Lock Me In. Kate Simants

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СКАЧАТЬ not going to lie to you,’ he said. ‘I don’t understand this yet, but I’m going to. We’re going to make you OK.’

      I told Mum later, and she was silent for a long while. Eventually, she just hugged me. ‘It’s your life,’ she said. ‘Remember to be careful, though. He’s a good guy, but I can’t protect him from her.’

      The very next morning, there were bruises all up her arms. I had no memory of what Siggy had done – what I had done. How I had slammed my own mother against a wall and thrown her out of my way.

      Like I was an empty coat, Mum said. But it wasn’t your fault.

      I heard a sudden movement and I froze, listening, but it wasn’t Mum coming back. Just boxes being moved around downstairs, from what I guessed was the stock room. Our flat was above a shop, an off-licence, and from the way sound travelled it seemed Mr Symanski’s ceiling, our floor, was made from little more than cardboard.

      I gave a start. Thin floors.

      If I could hear him …

      I pulled on my shoes and was at the front door before Mum’s warnings about him sounded in my head. Don’t talk to the neighbours. It only takes one person to suspect us.

      What was I going to say? Did you hear me leave the flat in the middle of the night? Because I’ve got a whole load of unexplained injuries and I don’t remember what happened? I stood there for a moment, my forehead resting on the cold glass of the door. Then I took my shoes back off and kicked them sullenly away.

      In the kitchen, next to the sink, Mum had left a beaker for me and a carton of orange juice. Forgetting the damage to my hand, I made the mistake of trying to twist the cap. I recoiled and knocked the whole box to the floor where it slopped out across the lino.

      Irritated, I opened the safe cupboard under the sink and took out the homemade cleaning fluid and some latex gloves. We didn’t take chances anymore: everything harmful was locked away. I couldn’t even be left alone with a bottle of bleach. I tried all the other doors, out of habit. All locked. Knives, matches, bleach, all beyond my grasp. I snapped on the gloves and clenched and stretched my hands, feeling the thin scabs on the wounds split, reasserting myself over her.

      My pain, Siggy. Not yours.

      After I mopped up the juice I carried on cleaning, using the soft scourers to attack the rest of the floor, the dented metal sink, the wood-effect laminate of the worktops. I scrubbed until my jaw ached from gritting my teeth. Folded in a corner, Siggy eyed me.

      My phone rang, and I pulled off the gloves, my heart leaping as I recognized the first few of digits of the number on the screen. It was the hospital.

      ‘Matt?’

      ‘Oh, hi,’ said an awkward voice, a man. Not Matt. ‘Ellie, right?’

      I let my eyes close. If someone at his work was calling me, that meant—

      ‘Listen, do you know where Matt is? Only, we were expecting him in, and he hasn’t shown up.’

      I told him – after swallowing the lump of lead in my throat – that I hadn’t. ‘Who is this?’

      ‘Leon. From the hospital. The imaging lab?’

      ‘Oh, OK. Leon.’ Matt had mentioned Leon: they’d been working together for a couple of months now and he’d gone for a pint with him after work once or twice, though I didn’t get the sense they were particularly good friends.

      ‘Did you see him yesterday?’ Leon asked, concern in his voice. ‘Like, in the evening? Because I can’t get hold of him on the mobile, and the guy at his moorings says he’s not there, and with yesterday being a bit … you know.’

      ‘A bit what?’

      The wet sound of him opening and closing his mouth told me he was choosing his words. ‘No it’s … it’s nothing. But look, if you hear from him—’

      ‘It was a bit what, Leon?’

      ‘Nothing. Just, you know. Busy.’

      Matt hadn’t mentioned anything unusual. Had I even asked? I told Leon I’d call if I heard anything and hung up.

      I went to the window, pulling the net aside. The thick cloud of the early morning was gone now, swept clean to expose a sky of cold blue, scarred all over with sharp shards of white.

      Wherever Matt was, he wasn’t OK. He wasn’t OK at all.

      My eye was caught by movement. I recognized Mr Symanski’s son, Piotr. Maybe a little older than me, mid-twenties and already paunchy. He was a sullen figure, shuffling up the road. I watched him bend to scratch a passing cat behind the ears, and let it weave between his ankles a few times. When he stood, he saw me. Stock still, nothing on his face, staring straight at me for five seconds, ten. More. Then as if he’d suddenly come to his senses, he looked away, got out his keys, and went inside.

      I dropped the corner of the net curtain, and stood there blinking, thinking only of that stare. Did he know something? I thought again of going down, speaking to them. But before I could make a decision, I heard movement on our steps outside and the clatter of fumbled keys against concrete.

       5.

       Mae

      The Snoop Dogg was damaged worse than he’d thought, so he felt around in the side pocket for anything CD shaped and slipped it in. Turned out to be a demo from a mate of a mate, who Mae vaguely remembered wanting to punch. White guy, gangster lean, called everyone bruv. Mae gave it until after the first refrain, pressed eject, checked for witnesses, and windowed it.

      He took a little detour and got a coffee from a new Cuban place on the corner by Acton Central. He ordered short and black on the grounds that it would be fastest and bounced on the balls of his feet as the barista made it up, feeling the snip of unspent energy amassing in his blood. A muted newscast on the screen above the counter was wringing the final drops from an American school shooting, a week old and almost forgotten.

      After paying, he got out of there, and had emptied half the scalding caffeine into his mouth before he’d even pulled away. Needing the buzz, needing the lift, because there hadn’t been a chance for a run that morning, either.

      He tolerated the flack he got about his thing for exercise. If it made his colleagues feel better about themselves to call him vain, call him a poser, that was their business. But to Ben Mae, exercise had never been optional. Without a run in the morning, without an hour of circuits or weights or anything else in the evening, the noise in his head got too much and he knew where that ended. These days, he could trust himself to recognize that inevitable build-up of whatever-it-was and burn it off in the gym. But age as he might, those years after his dad died of finding himself prowling, angry without provocation, skulking around for a fight or a fuck never seemed that far behind him.

      Objectively, he thought, as he slowed for the barrier and flashed the fob at the reader, it was doubtful that coffee helped. Objectively, the right thing to do was to deal with the anger, understand it. Go right back to that dark СКАЧАТЬ