Deliverance (The LockDown Series Book 1)

by Dobson, Shannon

  Getting her phone from her night bag, I called 999. My body shaking and trembling.

  “Emergency services, which service?” Which service did I need? I didn’t know.

  “I…I…I don’t know. My dad, he, he hurt me and my friend. We're stuck in my room.”

  “Okay, I’m sending someone over, what’s your name?” the older woman’s voice cranks through the phone shaking vigorously in my hand.

  “I’m... I’m Abbi, and my friend is Melissa, please hurry I think she is hurt bad. She’s not talking, she just keeps crying. ”

  “Ok, just stay calm sweetie, can you tell me what happened?”

  “He came in last night.” I hear a bang bang bang on the stairs as my father's heavy booted feet run the length of them. My door crashes into the wall as it is thrown open.

  I drop the phone on the floor, still on the line.

  He stalks towards me fast. “No dad, please I’m sorry, please.” His hand wraps the girth of my fragile throat and squeezes, my airway now restricted.

  “You stupid cunt. You tell anybody about what happened and I’ll kill you, and your fucking friend. You understand you little bitch?” he screams at me.

  I faintly hear the lady on the phone asking if I’m okay, my father oblivious to her, for which I am thankful; this moment could have been very bad if he had heard.

  I can hear the front door bang open in the distance, my mind becoming foggy, the lack of oxygen making me dizzy. I glance to the bedroom door and see four men in black uniforms.

  “Hands on your head and on the floor now!” The police instruct from the door.

  My father tightens his grip before finally letting go and lying himself down.

  I gasp for air and grab my throat, willing the oxygen to enter my blood stream quickly before I pass out.

  I briefly see my father being carted out in cuffs. Two women in green paramedic uniforms enter my room as the men leave our naked bodies with the ladies.

  I break down screaming, tears streaming my face.

  “It’s okay sweetheart, you’re safe now. You’re so brave for calling. Well done.” She huddled me into a blanket and wrapped me up tight before pulling me into her body and letting me weep on her.

  My ears overhear the other paramedic talking “311, this is 214, requiring further assistance at the scene of incident. We have an adolescent female haemorrhaging,” and then she stops talking. What is haemorrhaging? I ask myself.

  I arrived at the hospital a short while after Melissa; police patrolled the corridors and the doors to Melissa’s and my room.

  I was poked, prodded and questioned about what happened over and over again. I was then discharged into foster care. I was to live with a strange family. I didn’t get to see Melissa again, I wasn’t sure if she would want me to.

  I found out shortly after leaving that Melissa had suffered severe tearing in her vagina, her cervix had been ripped and she had suffered internal bleeding in her uterus. She had to have an emergency hysterectomy at age fourteen. The guilt I still felt over that haunts me every day, and when I sit and think of what she would be like now I want nothing more than to rip my own womb out and give it to her. She would never be a mother.

  So this moves us on to the next chapter in my life.

  Age Seventeen, just before my eighteenth birthday I ran away from care. My life going from one extreme to the other. My foster parents and family were wonderful; they made my life bearable and worth living a little. They fed me, clothed me, and loved me, sometimes a little too much. They were over protective of me; I often wondered if they thought I’d break if they let me out of their sight.

  Shortly after my seventeenth birthday they fostered a new kid. A sixteen year old boy named David. He was nice from the start, a little flirty and a whole lot gorgeous. He was a bad boy from the very wrong corners of town. He smoked weed, shagged far too much for his age and drunk a ‘little’ too much over the advised ADULT daily limit.

  He turned seventeen shortly after joining the family home.

  I still clearly remember the first day he came and what he had said to me, in all his cocky sixteen year old charm ‘Well hello there. Did it hurt when you fell because you look as though you’re from heaven baby?’ I had giggled like a schoolgirl and had clearly gone scarlet red in the face.

  We had developed a close relationship from then on, eventually becoming boyfriend and girlfriend.

  After three months of living with him we sat outside on the porch one night watching the night sky. I told him what had happened to me and he told me about his life with his mother.

  She used to beat him, let her friends have sex with him, force him to smoke weed and take cocaine. That was the first time I had sex with him.

  He had kissed me slowly and deeply on the porch step, running his hands through my hair and holding the back of my head, his other hand roaming my body.

  He then stood taking my hand and guiding me quietly through the house to his room, where he persisted to make my body come alive. Kissing every inch of my skin, making love to me so deeply and sensually I forgot the world. It was the first time I had been intimate with anyone. It had taken me too many years to get over what my father had done, I wasn’t sure I was even ok now, but David stirred things in me I didn’t know existed. He made my stomach flutter, my knickers dampen and my sex clench.

  He was sexy as hell. Shaved head, deep blue eyes that held a lot of pain, tattooed arms and far too much stubble on his jaw for somebody his age. He was old before his time; the maturity, looks and body of someone in their twenties, not a seventeen year old boy. Since coming to the house, he had spent the last three months busting his arse at the gym where social services provided his membership. He worked in the local garage helping the old guy fix cars up, and when he wasn’t there he was playing footie with a few of his old buddies.

  When he had held me in his strong arms and pulled me into him, his scent intoxicating me, I had stared into his blue lagoons and begged him, “Kiss Me.” I needed to feel him on me, in me and around me.

  I had begun to fall in love with David. We spent almost every waking second with each other, both of us healing one another and bringing out the best of each other. He was becoming my whole world pretty quickly. I lived and breathed David. I slept beside him at night, watching his beautiful face as he dreamed, watching his chest rise and fall. He was my soul and my every breath.

  With that said, this brings us to me running away.

  Early on a Friday morning in September David approached me; I was making breakfast for the family.

  “Morning baby.” Kissing my hair he whispered in my ear.

  “Morning yourself.” I kissed him back on his lips, wrapping my arms around his strong neck. I could still feel him on me from the previous night, where he had once again owned me entirely as he had buried himself in me and made love so deeply and passionately I feared nobody would ever come close to him.

  “I need to tell you something, but you have to promise me not to freak.” His eyes searching mine for any clue at how I was feeling.

  “O-ka-ay.” I said slowly.

  “I have to go and see my mum today, she isn’t doing so well.” Okay now I was pissed. His ‘mother’ had used and abused him from birth until he finally got brought here at sixteen. She had got him hooked on weed, beat the shit out of him every day, fucked with his mind so much that some nights I could feel him trembling and could hear him crying in his sleep. And to top it all off she lived in the roughest estate in east London. At least three lots of people were out to get David after he had to report them to the police for dealing heroine just so they’d back off from his mother.

  This was so not going to happen, over my fucking dead body.

  “Not fucking happening babe.” I told him sternly.

  “I know you don’t want me near her or the area but I have to see her. The doctors called and said she may only have a few weeks to live, the cancer has fi
nally caught up and has basically latched on everywhere in her body. I have to see her, I have to settle everything and say goodbye baby. I’ll never forgive myself if I don’t.”

  I couldn’t breathe; my heart was beating so hard out of my chest I thought I might pass out. Tears started to fill my eyes and I tried my best to hold them back, to stop them falling.

  “How could you want to see her after all she’s done to you Dave, she doesn’t deserve your forgiveness?” I ask him, totally bewildered as to why he’d want any contact with the witch.

  “She’s still my mother; she still gave birth to me. I have to at least let her leave this world knowing I loved her.”

  “I understand, I’m just scared. Those people could still be looking for you.” I dreaded the thought of them seeing him and getting hold of him.

  “I know Abbi. I’ll be fine. You know me, big, strong and tough ‘n’all.” I giggled at him as he tensed his arms like Popeye, trying to act badass.

  “You silly bastard. Just please be careful baby. I don’t want you to get hurt.” I playfully smack his arse and then lean in to take his mouth in a heated kiss.

  “Don’t you worry, I’ll be back baby. Have a good day and stay out of trouble yourself ‘kay? Love you baby,” he tells me and kisses me one last time before leaving the house.

  My heart rate is still sky high as horrible images flash through my mind of what could happen. I tell myself I’m being silly and over the top trying to calm myself down.

  I ponder the whole day, waiting for a text from him, or to see his name flash on the screen of my phone. Nothing, zilch, nada.

  After cooking my new family and me a lasagne, we sit in the lounge and watch EastEnders; same old drama all the time. I hate soaps.

  “Has Dave text you Lisa?” I ask my foster mother. I was seriously worrying, it was half seven and I hadn’t heard from him and he still wasn’t home.

  “No hun. I’m sure he’s fine. Stop worrying.” She reassured me.

  As the theme tune to the soap begins, a knock at the door alerts us. I run to the door, knowing David he must have forgotten his key.

  “You silly bastard remember your bloody ke…” I say as I open the door. David isn’t who I answer the door to.

  “Evening Ma’am is Lisa McIntyre there please?” Two policemen frame the doorway to my home. Fear and dread flooding my gut.

  “Lise, door,” I shout to her before I run down the hallway to my room.

  I hear the policemen start to talk to her as I get to my door.

  “Mrs McIntyre I’m sorry to tell you, we found the body of David Yates this evening. He was stabbed whilst visiting his mother in Bow,” I hear the female police officer state sympathetically.

  Vomit rises in my throat and I run to the bathroom to stop myself from depositing it on the floor.

  I stare at the swirling toilet as my sick is flushed away, my heart breaks. The tiny pieces shatter onto the marble floor below my feet, the blood in my veins freezes over and the tears falling from my eyes sting my cheeks.

  A knock on the bathroom door alerts me before Lisa walks in, her face bright red, her eyes puffy and swollen. She rushes to me, pulling me in her arms, and sobbing in my hair.

  “I’m so sorry Abbi, fuck this is so unfair.” I scream out in pain as my body shakes and begins to close down.

  “Why him? Why me? Fuck I need him back, I need him Lisa. I can’t cope without him. What am I going to do? Why did he have to go? I said he shouldn’t but he said he’d be fine. He never fucking listens.” I pull away from her turning to the mirror on the wall and punch the thing, shredding my hand in the process.

  “Baby girl. I’m sorry this keeps happening to you.” She was more of a parent than my own father had ever been. She bought me my tampons, supplied my first lot of condoms to make sure I avoided an unwanted pregnancy and talked to me when I was down.

  I screamed a heart wrenching scream. Anger flooding my body.

  “I need to go. Please let me go.” I pull away from Lisa and run to my room. I pack up the most important things to me, including a picture of me, Lisa, Carl and David. I stroke his face in the picture and start crying again. After I’ve stuffed the bits into a holdall I go to David’s room. I sit on his bed and hold his pillow to my face, weeping into the linen.

  I pack a few bits from his room to take with me, a few pieces of evidence of the times we spent together the past four months.

  And then I leave.

  I walk out of the door and I don’t look back.

  So here I am, alone, homeless, jobless and begging for scraps on the street. For the past three years it has been this way. A cardboard box my home, a plastic cup my bank with the hope of a giving person to pass me.

  My once silky smooth blonde locks piled in a mass of knots upon my head, my pale pink full lips now cracked, chipped and broken. My once beautiful creamy skin, blistered, bruised and destroyed. My old bright blue eyes once happy and full of life with David, now empty and hollow vessels.

  My twenty first birthday has come and gone, a day spent like every other. Begging, scrounging and pleading to God to do something to help me.

  I hadn’t attended David’s funeral it was too hard. I didn’t want to see the box that was now the place he slept. He belonged in my arms and that’s the way I wanted to remember him, not in a wooden crate six foot under.

  It’s January now, and it’s so fucking cold, the wind whips through the streets of London, freezing my sensitive skin. My body has gone past shivering, my fingers and toes are numb, my skin an ice white, my cracked lips aching and stinging as the cold spits at them.

  The local homeless shelter opens soon, and the hundreds of people hoping to get a room for the night will soon pile in, pushing, shoving and sometimes becoming desperately violent. I collect my few items of worth, drag myself from the floor and trudge the streets, my thin blanket wrapped tightly around my tiny malnourished frame.

  I have tried for the past year to get a bed for the night there, and as every other night I make my way to the building and wait outside.

  No one is at the doors when I arrive. For the first time in a year I might have a bed for the night. I might have heating and a shower. A sad smile frames my face for the first time since I can remember. The simplicity of a roof over my head, cheering my bitter insides up a little.

  After an hour of waiting and mountains of people pushing and budging from behind, the way I expected them too, the doors open.

  “Right we only have eighty rooms free. It’s first come first serve I’m afraid.” I look to the sky and thank the Lord.

  I tell the lady my name and collect a token for food from her. Making my way to the small room allocated to me I place my backside on the lumpy mattress. The amazing, lumpy mattress.

  I lay myself down and breath in and out, lavishing the heat around me. I sigh contented with my accommodation for tonight. This was luxurious and safe compared to my usual spots. I was thankful for every second I got to spend here.

  An hour later I go to the soup kitchen and collect my free hot meal and drink.

  The gruel type mush is heart-warming and delicious. One bowl fills my empty stomach easily. The piss-water cup of tea also a blessing from God. It warms the blood running through my icy veins.

  When I get back to my room I collect the towels provided and head to the shower to rinse the year’s supply of grime, grease, semen and other human fluids from my skin.

  The scorching shower is astonishing. The pounding water ridding my body of the filth. I use the cheap shampoo and conditioner they provide me with, and wash my knotted hair. The silky length reforming and trailing my back the way it once had.

  I scrub my body with the Tesco value body wash and breathe in the clean scent around me. The freshness enveloping me and warming my soul.

  Just this moment in time I forget everything else and wallow in the comfort. Tomorrow is another day and will most likely follow as every othe
r day has the last three years, but this moment in time, I will appreciate it with everything I can give.

  My night’s sleep is amazing; the lumpy bed does wonders for my aching back, the thick duvet keeping me warm.

  At seven a.m. the warden knocks on my door and tells me I have twenty minutes to get out. Claiming my free breakfast and then closing the door behind me I leave the shelter, a real satisfied smile on my face for the first time in three years.

  I find a spot at the rear fire exit of a restaurant; I can distantly recall visiting here with my foster parents when celebrating. I place my butt on the step by the back door, the warm air from the underground tube lines blowing up through the metal grate by my feet. The hot air keeps the biting winter chill from giving me hyperthermia, controlling those body wracking shakes for just a while longer.

  I spend my day as usual sleeping, begging and trying my damn hardest to get comfortable with the limited amount of space and shelter provided.

  When two a.m. rolls around, I can hear people leaving the clubs opposite the restaurant entrance. Their noises echo around me, their drunken shouts and high pitch whining grating on my very last nerve. The bellowing of testosterone fuelled males fighting does nothing but make me feel very wary and a little frightened. I have seen enough violence and destruction in my short twenty-one years that I never want to hear or experience it again.

  I feel like decking some of the girls for whining about trivial pathetic things. ‘I broke a nail', or 'mummy won’t let me have the car I want', 'daddy only gave me £500 for my birthday’ blah blah blah. I want to throw my fist into something to alleviate the anger I feel towards the selfish people walking past me.

  “Hello sweet thing. Want some company?” A grimy looking man crouches in front of me, the stench of cheap whiskey on his breath. His smell automatically sends me into an internal fit of panic, reminding me of the one man I detest most in this world. I can see the yellow tinge to his weathered skin as the single street lamp illuminates his darkened presence. His teeth are a disgusting, gut churning black. I don’t want anyone’s company tonight, let alone an alcoholic's. I just want sleep. A few times in the past three years I had had someone stay with me, sharing my spot and giving me someone to talk to, to prevent the madness from manifesting within my head. It was so easy to fall into depression being in this situation. Sitting on your own day in day out, wondering and analysing your life, wondering where you went wrong, what you did to deserve the hurt and isolation you now felt.