Pacifier

\\ Della //

I didnt tell Nana Ru about the break in. That was my first regret.
I didn't tell anyone about it, though other than Nana Ru I had nobody to tell.

I didnt see anybody else all week.

After they'd left, whoever they were, I'd remained hidden behind that sofa all night. I'd woken up early in the morning to find that I'd fallen asleep there in the early hours and when I tried to wriggle free all my bones ached. My ribs creaked as I crawled across the living room floor not wanting to let anybody who might be looking, because i no longer knew who was looking, that I was home.

It had been three days since then and the car Id noticed outside when Nana Ru had first decided to keep me locked up at home had pulled away. For the first time in weeks whoever it was had stopped watching me and that left me a little uneasy. Because I'd sort of thought they had been sent by my brother and his friends to keep me safe. Thats why I'd turned the lights on the night before.

To get their attention.

Now I felt lonely. For the first time in three weeks I felt really alone.

It had been easy before to pretend I was still one of them, pretend I was still connected in some way. To pretend they were still there and hadn't abandoned me.
The convince myself that Nana Ru hadn't won this time.

Now when I lay in bed at night listening to the police radio, i was struggling not to convince myself that she had. That she'd gotten what she wanted for the first time since I was a little girl.

Me to herself.

My brother and his friends to forget that I'd ever been born.

She thought it would make us safe if they did. She thought you could just cut ties with those sort of people and be safe forever. Live a normal, quiet life.
But I wasn't so naive. I knew how it worked.

You can pretend all you like that you're not a bottlemen but if it runs in your blood theres no escaping it. There will always be someone looking for you, hunting you down. Desperate to use you for their own gains.

For as long as I was Larrys little sister there would always be someone who thought the threat of my blood spilt could get them what they wanted. Money, power, somebody else.

For three nights in a row I'd hovered in my window waiting for headlights, waiting for that car to pull up onto the close again but no.

I really was alone.

The nights were closing in, it was dark by four oclock and I watched from my window as the other children returned home from school in drips and drabs. Meandering like a broken up lazy river down the hill and to their front doors. Some of them stopped for cigarettes on the corner and sprayed themselves in perfume, as if they thought their mothers couldn't see them from the kitchen window, as if they thought their mothers wouldnt be able to smell it on them the moment they walked through the door despite their efforts.
I watched them all and lit up my own, hoping that Nana Ru was still down the shops because she'd have gone mad if she smelt smoke clinging to me.

The radio crackled on the sill beside me and absentmindedly I fiddled with the diall, still watching the road, trying to find a familiar face among the lads who stood with the girls on the corner. Wondering whether one of them was watching me instead.
Hoping they were. Desperately hoping.

Because although the car had gone, although I wasn't sure my brothers gang were watching me now, I still felt as though i was being watched.
I couldn't shake the feeling tugging on my senses. Torturing my nerves..

Ever since those three men had stood in my living room discussing my fate, angry that they wouldn't get to decide it for me yet, I'd felt as though my home was not my own.