by Matthew Crow
I leant out of the car window as he shut the door and squeezed his hand.
‘So did I.’
We drove home in silence, getting used to sharing space.
‘Well, I’ll put the kettle on then,’ Dad said as I dragged my bag into my room and shut the door behind me.
The window had been replaced with new glass. Double glazed this time. With a security sticker still stuck to the bottom right hand corner. I unpicked the clear plastic as the radiator clicked and clanked, before omitting a gentle hum of warmth that seeped up towards my wrists.
I left my bag on the floor and lay back on my bed. There was a bare patch on the far wall where the blood must have been particularly stubborn. Memories of the day leading up to the hospital came in dribs and drabs. I felt the glass shatter against my hands; felt the sharp edges slicing cleanly at my skin. I remember walking as though my life depended on it. Dripping blood all the way to school. I remember standing at the gates. I remember a fuss around me and then… nothing.
The thought of Dad hunched on his knees, bleaching my blood from the paintwork, made my stomach tighten and knot.
The thoughts became loud but then settled as my phone alarm buzzed against my leg to remind me to dose up. Fluoxetine made me nauseous if I took it before lunchtime, I had found, but without my morning ritual with the pensioner’s pill divider Dad had bought me, I needed some form of reminder or I’d forget altogether.
I turned off the alarm while I fished a tampon from my bag, securing my gum in its wrapper before washing down three tablets with a flat bottle of Coke that stood guard beside my bed.
Being back home still didn’t feel quite right. Or rather it felt like only half of me had returned. That the rest of me – the part that had been jettisoned to make room for the mania that had taken the steering wheel in those last weeks – was still out there somewhere, lost and homesick. I didn’t feel quite whole. The memories still burned bright behind my sockets, so I scrunched my eyes together tightly and tried an exercise that they taught in one of our group sessions. Whenever you feel bad about your actions during an episode you think to yourself, When I’m In Control I… and then go through the good things that you’ve done for people.
When I’m In Control I… help with the vacuuming.
When I’m In Control I… leave Dad’s dinner in the oven if he’s on night shift.
When I’m In Control I… spend time with Dad even though I’d rather be in my room.
When I’m In Control…
A gentle knock on the door interrupted my exercise.
‘Yeah, I’ll be through in a second,’ I said, translating the sound of the knock into the question I knew it was.
‘I forgot to get biscuits,’ Dad said through the door. ‘Shall I pop out and get some?’
‘I’ll go,’ I said, opening the door. Dad had one tea towel draped across his shoulder and another pressing inside of a World’s Best Dad mug.
(When I’m In Control… I buy cheap card-shop mugs, because I know that the sentiment implied will mean more than the five ninety nine it cost me.)
‘I don’t mind,’ he said, trying to stifle his concern with selflessness.
‘Dad, I’ll go. I need some air. That hospital was always too warm. The air was stagnant.’
‘You watch how you go,’ Dad said eventually, quietly resigned to having lost this battle. ‘Do you need any money?’
‘Nah, I’m liquid,’ I yelled, tucking the spare key into my jeans pocket as I slammed the front door behind me.
A man I didn’t recognise stood at the counter as a beeping door announced my arrival. He was talking to Mrs Nesbitt, who ran the shop. Their voices dipped as I made my way past sanitary-wear towards the biscuit section of the aisle. Out of eyesight, Mrs Nesbitt said something and the man let out a short, sharp laugh.
‘Not in our day, eh?’ he said as he made his way towards the door which beeped again as it closed behind him.
I took the biscuits to the counter and held them out to be scanned.
‘Claudette, isn’t it?’ Mrs Nesbitt asked. She had lived in the area for longer than most of the architecture and knew everybody’s business. Feigning ignorance over a detail as pivotal as your name was simply one of many power moves in her armoury.
‘That’s me,’ I said, pressing the biscuits towards her.
‘Hmmm,’ she said uncertainly, locking me in her suspicious glare as she carried out the meagre transaction. ‘I’m keeping an eye on you, mind,’ she said as I opened the door to leave, though her tone implied more warning than concern. ‘You just be careful.’
I walked the long way home, across the grass banks that separated the beach from the high street, to avoid a camera crew in the alleyway that I’d normally have cut through.
Sarah seemed only to travel via backstreets. She had an encyclopaedic knowledge of the town’s veins and arteries, and could take you wherever you wanted to go without being seen. It was a habit that had rubbed off on me to a degree, but out of curiosity more than necessity. The effort Sarah often put into disappearing made me realise that more often than not she was hiding from something. She just never said what, exactly.
Across the beach there were white tents erected where evidence had been found. Metal poles with Do Not Cross tape marked out square sections of sand. And men in overalls placed dug-up treasures into marked plastic bags. Cameras dotted the lower promenade as a dozen or so presenters all found different ways to tell the world that nobody knew anything.
Ross Lions stood on the upper promenade. He was throwing chips towards the mawkish reporters in a bid to make seagulls attack.
‘Got you!’ he yelled, as a gull the size of a shire horse bumbled its way towards the high heel of a presenter, causing her to dance on the spot as it fussed over the soggy chip.
I’d almost passed unnoticed when Ross’s voice snagged behind me.
‘Claudette Flint!’ he yelled, as I turned slowly to meet his gaze. ‘I didn’t think you were coming back.’
‘I nearly didn’t,’ I said.
‘You coming down here then?’
I shook my head and held up the biscuits.
‘Got my morning all planned out, thanks,’ I said, and Ross nodded, the bravado slipping from his face.
‘You all right though?’ he asked. Ross was an idiot. But somewhere, hidden deep, was a genuine human being.
‘Yeah,’ I said, nodding as I turned to leave. ‘Thanks. Are you?’
He shrugged. ‘Never better,’ he said as he returned to tormenting the camera crews.
Ross had been the first boy I ever kissed.
When we were eleven we’d play Chicken on the road behind our flat. One person would stand on the white lines as a car came towards them, and stare it down until they got scared and jumped out of the way. The winner was the person that avoided death by the narrowest margin. One by one the boys would stand there snarling at oncoming vans and cars. The girls would sit quietly and watch, rapt with admiration, until our number was up and we were called home for tea.
One night Ross and I were the last ones standing.
‘I’ve got to be home,’ he’d said as the evening became inky and chilled.
‘But I haven’t had my turn yet,’ I said, standing up and making my way towards the kerb.
‘Girls can’t play,’ he said as I walked into the middle of the empty road and closed my eyes.
For a while it was still and quiet. There was nothing but the sound of waves lapping in the distance.
It came gradually at first. I didn’t open my eyes. I just let the sound of the engine grow louder and louder until it blocked out everything else around me. I spread out my arms and tightened my eyes until I felt a yank on my right arm and the whoosh of the car speeding past us as a horn blared out and faded into the distance.
Ross had hauled me onto the kerb with such force that I’d rolled underneath him. I opened my eyes as his lips touched mine and his tongue scraping across my top row of teeth.<
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‘Gross,’ I said, pushing him off me as I sat up.
‘Better than being run over.’
‘Says you,’ I said. ‘Does this mean I win?’ I stared at the scorched tyre marks where the car had tried to swerve.
Ross stood up and shook his head.
‘Don’t tell anybody,’ he said
‘That I beat you?’
‘That we kissed.’
‘Why not?’ I asked.
‘Because you’re strange. If you say anything I’ll tell them you’re lying.’
And with that he ran off towards the bus stop.
The promenade’s lawns were strewn across with takeaway wrappers, tin cans and the odd used condom. The concrete waves of the skate park lay silent and empty and in the distance a helicopter chopped the air into bullets of sound that carried on the wind.
All of the benches facing the sea were memories. Each one held a plaque covered in grime. They said things like: Mary’s Seat, Who Loved The View, or, In Memory of Charles, Forever At Sea. It was sweet. And slightly comical. These benches would bear a very different sentiment when my friends and I started dying. They would say things like: In Memory of Paul, Who First Fingered Charlotte Here After the Sea Cadets Disco, or, Forever Aaron, Who Vomited Two Bottles of Lambrini and Half a Doner Kebab All Over This Very Bench.
Each seat was covered in bird shit except for one. It was here that Mr Fitzpatrick sat.
Mr Fitzpatrick was nobody’s dad, though he paid particular cantankerous interest in us all when we were growing up. No ball bounced in the back lane without a yelled warning from him that people were trying to sleep.
‘You’ve a whole beach out there, why you making a fuss in a dirty old lane?’ he’d yell.
Silence was what he demanded. And more often than not it was what he got.
Our parents had warned us about Mr Fitzpatrick.
‘Just do as he says,’ they told us. ‘He’s old and he’s got nobody else,’ they’d say.
‘Mr Fitzpatrick likes things just so.’
That was at first, before he shifted for most of our parents from being a curmudgeonly nuisance to being an active figure of hate.
Before long his disdain became more problematic.
There would be knocks on the door as apologetic police explained that they were being forced to respond to reports of antisocial behaviour in the form of ball games and hopscotch. Phone calls from Social Services after Mr Fitzpatrick had declared that any children allowed to play out that late were surely victims of neglect.
Our parents weren’t so keen to accommodate his quest for quiet after that.
The funny thing was that, save the odd night-shift worker, almost nobody slept through the day except for Mr Fitzpatrick himself. A few years later, when I first stopped sleeping, I’d watch him leave his house in the dead of night. Stare at him in the yellow glow of the street lamps, tracing the path of his long shadow until he was out of sight.
Then as I got older and started sneaking out at night myself, I would follow him. Even when my brain felt like a den of spiders I could focus on one individual task if I concentrated hard enough. In the daytime it varied. But at night-time it was always Mr Fitzpatrick.
I’d follow him from a safe distance, watch him winding his way down to the beach in the dark. He’d scurry and shuffle, the way men who wear flat caps do, stopping dead where the sand grew cold. Then it was as though he was reborn. His posture would change. He’d straighten up and puff out his chest. His worn-down hump would disappear and he’d look out, framed by moonlight, whispering to the waves as they dragged farther and farther out.
I walked over to the bench and sat down beside him. He didn’t look at me. At first it was as though he didn’t even register my presence. He just carried on staring out at the waves, oblivious to the flickering police tape and slamming van doors from which made-up ladies with microphones emerged.
‘You’re the one with the funny name,’ he said in a voice that sounded like a question and an accusation all at once.
‘Depends on your sense of humour I suppose,’ I said. He surprised me by chuckling to himself, and I felt a brief rush of pride, having elicited an emotion from the man we used to joke was made of stone.
‘Are you well?’ he said eventually, as two gulls landed unsteadily on the water.
‘No,’ I said, still staring straight ahead. ‘But I’m better.’
‘Better than what?’ he asked
‘Better than I was.’
‘It’s a start, I suppose,’ he said, slowly standing up.
‘I suppose it is,’ I said. For there was nothing else I could think to say to him. Mr Fitzpatrick had never spoken this much to me ever, or anyone else for that matter. Spoken at them, yes. But a two-way conversation was not usually his style.
‘Well, it was nice speaking with you,’ he said with a faint hint of surprise as he stood up and collected himself, shuffling off towards the wires and the cameras in the distance. ‘And I’m glad to see you’re on the mend,’ he added, but was gone before I’d had a chance to ask why exactly he seemed to care.
There was a chill and a shadow as I readied myself to make my own way home.
‘All right,’ came a voice from behind, deep and certain.
The shadow moved to my right before Dan Vesper’s shape filled my view.
Dan had never exactly gone to our school, but everyone there seemed to know someone who knew someone who knew him. He ran a dance night at the biggest club in town but most of his income seemed to come from business conducted in alleyways and car parks. Occasionally Sarah would climb into his car after school, though nobody ever saw exactly where the pair of them went together, or where it was that she got out. He was what they described as the darkness on the edge of town. The one and only time I’d mentioned his name to Sarah she had blanched.
One afternoon, staring out the window in double maths, I saw her leave school early. She climbed into Dan’s car before disappearing into the grey afternoon.
Later that night, walking home from Donna’s, I noticed her sitting in the skate park on the crest of a concrete wave, alone but for a Staffordshire terrier resting sleepily across her thighs.
‘Where did you get him?’ I asked, trying my hardest to hide my fears. I always had been the opposite of an animal person. The notion of trusting a beast not to turn and devour you at whim never quite sat comfortably with me.
Sarah looked up. She seemed sadder than usual. Not quite broken. But her fight had gone.
‘He was lost,’ she said quietly, looking down at the dog with a mother’s love. ‘And he found me, actually. He won’t hurt you.’ She was almost defensive, catching my apprehension.
‘You can’t know that.’
Sarah shrugged.
‘Anyway, at least he’s warm,’ she said, slipping a hand beneath the beast’s chin.
‘Do you have somewhere to go?’ I asked eventually, steeling my nerves and moving closer to the strange, dangerous pair. Sarah looked up at me then away again with a sneer.
‘I can go wherever I like,’ she said bluntly; the weight of the day rested heavy on her shoulders as she sat slumped, absorbing the animal warmth.
‘Come on,’ I said, placing my hand on her shoulder which flinched at the touch. ‘My dad works nights. You can stay at mine.’
As we undressed for bed that evening I noticed bruises on her wrists and teasing her inner thighs.
‘Did Dan do that to you?’ I asked as we climbed into bed and lay rigid, neither of us used to the shape of another body beside us.
‘Do what?’ she asked, her face turning cold as she turned to the wall and flicked off the lamp, disguising her fear.
‘Sarah, you have to say if something’s wrong,’ I whispered, despite there being nobody else in the house. The darkness demanded a hushed reverence. ‘I can help, but not if you don’t talk.’
Sarah sighed and rolled back, staring up at the black canvas of the ceiling.
‘
I can help myself,’ she said flatly, like a mantra grown stale. ‘And if you really want to help then you’ll keep your mouth shut.’
She fell quiet, then said, ‘Does Dan ever talk to you?’
Her voice was smaller than I was used to. I shook my head no and felt her body relax, as much as it ever did.
‘Good. But if he ever does, don’t say you know me, OK?’
I didn’t respond.
‘OK?’ she said again, like a parent drumming safety lessons into a child.
‘All right, Sarah, I won’t,’ I agreed and I felt her nod her head beside me.
‘And don’t ever tell him where I am,’ she whispered. ‘Even if you know.’
‘I won’t.’
‘Good,’ she said, her breath growing heavy as sleep came at her hard. ‘Thank you, Claudette,’ she said, almost on a whisper, before one final sigh carried her into a dream.
When I woke up the next morning she was gone. Within a week she had disappeared completely.
I had no evidence connecting our conversation that night to the fact of Sarah’s disappearance , but somewhere deep down I knew that wherever Sarah was, she was there because of Dan. Just being in his presence made me feel vulnerable. Even his niceties felt barbed.
‘Hello,’ I said, and went to stand up, though Dan managed to sit next to me in a way which suggested I would leave only at his say-so.
‘Are you who I think you are?’ he asked and I felt myself blush. His tracksuit was a dark blue and zipped up towards his chin, so that only the bare essential flesh was exposed to the world. Every part of him that could have been made secret was.
‘I don’t know who you think I am,’ I said as calmly as I could manage. Scanning the green as subtly as I could, I realised that there was nobody else in sight. I was alone and Dan was sat next to me. I did not know much about him but I knew that nothing he did was without reason. Our meeting had not simply been chance.
He thought for a moment and slid closer to me.
‘I’m Dan. And you’re Claudette,’ he said as a statement of fact. Even had it not been my name, in that moment I would have conceded. ‘Whole world’s going mad and yet you’re the one they locked up. Funny, isn’t it?’