That’s why I’m not proud of myself, because I’m a bad person. I’m violent. I’m horrible. I’m fucking ungrateful just like Hugh always said. I want to go back to my cage, to lock myself in and never come out. That’s what I want. I don’t deserve to be around Mum or Gina. I don’t deserve family.
***
I had to take a break again. I got so mad. I had to put the pen down, take some deep breaths, get out of my bedroom and do something else. Painting seems to be the only thing that calms me down when I’m mad.
I probably shouldn’t tell Dr Anderton this but sometimes I use the computer and search for results about the kind of person I am. I want to know what happens to people who have experienced the kind of things I’ve experienced. Do you know what I learned? I learned that a high percentage go on to do those things to other people.
Dr Anderton wants me to talk about all of my feelings, from how angry I am, to how sad I feel, or even how happy I am to not be in the bunker anymore. But there are other feelings that she wants me to talk about that I don’t think I can. Not yet. And those are very complicated. They involve things I don’t really remember, because when they were happening to me, I went to another place. I focused on a spot on the wall, or I pretended I was back in the village with my friends, playing football with Billy and Oscar from school.
***
My bed is soft at night, now. The air in my room is fresh, and I always leave the door open so that the air remains like that. I don’t often open the window, just every now and then. Sometimes I stand by the open window for a moment, feel the cool breeze on my skin and look at the street below. There are times when my heart almost seizes inside my chest because I suddenly realise how big the world is. I don’t always like remembering the size of the world.
It’s weird, but at night I like to wrap myself in the duvet. Head to toe. I like the darkness. I couldn’t always control the lights in the bunker, because some were outside my cage, but when the lights went out it was pitch black. The kind of black I haven’t seen since. The darkness doesn’t frighten me because nothing bad ever happened in the dark. Of course, I was afraid the first time. I wondered what it would be like for a rat to crawl on me, or for a spider to drop from the ceiling. Nothing like that ever happened. Darkness usually meant the generator needed a new battery. It also meant that Hugh wasn’t there, which meant nothing could hurt me. Unless a rat nipped at my toes, but then I’d been through much worse already.
I like the darkness before I sleep. I like knowing that Hugh isn’t there and that he won’t hurt me ever again. But I don’t like my dreams.
***
I had a break because I didn’t want to write about my dreams.
I still don’t, but I’m going to try.
In my dreams I feel his breath against my skin, his large hands on my arms. I see him in many different ways. Sometimes they are harmless memories, like him reading me a story, cutting my hair, cutting my nails, turning up with Indian food. Sometimes they are the in-between memories where I’m scared but he’s not hurting me. The way he’d rant about his wife, his brother, his friends. The way his face would screw up as he spewed out vile things about the world. The way he’d change his voice to imitate other people.
At one point he started setting me homework. I’d write essays on different subjects. He’d either nod his head in approval or laugh. Whatever it was, at the end, he’d burn the pages. He burned a lot of my writing. But I kept most of my drawings. Those I stuck on the wall or hid under my mattress. But words were too much for him. Perhaps they felt too real.
“Do you see how kind I am to you?” he said one day. “Look at the books I bring you! Look at how much I’m teaching you about the world. I’m better than a father, aren’t I? Aren’t I, Aiden?”
“Yes.”
“Good boy.”
All of this turns up in my dreams, often broken up, or out of order. They’re hazy. Hugh’s face changes. At times his hair has greys in it, other times it doesn’t. Or I’m younger in my dream than I was in real life. It doesn’t matter, though, because I always wake up sweating.
I won’t write about the worst of it, no matter what Dr Anderton says. I know that words heal but I don’t even know how to put it into words. So how can I heal myself?
Sometimes I imagined I was in a completely different part of the world, like Mum and me used to do when we were playing. The Great Wall of China. The Eiffel Tower. The playground at school. The campsite I went to on holiday with Mum and Dad. Mum’s wedding, the one Hugh showed me a video of. I went to all of those places during the worst moments. That’s where I was. But my dreams don’t understand. They keep showing me clips of it like something on a film. I hate it. It was so bad that for a while I tried not to sleep at all, but I got too tired. Dr Anderton says it’s healthy to have at least seven hours of sleep at night. I’m not sure she’s right. I would rather not sleep if I can. I’d love to never have to see any of those things again.
But the worst dream of all isn’t one where Hugh is hurting me. No, it’s very different. It’s the dream I have of Hugh’s death. It’s me holding the bat. It’s me hitting him.
The bat was meant for me because I was getting too old to keep in the bunker. I see Hugh now like I’m there again, his eyes wet with tears, hand wrapped around the handle of the bat, his body trembling all over. He’s going to kill me. But now there’s a flicker in his eyes. He’s thinking about what it’ll be like to take another child, I can tell. He’s thinking about going through it all again. And now he’s thinking about how he can’t help himself, even though there are times he wants to stop. He’s thinking about the time he almost let me go, when he opened up the cage door and closed his eyes. But when I actually went to leave he slammed the door shut and started to cry.
And now he’s thinking about it all being pointless. That it needs to stop. Now he’s thinking about the only way this can end. Now he’s thinking about giving up, giving everything up.
He gives me the weapon. He eggs me on.
I look down at the piece of wood in my right hand, and for a moment I’m not sure whether I know what to do with it. But I’ve been hit before and I know the parts that are the softest, most vulnerable. I lift it up above my head and swing it, hard.
I’m hitting him, over and over and over until his skull cracks open. I’m there again, watching the blood spurt from his wounds. Fuck. I’m there. I head the crack of bone. I’m there watching the stillness of his body. The light fade from his eyes. The thoughts leave his body.
I’m there.
***
I had to stop again. I was shaking. You can see the wobbly pen marks. My words are scrawled all over, missing the lines completely. But it was like I was there again, watching it happen for real.
Dr Anderton, how could you make me relive these things? I don’t understand how it helps me. It just makes me feel bad. I’m so mad at you right now that I want to do something, like, I don’t know, hit a wall. Stab a pen into my leg. Why are you making me do this?
***
That was yesterday and I think I’m okay now. I spent the evening helping Mum entertain Gina. She’s eight months old now and can pull herself up. It’s like watching Dad learn to walk again.
I feel really crappy today, like I’m nothing but black and grey lines fused together. That’s what I painted earlier, lots of black and grey lines in the shape of a boy. When I was finished, I left it on my bedroom floor to dry. But as I was getting up, I knocked over some yellow paint and it splashed onto the canvas. I was mad at first, but then I kinda liked it. It reminded me of what Mum says, about light coming in through the cracks.
But it only made me feel better for a moment, so Mum asked me if I wanted to go for a walk with her. We made our way out into the countryside where it was quiet, with Gina in a carrier on Mum’s back. We walked until my bad leg ached and then we sat down on the grass, which was slightly damp, and we ate sandwiches and didn’t really talk much. Mum asked me how my writing
was going, and I told her that it made me think things that I don’t want to remember anymore. She said she loved me and that we’d get through it together.
Mum says love a lot. She likes to remind me that she loves me. But I’m not sure I understand that word. Hugh used to say it too. But being in the bunker wasn’t love. Being hurt wasn’t love. And what if I don’t love anyone or anything? What if I’m numb forever? Or worse, what if I’m a bad person?
Families are supposed to love each other but I didn’t see my family for ten years. The only way I saw them was through photos and videos that Hugh showed me on his phone. Smiling images of them living their life without me, believing that I was dead. How do I match up the smiling picture of Mum and Jake with the Mum who takes me on a walk and tells me she loves me? Who tells me that light comes in through the dark cracks within us? That promises me that everything will be all right?
It all comes back to one thing that I know is true: I don’t know her. I’m getting to know her now, but I haven’t lived with her for years. She might not be the person I remember.
Because I was six when I was taken, I had happy memories from before. Yes, I remember family holidays. I remember going to school. I remember Christmas and the presents I got. I remember Mum painting. She laughed a lot more, then. We used to chase each other. I remember all of those things and I try to hold them in my memory and never let them go. But while I was inside the bunker, they began to seem like something that never happened. Did we really make up games together or did I make it up in my head? Did I dream the picnic in the park or was it real?
I was alone so much that my mind often played tricks on me. That was why I read so many books, it was the only way to stop my mind from drifting. Otherwise everything distorted. Everything twisted up until I couldn’t recognise it.
The sandwiches were good. We didn’t talk all that much and I think Mum got a bit frustrated because I kept shrugging and answering with one word. But Gina was funny, making silly noises and faces.
We went through the outskirts of the woods on the way home and all the trees were turning brown for autumn. I ignored my leg and kicked up the leaves to make Gina laugh. Mum smiled, too, and it seemed so different to when Hugh used to smile. It’s like she’s looking at the things she values the most, or like she’s warm from head to toe. I ached from walking, but it was the kind of ache that I like. It made me tired, but it reminded me that I was free to walk.
Now I’m about to get into bed and I think maybe I’ll sleep well tonight.
***
I decided to read a fantasy book today. It’s a chilly October day, but I went into the garden and sat on one of the garden chairs with a book about a hero with a pet dragon. I put a blanket over my knees and Mum made me a cup of tea to keep my hands warm. The dragon starts off small and cute, and then he gets bigger and the hero has to find things to feed the dragon with. Goats, sheep, wolves… until he realises that the dragon wants to eat people. The more the hero feeds the dragon, the bigger the dragon gets and the more dangerous it is.
Eventually the hero realises he has to feed the dragon people, because nothing else will fill its belly. But when the hero does feed the dragon people, the dragon realises he doesn’t need his master, and flies away to hunt alone. The dragon wreaks so much violence that the hero has to decide whether to kill the dragon or let it live and keep on hurting others.
Sometimes I wonder whether I have a dragon inside me that I’m feeding. There’s an angry monster inside me and if I feed it with negative thoughts, it’ll keep getting bigger until I start to hurt other people. But my response to that is that my life has been so unfair. Why shouldn’t I be angry? And if I am angry, how do I stop feeding the dragon? Dr Anderton says that I can do that by turning my negative thoughts into positive ones. Words heal. The more I write them down, the more I can let them go. The less they go round and round in my head until that dragon grows up to be a beast.
And maybe she’s right, because since I wrote about Hugh and the way I hit him over the head until he… No, I should say – since I wrote about the way I killed Hugh – I’ve felt lighter, in a way, like the dragon is a bit smaller.
Since my last entry, we’ve been walking a lot. Mum likes to point out some of the trees as we stroll. She said that we can buy a book so that we can identify them better. And plants. I think she believes that I should spend more time outside because I was in the bunker for so long. Maybe she’s right. Maybe I do need to look at the sky more and listen to the birds. Maybe these things are as healing as words. Maybe they help turn the negative thoughts into positives.
The walks are helping me, but I still feel overwhelmed by the world outside of the bunker. Especially people and the way they stare at me. Or the sound of loud cars. Ambulances and fire engines. The brightness of the sun. But with each passing day, they become a little bit more bearable. Both Mum and Dr Anderton tell me that I’m adjusting well. Mum says I’m a good son and a good big brother and that I should be kind to myself at all times.
It’s nice today. There is a slight chill in the air, like night-time in the bunker, and the sun is hidden behind some clouds so it doesn’t hurt my eyes. It seems like it might rain, but for now the weather holds. I can sit here and read my book, thinking about ways to stop feeding the dragon. The hero slays the dragon in the end. It’s not exactly a happy ending, he’ll forever miss his dragon, and he won’t ever be able to stop thinking about the moment he killed it, but in the end, killing it saved him. And now he can move on and go ahead and live his life without a monster to feed.
***
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About the Author
Sarah A. Denzil is a British suspense writer from Derbyshire. Her books include SILENT CHILD, which has topped Kindle charts in the UK, US, and Australia. SAVING APRIL and THE BROKEN ONES are both top thirty bestsellers in the US and UK Amazon charts.
Combined, her self-published and published books, along with audiobooks and foreign translations, have sold over one million copies worldwide.
Sarah lives in Yorkshire with her husband, enjoying the scenic countryside and rather unpredictable weather. She loves to write moody, psychological books with plenty of twists and turns.
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