Pacifier

// Isabelle //

The Balcony was darker than it usually was at this time of night. Emptier.

I sat swinging my legs off the end of the bar, fingers wrapped around a fine tooth comb as I waited for my sister to come home from work.

It was later than usual, though I couldn't really read the clock, I'd not been taught about the clock yet.
I could tell it was late because the lights in the street kept flickering, on and off, on and off, it didn't usually start doing that until Lyra was home. Until she'd combed my hair and tucked me up in my bed. Until she'd brushed her thumb across my cheek and kissed my forehead.

It was quieter than usual too. Kicking out time had passed and the ruckus of Manchester's adolescent population making their way home through the city had long since faded.

And so swinging my legs and clutching Lyra's fine tooth comb I found myself home alone and wondering why.

Why and where.

Why Lyra wasn't home.
Where my brother and his friends were.
Why on this particular Friday night the front door had not been locked from the inside, the keys tossed behind the bar and the music turned up too loud.

Why Lyra wasn't dancing on the tables with her boyfriend. Why my Auntie Rose wasn't shouting over Springsteen and Northern Soul interrupting my not so sweet sweet dreams.

"Bondy don't!" My uncles voice reverberated around the alley outside as shadows gathered just beyond the window.

"Johnny be very careful alright.... you don't know whats on the otherside of that door," for a second there was silence and then there was not.

Johnny, my eldest living brother - though I didn't know that yet - burst through the door, wood hitting wall before he stumbled inside his eyes frantic until they rested on me.

It were his footsteps which ricocheted off the walls of the Balcony, it were my cousins and their friends who's solemn expressions and slammed doors startled me and left my sisters fine tooth comb at Johnny's feet when he picked me up and pulled me in close.

"Fuckin hell Isabelle," he grinned, his hand cradling my head to his chest, my little legs wrapping round his waist as he rocked me. "You gave me a scare you did," he said his arms so tight around me, his breathing so strangely sporadic that even then, at only 7 years old I knew something had gone horribly wrong.

But I wasn't naive like most 8 year olds and a childhood spent swinging my legs from the bar in the Balcony had given me intuition enough to know that tonight wasn't a night for questions, it wasn't a night for words.

It was a night to nuzzle my button nose into his neck, hold onto his jacket with my tiny little hands and let him hold me and rock me, lock up The Balcony with me half asleep on his shoulder, carry me upstairs to his bedroom holding our sisters fine tooth comb.

It was a night like many more which would follow, where I would sit on my pillow, let him comb my hair and tuck me in. He'd brush his thumb across my cheek and kiss my forehead and I'd sit sleepy and solemn and wait for him to speak.

When he spoke that night, the first night I remember that anything was wrong, he spoke quietly, lowly. He'd been thinking about what he would say all evening, and somehow still, saying it was a struggle even for Johnny.

"Izzy love," he started, sitting opposite me on the bed, "I know you don't know what we do, me and your cousins and our friends,"

"Lyra says its bad," I said quietly, looking up into his sorry brown eyes. He smirked a little, his eyes flitting from the floor and back to me.