8

I’ve been watching the news almost constantly since it happened. That’s the wonderful thing about modern media. And its curse. Rolling twenty-four hours of people talking shite about stuff they don’t understand. Anything to fill the void. Half the press is convinced this is a terrorist attack, even though nothing about it really fits. I can still see the old geezer in the cab as it hurtled towards us. He wasn’t doing anything more suspicious than having a heart attack. Trying to avoid hitting people, not hit them.

They’ve named a few of the dead now. Not the driver yet, and not Maddy either. I’ve still got her scarf on, ends wrapped around my hands. It stinks, and the bits soaked in her blood have gone crusty now, but I’m not letting go. It’s my only anchor to reality at the moment, my brain still working through the shock. I can’t believe she’s gone, right at the moment when I’d just found her again. Fifteen years since I last saw her. Fifteen years since I burned down that house.

It was a big old place, hidden away in rolling parkland surrounded by forest. I’m not supposed to know, but I’ve pieced enough together to work out that it was in north Essex, not far from a village called Great Hallingbury. It could have been anywhere the sun shined and the rain fell for all I knew at the time. I was never allowed outside, spent most of my time in a tiny room somewhere up in the eaves. I was fed, kept clean, given a few toys to play with and colouring books to scribble in. There were others there, too, mostly boys like me, but a few girls. We weren’t allowed to play together, though, barely saw each other except in passing, led by a sour-face nurse along the plain corridors from bathroom to dining room to bedroom. A nod maybe, sometimes a word, though I didn’t really speak much back then. Never had the chance to. Mostly it was boring but safe enough.

But every so often the men would come.

I’d know they were coming by the way the nurse fussed over me. Made sure I was bathed and clean. Fresh clothes, no food after lunch and only water to drink. Then sometime in the evening I’d be taken to one of the big bedrooms downstairs. On the good days, the best days, I’d just be asked to undress and stand there while the man did something to himself. Those days were very rare.

I know what it is now that they made me do, and just thinking about it makes me angry. Angry at myself for letting it happen, even though I was only six years old so what the fuck else was I supposed to do? It always hurt, some times more than others. I learned early on not to cry if I could help it. Grin and bear it, soon enough it would be over. Usually the nurse would take me away after a while, bathe me, treat any injuries, put me to bed with a mug of hot milk that now I think about it was almost certainly laced with something strong enough to knock me out for a while. Then there’d be a week or so of healing, trying to forget, sitting alone and sobbing. And then the whole thing would start all over again.

After a while they started taking two of us at a time. That’s how I met Maddy.

I don’t know why they liked us together, Maddy and me. Maybe it was because she looked so innocent, with her hair cropped short like a boy, her clothes ever so slightly ruffled. She had a way of biting her lip that might set a pulse racing if she was a bit older, but at six it wasn’t really sexy at all. And yet week after week the men would have us both brought to them.

I didn’t understand it then. If I’m being honest, I still don’t understand it now. But I was grateful, in that pathetic way of beaten dogs given a scrap of food. Together, the experience was shared and somehow that made it worse but easier to bear, what they did to us, what they had us do to each other. And sometimes, all too seldom, whichever man it was whose lusts we had temporarily sated would fall asleep before the nurse came to fetch us. Before we could be separated and spirited away to our individual attic cells. I came to cherish those short moments, naked and shivering and hurt, when I could just cling to Maddy and she to me. We neither of us had much in the way of language, deprived of conversation in those formative years. But we had our ways, could speak well enough to make up tales of escape, promise that neither of us would ever leave without the other, cry and hug and wonder what we had done wrong to deserve this terrible, enduring punishment.

It was so much more than friendship that was forged in that terrible adversity. More than love, and certainly more than the sickening lusts that drove the men who abused us. Losing her now, after so long apart, feels like someone has cut me in half. Feels like I’m dead, too.

I need to get out of this room. I need to find that someone.

I need to make them pay.