Today feels different. Like I’ve woken in some parallel universe where everything is the same apart from the light that touches it. There’s an ache in my heart and my hand feels warm, like someone’s held it recently.
I turn over and pull the covers up and around my neck, curling into a ball. I reach forward and flick on the electric heater, which releases a soft brr as it kicks into life. I wait until my bones start to loosen in the warmth before throwing back the covers.
Tiger barrels into the room, just as I’m swinging my legs out of bed, and bounds onto the bed licking my face.
‘Good morning to you too.’ I run a hand over his soft ears, and he pushes himself into the palm of my hand, his slightly wet nose nuzzling my fingers. ‘Is it time for breakfast?’
I slot my feet into my slippers and grab my fleece dressing gown, wrapping it around my waist as I pad into the kitchen. The windowpane rattles as a train approaches, and the green plant pot with twisted dead flowers lightly taps the glass as it trundles past. It’ll be a freight train this time of morning; the commuter trains only run every hour. I look at the clock on the wall: half six, it’s still dark outside, but I can already tell it’s going to be a grey, miserable day.
I pull the window open anyway, despite the cold, just as the end of the train passes. It’s so close to my house, it’s like I could reach out and touch it, but they’ve recently put up a metal fence for safety.
Tiger barks at me for attention, slotting his face into my hands, his tail striking the back of my legs as he sits obediently next to me watching out the window, at the waterlogged marshes in the background, the tufts of white and the smell of manure.
‘Another day,’ I whisper to him.
I make a black coffee and sip it slowly, savouring it. This is my favourite part of the day, where everything ahead could change, anything could happen. I check the papers, the ones I get delivered to the doorstep, and everything I can read online. My morning ritual.
Tiger enjoys his breakfast, then whines, his dark eyes looking up at me and his tail wagging instantly, knowing I’ll take him on a long walk through the fields. We’ll walk for hours, most of the morning, most of the day, and that’s how we’ll fill time. Until we come home again and I make a simple meal, enjoy another coffee, and check the papers all over again.
Today is different, though. There’s interest in me again and I must be careful. The disappearance of Katy Harper. I watched it, out of curiosity more than anything else, but it was much more painful than I anticipated. Strange to see a programme pretend to know more about me than I know about myself.
But it was a glimpse of who I was back then, happy, cynical and ambitious. I am still at least one of those things.
It was frustrating, though, to see them get it so wrong. They really put Graham through the wringer, and sure, he was a bit controlling, and the moves he pulled after I went missing were questionable at best, but he didn’t deserve what happened, all the accusations. None of them did.
I’m surprised Peter was dragged into it, but it made sense; he was the last person to see me that day and we were close, though he isn’t how I remember him. He was the only one I told about the USB, that I was working on something, and I was right to trust him.
The fact that my old English professor got sucked into the story struck me as quite bizarre, but I did speak to him that morning, I did go to him for advice.
It was difficult seeing Joanna, though I follow her closely on social media, anonymously of course. It’s easy not to be traced these days; it wasn’t at first, but now I’m comfortable and confident in the fact that no one will find me. And if they did? They’d kill me, but it would be like I died ten years ago, anyway. The thought of death doesn’t even bother me.
But other people’s death? What they could do to Joanna, to Annie, to my mum.
Seeing her on the screen was almost too much to bear. I cried after the first episode, long, angry, hurt tears, and I almost cracked, almost thought about calling her and telling she doesn’t need to be sad. But I would rather her sad than dead.
I gently stroke Tiger as he noses my hand, impatient for his walk.
‘We have to be careful,’ I say. ‘People are looking for us.’
To the world I am missing, but to most people I am dead. Most days I feel cowardly, but I have to remind myself that coming forward isn’t an option. I would be silenced before I even had the chance to speak.
I always silently and patiently hoped that what really happened to me would come out, but I know that’s impossible and it never will, not without death, my death, maybe others’. I’ve toyed with this over the years. The life I lead now, is it really living? Or surviving? But it feels like neither. I am waiting.
I just don’t know what I’m waiting for.
One day, when I check the papers, there will be a list of names and those names will be carried to court and the women will see justice, and maybe I’ll get my life back.
Tiger whines.
‘Not that I’d change anything,’ I say to him.
It’s hard to know that people grieved me, but I also had to grieve myself and after the initial trauma from that night, I slowly had to piece together a future.
I always thought Annie would step forward, but they must have gotten to her too. I found her online. She still works at the network, she’s been promoted. I don’t blame her, I couldn’t, she was scared then and I was the one who pushed her into it.
I’d found her alone crying in the bathroom, still wearing the outfit from the day before, red lipstick smeared down her chin and black rings of mascara circling her eyes like a masquerade mask. She confided in me and what I imposed on her made her terrified, laying it all down on paper, seeing her words reflected back, tracing her fingers over what happened to her like that.
After that, there was no letting it go, as much as she begged me. I sometimes wonder if she was the one who told Mark about me knowing, if she told him about my plan to go to the press, if she knew that I was trying to find more girls to come forward. I pressured her into giving me names, but she didn’t know any. She just knew it happened often, that she was on the menu one night and they ate her alive.
Quietly, in bed to myself every night, I whisper their names under my breath, all the men Annie told me about, the names of people I tried to prove existed in a seedy underground club, a nightmarish place that Annie couldn’t even describe to me properly.
They’d drugged her, taken her there, but she said their faces were all clear.
The list of names terrified me. I knew it wasn’t as simple as taking down a well-loved journalist, a national treasure; the list of names stretched further than television screens and high society. It is engrained. It is the structure of our existence. It is ubiquitous and potent. It was, and is, too powerful.
Sometimes I feel like I’m here, waiting, to gain enough strength to fight it, but I have been drained of any powers I had that night. I was stripped bare, but it wasn’t until afterwards, until I lay in the back of that van sure of my death, that I really understood. If you tear down an empire, it must be replaced. The hole that it leaves can’t be allowed to exist, but to replace it with a better power takes time.
But what I see of the world gives me some relief. There’s a wave coming, gentle and free, and it’s going to fill the hole, and out of it something beautiful might have a chance to grow.
Though the divide between their world and ours has never felt greater, people are angry, people are better, and maybe all we have to do is wait.
I’ve seen the movements, hoped that maybe some girls would come forward, because on my own I am not enough. But they never did, and neither did I, because we all remain fixated in our fear.
‘Come on,’ I say to Tiger, as I grab his collar and lead.
I stop in the hallway, staring for a moment at myself in the mirror. Perhaps the biggest shock was seeing myself ten years ago. Pictures and videos of me growing up. I had bright blue eyes and silky long blonde hair; now my hair is dyed dark brown and cut short, my eyes have dimmed to a deep grey, my skin is sallow and lifeless. I lost my round cheeks and my full lips.
I am unrecognisable.
‘Still,’ I say, turning to Tiger, ‘we have to be careful; my face is everywhere at the moment.’
We walk across the flat Suffolk countryside, Tiger skipping ahead, sniffing in bushes and checking in with me every so often. A few other dog walkers slow to try and say hello, but I keep going, Tiger ignores them, like I taught him to.
I have spoken to people over the years, but they’ve always been short, reserved conversations. I’ve never let it go too far or get too serious. Life can be lonely, living it like this, but it’s not worth the risk. Mark might think I’m dead, but it’ll be worse than that if he finds out I’m alive, if any of them do.
I worked on a farm for a short period, cash in hand, no questions asked. But when I heard about the show, it became too risky, so now I’m living on everything I saved up, knowing there’s only so long it can last.
Tiger and I walk for hours, until the bottoms of my feet start to get sore and I lower myself onto the bench overlooking the Waveney Valley. A woman walks past with a little terrier and I lower my head as Tiger comes to join me. I bend down, offer him some water and feed him half of my ham sandwich, which he devours, licking my hands clean afterwards.
‘We best go home,’ I say and he leaps off the bench and turns back towards the house.
When we get home, I kick off my muddied shoes and grab a blanket from the back of the sofa. I put a kettle on the stove and wait for it to boil, and as I’m waiting I open the old laptop on the kitchen table. I check all of my bookmarked tabs that I’ve saved into folders: news and socials.
There is nothing. This is just another ordinary day, and whatever felt different this morning fizzled and fell away.
I click through the last social accounts, seeing Mum is now active again on Facebook, which is a surprise, because she stopped using that a long time ago. Her profile picture is the same, her last status was still ten years ago, but she was online recently.
I try not to think about what this has done to her, knowing that the alternative is worse, but I’d give anything to hug her, to feel her warmth, to tell her that I miss her.
I scroll down my fake profile, one I made under a fake name, not even the name I go by now. There are a lot of layers to this, so I don’t get caught.
I’m about to close the laptop when I see Annie has posted something, in capitals. It’s innocuous enough, a message disguised as a plea for my safety, but it doesn’t feel like that. It feels like she’s speaking directly to me, not for me, or because of me.
It’s because since I disappeared, she’s never said one word about me.
KATY, IF YOU’RE OUT THERE, PLEASE COME HOME
I scroll down searching the comments, but people, most of whom I’ve never met and never will, respond with broken hearts and sad faces. They think she’s asking me to come home, and maybe she is, but not for the reason they think.
I lean back in the chair and stare at the message, checking the time. I go to the kitchen sideboard and yank open one of the drawers. It’s covered in dust and old takeaway menus. I search through batteries and lone Tupperware lids until I find it. The phone I took from him ten years ago.
I keep it charged just in case, but always turned off, so he can’t contact me, it can never be that way around. I stab at the power button and wait for it to turn on, then I call the only number in the contact book.