by Jo Baker
Go hide, I mouthed, go hide.
But he padded down the stairs towards me.
I frantically waved him back, but he kept coming. Nicholas crashed into the door, and the door slammed into my back, and Sammy slid down and put his back against the door too.
“Sweetheart,” I whispered. “Darling. Please. Run away and hide.”
He shook his head.
“Mummy says go and hide, so go and hide.”
His wide eyes caught the light. “I helping.”
The door whacked into us, and we flinched together. I took his hand and squeezed it. It couldn’t last much longer.
“We have to go.”
Sam nodded.
“We’ll get out of the back door, yes? We’ll go to the farm, okay? Go see Gracie and Mr. M. and the doggie? Away from this silly man.”
He nodded again. I’d carry him; we’d be faster that way. Nicholas would break the front door down and search the house and we’d be long gone out the back. I went to get up, to shift Sam onto my hip, but then there was a crash, and a shower of glass sprayed out overhead. I swung Sammy onto my lap, huddled over him. Shards rained down; a rock spun and slid to a halt on the hall tiles.
I could see the back door—down the hallway, through the kitchen—but between us and it, the cold hall tiles glittered with broken bits of old stained glass. Sammy’s soft bare feet dangled. My feet were in my bedtime socks. I knew we had to go. I knew that this was the last moment of not hurting.
Nicholas’s hand—grubby, broken-nailed—came in between the broken leads and reached round for the top bolt.
I heaved myself to my feet, still planted in my own footprints. I lifted Sammy with me. “Hold on tight, my love.”
I told myself: Worse things happen than this; worse things than this happen all the time.
You hear stories of incredible feats. Of gunshots and broken bones and dislocations barely noticed. Of the surge of adrenaline and dopamine that sees you through it all and out the other side, until you’re safe enough to be in pain. But I felt each scrap of glass that cut me. At the back door, I stood on one foot to pick out a piece, still clutching Sammy. We went out quietly and locked the door behind us, left the key in the lock there so that Nicholas wouldn’t be able to open it from inside.
We stumbled off across the garden as I helped Sammy round from my hip and onto my back.
“Hold on tight.”
He wrapped his arms across my collarbones; I tied him on there with my scarf; we swung over the wire fence and I caught my hand on a barb, winced and eased it off. I sucked the blood from my palm and we jogged out across the field. The wide space of it, alien, the grass silver and the trees casting shadows you could fall down; all lit by the huge bone-moon; and me in my white pyjamas, with my blue and white scarf, so painfully visible, and so sore and heavy and slow.
We came to the cusp of the hill, and then staggered down towards the hedge, and dropped into the darkness underneath it. The ground was hard and stony underfoot. I wished there was something I could do to cover up our whiteness. I hunkered down and loosened the scarf and Sammy slid off my back and shuffled round to me. I put an arm around him, my breath raw.
“Are sore, Mummy?”
“Little bit.”
The second storey of the cottage peeked up over the rise of the hill. We watched the landing light came on, then Sam’s bedroom light. Nicholas was searching the house. If we had left bloody footprints, he hadn’t noticed them. I slid my phone out of my pocket, cupped my hand round it to cover up the light. Blood dripped from my cut onto the screen: no signal here either. I wiped it on my pyjamas, pocketed it.
The Metcalfes’ farm was two fields over to the left. We’d go in shadow, round the edges of the fields. I took Sam back in my arms, winced to my feet.
“Tell you what, Sam,” I said. “When this is over, Mummy’s gonna get herself a good pair of trainers and go running every day and get properly fit. You wanna do that too? I’ll get you a three-wheeler if you like, for when you get tired.”
He nodded and said, “Silly man.”
“Yes,” I said. “I know. Silly, silly man.”
I knotted him tight, and we headed on. The soreness of my feet now hit me fully; each step burned. My socks were soaked with blood. We crept gingerly along the line of shadow, clambered over a patch of wooden fencing; we picked our way along the edges of the next white-lit field, and it was like the ground was made of knives. My head see-sawed. My ears buzzed. I blinked and shook my head to try to clear it, but that made me feel sick. I bit my lip. I could not pass out, not now, not yet.
“Keep a look out, lovey, for the silly man?”
I felt Sammy half turn; I hitched him higher, and the ground yawed beneath me. We staggered out across the field. There was the side wall of the Metcalfes’ farm; the broad back gate, the concreted yard, the cluster of barns and sheds. Here there’d be people, help, a working telephone. Just a couple of hundred yards. I thought, we’ll be okay; we’ll make it.
“Mummy! Look!”
I glanced back; saw a flashlight’s beam bouncing across the field towards us. I thought, why bother with that big heavy Maglite of his, with the moonlight soaking everything, and clear enough to read by?
“Hold on, sweetheart.”
We ran.
The buildings danced before me; the moon streaked like a sparkler’s burn. The world went past like a zoetrope, frame after frame after frame. The stink of cattle and the sound now of his heavy footfalls and the grass swishing and my heart thudding and Sammy breathing. We reached the gate; I let go of Sammy, rattled at the latch; the world spun. Nicholas was close, the yellow of his flashlight flicking around us now. I had the latch open and the gate swinging back: I glanced over my shoulder and he was there, slowing to a lope; we were cornered.
“Change of plan,” I told Sam.
I unhitched the scarf, set him down on his little bare feet round the end of the gate; he stumbled on to the concrete beyond, looking back at me. I shut the gate behind him; the torchlight cast my shadow over him. I could feel the thud of Nicholas’s approaching footfalls. The beam of light danced over us. If this was the last time Sammy ever saw his mum…I reached through the bars of the gate and touched his cheek; I smiled.
“You remember the farmhouse?”
He nodded.
“Go there. Now, sweetheart, go find our friends.”
He frowned up at me. It’s the loveliest thing I’ve ever known, his little face.
“Fast as you can. Go find them. Go. Do what Mummy says now, please.”
He nodded. He turned and stumbled away, barefoot on the mucky concrete.
I turned to face Nicholas; he came to a halt, the Maglite’s beam trained on me. I held up a hand to screen the glare.
“Nicholas,” I said. “Please.”
I still thought that there were words that could be said that would make things different. I still thought there was a way of dealing with it somehow better.
“If you stop now, if you end it here…” I tried.
He changed his stance, as if considering this; as if there was a part of him that still entertained the possibility of things ending differently for him and me. I held on to the top bar of the gate to steady myself. My thoughts were wrapped up in a bundle and gone with Sammy, stumbling away towards the farmhouse. All alone. Too small to even reach the doorbell.
But if I could just hold it together. If I could just get Nicholas to talk.
“There’s still hope for you,” I said. “Things can be better. I’ll say you’re not well. If you stop. Here, now, please.”
I didn’t even see it coming. The light slammed itself inside my skull. Brilliant and blinding.
For a moment there was nothing. My hearing flattened out to a hum. I remember my hands on my head, the heat and wet I felt
there, I remember curling up on the ground, feeling like I was going to throw up. I’d thought the worst had happened already but the worst had not happened yet: I still didn’t even know how bad the worst could be. And I understood why he’d brought that heavy Maglite when there was moonlight enough to see by.
Then I remember his breath on my face, level and steady. I remember him hauling at me, I remember grabbing at the gate and getting hold of something and not letting go. He levered at my fingers, then gave up and smashed his Maglite down on my hand. I let go.
He heaved me up, his arms under my arms, my feet scrabbling for purchase on the stony dirt. He hauled me away. Away from the gate, and from the farm, and from Sammy. I dug at his hands with my good hand, I tried to pull away, but it was like struggling in a dream, where the bedclothes are tangled round you, and you’re slow and feeble and nothing works as it should. Sometimes when I dream that kind of dream, I stop trying to fight or run or struggle, and instead I swim; I swim up and out and up, slipping through the air, away from everything, and it’s so much easier than struggling; I keep swimming up, higher and higher, and am skimming through the sky with the birds, and wondering why I didn’t do this sooner, why I didn’t do this all the time.
So maybe this was where I could just swim away up into the air and join the birds, and have done with struggling. I felt so tired. So sick. So sore. I’d done what I could; I thought. I had nothing left.
I remember noticing the torch lying abandoned on the ground, the wedge of yellow light laced through with grass stems; I remember it getting smaller as we left it behind. I remember the way my feet bumped over the ruts and stones as he dragged me away. I remember the way my hand was a throb of pain, the way his breath came and went above me; the way the warmth of his body bled into my back.
I remember that he was speaking as he heaved me along, and it took me a while to connect what he was saying with what was happening to me. But he was telling me something. He was offering me an explanation. He hadn’t wanted to have to do this. It shouldn’t have been necessary. But I just wouldn’t do what I was supposed to do; he couldn’t understand why I just wouldn’t do what I was supposed to do, but instead was so unreasonable, so difficult, so very fucking crazy indeed.
Fear is disabling, and I’d been afraid for so long. But anger—anger’s helpful. It clears the mind. It’s energising.
I lifted my feet; he had my whole weight now. He fumbled, swore, half-dropped me, but clung on. I lunged away; his fingers sank into my arms. I heaved against his grip; he cursed and yanked me back, hard. And I went with the pull, added what force I could to his, and smashed the back of my head into his face.
My own pain was bad. But a crack like that to the nose is blinding. He let go, and I ran.
See-sawing, sick, blood in my eyes, I ran; the night tumbled and boiled around me. I could hear him yelling, cursing as he came after me. Crazy bitch stupid cunt fucking whore. I had no breath. Stupid crazy cunt bitch fucking whore for not just doing what he wanted me to do. I staggered on towards the fallen Maglite, the gate, the farm.
Then the night burst apart. I dropped to my knees, my hurt hand cradled to me. A thin whine of white noise, then the night meshed itself back together again, its fingers intertwining. Here’s the church, here’s the steeple, look inside and…There was John Metcalfe, shotgun at his shoulder. A blur as Moss skimmed past me; teeth and hackles. And then other shapes swam into clarity, became James Metcalfe in wax jacket over pyjamas, who was pounding up towards me; became Grace baffled in her blue dressing gown, became little Sammy, hand in hand with her. I tried to call out to him, but there was no breath left in me.
I glanced back; Nicholas still stood there, brought up short by the gunshot and by Moss, who had planted herself between him and the rest of us, lip curled, snarling. There was blood trickling from his bust nose, but that was my doing; he hadn’t been shot. James came thudding to a halt beside me, squared up to Nicholas. Nicholas took it all in with those strange pale eyes: the young man standing over me, and the old man with the gun, the slavering dog, the old woman and the little boy, and me, getting unsteadily back to my feet. A long, still moment as he and I looked at each other. Then his face somehow cleared. He turned, and sprinted off into the dark. Moss made a lunge after him, but John Metcalfe called her back. I swayed; James wrapped an arm around my waist. John Metcalfe broke his gun and strode towards us; Sam wriggled out of Grace’s grip and belted over to me. I went to scoop him up, but my head swam, and I was almost gone; Grace picked him up and leaned in to me, and she wrapped her arms around both of us.
* * *
—
“You said you’d kill him, if you ever saw him,” I said to John Metcalfe, a little later, as we waited in the farmhouse kitchen. “But you only fired one barrel, and you missed.” My voice sounded strange, hoarse and ragged.
“Aye well,” he said, “you were in the way.”
I laughed, and the laugh collapsed into coughing, and John Metcalfe said, “Darned inconvenient of you.”
Because when it came to it, we both knew that he wasn’t up to it. John Metcalfe couldn’t do a thing like that. To look a person in the eye and pull a trigger and watch the blood bloom on their chest; to place ketamine in a trusting palm, and watch the sweats and horrors come upon the taker; to weigh your will against another’s life and decide that your desire is what matters most; that’s an astonishing degree of self-importance right there, and Mr. Metcalfe just didn’t have it. He just didn’t feel entitled.
Beyond the kitchen window, blue and white lights skimmed through the distance; I heard the sound of sirens.
* * *
—
A triage nurse peered at my head wound, checked my pupils for concussion, took a look at my hand, winced; winced again at the state of my feet:
“Now they are a proper, proper mess,” she said.
She gave me two Paracetamol and a plastic cup of water, and sent me for x-rays.
After the x-rays, a second nurse, who was plump and Scottish, cleaned my head wound, stuck it together with glue, and pressed a dressing over it. He gave me a local anaesthetic, picked out bits of glass from my feet—he kept flicking back and forth between the x-ray on the computer screen and my fleshy mess—then washed and stitched the wounds. He cleaned, glued and dressed the barbed-wire cut on my palm, and strapped up my hand with a splint. I was lucky, he said, that nothing was broken, but the bruising was going to take a while to go down. He gave me a dose of antibiotics, then washed the blood off my face with cotton wool. His hands were careful and gentle and by the time he had finished I just loved him. I wanted to take him home with me.
Sammy had fallen asleep on the police officer’s lap. Her name was Tracey. She just sat there, on the hard chair, letting him sleep. She was lean and freckly, with brownish-ginger frizz escaping from her ponytail. Whenever I caught her eye, she smiled, and she had dimples; the smile and the dimples and my boy sleeping on her made me choke with love. It might have had something to do with being doped up on painkillers, that I kept falling in love with people that night, but it was mostly to do with their kindness.
“You’re going to have a fair few scars,” the Scottish nurse said. “But because of where they are, no one will know unless you want them to.”
* * *
—
It was nearly daylight by the time we were done at the hospital. We were driven in an unmarked car to a redbrick semi on the edge of town. The sound of the motorway was like waves on a beach; I could hear birds singing too. Across the road, a horse stood in a scrubby field, cropping the grass. Sam and I had passed this place a hundred times or more on the bus. It was a nothing place, not town nor country nor even suburbia, but an old dead shoot of a development that never grew into anything, the kind of place where, in the normal run of things, you would never have a reason to go. I guess that’s why they had the refuge there.
/> Tracey carried Sammy from the car for me; I followed along in washed-out trackies and disposable slippers. A woman was at the door; I said hello and she took my good hand in hers, and showed us in. Her name was Pamela and she said she was duty staff here. She was lean and rangy and wore a purple fleece.
Our room had two single beds and a chest of drawers. Tracey laid sleeping Sammy down, and he rolled over and snuggled in, and I whispered my thanks.
“Shouldn’t have to keep you here so very long,” she said.
Before she left, she hugged me, and rubbed my back. Then she let me go and said she’d be back to check on us, and let us know if there was any news, and she left with a glimpse of cool outdoors, the birdsong, traffic. I pressed my tired eyes.
Pamela showed me around the place while Sammy slept. There was a communal sitting room with sofas and a basket of grubby toys and shelf full of fat broken-spined paperbacks, there was a quiet room with a table and chairs; there was a kitchen with a jar of Nescafe and milk in the fridge and bread and jam, to which I could help myself, and a steam sterilizer on the countertop and the cupboards with a clatter of baby bottles and sippy cups and weaning spoons and toddler cutlery in the drawers. Out the back, a few outdoor toys, and the view was a high clapboard fence, and beyond that scrubby fields and milky sky and a distant wind turbine turning.
Pamela left me to rest and settle in.
The stair treads creaked, and then a woman came into the kitchen; a girl really, thin as string, with a scrappy ponytail and a skinny baby, nightwaking shadows underneath her eyes. She introduced herself as Bethany, then held up the dozy little bundle and kissed a flaky cheek, “and this is Sienna.” She told me to put my feet up and she’d make me a coffee, and she handed me her baby, and sent me to the seating area, and I sat back on a charity sofa and let the baby sleep on my chest. When the baby woke, her mum laid her down on a blanket on the floor and we both watched her spread and curl her tiny fingers and kick her legs around while we drank the instant coffee and it was the best coffee I had ever drunk. Then the girl made up a bottle and chugged it into the baby, and then the baby fell asleep again, and then I fell asleep.
