Lock Me In. Kate Simants

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СКАЧАТЬ given up hope that she was wrong: that whoever told her he was dead had made a mistake. I still found myself checking the eyes of every man I saw who could, conceivably, have been the right age to be my dad, looking for the mismatched irises that Mum said I’d inherited from him.

      Jodie waved the cigarette again, offering.

      ‘No thanks,’ I said, almost inaudibly.

      She looked at it and shrugged, then tossed it into the void at the middle of the stairwell. I gasped, leaned over the railings to see if there was anyone down there, and she laughed.

      ‘Fuck ’em,’ she said, getting to her feet. ‘Going for a walk. The pier. Coming?’

      She was on a suspension from school – one fucking joint and they reckon you’re Amy Winehouse, she said – and things were brittle with her mum. Jodie drank, she smoked, she did drugs occasionally. After she disappeared there were even claims that she’d sold sex, though I’d never heard that from her. For all these reasons, I kept my friendship with her from Mum. Although I knew it was an unthinkable betrayal, lying by omission over and over: having a secret was the most delicious liberation, too. Jodie and I saw each other nearly every day, always at hers, always arranged the day before, to coincide with Mum being out.

      Everything was easy with Jodie. I was happy. I’d never had a friend like her, someone I could truly be myself with. So, despite the promises I’d made to Mum, despite her warnings, eventually I told her about Siggy.

      I told her everything. All of it. Not just the fugues but about the dreams that repeated until I knew every thread and wisp of them: the long, low building, just flashes of it; being trapped, a fire; the little boy bleeding on the ground; the cell-deep of the man in a uniform. These dreams – nightmares – were so vivid, their details so constant even in my waking thoughts that they felt like memories.

      I explained to her about the panic attacks: terrors that would burst out fully formed, whose triggers I could pin down no more easily than puffs of smoke. Over the years, Mum had helped me understand that these fears lodged in my mind weren’t mine but Siggy’s, and that was a distinction that helped me make sense of them. And even though it couldn’t have made sense to her in the way I wanted it to, Jodie had listened.

      The next day, she took me to see her mum’s boyfriend. Dr Cox. Charles.

      I didn’t want to go, of course. I refused all the way along the prom to his office in east Brighton. ‘It’s not going to make any difference,’ I insisted.

      ‘Oh yeah? How do you know? You psychic, too?’

      ‘No,’ I said grumpily. ‘I’ve done psychotherapy before.’

      ‘When?’ She clunked her jaw, trying to perfect her smoke rings.

      I shrugged. ‘I don’t know. I was a kid. Little.’

      ‘Can’t have been great if you don’t remember it.’

      ‘Well yeah,’ I said, making an effort the way I tried to back then to give as good as I got. ‘Obviously, it wasn’t great, because it didn’t work, did it?’

      She pulled on my sleeve, rolling her eyes. ‘He’s gooood,’ she wheedled. ‘You’ll like him. Come on. It’s got to be worth trying again.’

      We found a way of me going to sessions with him, and she came along. I ran with the lie I’d told Jodie about my age because it meant that Dr Cox would see me without parental permission. He waived his usual fee too, claiming I was an interesting case, though we all knew it was really because I was Jodie’s friend. To start, she’d sit in and listen, not saying anything. No one, not Mum, not Cox, not even Matt, ever listened to me like Jodie did. Like she was storing it all away, cataloguing it, fitting the pieces of my fragmented pasts together. I believed she would solve it.

      Maybe she would have done.

      There was a click from the living room door, and the voices were clear again. Right outside the bedroom where I was hiding, crouching like a shamed dog. I mouth-breathed, absolutely silent, quiet enough to hear Ben Mae’s deep breath before he said, ‘What happened before …’

      What happened before. I pressed my hands against my temples, and Siggy grinned.

      Don’t think about it, I told myself.

      The only images I have in my head of the night my friend died are Mum’s, just hand-me-down mental pictures appropriated from her description. The problem was that these appropriated visual details are lodged so close to my own memories – of the endless summer before it and the black-hole horror of the months after – that I sometimes feel that it was me who was there, not just Siggy. But that would mean the lines between her and me had started to blur, and if that could happen …

      Just don’t think about it. Calm down. Breathe.

      Mum found her down by the river, where we go on Cherry Tree Day, to mark a special day for Siggy. I’d never taken Jodie there before, and it’s a secret place, inaccessible, overgrown and wooded. But I – or Siggy – had taken her there that night. It was days until Mum admitted to me what she’d found.

      The missing belt—

       I can’t breathe.

      The missing belt from my—

       Shit. I can’t breathe!

      The police were still in the hall, just a couple of inches of plasterboard separating us. I tried to force myself to think about something else, because this couldn’t happen, not with them there – the police! – right outside the bedroom door with my mother lying to them.

       Breathe. Breathe. Please just breathe.

      Everything rotated. A slow, dark tornado, twisting around me, and the vacuum in my chest got harder, tighter. My vision darkened at the edges and my skin started to burn, and the insides of my lungs started to curl up from the heat and this was it but right at the last second, the pressure broke, and I was breathing but

       Calm. Calm down.

      Too fast now. I couldn’t stop.

      Deep breaths. Slow. You are having a panic attack. Slow down – breathe slowly – but I couldn’t stop. In and out and in and out and too shallow, not enough, not enough air, and all the time the only thing I could think was all the things Mum had eventually told me—

       The missing belt from my coat, sodden and caked and wrapped twice around Jodie’s neck and

       her fingernails broken and her hair bloodied and studded with broken leaves and

      not enough air!

       the skin of her throat pressed white and her mouth slack and her eyes wide and glazed and

       the rain falling against their bulging, panicked, unblinking surfaces

       Because of me.

      Movement in the hallway. I felt myself lighten, losing consciousness. Were they, were they coming in? They were coming in.

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