. Her name’s Alicia Mathers. I know where she lives.”
He blinked. “How?”
“I’ve been watching too. I’ve seen them. He met her at work. She’s a psychologist, like him. They started dating in the summer. They spent the night at a hotel just before Christmas. She lives in Willesden Green. She’s twenty-nine. She’s got two degrees and a PhD. She’s pretty smart.”
He didn’t speak for a moment. Then he looked at me with those eyes, so like Roan’s eyes, and said, “Who are you? Are you real?”
I laughed.
“You’re really pretty,” he said.
I said, “Thank you.”
“Am I dreaming you? I don’t get this. I don’t get any of this.”
“We’ve met before.”
He said, “What? When?”
“Last year. You did a couple of beginners’ classes at the martial-arts place. I spoke to you in the changing room. Do you remember?”
“Yes,” he said. “Yes. I do. You had pink hair then. Didn’t you?”
“Yeah. That was me.”
“Did you know who I was? Even then?”
“Yeah. Yeah, I did.”
“Is that why you spoke to me?”
“Yup.”
“I was so embarrassed. You were so pretty.”
“Yeah, you can stop saying that now.”
“Sorry.”
I smiled. I didn’t mind. There was something so easy about the boy. “It’s OK,” I said, “I’m only joking. Why did you stop going? To the dojo?”
He said, “I didn’t. I still go. I just changed my class times. I go on Fridays now.”
“Are you any good?”
He said, “Yeah. Green belt. So, you know, getting there.”
“Remember you told me you wanted to be able to defend yourself? That’s why you were taking lessons? You told me you’d been mugged?”
He nodded.
“What happened?”
He put his hand into his pocket and pulled out a little bag. As he talked he constructed a spliff on his thigh.
“This guy,” he said, pulling out a Rizla from a paper packet. “Came up behind me. Last summer. Just down there.” He pointed down the hill. “Put his arm round my throat, quite tight. Said, ‘What you got?’ Put his hands in all my pockets. I tried to push him off but he said, ‘I’ve got a knife. OK?’ Then he took my phone and my earbuds and my debit card and he pushed me, really hard, so I nearly fell onto my face and I grabbed hold of the wall to stop myself falling, and then he ran. And I just stood there. My heart pounding. It was, like, the scariest, scariest thing. And I didn’t do anything. I just stood there and let him take my stuff. Stuff my mum and dad worked really hard to pay for. Stuff he had no right to. And it makes me so fucking angry. I just feel like now, if I saw him, I would kill him.”
His words hit me hard. I drew in my breath. “I know exactly how you feel.”
And then—and how weird is this, after three years of taxpayers paying for Roan to fix me in his warm room at the Portman, after all those hours and hours and hours of talking and talking and talking but never saying the one thing that really mattered?—I finally found the words to tell someone about Harrison John.
“Something like that happened to me,” I said. “Someone took something from me. And I let them.”
“What was it?”
I let a beat of silence pass. Then I talked.
“When I was ten years old, this boy in the year above groomed me. He was the tallest boy in the year. He had two younger sisters in the school who he was really protective of. He was naughty, but the teachers all loved him. And he kind of picked me out. When we played dodgeball at breaktime he’d tell the other year sixes to get out of my way. To let me have my turn. And he’d give me these looks like: ‘Don’t worry, I’ve got your back.’ He made me feel really special. And then one day…” I stopped briefly to step back from a wave of emotion. “One day he beckoned me into this little section of the playground where the youngest children usually played, but they were all in their classroom or something, and he said, ‘Do you want to see something magic? And I said, ‘Yes, yes!’ and I followed him in and he said, ‘You need to squat down, like this,’ and he squatted down to show me and I did what he said and I was looking up at him like, ‘Yes! I’m squatting! Now show me the magic!’ And then he… It was so quick. He inserted his fingers inside me and it hurt, it really hurt, and I said, ‘Ow!’ And he said, ‘It’s OK. It only hurts the first time. After that the magic happens.’ He stroked my hair, and then he took his hand away from me and he showed it to me, and he smiled and he said, ‘It’ll be better next time. I promise.’ ”
It felt like a belt had been squeezed around my gut, and with every word I spoke, it was loosened a bit. By the time I got to the end I felt weirdly like I could breathe. Even though my eyes were full of tears and my head ached with the sadness of that little girl waiting for the magic that never ever came, I could breathe. Three times I let him do that to me. And then school finished for the summer and Harrison left, and I never saw him again. But he stayed, inside my head, inside my DNA, my marrow, my breath, my blood, in every single part of me. He stayed. My tumor.
Josh licked the Rizla and stuck it down, twisted the tip, stuck in a tiny roll of cardboard to make a filter. He reached back into his coat pocket and brought out a lighter.
“What a fucking bastard,” he said. “That’s just so sick. So sick.”
“Yeah. It was. But guess what? I saw him the other day. I saw the boy who did that to me.”
“Oh my God,” said Josh. “Shit. Where?”
“There.” I pointed down the hill. “He was just coming up from the Finchley Road. I was going down. He said my name. He recognized me and he said my name and it was like… It felt like the playground all over again. Like he had the right to me in some sort of way, like he was entitled to me, to my body, to my name. You know? And for a day or two I felt myself going backward, like I’d climbed the top of a mountain and then lost my footing and started slipping back and was trying to find something to grab hold of to stop me slipping but there was nothing there. And then I found something.”
Josh looked at me wide-eyed, his face lit with orange shadows from the flame of the lighter he was using to light the spliff. “What?”
“Revenge. I found revenge.”
“Oh my God. What did you do?”
“Nothing. Not yet. But I just know that that’s the only way for me now. The only way to get him out of my DNA. I need to hurt him.”
Josh brought the spliff to his lips and inhaled. He narrowed his eyes and he nodded. “You really do,” he said.
I glanced at him quickly. I’d just put something into words that had been buried away so far inside me that I hadn’t even known what it was until I’d actually said it. I needed to know what it looked like to another person.
“You think?”
“Yeah. Totally. He’s probably still out there abusing people to this day. If he was doing this when he was eleven, getting away with it, then…”
I looked at Josh again. He offered me the spliff. I shook my head.
And then we both turned at a sound from the undergrowth. Two amber dots of light. The shimmer of red pelt. A snout held to the air. I put my hand into the outside pocket of my rucksack for the dog treats I now kept in there all the time. I opened up the packet toward the fox, and he came.
I laid the treats out around us, and we watched as he picked each one up in turn, never once looking at us.
“I want to help you,” said Josh. “Help you get your revenge. Please. Can I help you?”
The fox sat down and looked at my bag expectantly. His tongue darted out and he licked his lips.
I looked at Josh.
I said, “Yes. Please.”