THE BEGINING
It is 11:52 p.m., and my mother is awake.
I know because I can hear her slippers in the hallway, slow and deliberate, the way she walks when she is looking for something to be angry about. My suitcase is under my bed, packed with everything I own that matters, which is not much. In the pocket of my hoodie there is an envelope with two hundred pounds, the only money I have that isn’t owed to someone, and a train ticket for six in the morning.
If she finds either one, I will not get out. Not tonight, and maybe not ever.
The slippers stop outside my door.
I hold my breath. And while I wait, I do what I always do when I am afraid: I remember the first time I learned to be afraid of her.
What does home mean to you?
To me, home is the place I have been trying to leave since I was twelve. People love to say there is no place like home, and they are right, but not in the way they mean it.
My name is Bella. I am twenty-six years old, I have a degree in Tourism and Hospitality Management, and I have no job. I am the third of four children, the second daughter, the one in the middle who learned early that the safest thing to be in our house was quiet. I live in my parents’ house in Marlow Heath with a mountain of debt and a mother who counts every day I do not pay her back.
I am not telling you this so you will feel sorry for me. I am telling you because I have never said any of it out loud, and I have decided that if I cannot say it to a person, I will say it to a page.
So here is where it started.
I was twelve. It was a Saturday, and I had spent the whole afternoon playing football in the road with the boys from the corner, the way I always did, all knees and noise. When I came home and went to the bathroom, there was blood.
I remember standing there with my heart going like a trapped bird. I was sure I was dying. I was sure I had played too rough and broken something inside me. And right behind that fear, heavier than the fear, came another one: that I had done something wrong, and that someone was going to hit me for it.
In our house, mistakes were paid for. My mother, Diane, hit with whatever was near her. A wooden spoon, a slipper, once a hairbrush. Sometimes she would run a bath and then hit us afterwards, wet and shivering, as if the water had been part of the punishment. So, I did the only thing I could think of. I told no one.
My father was at work, as he always was. My mother was away on one of her trips. We were mostly raised by aunts and uncles who drifted in and out of the house, and none of them were around that weekend. For three days I washed my own underwear in the sink and hid it under the bed to dry. I cried quietly so nobody would hear. I really believed I was dying, and I did not want to die with everyone angry at me.
On the third day my older brother Mark walked into my room without knocking. He saw the stained cloth in my hands, and his whole face changed. He looked delighted.
“I’m telling Mum,” he said.
I begged him. I actually got down on my knees, twelve years old, and begged my brother not to tell. He only laughed. Mark was the golden child, along with Tess, my baby sister. Mark had his health problems, and our parents handled him like glass. Tess was small and sweet and could do no wrong. I was neither. I was the one who got blamed.
My mother came home that evening. I heard the front door, the suitcase wheels in the hall, then Mark’s voice, low and eager. Then footsteps up the stairs.
She called me into her room. I will never forget her face. It was not worry. It was not tenderness. It was suspicion, flat and cold, the look you give someone you have already decided is guilty.
“Have you been sleeping with someone?” she said.
I did not even understand the question at first. I was twelve. I had never been kissed. I stared at her, and then I started to cry, because I understood only that something terrible was happening and it was my fault again.
“No one touched me,” I said. “I swear. I don’t know why I’m bleeding.”
“Don’t lie to me.” Her voice dropped. “If you tell me the truth, I might not beat you tonight.”
I told her the truth. I told her again and again. She did not believe me.
It was only when she rang my aunt Margaret, who was a nurse, that anything changed. I stood in the doorway, shaking, while my mother listened to the phone. I watched the suspicion drain out of her face, not because of anything I had said, but because someone with a title had said it.
“It’s her period,” my aunt told her. “That’s all it is, Diane. She’s a girl becoming a woman.”
My mother put the phone down. She did not apologize. She did not hold me. She said, “Next time, tell me,” as if I had been the one who failed her.
What I didn’t notice then, because I was twelve and too frightened to look properly, is what she did next. I was still standing in her doorway when she knelt at the foot of her wardrobe, pulled a biscuit tin out from behind her shoes, and lifted the lid. She stared at whatever was inside for a long moment. Then she saw me watching, and she shut it so fast the lid rang like a bell.
“Go to bed, Bella.”
I went. But I never forgot the sound of that lid, or the look on her face. It wasn’t anger. It was fear.
I did not understand then what that night had taught me. I understand it now. It taught me that my word was worth less than anyone else’s. It taught me that when something frightening happened, the safest thing to do was to say nothing and carry it alone. I made a promise to myself in that room, with the hall light buzzing and my brother grinning at the end of the corridor: I would never tell my mother anything about my life again.
I have kept that promise for fourteen years. It has cost me more than I can tell you.
That was the first thing that broke. It was not the last. This is the story of the rest of them, and of what I did next.
Back in the present, the slippers have not moved.
A minute passes. Then the door handle turns, slowly, a quarter inch, and stops.
“Bella.” My mother’s voice comes through the wood, quiet, much too quiet. “I know you’re awake. And I know what you took.”
My blood goes cold.
Because the suitcase is not the only thing under my bed. Wrapped in an old school jumper beside it is a biscuit tin with a dented lid. I took it from her wardrobe three days ago, while she was at church. I haven’t opened it. I told myself I was only borrowing it. The truth is that I wanted to know what could frighten a woman who frightens everyone else.
The handle turns again.
And this time, it does not stop.
