I’m ten and I’ve chopped all the hair off my foster sister’s Barbie. I’ve used a black felt-tip pen to colour in her nails and I’ve smudged half moons under her eyes. Then I tell my foster sister that this isn’t Barbie, it’s Hormonal Harriet, who’s addicted to sleeping pills. One night, Harriet took so many of them she didn’t wake up for a week. She slept for so long her starving dog ate her left foot before she came to.
My foster sister runs screaming to her parents before I can close the scissors around Harriet’s plastic foot.
(And yes, ten is young to know the word ‘hormonal’, but what can I say? I’m good at eavesdropping on my foster mother when she’s bitching about her colleagues.)
I still have a few customised Barbies in my flat. I pinned one to my headboard like a voodoo doll. Not because I like Barbies. I’m not sure why I keep them around. I suppose they’re a joke but at least they’re in on it. Sometimes they feel more human than the people I shadow.
For a moment, I imagine I’m sinking into the worn mattress that came with the flat. The jar of bottle caps by the bed. A torn Stevie Nicks poster on the wall. Small touches, little things to make it mine instead of a cardboard box.
The mattress is solid cement, though, and I’m not in my flat.
I snap to, coughing into the floor. I must’ve passed out. A person can only take so many knocks before the shutters come down. My eyes scratch open and my lips peel over my teeth so I can draw a ragged breath, tracing a hand over my ribs. As I raise myself up off the floor, the memory of where I am is a fresh blow to the chest.
Indistinct shapes surround me, motionless and reeking.
Uneasiness skitters like a spider in my mind. It’s been there for as long as I can remember, the spider, huddled in a dark corner, watching, listening, brooding on the things it sees.
The nearest corpse looks like it’s laughing at me. It’s lying directly under the grate in the ceiling and a net of grey light lies over it. I can’t believe I didn’t land on it when Nicotine Man threw me in here. The corpse seems to think that’s funny, too.
She.
The corpse used to be a she. I can tell from the dress, which is dirty and ripped, but has flowers on it and probably used to be pretty.
I ease myself up from the floor, then scoot back into the shadows. The wall props me up and I hug my knees to my chest. Everything hurts. My wrists remember ropes and I caress the bruised skin, then stop because it stings too much. I grit my teeth and the jag of pain is a reminder that one of them is broken.
With faint relief, I realise the stink of bodies doesn’t bother me as much as it did earlier. Funny how quickly you get used to something, though it might just be that the sight of them is worse.
I count ten. Ten bodies. There could be more beyond the light.
The nearest one is still laughing at me and I realise I’m the punchline. I follow people for a living but death follows me. Everybody I’ve ever been close to has died.
That’s what my mother left me with. The curse.
It’s so quiet I’m embarrassed to breathe. The shapes in the dark must think I’m mocking them.
How long did it take for her to die, the woman in the flower dress? She’s lying on her front like she’s sunbathing but her head’s to the side and her dried-out eye sockets gawp at me.
Are they going to keep me in here until I’m like her?
No, they need me alive. They think I have the Crook Spear, whatever that is. Why does he think that? The guy in the kimono mentioned my mother – he talked like he knew her. I’ve never met anybody who knew my mother and curiosity nettles the spider in my mind. The stories I’ve read about her, it’s not inconceivable that she knew somebody like him. The kind of person with a corpse pit.
Is she the reason I’m in here? Miles away from the cruddy flat I call home? All these years later, she’s still fucking up my life.
My life feels so far away. I wonder if Julian knows I’m missing. Would he track me down? Or would he shrug, put his feet up on the desk and say he knew I’d do a runner one day? That’s more likely. I’m just one of his paper cups attached to a piece of string. Who cares if one of the strings gets cut? He has a dozen more.
What about Bolt? My gut shrivels and I try not to think about him. I shouldn’t be thinking about him anyway.
I breathe deeply and choke on the stench, pushing thoughts of Bolt and Julian and my mother away, drawing a curtain over them. Especially my mother.
It’s going to be okay. They won’t kill me until I tell them where the spear is.
Unless they decide I don’t have it. Then what? I’m dead and funky like everybody else down here, smelling like the worst kind of meat you forgot was at the back of the fridge. Which is poetic justice, right? I’ve killed so many people in my nineteen years I was always going to end up somewhere like this. It was only a matter of time. I almost start laughing with the she-corpse.
A scuffling sound freezes me where I am. I wait, expecting a rat to dart across the floor. Or maybe there are bugs. A few of the bodies look like they’ve been here long enough to become maggot farms.
Another scuffle and this time I see where it’s coming from. In the far corner, a slumped form. It’s too dark for me to really see, but it’s definitely a person. A male person, I think.
Somebody else is alive down here?
I fight the impulse to creep closer. He’s down here, which means he did something to piss off Butterfly Man. He could be dangerous. I was thrown down here for something I didn’t do, though. Perhaps Butterfly Man makes a habit out of imprisoning innocent people.
But… this guy could know something about him. He might even know who took the Crook Spear. He could be my ticket to freedom.
Yeah, that’s a lot of coulds.
‘When did you get here?’
His voice is as weak as parched leaves.
‘Just now,’ I say.
‘Lucky you.’
‘How long you been down here?’ Talking makes my head pound.
‘Long enough to know it won’t be for much longer.’
He winces. As my eyes get used to the dark, I see how skinny he is. I can’t tell how old, but the voice is young. He sounds a bit like Troll. He’s not wearing any shoes and one of his grubby feet scuffs the floor, as if he wants to move, but it’s too much and he gives up.
‘What did you do?’ I can’t help asking.
‘Nothing.’
‘Who is that guy?’
His eyes are hazy dots in the gloom.
‘Kimono? Butterflies? Bad case of cataracts?’
I nod.
‘You don’t know who that is?’
There’s no answer to that. Should I know? I feel stupid, like somebody who’s never heard of Pat Benatar or George Bush.
‘Thought everyone knew about him,’ Skinny says. He sounds more surprised than judgemental, as if he didn’t realise there was another world outside of whatever crime ring he’s part of. ‘You really are lucky. Or, you were. Must’ve done something to get his goat. What did you do?’
‘Nothing.’
His scrawny body convulses with laughter.
‘What’s his name?’ I ask.
Skinny stares at me. Or, I think he does. I realise we’re talking over the woman under the grate and I feel bad for her. I wonder if Skinny talked to her before she died.
‘Reverend Mara.’
‘Reverend? He didn’t look like one.’ I say it before I can stop myself. Of course he’s not a goddamn reverend. It’s probably a nickname or a title. If he’s the boss of some crime syndicate, it stands to reason he answers to cardinals and – maybe somewhere – a pope.
‘Might as well be one,’ Skinny says. ‘The way he thinks he’s God’s gift to London.’
‘He’s some kind of gangster?’
‘Wow, you really don’t know anything.’
I’d be angry if Skinny didn’t look so messed up. If we weren’t in this pit, I’d have smacked him. Of course, if we weren’t in this pit, we wouldn’t be having this conversation.
Mara’s face flashes before my eyes. Beautiful and chiselled. When I first glimpsed his dark outline on the sofa, I thought it was her. My mother.
She lies with her mother’s tongue, he’d said.
How did Mara know my mother? Did she work for him? Were they friends? Did she help him pick out kimonos? Mara’s not how I ever pictured gangsters. I imagined guys in hats, smoking cigars, fingers hard with gold. What’s Mara’s story? You grow up in London, you see the different ways people live, none any better or worse than the other, mostly. Mara wears dresses, big whoop, but to do that in his world, a world run by angry men… That takes balls.
Despite myself, I shudder at the memory of his flashing nails. He had the deranged aura of a desperate man. Desperation makes people do crazy things. I should know.
Skinny’s gone quiet in his corner.
‘Hey,’ I hiss.
No reply.
He might have passed out. Or died. I think I hear faint breathing on his side of the pit. Maybe he’s playing dead. It doesn’t make much difference to me.
‘Hey, you still alive?’ I ask.
No reply.
Fine. Be that way.
I just managed to get comfortable against the wall, but I have to move, even though my limbs feel so heavy it’s like they’re coated in lead. Grimacing, I prise myself up, my boots scratching the cement floor loudly. I peer up through the grate, but there’s no movement. I don’t know if we’re being watched, but I’ve got a feeling Mara’s guards are confident in my confinement. Nobody else down here escaped.
There has to be a way out. I just have to find the flaw in the pit. Something tiny, maybe. A mouse hole or an opening into the sewer. I’ll Shawshank my way out of here somehow.
Moving must have disturbed the air down here because my nostrils are assaulted by a fresh wave of death-stench and I fight the bile, swallowing it down, trying not to think about the tiny molecules of dead skin and hair that must be floating around me in a putrid soup.
Breathing through my mouth, I trace the walls with my fingers, searching for anything that might give. The wall’s knobbly and flaky, but rock solid. If I had a pickaxe, it’d take a week to bust through.
Stepping over bodies, I keep searching.
Nothing nothing nothing.
Wall wall wall.
Frustration sets my jaw ticking. I’m almost at Skinny’s side when my fingers brush something different. Metal. My heart flutters and I don’t want to get ahead of myself but, as I forage the surface, I realise it’s a door. I tap it. Thunk. That’s one heck of a door.
‘It’s locked.’
I nearly jump out of my skin.
Skinny blinks up at me from his corner. ‘You don’t think I already tried that?’
I ignore him, exploring the rusty contours. None of the bolts are loose. They’re practically welded into the metal. What the hell was this cell used for before Mara and his mob moved in? Was it purpose-built by the Rev for his enemies?
My fingers find deep gouges in the door. Long, narrow furrows, like something tore at the metal, and I realise something probably did.
No way out through there. There must be something else. I eye Skinny as I go past. He’s too weak to move. Besides, what would he get out of attacking me? We’re in the same shitty predicament down here.
It’s a good thing I like the dark or I’d have lost it by now. I try not to imagine what it’d be like spending weeks locked in Mara’s pit. Slowly ripening, then rotting. My starving body eating its own flesh until I’m a withered skeleton, and then it’s impossible to move, impossible to breathe, and just like that I’ve become the girl in the flower dress.
The dark’s comforting. The shadows are an ally. I’m one of them and they embrace me like a sister.
My fingers discover something in the wall. I dab it, feeling something hard.
‘What you doing?’
‘Quiet.’
I work at the thing in the wall, cement crumbling around it. The object wobbles and I tease it out of the little hole it’s nestling in. I turn and hold it to the grate’s grey light.
A rusty nail twice as long as my index finger.
‘Jesus,’ Skinny breathes.
The girl in the flower dress grins.
So now I have a weapon.