I can’t sleep. I listen to my sister Amy’s heavy, slow breathing and try to ignore the yells coming through the thin walls.
“No! No! Ashley-” Her voice rises louder, hysterical now. I can hear her tears breaking at the back of her throat as she desperately tries not to cry. I think about the breathtakingly beautiful girl who I sat beside all day. I remember her bruised arms and elegant handwriting and the way her body moved. I wonder if I’d recognise her if her hair was tangled and tied up, if her lips were cut and bleeding and if there was nothing but an animalistic fear in her beautifully dark eyes. I know that I wouldn’t. I stare at the black crack that scrawls its way across my bedroom ceiling, feeling my spine dig into the hard mattress and my neck beginning to ache.
“You fcuking *Female Dog*-” his voice is slurred. Horribly, scarily slurred. I can feel a tiny tremor of fear running down my back, icy cold.
“Please-” she whimpers, and I can hear her fear in her voice. Her accent is no longer careless and tough, it’s that of a scared girl, little more than a child. I can imagine her tears falling down her cheeks, hot, burning hot. My skin feels sticky, and I have a sick, churning feeling in my stomach. I can’t bear to hear her plead with him. I roll over and pull my pillow over my ears in an attempt to block out the shouts. It doesn’t of cause. I can still hear the sickening crunch of bones as his fist meets her body. I screw my eyes up tight, creating tiny and dark flashing lights inside my eyelids. I run my hands over my face, and I can feel cold sweat settling there.
“Oh my god” I murmur. I roll over and check the time on my phone. It reads 03:27. For a second I look at my phone’s background, a photograph of me and my two best friends. I look at our smiling faces, knowing that they’ll both be deeply asleep and a hundred miles away. Distance. A hundred miles of pitch black moors and the scummy industrial cities that make up the north east of England lay between us.
And suddenly I know that I won’t be able to sleep at all that night. I get up and swing my legs over the side of the bed, my bare toes skimming into the grainy, cheap carpet that stinks of stale cigarette smoke. I sweep my long light brown hair up into a ponytail, the ends tickling my shoulders. I pull on my discarded school shirt and a pair of ancient joggers, shoving my feet into my beat-up sneakers and stand at my bedroom window as I button up my shirt. The view here is far less than breathtaking, just the bins and a few garages decorated with burnt out BMWs and a rusty old Ford with no wheels. The night sky is heavy and burns red from all the lights of the city, reflecting back from the clouds. Blood red. I shudder.
“Just get the fcuk out!” he screams, and I hear her scramble to do as he says, slamming the door behind her. I cross the room silently, my soft-soled shoes making no sound on the hard carpet, and I close the door even more carefully so that I don’t wake Amy. She rolls over, murmuring sleepily into her pillow. The hallway is cold and so impossibly dark that I can’t see my hand in front of my face. I run my fingers along the walls until my fingertips meet the soft leather of my jacket. I pull it on, messing up my sleepy hair but instantly feeling a lot warmer.
I walk slowly through the kitchen, my trainers sticking to the tacky linoleum. The front door. My fingers skim over the icy cold handle. I turn it, hearing the complex lock mechanism click and draw back the bolt with a dull thud. I open the door and breathe in the heavy night air, so thick it’s almost solid. And I close the door quickly behind myself. And as I hear the lock close I realise that I don’t have my keys. I sigh, resting my head back on the cheap, plastic door, the peeling paint sticking to my hair.
“Fcuk!” I swear under my breath, and then look out across the stunning view of the city. I can hear thudding drum and bass music from the flat below me mixing with the sickeningly fast dance beats from the club over the river, creating a musical mess. And the city looks, if possible, more beautiful than it does during the day. And as I lean back against the peeling door of our scummy two-bedroom council flat, I realise that I don’t even care that it’s 3am and I’m locked out in a strange city. Because the air is electric and full of buzzing lights and blurred bass.
I pull my leather jacket closer around my body and I start to walk aimlessly along the walkway towards the stairs, kicking the concrete railing with the toe of my trainers. As I walk past the door of the flat next to my own I try very hard not to notice the three, no, four, drops of blood staining dark on the iron grey concrete. And there’s a smudged bloody thumbprint on the rusty door handle. I carefully avert my eyes, looking instead at the tiny trail of blood droplets that are spotted over the dark concrete, each reflecting a miniature pool of light, glinting ruby red. Fresh. I can smell the blood too, sharp and metallic, biting my tongue, mixing with the stench of urine and weed smoke. In the doorway to the stairwell I pause, glancing into the darkness. Somewhere far below me a neon strip light flickers on and off. On and off. On-it hypnotises me for a moment, throwing distorted shadows and the shapes of twisted terrors onto the graffitied wall and allowing me to read brief snippets of the scrawling writing. And in front of my sleep-blurred eyes the writing distorts horribly into Cheryl’s curling script, splattered across the wall in crimson blood...And I blink, and the writing becomes just a messy love-note left by a drunken teenager once again.
There is a pause in the thumping drum and bass from below, and as the silence presses down on my ear-drums, a single noise tears the night apart. I hear a short, sharp sob from somewhere above me. I hear it tear at her vocal chords as she cries almost silently. I look up and see a rusty iron ladder leading up into the blackness above me. I hear another gasp from the rooftop. I don’t even think about what I’m doing. I have no plan. I just hold the ladder carefully as I climb, and I can feel hot, sticky blood cooling beneath my palms, clinging to my skin. It makes me shudder, but I continue to climb upwards.
And finally I reach the roof. And I see her, silhouetted dark against the city skyline. Her legs look miniscule, her waist is tiny, and all of the lights of the city are behind her. Red, blue, golden. A mass of colours playing on her skin, in her hair. And Cheryl’s dark hair still curls down her back, and she raises her arms like an angel, or like a latter-day Jesus on the cross. I stand on the rough fabric of the roof and watch her cover her face with her hands. I watch as a drop of blood drips from one of her fingertips, rolling, twisting through the air and finally slamming onto the black asphalt. I gasp. But there is suddenly no oxygen left in the air.
She swings around, her dark curls flying, her hands covering her face. “Ashley?” she gasps through gritted teeth. I feel physically sick as I watch her muscles contort as she flinches away from me. Like a scared child. I want to reach out to touch her. But I’m afraid. Really afraid. And just as the thought crosses my mind, she reaches out to me, her fingers bloody, her arm horrifically bruised.
“Will you hold me hand?” Cheryl whispers.
