‘No. But … look.’ I lifted my hand, and her eyes went wide.
I let her take it, and she turned it over. Under her breath she muttered, ‘Jesus,’ then decisively, ‘Bathroom. Got to wash it. Come on.’
Holding me by the wrist so she didn’t touch the wound, she guided me through into the bathroom and pulled the cord for the light. She flipped the toilet lid down and sat me on it like a child, then yanked up her sleeves, exposing her ropey, muscular forearms, hardened from the years of push-ups she did to make sure she was stronger than Siggy.
‘This’ll sting, love.’ The tap screeched as she turned it on, and a thick twist of cold water ran into the avocado-coloured sink. ‘Stick it under here.’
I did as I was told.
Frowning at my palm, she pointed. ‘My guess is barbed wire. Look at the spacing.’ She was right: the punctures were even. Each a centimetre from the last.
She turned and angrily whipped the towel from the electric heater that hadn’t worked in the eight months we’d been there. She dried her hands and kicked it into a bundle by the washing basket.
‘Fucking Siggy,’ she said, dragging her fingers hard across her scalp. ‘What did she do with you this time?’
She wasn’t expecting an answer. We called them fugues, and I never knew what Siggy made me do during them, where she took me. Or why. All I could do was piece it together from whatever mess Siggy left behind, crowbarring in cause by surveying the effect, trying to make sense of it. The fact that the fugues always happened at night had baffled psychologist after psychologist, neurologist after sleep specialist when I was younger until Mum got so frustrated with them that we stopped going altogether. It’s a time in my life I have almost no memory of, but Mum kept journals: all the medicines, all the experts, all the sessions and techniques and homework. Nothing worked. The drugs they said would help with the dissociation made no difference. The fugues continued; the nightmares kept coming. Although I didn’t get worse for a long time – I was plagued by panic attacks, but I never started ‘switching’ during the day, which had always been my fear – I didn’t get better. Eventually, they ran out of things to try. We never got a cure, and we never got an answer: we were dismissed as an anomaly.
But this was back when Siggy was playful, doing small stuff, things that didn’t matter. Like when she filled our shoes with milk while we slept or pulled all the books off the shelves and made them into colour-coded piles. Just the little things, things we could laugh about, almost.
This was before we started needing locks.
This was before Jodie.
My fingers were going numb with the cold, but the torn flesh on my hand was burning now and had started to swell. The mud darkened and flaked off under the water until soon there was nothing left, just clean, pink, angry skin. I turned to wash the mud from the other hand too, and found more of it, up my arm, as far as my elbow.
Where had I gone last night?
What had I done?
Eventually the cold got too much to bear, and I pulled my hand out of the sink and shook my hair back. Mum’s eyes went to my throat.
‘What the hell happened to your neck?’
I got up, dodging round her to get to the mirror. I lifted my chin.
‘Don’t freak out.’ Mum stood behind me, put a hand on my shoulder. ‘Control it. Do not freak out.’
Dark marks the size of grapes, with blue-white crescents indented at their outer edges. Bruises: four in a line on one side of my windpipe, one on the other. Just above the old, jagged scar from years before.
Four and one. Fingers and a thumb.
‘Come on, sweetheart, try,’ she said, angry now. ‘Try to remember.’
I studied the bruises, touched my fingers to them, lining them up, then I stared at myself in the eyes in the mirror: one green, one blue. One for me, one for Siggy.
Think.
Mud.
Barbed wire on my hand.
And a handprint on my neck.
My breath turned solid in my chest as the thought bloomed, running its course.
‘Mum. What if someone was trying to stop …?’
I trailed off. Matt. I lurched out of the room.
My phone wasn’t beside my bed, and it wasn’t in the jeans I’d worn the previous night. I went to look for it in the pocket of the raincoat I was sure I’d left on the back of the door, but neither the phone nor the coat were there. I stumbled out into the living room. Spotting my phone charging in the corner, I yanked the cable out and dialled, pressed it to my ear, thinking, answer. Answer, for Christ’s sake.
‘OK, stop,’ Mum said from behind me. ‘Take a moment to think about this. Ellie. Stop.’
I turned to face her. ‘What?’
‘We need to think smart,’ she said, reaching for the phone.
I ducked away from her before I processed what she’d said. I’d been thinking there must have been a fight, something I could fix. But my mother, she was already thinking of Jodie. Of what Siggy had done before.
That she’d done it again.
The fog in my head cleared suddenly and the gentle Scots of Matt’s voice was in my ear saying you’ve reached Matt Corsham. I’m probably in my dungeon – the photo lab, in the hospital basement – leave a message. I hung up before the beep and dialled it again. Looked at the clock: 07:43. He was on earlies, started at eight, he should have been on his way to the hospital, on the 267. He should have his phone in his hand. I slumped onto the sofa. He should be texting me.
Mum sat beside me and took my face in her hands.
‘What do we do?’ she asked me gently. ‘Things get tough, what do we do?’
‘We deal with it,’ I told her in a whisper.
‘That’s exactly what we do. You and me.’ She sighed, took my good hand and peeled each finger from the phone, until I released it. It went on the table, out of reach, then she moved up next to me, pulling me close. I relented, sank my head against her chest.
‘Please don’t let this happen again, Mum.’
‘Shh. He’ll be OK, though. Probably just have worked late or started early or something.’ She gave me a gentle nudge. ‘Don’t worry. Just a bit of mud. Just some scrapes.’
Even then, neither one of us believed it.
Detective Sergeant Ben Kwon Mae stopped at the lights. He raised his eyebrows in the rear-view mirror and the kicking to the back of his seat immediately ceased. Bear, his 8-year-old daughter who was suspiciously engrossed in the palm of her hand, slowly lifted her chin to meet his gaze.
‘What?’ Eyes all wide, butter-wouldn’t-melt incredulous. ‘It wasn’t me!’
He laughed. Thirty quid a pop, the drama lessons his ex-wife made him shell out for and look what it bought.
‘You’re a terrible actress, Bear. Really bad,’ he said, returning his attention to the school-run gridlock. Should have walked.
The kicking resumed, and he swung around. ‘Oi! Stop it!’
She laughed, but then he clocked the crisps all over her almost-freshly-laundered school sweater. Busted, she