Coming Undone by Terri White (ebook reader with highlight function .TXT) 📗

tote bag from the Brownies featuring a smiling girl outside a country cottage, roses around the door.

We left the house – me, Mum, my brother and sister. I still couldn’t believe we were really going. What I did believe, though, was that he was going to kill us. He would come back, find us trying to leave and first he would kill Mum and then he would kill us. I saw our bodies, piled on top of each other, our tongues bursting out of our non-moving mouths. I stroked the little girl’s face, her features smooth and unchanging under my fingertips. The roses stayed pinned.

We walked out of the door, four more pairs of feet hitting the uneven paving slab as one by one we marched in order. We walked down the street, round the green, past the shops and arrived at the bus stop. We waited for the bus to come bumping, humping down the hill, while in my mind I saw his car come around the corner, coming for us. The bus stop was exposed on both sides, including the left-hand side his car would appear from, catching us in his headlights. I tried to look for an escape route, but could see only capture.

I thought of our dog, who had been on the end of his boot a hundred times or more. She would hide under my bed, curled into the tiniest ball as he hunted her, before making a desperate bid for freedom along the radiator, his outstretched fingers and ends of his feet straining for the edges of her fur. He always caught her, her howls alerting us to the fact that he had, that he’d found her ribs, was enjoying the moment of pleasure from feeling his steel toe pin her to the hot metal. And now, we’d left her at home to run. And if he couldn’t kill us, he would kill her.

But we had nowhere to go and no one to save us – he knew my nana, who lived just a few streets away, and my mum’s few remaining friends who also lived in our village. Mum had no money of her own. And so, we pitched up in the place that those with no hope go: the Citizens Advice Bureau. We sat first behind a desk facing a harried woman who listened to the basics of Mum’s story, our story, while we piled silently onto one seat. We were then spoken to in a private room. I heard Mum. ‘He’s going to hit me tonight … He said I’d get some fist … He strangled me on the settee after I said I didn’t want his baby.’

The lady softened, began to call around, searched for a safe place, a refuge. There weren’t many places that could take three kids, I learned very quickly. She called, her voice dropped, the phone went down. She called, her voice dropped, the phone went down. The fear in my belly grew. But then – good news. There was a refuge that could take us – the last one with any room in the country. I’d never been out of our town. We were given money for the train we couldn’t afford, warned to go straight to the station without telling anyone. We were still in danger. This is when most women die.

We arrived safely at the refuge, walked up tall steps, knocked on an imposing door and, once the person on the other side had established who we were, we were let inside the house. The refuge was full of women and children who looked just like us – our mirror image, over and over: small, brittle and terrified. Women who needed to be invisible but were alert for the fight they weren’t yet sure they didn’t need to have. The fear was hot, thickened the air. There was a panic button linked through to the local police station. I wondered how many minutes, how many seconds, the door would hold under a boot.

The other children had knotty hair, balled fists, dirty knuckles and wild, suspicious eyes. The women clutched mugs of tea and spoke in small, sore sentences. It was the first time I’d heard accents other than ours being spoken and the sound of their singing belied the brutality of their song. One had left when her husband finally stabbed her after years of beatings. She’d run before, but he’d found them. He would find them again, she said. He always found them. Her girls twirled around her words, knotted hair dancing. She would go home to him, sorrys accepted, just days later. He’d found them.

We had our own bedroom but shared a bathroom, a kitchen, a living room. There were rules: everyone did chores and contributed to the running of the house. We weren’t to tell anyone the address of the house, or that the house was a refuge. Breaking that rule would be when the men came. At that point, our only protection would be the female workers in the refuge.

On the second day that we lived in the house that didn’t officially exist, I found it: a book on UFOs and alien abductions, tucked in the back of the cupboard under the telly, giving voice to those taken in the dead of night. They all spoke the same language, a language that I recognised: of bright lights, cold metal and paralysing fear. I read it, their stories, over and over, carrying it everywhere, always, tucked under my arm as I moved from room to room. At night, I lay with it beneath me, waiting for the men to come as darkness fell and the moon looked away.

During the daytime, I now went to a nearby school, where everyone spoke words I couldn’t decipher, who looked even more alien: they ran through the playground so free and carefree. So absent of pain. I stood on the edges of the playground silently, clutching my book. My nights were spent waiting to