I pushed Harrison off me and he started to stir, clutching his broken fingers, moaning.
I looked at Alicia and said, ‘AreyouOK?’
She looked at me blankly. ‘Who are you?’
I said, ‘Let’s get out of here. You got Uber?’
She nodded and pulled her phone out of her bag. Her hands were shaking.
Harrison was trying to get to his feet. He started to lumber after me but I grabbed Alicia’s hand and together we ran down the hill.
‘I’m going to kill you, Saffyre Maddox,’ I heard him yell after me. ‘Next time I see you, you’re fucking dead. Do you fucking hear me?Dead.’
The Uber took us to Alicia’s flat. I thought about telling her that I’d seen her block before, that I knew she lived on the fourth floor. But I thought, upon reflection, that the night had already been weird enough for both of us without adding that into the mix.
Her flat was really cute. Mint-green sofas with buttons on the backs and squat wooden feet, funky art in white frames, a lot of plants, a lot of books.
Alicia made us tea and opened some biscuits. As I picked up my mug I saw that my hands were shaking. I put the mug down again and breathed in hard. In my head I replayed the feeling of Harrison John’s bones snapping, the weird noise they made, like the noise when Angelo crunched his biscuits. And then I pictured him lumbering home to his flat on Alfred Road overlooking the railway track, clutching his broken fingers. I saw him sitting in the A & E department at the Royal Free Hospital and I pictured him leaving a while later with some kind of plastic covering over his hand, splints and bandages and whatnot holding his hand in place while it healed. I thought, How will he explain this to the world? And then I thought, Will he go to the police? I imagined him telling some fresh-faced, straight-out-of-Hendon cop that a girl called Saffyre had felled him in one blow and broken hisfingers on a pavement in the dark for no good reason, and I could not see that happening.
‘Are you going to tell me who you are now?’ Alicia asked me.
‘I’m Saffyre Maddox,’ I said.
‘And you used to be a patient of Roan’s?’
‘Uh-huh.’
I watched everything processing through Alicia’s head, saw her big clever brain trying to compute everything, and failing.
‘And that guy?’
‘I used to know him. He hurt me. Now I’ve hurt him.’
‘He said he was going to kill you if he saw you again.’
‘Yeah,’ I said. And that was the problem. That was why my hands were shaking. I’d finally purged the childhood event that had destroyed me by inflicting pain on the perpetrator, but in doing so I’d opened myself up to yet more pain, more fear, more hurt.
‘Have you got anywhere you can stay?’
I stared at my fingers. ‘I live with my uncle,’ I said.
‘Are you safe there?’
‘Not really,’ I said. ‘It’s very close to where that guy lives. My school is just around the corner from his flat.’
‘You can stay here tonight, if you want?’
I glanced up at Alicia. Her eyes were still red from crying and the scuff on her cheek from where Roan had hit her was swelling up now. I thought, She needs me as much as I need her right now. So I nodded and said, ‘Thank you. I really appreciate that.’
I ended up staying at Alicia’s for a fortnight.
And for a fortnight I resisted the urge to contact Aaron. I can’t really explain it, how I could have done that to him. To someone who loved me and cared about me the way I knew he did. I knew he would be suffering, but each day that dawned I thought, Not today, not yet, he’ll be OK for a few more hours, I’ll go home soon. Each day I thought would be my last day in hiding. Each day felt like it was the day that Josh would track down Harrison John, that he would be detained by the police and that I would be safe.
Time didn’t have much form during those days. Without the punctuation of being the version of myself that puts on eyeliner and goes to school every day, I just stayed in a kind of sleep mode. My instincts didn’t work properly: Alicia had to remind me to eat; I would wake up at three in the morning and think it was daytime and that I was blind.
Alicia called in sick for the first few days and she did her best to keep me safe and sane. In weird, disjointed streams of consciousness I ended up telling her everything, everything I’d never told Roan about the real reasons why I’d been self-harming.
Alicia was twelve years older than me, but for those days we spent together, she felt more like a friend than a therapist. The sort of friend, I thought, that I’d managed to keep at arms’ length almost my entire life. Then Alicia went back to work and I was in her flat all day by myself. I could barely remember my name sometimes. Shards of my existence flashed through my mind like a psychedelic slideshow; I’d see the fox in the corner of the room sometimes. Other times I’d hear Josh’s voice coming from Alicia’s TV, the mewl of a tiny kitten outside the front door, Jasmin’smad laugh coming from the flat upstairs. And every time I closed my eyes, there was Harrison John, looming at me from every direction with a claw for a hand, threatening to kill me.
