Even in your sleep, the fear does not leave you. You are plagued by nightmares. Running, running, running, never getting anywhere. Stopping to look behind you and telling yourself that’s the worst thing you can possibly do, you are only slowing yourself down. You think maybe you deserve to get caught.
You are a child again, it is summer and you are lost. You cry out for your mother but she is nowhere to be found. You walk around faster and faster, getting more and more distraught, and everyone looks like your mother from behind. You keep shouting “mummy, mummy it’s me” but it is not her. After what feels like an age you see her, you run up and wrap your arms around her leg and your heartbeat starts to slow. She peels your dirty fingers away from her clean white trousers, and looks you square in the eye. “Filthy little child! Go! I do not want you anymore. I do not love you anymore.” You are not worthy.
Even when you know you are dreaming you cannot make it stop. You tell yourself again and again it’s just a nightmare, wake up. It’s just a dream, wake up. But the dreams continue and after a while you think maybe justice is only served when we are asleep. You begin to lose count of the times you wake yourself up screaming. This is not a book or a film, there is no cold sweat. There is heat. You wake up boiling, like you really have surfaced from hell. Your heart beats faster than you ever thought possible and you’re struck by the fact that “the heart of a mouse beats at the rate of six hundred and fifty times a second.” Flashbacks of your younger sister insisting on reading Matilda aloud every night make you wish you were still asleep. Every cell of your body burns with you don’t even know what. You just feel on fire. Charged.
You started out with better intentions than most but you know that you have changed. It’s only been six months but already you do not recognise the angry young man that stares back at you in the mirror. You have lost weight - gained muscle. You were a quiet child, careful to avoid confrontation. Now you seek it out like a teething child seeks comfort. You did this so your mother wouldn’t have to. So your siblings wouldn’t go down this path themselves. You are becoming the example they will learn to avoid, although they do not know it yet.
You still respect your mother, you love her dearly, but all these secrets mean you are impatient with her. For the first time in your life you do not trust her. You know it is because you yourself can no longer be trusted. You are doing the wrong thing and the heat makes you uncomfortable. Poverty breeds a lack of privacy and while you learnt to accept this a long time ago, it fills you with terror.
When they find out the air you breathe won’t be the same anymore and everything will be tainted. You want to stop but you do not know how. You have become greedy. You walk with purpose and money in your pocket. It excites you. You never liked to think about the future but now scenarios play out in your head constantly.
They don’t find out until years from now - when you have long since stopped - and while they are angry, they are grateful. They love you more for the dangerous decision you made on their behalf, the lengths you went to to protect them and their unborn children. They follow this path anyway, and it renders all your hard work futile; stupid. It’s three o’clock in the morning and the police are banging on the door. Jamie is crying and Lucy tries her best to comfort him. Your mother sits on the sofa, wrapped in a dressing gown you never knew she owned, staring into the distance at nothing in particular. Perhaps she is staring at the past, before life made her face pained, her shoulders hunched and her heart heavy. The cigarette in her hand burns so brightly then crumbles into a pile of dust; curls of smoke and flakes of ash swirling around the half lit living room. Even worse-it’s four o’clock in the afternoon, Lucy and Jamie are doing their homework on their beds and in they come. The boys from the estate. You can’t let them make a scene. You can’t let them walk all over you. You are torn and try to tough it out but they walk away with everything, laughing. It’s half term and you’re in the park with your friends sharing war stories and a crate of something cheap when you get a call, it’s mum. Jamie’s fitting and they don’t know why.
He was playing in your room.
It was a summer of late nights and drinking to excess. Awkward exchanges in parks and pubs,” how are you?” followed with “pretty hammered.” Even now neither of them would go as far as to say they were friends. She liked that he had a biblical name; he hated the way she always drank from the bottle. They shared a secret. Several secrets even, all stemming from a Wednesday in July. The weather had been uncomfortably hot for weeks-tempers getting shorter as the days got longer, and then the rain. It wasn’t beautiful or cleansing or special in any way, just rain.
