Girl:Broken

by S Williams

The inspector watched the scene play out. Then she leaned forward and pressed a button, restarting the feed. She watched it through again.

  Then again. Not only looking at Daisy, but at everyone else. Trying to see what had caused the woman to collapse.

  Some movement in the corner of one of the playbacks caught her eye.

  ‘Well, well,’ she said softly, staring.

  She knew she’d find Daisy eventually. It was inevitable. If the young woman was alive then it was impossible to hide forever, no matter how far under the radar you were. And once the flares went up it was just a matter of time.

  And Slane had found her.

  But that wasn’t all she’d found.

  Because there was more than one person on the screen she recognised.

  Slane watched as the girl fell to the ground, screaming in silence; none of the feeds were wired for sound. Watched as the crowd surged by, hiding her from view. Watched as, when the crowd cleared, she was gone.

  They both were.

  Slane smiled humourlessly and reached for her phone.

  3

  23rd October

  Jay finished texting and slid the phone into the pocket of her cargos, zipping it safe. She wouldn’t ever put it in a handbag. Too easy to steal. And if you stole a phone, especially her phone, then you stole a person’s whole identity these days.

  Not that she owned a handbag. Or a clutch bag. Or shoes with pointy heels. Or hair products.

  They wouldn’t go with the tattoos.

  Or the dreads.

  Mind you, she thought, neither had the police force.

  ‘Why have you made your body look like a war zone. Why can’t you make it easier for yourself and just fit in.’

  That’s what her mother had said to Jay, in her soft Yorkshire accent, like dew in the heather. After the incident. After the suspension. After she had been furloughed from the force.

  Thinking about her mother, Jay shrugged subconsciously.

  ‘You can talk,’ she whispered, looking at the warm light washing from the lamp on her desk. For a second, an image of her mother, walking out of Holloway, slashed in front of her eyes. Jay had been three the first time she remembered her mother being prosecuted, along with all the other protestors. It wasn’t the last.

  Jay sighed at the memory. She was sitting in the library, on Commercial Street, hiding from the rain. It was privately owned, over two hundred years old and was harder to get into than Hogwarts. Everything about it was everything she loved. From the smell of the books to the polished brass and wood. From the subdued lighting to the quietness and respect of the other members. If ever she had a spare moment in the city, she came here. It centred her. Helped her to get perspective.

  She scrunched her toes on the hard floor, feeling the wood through her thick socks. She smiled and checked the time on the large clock on the wall.

  Five past ten.

  Nearly time to meet Daisy.

  Jay stopped smiling and thought about the situation she had got herself in. Perspective was something she was sorely missing.

  Because Jay was fucked.

  Double fucked. Triple fucked.

  Also, she was becoming emotionally attached to Daisy and that just wasn’t acceptable. Not in a million years.

  Not because the woman was so damaged, although God knew that alone would make it unethical. Daisy was so messed up it was amazing she could function at all. Hence all the therapy sessions. Hence all the meds.

  But because she was work.

  Daisy thought Jay was her friend, and she was her friend, even though she was work. Not when Jay had started, of course, but as they had got to know each other. Jay felt it deep down. Like they were cut from the same cloth. But Jay was also lying to her. Pretending to be something she wasn’t.

  Like she was with her mother.

  Like she was with her ex-colleagues.

  Like, she felt with increasing certainty, she was with herself.

  She wished she’d never taken the assignment. Never let herself get dragged into this dark subterfuge she found herself in, with no easy route on how to get herself out.

  Jay blinked.

  The clock on the wall now showed ten past ten.

  Time to go.

  She pushed her chair back and put her engineer boots on, lacing them tight. Standing, she shrugged into her jacket.

  She walked out onto the street and made her way down toward the station, criss-crossing through all the little alleys and snickets that made up the centre of the city. As she passed The Angel pub a street boy asked her for some money. He couldn’t have been more than seventeen. Reaching into her cargos for change she saw the tremor in his hand. She found a few pounds and dropped them into his paw. She wondered if he would get to keep them or have to pass them over to a handler. Even begging was being commercialised these days.

  She stopped off at Bean There, Dunk That and picked up a couple of coffees to go.

  By the time she got to the apartment block, she was soaked through. She stood outside the converted mill and reached into her pocket, pulling out her keys attached by a silver chain to her belt. She sorted through them until she found the correct one. Flicking the rain from her hair, she slotted the key into the lock and turned it. Pushing the door open she stepped into the vestibule. Inside, on the wall, were numbered pigeonholes, giving a reminder to the building’s industrial past. These days they were used for post and were fitted with little locked doors. Jay selected another key from her chain and unlocked her mail. Gave a cold smile when it came up empty.

  Nothing from her mother.

  Nothing from her ex-employers.

  Nothing from her new employers, who had set her up here in Daisy’s block. But then she would have been amazed if there was. Her new employers were not ones to leave a paper trail. It was all in the name, really. Undercover. Clandestine. Secret.

  Maybe the text she had sent in the library would change all that.

  Because Jay couldn’t take it anymore.

  Couldn’t lie to Daisy.

  She pressed her hand against the biometric pad that allowed entrance to the lobby of the flat complex and looked at the camera. The system read her and the red light above the door turned green. There was a click as the electromagnets were disengaged and the door was released. Jay pushed it open and walked through. The reception area was all about retaining the feel of an industrial past. Brick walls that had been treated with some sort of sealant. Wooden floors that shone with polish. Leather sofas scattered like they had been dropped from Dorothy’s tornado. A metal cage lift that looked like it belonged in a Hitchcock film. By the time she began climbing the brass-railed stairs to the first floor, the entrance door had already closed and locked itself.

  4

  August

  Beata hurried through the wet streets, her ankles already soaked where the morning traffic had splashed her. She hunched her shoulders and kept moving, pushing against the wind, her thin mouth set in a scowl. Beata hated Leeds, with its roads like rivers and its distressingly cheery people. Like they enjoyed the horrible weather that seemed to batter the city no matter what the season. Even in the summer, it seemed to suck away warmth into the grim stone of the buildings.

  But however much she hated Leeds, she hated her boyfriend and his friends more. All they did was hang around the flat all day, smoking and drinking and watching porn whilst she worked three cleaning shifts to pay for it all. Her boyfriend said there was no work for him here now, but after summer he would have no trouble. That the building trade would pick up and he would be the one bringing in the money. If the government didn’t throw them out.

  Beata turned off The Headrow and walked up Briggate, past one of the hipster hairdressers that seemed to have cropped up all over the city like salon-confetti. Beata glanced in through the window. Blurred by rain on the glass she could see razors and shaving foam and all the accoutrements to shape a painfully on-trend beard.

  Beata’s boyfriend didn’t have a beard
; just the stubble of a don’t-get-up-till-noon, beer-for-breakfast, live-off-your-girlfriend, waste of space.

  Don’t worry, I’ll be working soon, he said. Beata smiled humourlessly as she turned into Harrison Street, by the Japanese Karaoke place. Beata didn’t believe him. She’d been here eight months, acquired herself good work with the agency, moved into her own flat and had even managed to fit in a college release course. Another year and she would have been able to put a deposit down to buy a flat, rent it out, and move up the slippery English property ladder. If she was allowed to stay. If the bloody Brexit didn’t throw her out.

  But then her boyfriend had shown up. He’d lost his job, he said. Back home. He’d been kicked out of his flat, he said. He needed to move in with her, he said.

  And now all her money went on him. She’d dropped out of college and taken on an extra shift just to make ends meet. And when she got home he expected her to cook for him and his friends. Or worse. Recently she had got the feeling that her boyfriend had ideas about her that were definitely not to her liking. She’d seen the way he looked at her, joked about her with his mates.

  Maybe we should give up on the building and go into another trade, he had said the previous night, leering at her. His friends had burst out laughing and elbowed each other, like they were sharing a joke. It made Beata feel sick.

  Then later, after his friends had gone home and he had come to bed, he had woken her up and taken her. Hard. After he had finished he had left the bed to continue drinking. As he walked out she had heard him call her something under his breath.

  Kurwa.

  Whore.

  That was enough for her. She was going to end it.

  She hurried down the road to her second job. She had already been up since half past four cleaning offices, and now she was late. The roads were almost empty. Only others like her, cleaners and night workers. Uber cars taking the odd reveller home. Beata moved to the curb as a young jogger, in the hoodie and tracksuit uniform that seemed obligatory, ran past her, oblivious. She felt sore where her boyfriend had been rough, and as she walked carefully on the road she started making plans on how she could get rid of him.

  When she’d first come here she’d stayed away from the Polish community. She didn’t want to get sucked into the same sort of life she’d left behind. She did not think her boyfriend would come to England. If she was being honest she didn’t even think of him as her boyfriend, until he turned up and moved in and turned her life to shit. As soon as he got his feet under the table he had started transforming her flat into Zabkowska, the town she had left behind in Poland. Every time she came home there seemed to be another suspect character in her kitchen, eating her food. Half the texts she got were demands to bring more beer. More vodka. Like her boyfriend was a Polish stereotype joke.

  The problem was he was in her flat. If she were simply to walk away she’d lose her deposit. She needed to think of a way of getting him out or getting her money back.

  She slipped out of Harrison Street and walked left. The rain had reduced to just a drizzle, the kind that seemed to magically appear under the clothes without any obvious means as to how it got there. Leeds-rain. Beata pulled her scarf tighter around her neck, heading towards the new offices on Trafalgar Street.

  And anyhow, he’d find her. Everyone seemed to be in everybody else’s business in this town. Everyone knew everybody else. The whole city seemed to act like a village. Maybe it was because it was surrounded by wild countryside. The community seemed to cover the place like a web.

  Beata took her Juul vape out of her bag and slipped into the Grand Arcade. Once inside she stared out of the glass doors, thinking about her life. Across the road, she could see a homeless person asleep in a doorway. The light bleeding from the street lamp, mixed with the first blushes of dawn, made him seem disconnected. More like a painting than a real person. Or maybe it was because she was looking at him through the misted glass of the arcade. Beata gave a hard smile and sucked on her vape device. At least she assumed it was a he. It could just as easily be a she. There seemed to be so many homeless recently. You’d think, if you didn’t have a home or a job, you’d go and live in a city that got more sun. Less rain.

  Suddenly she brightened. Maybe she should just leave. Just forget the deposit and go to a new town. London, or Bristol. Maybe even France. Somewhere she wasn’t known. She was a good worker. She would always be able to earn a living. Just stay away from any Polish agencies. She took a last drag then put her Juul away in her bag. Maybe she could get a new bank account, without her boyfriend finding out. She grabbed the handle and left the warmth of the arcade.

  Outside the air was bitter. She looked over at the sleeping figure in the doorway. She could just make out a tin can next to him. Beata smiled sadly. What sort of desperation, or optimism, do you have to have to put a begging cup out in the middle of the night while you were sleeping? Beata blinked and made a decision. Maybe her luck would change if she helped someone else’s. Checking the non-existent traffic, she crossed the street, digging into her pocket for some pound coins. At this time in the morning, the street was empty. It was just her and the boy in the sleeping bag. Or girl. As Beata got nearer she could see a dark stain spread from the sleeping bag onto the street. She wrinkled her nose. The boy had pissed himself. Beata understood. Understood drinking yourself unconscious to blot out the reality you find yourself in. She pulled out her hand and dropped in the few coins she had. As they hit the metal of the tin they made a sad little sound, like a beaten-up wind chime.

  Beata straightened, then frowned. Now she was nearer she should be able to smell the urine. The puddle was quite large and, in the LED lighting, dark and shiny.

  But all she could smell was copper.

  ‘Hello? Mister?’

  Beata looked up and down the street, feeling the muscles in her stomach and groin twist. She was alone. The copper smell was high and sharp, like old pennies that had been scraped clean with emery cloth. Beata had smelt it before, in the hospital where she cleaned at the weekend. It was the smell of blood. She looked down at the dark patch she had thought was piss. It looked like an oil slick.

  ‘Mister? Miss? Are you all right?’

  Beata squatted down. The person was huddled in the doorway, with the sleeping bag pulled over their head. They were turned away from her, on their side, as if in sleep they did not want to face the life that had happened to them. Beata reached forward and gently shook the person’s shoulder.

  ‘Mister? Can I help you? Have you hurt yourself?’

  It wouldn’t surprise her. People pissing blood because their liver had packed in. Slitting their wrists because they just can’t take the madness and the loneliness. So drunk they collapse on their own bottle, lacerating themselves but falling unconscious anyway. It happened. It happened all the time. As she pulled on the shoulder the sleeping form turned towards her. Beata stood quickly, then realised it must have been her shaking that caused the body to move. That it must have been balanced on its side so that any movement would have caused him to roll toward her.

  Because this man wasn’t moving by himself. Not anytime soon. Not ever.

  Beata felt a bubble of scream fill her mouth.

  Bizarrely, she could hear a song playing, tinny and somehow at the wrong speed. Slowing down and speeding up, like it kept running out of power.

  The person was old. Maybe sixty. Maybe younger, because life on the street made the features appear older like they were trying to accelerate out of life. His mouth was clamped shut and unsmiling, but that didn’t matter because someone had carved another one across his throat, and this one was grinning.

  Bizarrely, the dead man was wearing earbuds. That was where the song was coming from. Tinny and insistent, like tiny voices inside the dead body’s head, trying to get out.

  She recognised the song, and the incongruity of it made the whole scene even more nightmarish.

  Culture Club’s ‘Do you Really Want to Hurt me?’

&
nbsp; Like a question that had already been answered.

  Beata stared at the body, listening to the song bleeding from his ears. Watched the life dripping from his throat, and then screamed.

  By the time the police arrived she’d thrown up on the pavement, her breakfast mixing with the dead man’s blood.

  5

  23rd October

  Daisy woke up strange and wrong.

  Strange wasn’t the problem. Daisy often woke up strange.

  Strange thoughts in her head, remnants of dreams like ripped sheets on a washing line after a storm.

  Strange cuts on her body, physical marks of a dream that wanted to fight its way out of her, as if she’d trapped it in her sleep. That was why she kept her nails short. Biting them to the nib.

  So ‘strange’ wasn’t the issue. She understood strange; had factored it into her routine. Processed it over the years.

  This was different.

  She stayed on her mattress, eyes closed, letting the room tick around her as she tried to get a sense of the wrongness. There was a slight bitterness in her mouth like she had eaten a lemon in her dreams. She licked her lips, focusing in.

  ‘No,’ she said quietly. The taste wasn’t it. Something else.

  Daisy’s mattress lay on the floor of her room, with no frame beneath it as support.

  No frame, no legs.

  No legs, no gap. No space between the bottom of her mattress and the floor. Nothing to hide under. Nothing to grab her feet as she stood. Pull her into the darkness.

  It was the same with cupboards.

  She didn’t have cupboards; just shelves. Places she could see into. Cupboards have doors; things that hide and conceal. Shut away and keep secret.

  The only door in Daisy’s flat was the front door, which she kept locked whether she was in or out. Locked and bolted.

  Double-locked. Triple-locked.

  The locksmith who’d fitted them said that she was the safest woman in Leeds.