Junk - Melvin Burgess [94]
It was a complete accident I was at home at all. I should have been at the parlour but I just couldn’t face it that day. This time it wasn’t the junk. My period was late. My period was late and my boobs felt sore and…
That was absolutely the very last thing on this planet I wanted and now a monster was knocking on my door.
I walked very quietly down the hall as if I wasn’t in.
Bang bang bangbangbababababang…
I knew it wasn’t the police because it was so desperate. Then I heard the breathing. It was ragged breath. I mean, almost choking. Then, again – BANG BANG BANG – and the voice– ‘Please please please…’
I ripped the door open and Lily fell on to me. She had Sunny in one arm. Lily slammed the door behind her, moaning and weeping.
‘What happened, Lily, are you all right?’
She couldn’t talk. She could hardly walk. She had one hand on her throat. She gestured with that hand and I saw that her throat was red. She was only wearing her dressing-gown.
‘God…’
I dragged her in and plonked her on the settee. I took Sunny off her. He was screaming his head off. Lily leaned over the side of the settee and threw up.
I got the story slowly. It was a punter. He came up and he got her to undress and then he asked her to… something she didn’t want to do. When she said no, he grabbed her and shook her. Lily tried to scream to alert Rob, who always waited downstairs with a baseball bat in case there was any trouble, but the guy clapped his hand over her mouth. He shoved her over the bed and grabbed a pair of her old tights – her floor was always littered with clothes – and he put them round her neck and pulled them tight, really tight. He really pulled them tight.
He kept half strangling her and then letting go, just enough for her to know he could kill her, really kill her, if she didn’t do what he wanted. She couldn’t scream. He let loose just enough for her to get a breath and then he’d squeeze tight again. He was doing these things to her while she was being strangled. At one point she got her hand under the tights and flipped over on to her back and kicked him off. He turned her over and he bent her arm right up her back until she thought he was going to break it. Then he got the tights back on again and carried on with what he was doing, all the time tightening the tights around her neck.
When he’d finished he let her go and she tore the tights off and tried to scream. Her throat was wrecked, but she made some sort of noise. The bloke did his clothes back up and walked out of the bedroom and downstairs. Lily heard Rob shout, but a minute later the door went bang. Then Rob ran upstairs. She was trying to tell him not to call the ambulance because they’d bring the police along with them, but she couldn’t speak. Rob just stared at her. His head was bleeding. Then he ran back down.
Lily got up and tried to get downstairs. She got halfway down the stairs when Rob reappeared.
‘Go back up,’ he said. ‘The police are coming.’
Lily tried to say, ‘You stupid idiot,’ because he’d rung them up and the house was full of needles, weighing scales, heroin, everything. But she still couldn’t speak. She carried on downstairs. Sunny was on the floor screaming his head off. She managed to pick him up with one arm. Rob tried to stand in front of her and block her way, but she just pushed past him. She was still naked so she grabbed a gown from a chair and ran out and came straight round to our place.
While she was telling me all this two things happened. One was, we heard the police come. The sirens. I kept expecting Rob to turn up but he never did. He went round and hid at Dev’s. The other was, I had this pregnancy test on the table. It was one of those ones that shows you a little ring at the bottom of the tube if you’re pregnant.
That’s what I was waiting for. You have to wait so many hours. I was sitting next to Lily comforting her, but Sunny was screaming so I had to get up and make him a bottle. This little test tube was in the way. I had a quick glance and it seemed okay, you know? There was no ring, everything was fine, I wasn