So that’s how it feels to kill a human being. I didn’t know. In many ways, it was more upsetting to kill a pig.
I follow the road back to the motorway roundabout. It’s not as far as I’d thought. Time and distance expand in times of stress. It felt as though we were driving for ten minutes after he turned off the motorway, but it turns out that it’s only maybe a quarter-mile.
It’s nearly midnight. At this time of year I have the cover of darkness for another seven hours, before I will need to be in the sanctuary of my flat, no one looking at my rainbow face and wondering. Though maybe, if they do, they’ll just think I’m a Hallowe’en stop-out dressed as a vagrant or a deranged serial killer. My nose feels strange, as though it’s been popped out of alignment, one of my eyes is already beginning to close, and I can feel my split lip swelling. Only a mile and three-quarters to cover every hour. It should be easy.
I killed a man tonight. Not exactly in cold blood. I should feel something, but I don’t. Perhaps what Uri’s asking of me won’t be so hard after all. Especially if I start with Jaivyn. Jaivyn will be more like practice, the way the man was practice.
The others? I don’t know.
What I will do to keep you safe, baby. You must be the size of a kitten now. I wonder if you felt it all, buried as you are in the cushioning of my internal organs? You must at least have felt the adrenaline, must have jarred and bounced as he dragged me, dropped me.
You must trust me to keep you safe. I will do anything to keep you safe.
A road, another roundabout, another bridge. Two a.m. and I doubt I’ve gone more than two miles. I slide down the bank, jog across the tarmac with my head bent down, scramble up the other side, and in the adjustment from streetlight to moonlight through shadow I put my foot on something that rolls, wrench my ankle and hit my bad leg on something hard as I go down, and a supernova explodes inside my head. Something hard and sharp has stabbed straight into my scar, and the pain is so intense I can do nothing more than whimper. God, don’t let it have broken open. I roll onto my side and curl up in the foetal position.
I will not survive if I am this weak. We will die if I am this weak.
I breathe. In through the nose, out through the mouth, the way Vita taught us. And eventually I can open my eyes, and see that I’ve hit my leg on an old water tank, dumped among the stinging nettles. Hard edges, but not sharp, thank God. I lift my hands from where they’re clutching my thigh. The blue of my leggings is still uniform. A streak of mud on the grey marl of my hoodie sleeve. But no blood. No more blood, I mean.
I sit up. I hurt so much. Grazes and bruises, and now this. I think I’m still on the eastern outskirts of Slough. I will never make it to Hounslow before day. If I’m not careful, I won’t make it at all.
My walk lasts well into daylight. As we get closer to London the traffic builds and the motorway splits and splits again and I’m forced off it for fear of getting mown down, forced to use footbridges hundreds of hobbling yards up the subsidiary roads. My ankle throbs and my thigh throbs, and every piece of me is pain, and a blister in my other boot sings out a sharp note in my brain.
Fields give way to the remains of villages, built up, filled in, unloved and shuttered, their street plans a blow to my fantasy of walking straight home. Judging from the map on my new phone, staying to the left of the airport is pretty much all I can hope for. A plane passes over while it’s still dark, cruising in to land. Then another, then another, and then the villages join up into one long sprawl of roads and mean concrete houses and frustrating cul-de-sacs, and the lights start to come on, upstairs at first and then on the ground, at kitchen level. People start to emerge onto their weedy concrete parking spaces and notice me. Their eyes look up and see my face, and look hurriedly away.
They think I’m a Homeless, like the man outside Iceland.
I tighten the cord on my hoodie to cover as much of my face as I can, and concentrate on putting one foot in front of the other. My blister is bleeding now, and that’s something of a relief, for at least it lends a slickness to the lining of the boot. But with each step I’m getting weaker – my thigh jars with every step and my ankle is screaming and I have to grind my teeth to hold in my keening.
I get to Bath Road at half-past nine, and I start to weep with relief as I pass the little café and smell the bacon, the coffee. We can lie down soon, baby. Lie down and take the pain away.
And then I see my mother sitting on my doorstep, and for a moment my heart leaps. And then I realise that it’s my aunt, and my hopes implode.