Pacifier

// Della \\

"Adella Lau don't you dare take up that tone with me young lady, sit back down!"

I glared back at Nana Ru from where I stood by the back door, arms crossed, a sulk on. She'd caught me trying to sneak out for the third time that week and her patience - not that she had very much - was finally beginning to wear out.

I'd argued back the first time, I'd put up a fight the second, but now I just stood there, wordless and rolling my eyes at her because there was nothing she could say to me now that she hadn't spent my whole life drumming into me.

"I might not have managed to save Lawrence but I can still save you!" she said, all dramatic sniffles and a hand to her cheek.

"Nana i have to go to school..." i sighed though I knew there was no point putting up a real fight. If she thought she was doing what was best for me then there was no way she would buckle or relent.

"Well you have those idiot lads to blame for that... They don't think, thats the problem Della, they're so selfish..." and so she began again, the story of those selfish lads and their fighting, which was always awful and never warranted. Which she'd warned my poor poor mother about, who she wishes now she'd done the same to. Locked her up, kept her away from it all.

I'd look back one day and be grateful. That's what she always told me, that was how this speech always ended, but i couldnt help question how true any of the things she told me really were.

Because I hadn't always lived with my Nana Ru, though she'd confiscated me years ago, all of my earliest, and most fond of childhood memories were spent with Isabelle at the Balcony, with my brother Larry and her sister Lyra.
I could still remember every detail of happiness that we had shared together. I still cherished every memory I had from those few years I lived with my family.
And I still clung to them now, because up until this new wave of fighting had errupted, I'd been able to sneak away to the Balcony afterschool with Izzy, or meet Larry by the gates for a cig.

I'd been able to slip away from my Nanas somewhat iron grip on my life for just long enough to get to know my real family well enough that I knew when Nana Ru was lying to me.
This morning she was lying to me.
This morning she was laying the violence and the fear on thick to try and keep me inside. To try and keep me from trying to get to my brother again.

That was all I'd really wanted to do since the fighting had started, get to Larry, be with him again in case something happened. One of these nights something would.

Every night I tuned into the police radio and every night the callouts got worse. The rumours which were confirmed by their voices crackling and all their pointless code words.
I'd learned the language of the feds when I was younger and now I lived through it.
I spent every night living through it, messing with the tuning dial, ears pricked and listening, always listening.

It had become my method of closeness, especially now that I was being kept under house arrest. Especially now when my Nana Ru was the only person I'd spoken to in weeks. Now that I couldn't hear the rumours which shot through school, now that I couldn't sit next to Isabelle in tutor and quiz her on the facts and the fake news threaded through them.

Now the police radio was all I really had and I listened to it in the mornings when I was eating my breakfast, in the afternoons when I'd nothing to do but lounge around reading, trying to concentrate on anything other than the lingering sense of dread which was haunting me.

"Della you don't understand, I wouldn't be doing this if it wasn't to keep you safe, I promised your mother..." and so she started again, and when I pushed myself up and rolled my eyes and tried to go upstairs, back to my room, back to bed, she carried on. Following me up the stairs, tea towel in hand, still rattling off on one about what was best for me and what exactly it was that she hated the most about my brother and his reckless friends.