The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist.
~ Charles Baudelaire
Fifteen years ago
Twenty-eight, twenty-nine, thirty…
At school, I count the tiles on the classroom ceiling to stop myself from lashing out when I get angry. It calms me down. I don’t know why. I think one of the counsellors my mum took me to said focusing on something else when I feel it building up inside of me would help to tackle my anxiety. He suggested using nature. He said it can help to centre us, whatever that means. I’m six years old, but he had no idea how to talk to me. He droned on about the brain and how it works, showed me a video on something called mindfulness, and then made me sit in his window and watch the pigeons in a bird bath in his office gardens for the rest of the session. It was the most pointless afternoon of my life.
Sixty-four.
That’s how many tiles there are in my classroom, but I still count them most days, regardless.
However, in our bedroom at home, we don’t have tiles. I wouldn’t see them in the dark anyway when I really needed to count. So instead, when I need to, I focus on the wallpaper next to my bed. It’s torn and peeling off in places. Not because of anything I did. Well, not really. The damp makes it come off and then we can’t help ourselves, we have to peel the rest and give it a helping hand. “We” being my sister, Alice, and me. We share a bedroom. Most days, I wish we didn’t, but then most days I pray we lived far away from here, from anywhere that adults could hurt us.
If I had one wish, it would be to have a magic key to our bedroom, one that could only be used by us, so no one else could get in. The kids at school are mean sometimes, but adults are far worse. They pretended to be good in front of others, but they can’t be trusted. They hide their evil behind sweet smiles and gentle touches; touches that hurt when no one else is watching.
He told me he’d cut my tongue out if I ever told anyone about him coming into our room. He said Mum and Dad would be mad at me for telling, that Alice would be taken away and that I’d end up in prison and everyone would blame me. So, I keep quiet. I don’t tell anyone about what happens when the lights go out and the rest of the world falls asleep.
Neither does Alice.
When I hear the click of the bedroom door handle, my stomach rolls over. I stay facing the wall, trying to ignore the rocks in my tummy, and I remind myself to keep counting. If I count hard enough, sometimes I fall asleep too, and then I don’t hear Alice’s quiet cries or his grunting. I hate that sound. Last night, I counted one hundred and eighty-nine daisies before he left. I hope it’s not more than that tonight.
My sister always whimpers as the bed squeaks from his weight on it, and I squeeze my eyes shut as tightly as I can, pretending to be asleep. If I can’t count, I draw pictures in my head of what I’d like to do to him when I’m older.
I’m the lucky one.
He never comes to my bed.
It’s only Alice he wants.
One day, when I’m a grown up, I’m going to get my sister as far away from here as I can. We’ll live in a treehouse or on the beach somewhere, and I’ll make sure she has her own room with a massive bolt on the door. No one else will be allowed in unless she lets them. I’ll make sure she’s always safe.
But for now, we lock ourselves up tightly in our own heads. We keep the pain to ourselves.
We don’t talk to anyone.
What’s the point?
No one can help us.
No one really cares.
Present Day
I wake up to the sounds of machines beeping all around me, making my banging head pulsate harder and agitating me to the brink of insanity. It took a few seconds for my foggy brain to kick into gear, and when it did, I realised I was in the hospital. It wasn’t just the sounds though, the clinical smell gave it away too. The scent of bleach, illness,
and death made my stomach turn. It was the whole package; like a cocktail of catastrophe, the omen of my downfall.
Why did I have to wake up here?
Why did I have to wake up at all?
Lying still, my body felt like a dead weight, as if I’d been strapped to the bed like one of those mental patients in a horror movie. I couldn’t move. I could barely wriggle my arms, and my legs were fucking useless. As my brain-fog started to clear, I prayed to God no one else would see me here. I looked like a fucking loser. Really felt like one too.
I tried to lift my arm up, but even the slightest movement made me wince in pain. Breathing wasn’t easy either and I grimaced, trying to remember exactly what’d happened after I got that call. The drugs they’d given me in here really weren’t helping my memory. I was numb but drowsy, and I needed to be alert.
The last thing I remembered was going bat-shit crazy with the kind of fury that’d make my best friend, Brandon, proud, but probably shit his pants at the same time. I didn’t regret it and I’d do it again if only I could get my limbs to comply with my brain and bloody move.
There were exactly four people, other than me, who knew the truth about what’d happened all those years ago. The truth that’d landed me in this hospital bed. My sister Alice, Brandon, our local copper Tom Riley, and him. I’d never meant for Tom to find out like he did, but he was good to me. I guess the reason he turned a blind-eye to a lot of the shit we all pulled around Sandland was because of what he’d found out one night, while coming across me and Brandon arguing in an alleyway. I’d done everything in my power to keep my family secrets hidden, but sometimes shit just happened, no matter how careful you were. I was lucky Tom agreed to keep my secrets for me. It could’ve easily gone the other way, and I knew Alice wasn’t strong enough to face a court case.
When I got the call from Tom, giving me the heads-up that he was out of jail, I knew there was only one thing I could do. I had to hunt him down.
Me.
No one else.
I couldn’t involve anyone else in my plans. Brandon and his girlfriend, Harper, were having the babies. I couldn’t drag him into this. Ryan and Emily had been through enough with her dad and the trial. And Zak? He was a mate, but I didn’t feel close enough to him to share something like this. I knew he’d have my back, they all would, but this was my war. My battle. I needed to fight it alone.
I didn’t feel like a winner right now though. But what war had ever been fought and won in one night? I had a lifetime of regret, of feeling helpless and vengeful. The enemy I was fighting would take a lot longer to conquer. He needed to take more hits before his crushing defeat. But I’d do it. I owed it to Alice.
It didn’t take long for the Sandland grapevine to go into overdrive. When a notorious armed robber gets out of jail and takes himself off to the local boozer to brag about his time inside, it spreads around the town like wildfire. I knew exactly where to find him, and I didn’t think twice about going down there. He’d had enough freedom in my book, being out the few hours that he had. Now, it was time for him to face his past. A past that would never forget what he’d done.