Tuesday Falling. S. Williams

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       7

      It‘s all over the news, screaming out on every media platform going.

       One murdered and five crippled for life!

       Jason Dunne, 16, and five other teenagers, all excluded pupils of Sparrow Secondary School, were brutally attacked in a Tube train late last night. Mr Dunne died at the scene. At present the police are asking for witnesses of the crime to come forward, and say they will shortly be giving a statement. They are particularly keen to speak to a young woman whom they believe to be at the centre of the incident.

      When Lily sees the report she feels faint; she thinks she’s the young woman the police want to question. After a moment reality slams back in, and she breathes a shaky sigh of relief.

      Of course it isn’t. It can’t possibly be her.

      She was in all night.

      Just as she’d been instructed.

      Lily kills the image on her laptop and climbs out of bed. Without the noise of the news report filling the room, the rain can be heard plainly, tip-tapping at the window, behind the curtains. Lily is dressed in her favourite M&S brushed-cotton blue PJs. She has to roll the top of the pyjama bottoms over a few times to stop them falling off her. Lily has lost weight fast, and now weighs just under five and a half stone. Her bones hold up her skin in the same way a hanger does a hand-me-down dress. They look like they’ve borrowed a smaller girl’s body. Putting on her dressing-gown, she goes slowly to her bedroom door and presses her head against the wood, listening for sounds that shouldn’t be there. All she can hear is the noise of the radio in the kitchen, and her mother systematically beating breakfast into submission.

      No sounds of doors being smashed. And people stumbling in.

      No reek of drugs, and booze, and hate.

      No jackal laughter. No violence and ripping and body greed.

      Well, there wouldn’t be, would there?

      Lily pulls back the bolt on the lock that she had fitted three weeks ago and walks through the flat into the kitchen. She doesn’t walk much these days, and she is slightly unsteady on her painfully thin legs. Her mother is standing over the cooker, a look of complete incomprehension on her face. Lily smiles. It feels good. Lily doesn’t smile much anymore.

      Before it all, her mother rarely cooked for her; too busy working three jobs just to make sure there was food in the fridge and credit on her phone. Lily had repaid her by working hard at school and trying not to get in too much trouble. On Lily’s estate that wasn’t easy, but she had tried really hard. Now her mother doesn’t leave Lily alone in the flat. Lily no longer goes to school and rarely leaves her room. There is no longer any need for the cooker.

      You don’t eat when you want your body to die.

      Lily’s mum looks up from the cooker and stares at her daughter. Lily sees her own eyes in her mother’s face. Bruised from too much crying. Dry from too little tears.

      ‘Have you heard?’

      Lily nods and stares back at her. Outside, the rain speaks a language all of its own as it lashes at the window. Lily’s mum looks at the radio; the quiet, measured radio-voice is talking about the attack on the six boys on the tube train. Lily’s mum nods her head sharply. Just once.

      ‘Bastards deserved everything they got.’

      Lily smiles again. Hearing her mother swear, however mildly, makes her feel grounded. Not like she is walking through a cotton-wool dream world in her head where nothing matters and everything’s all right.

      Lily goes over and gives her mum a hug, but only gently so that she doesn’t feel how sharply her bones are pushing at her thin skin. Lily knows her mum blames herself for what happened to her. When she was at work.

      ‘I tell you what, Mum. You mix me a Complan while I check my messages, and then we’ll swear at the radio together.’

      It isn’t much, but it’s the best she can do. Interaction is a skill that has become lost to her. Weaving words to make a shield used to be part of her structure. Now words are a maze that confounds her. Lily leaves her mum crying in the kitchen, staring after her as she walks back to her bedroom. The last time she saw her daughter eating was two days ago, and that was a carrot sliced so thinly it looked as if it had been shaved.