Take your time. Let your mind get used to consciousness.
A girl. There. Not in the passage, not at the door, or by the window. Not even at the end of your bed.
Closer than that.
She stares, unblinking, her eyes burning into yours even though you keep your eyelids shut tight. You move, and for a moment, she slips away from you. But she’s not gone. You know that much.
You think, please. Not again. Your teeth tighten so hard they squeak against each other. You don’t mean to do it, but this is real, right-now fear, and your body doesn’t care what you want. Your heart starts firing out ball-bearings instead of blood. Open your eyes, you tell yourself.
You say her name, and she stiffens. You feel her do it, rigid and alert in your stomach. She is inside you. She is always inside you, listening under your skin.
When you were little, the doctors said this was a known disorder, that they could help. That this other you, your alter, the one who’s always there like an unwanted imaginary friend, could be brought out into the light. That this other girl that you sometimes became was there because, at some point in your life, you needed to switch your reality off. There must have been something, they said, that brought her bursting out of you: some trauma, some incitement, some moment of quickening. You never found it. In the end they gave up, telling you she was nothing to fear, that she could be managed, medicated, contained.
The doctors were wrong.
You feel her rising. And it doesn’t matter how much you know it’s not a physical condition, that it’s all in your head: when she fights you, it hurts. If you want your body to be yours and not hers, you have to fight back.
Now comes the tension, a thickening, swelling the marrow of your bones. You wrench the bedclothes in your fists, and you press your heels into the mattress. She is stiff and screaming in your veins, inside the cells of your blood. You try to cry out but your voice sticks behind your tongue, no breath behind it. She has her hands in the wet depths of your throat, bending the stiff cartilage of your windpipe.
And just like that she bursts into smoke. Goes quiet. You’re left with the ragged sound of your breath, your heartbeat thundering in your ears. Even as it slows, you know she isn’t gone. She doesn’t go, ever.
You have learned never to trust the silence, never to let your guard down. Even as you sleep.
Especially as you sleep.
You want to know fear?
Fear has a name.
Her name is Siggy.
London, 2011
I woke gasping, the sheet dislodged and twisted tight around my limbs.
I kicked a leg out against the thin partition between my room and the kitchen. Through the wall I heard the radio being clicked off.
‘Ellie?’ Mum’s voice, muffled through the plasterboard.
Siggy went still, and became a cold, thin layer at the base of my brain. She was quiet for a few moments, then she disappeared like a flame in a vacuum, leaving just the staccato sound of my breathing.
‘Ellie, sweetheart? You awake?’
I let my eyes open, worked my jaw and mumbled a croaky, ‘Yeah.’
It was later than I’d thought. A cold screen of early winter daylight sliced through the middle of my tiny room. Motes of dust danced in its blade. I spread my hand across the bare wall. All our walls were bare, in all the flats and houses we’d lived in since I was a child. We never stayed long, and whenever we left, we left in a hurry.
‘She gone?’ Mum called. She always managed to sound cheerful.
‘Mm-hmm.’ I untangled myself from the sheet and tried to swing my knees over the edge of the bed, but I couldn’t do it. Too heavy. It was bad this morning, worse than usual. Soreness bloomed across my right shoulder and down my arm. I had to heave my breath in.
‘Just doing coffee,’ she said, her voice already moving away. She turned the radio back up. The track finished and was replaced by a DJ in an inoffensive, sing-song voice. I heard her unlock the crockery cupboard, taking out mugs, locking it again, setting them down.
I lay for a minute in the S-shape of warmth, trying to salvage what I could of the dream. There was a bright blue sky, and that building. Always that building, the one I’d drawn as a child over and over again: long and low, as unchanging and precise as a photograph, every time. Every night.
Slowly, under the duvet, I shifted. But as I moved to push myself up, bright, brilliant pain shot across my hand, bringing tears to my eyes.
Bisecting my palm, intermittent but extending right over to the base of my thumb, was a ragged tear. Deep punctures, red and swollen. I touched it and winced: it was exquisitely sore, the flesh not yet dry.
Gingerly, I pushed away the covers and looked myself over. Across the right of my pelvis, a blue-black mess of bruising. I pressed the tip of a finger to the centre of the darkest part. The ache, bone-deep, rose up to meet it.
Where had it come from?
A fine thread of fear started to tug at me, hard. I sat up, planted my feet on the floor. Built up the courage to look at the door.
It would be locked. It had to be locked. Hadn’t I heard Mum lock it? I played back the last moments of the day before. Matt had dropped me off after our quick trip to the pub near the narrowboat he was renting. Mum had made me dinner, a pasta thing we ate together in the kitchen. I’d gone to bed early to read for a while. Mum had locked me in before she left for her late shift. She had.
With my blood roaring in my temples, I turned my head. Opened my eyes.
It was only a fingerbreadth, but the door was open. There, on the white gloss of the frame, was something that made me shoot out of bed as if it had caught fire. I crossed the room in three steps and lifted my fingers to the dark marks on the paintwork.
Smears of reddish-brown, crusted at the edge. And on the backs of my hands – I saw it now – the same thing, the same colour, exactly.
Mud.
Siggy had taken me outside.
Mum appeared in the corridor, holding mugs. She stopped dead, then nudged the door fully open with her toe.
‘What—?’ she started.
I met her eyes. ‘You locked it.’
She gripped her eyelids shut for a second, as if dislodging an image.
‘You locked it,’ I repeated, louder. ‘You did. I heard you.’
She set down the two mugs of coffee and bent to touch the door. She was still wearing her cleaning uniform from the nightshift at the same hospital where Matt worked, the bleach-stained mauve tabard over blue scrubs.
‘Holy shit,’ she whispered, the blood sinking from her skin. She went back out, examining it from the other side. ‘What the hell happened here?’
I followed her. In the hall, the bolt that should have been above the mortice lock on the outside of my door was lying on the floor, its two separate sections still secured together with the padlock. Torn paint and splinters of wood clung to the screws where they’d been wrenched out of place. Several inches higher was what remained of the sliding chain lock, the plug hanging uselessly, swinging on the chain. The force it would have taken to break it like that, wrenched inwards with enough power to break the locks on the outside …
Siggy’s little fingers plucked