Morgan

I’m locked in my bedroom, being punished for the rice.

Mum said, ‘I would never have dared waste food. Never.’

I said, ‘It’s not a waste. There’s always loads of rice because someone keeps leaving it outside our gate and you let Dad out to bring it in, but we never talk about it. I ask, but you won’t tell me.’

She said, ‘I don’t want to talk about rice, and you, you’re giving me a headache – what do you mean, hungry? I’m hungry, my family only had two rooms, between six of us – no room in there for me, not for anything I might be hungry for … broken hand-me-downs—’

I said, ‘I’m not a child. You’ve moved the age. It was eighteen. I am eighteen.’

She said, ‘It wasn’t. It was always twenty-one. You’re too immature to leave home. You’re making me feel nauseous. Is this what you want? That rice is disgusting. Congealed. I feel sick.’

How often she tells me how I make her feel.

She yanked me into the kitchen, handed me a bucket and a cloth and walked out. I cleaned the rice off the table and it took a while because it had set like glue. I wasn’t sure what to do with it all, so I took the grille off the drain just outside the back door and pushed it down there. It filled up the drain and there was still some rice left. So I filled the bucket from the well and poured it in. It glugged through the rice, which sunk a bit in the drain. Not enough. So I wrapped my hand in a towel and pressed it down to make room for more, and the towel felt like a slug. I poured more water in, and more rice, more water and more rice, till all the rice had gone.

The drain might be blocked.

Mum came back into the kitchen with Dad when I was looking at how shiny the table was. Neither of them spoke. They both hauled me up the stairs, one arm each, pushed me into my bedroom and locked the door.

I didn’t speak either. Because it doesn’t matter. It happens all the time.

I stare out of my bedroom window. On the hill in the distance is the tall building with the bell tower. Sometimes it seems newly constructed, perfect. Other times, when the wind blusters and the sky turns charcoal, it’s more like a ruin, the ghost of a house.

My bedroom is the smallest room in our house. There’s nowhere to hide things, even if I managed to steal anything of use. In here, I have: my books, a single bed, one table, one chair, my old dresses of Mum’s that she’s taken in, my rags, a tiny pair of nail scissors and a hairbrush.

Other rooms, I’m kept away from. The room Mum builds furniture in has hammers, saws, screwdrivers … all the tools she needs to create furniture of beauty and function, but the same tools I’d use to break my way out.

The high fence outside, the fence that runs all the way around our house, has only one gate. The gate is kept padlocked. And Mum has the only key. It swings from an old charm bracelet that she never takes off her wrist.

She said for years I could have my own padlock key when I was eighteen. That she’d get Dad to go to the smithy and get one cut for me. And I’ve counted the passing of years and months and days, imagining my eighteenth birthday, when I’d walk to the gate, my hand outstretched, my fingertips clasped on the key, unlock the padlock and walk away.

But my eighteenth birthday was three months and twelve days ago and I still haven’t been outside. Because Mum changed her mind. So she told me she’d never made that promise. She said, ‘I just wouldn’t. Doesn’t even sound like me. I’d worry too much. You don’t want me to worry, it fills me with …’ She held her chest, as if she couldn’t breathe. Then she narrowed her eyes and said, ‘You wouldn’t want to make me feel like that.’

After her mind had changed, and my birthday had gone, I tried to dig my way out under the fence with a bread knife. In five weeks I’d only dug down about a foot, a tiny bit at a time. I hid the hole under a plant pot.

Then a stormy wind blew the plant pot over and the knife went blunt and my mother found the hole and cried and raged in her room and my father disappeared in there with her, and when they came out they hid the knives till they realised that meant I couldn’t cook, so they gave me just the one, watched me chop vegetables with it, and then took it away.

By the time they trusted me enough to give me back the knives, or didn’t want to watch me making their meals any more, I’d decided to steal the padlock key when she was sleeping. The night I made my first attempt, their bedroom door was locked.

It was locked the next night, and the next, and the next.

The night after that, I tried again, but a small square of white paper was pushed out under the door, and it said in her handwriting: ‘I’m cleverest.’

I realised then, she’d decided to think of everything.

One night last week, I saw my twin sisters steal down the stairs to the basement. The next night, I went down the stairs. At the back of the basement are three rooms: one for the coffin-building, one for the office where my father writes all the deaths in his book and the other for the preparation of bodies. In the coffin-building room there was a hole that the twins had started to dig in the back wall. It had been boarded over, roughly. My mother’s handwriting was smeared in pink paint over three planks she’d hammered across it: ‘Morgan. You will never think one step ahead. I know you better than you think.’

I didn’t bother telling her it was the twins. When they were really small, the twins joined in my games. Before they learned that they could play more interesting games when alone with each other. The babies they’d been when I carried them, one in each arm, the toddlers they became, one attached to each of my legs, have now become inseparable. In my parent’s eyes, they are obedient little girls. In mine, they are far too quiet, and they tell one another’s lies a little too well.

I went into their room and asked them about the hole in the basement. They gazed up at me, holding hands, and said in rehearsed voices, ‘It was a tunnel. For you. It was meant to be a surprise.’ When I told them I didn’t believe them, they looked at each other’s eyes in silence, the kind of looking that they can get lost in for whole days, or until they get hungry.

Since then, I haven’t thought of another escape plan to try.

Other than the one I’ve got now.

The one where I annoy my mother so much she’ll want me to leave.

But I can’t annoy her tonight because I’m locked in my room till my family get hungry and remember that no one else wants to cook. I don’t mind being in here, because my books are locked in with me.

I am reading reading reading, locked in the stories.

I’m a wicked daughter, a drunken witch, a terrible scientist, a king with a severed hand, a resentful angel, a statue of a golden prince, the roaring wind, an uninspired alchemist, a fantastic lover who has only one leg, a stage magician with glittery nails, a shivery queen with a box of Turkish sweets, a prostitute wearing poisoned lipstick, a piano player whose hands are too big, a raggedy grey rabbit, a murderer with metal teeth, a spy with an hourglass figure …

I am eighteen years old and my real life is here locked inside these books.

My pretend life is here, locked in, with my family.

I breathe on my bedroom window and write in the condensation:

WITCH REQUIRED,
PREFERABLY WITH BROOMSTICK.
ENTRAPPED FEMALE IN NEED OF
ESCAPOLOGY LESSONS.
PLEASE APPLY WITHIN.