Skin scraped stone. Gravel lodged in raw flesh. Still Zoey crawled.
Death was a ghoul in the dark, creeping up behind her one rasping footstep after another. Soon its freezing fingers would land on her shoulder. Then she would stop, but not until there was no blood left inside her. She was grateful for the pitch black of the autumn night. It meant she could not see the grotesque mess of her own body. What little strength remained in her upper arms deserted her. On her elbows, she dragged her body forward, hope still pulsing through her veins where plasma had once flowed.
Bad girl, she thought. The man had promised she would live if only she confessed. ‘Bad girl,’ Zoey whispered into the dirt. She did so want to survive.
Agony claimed her, planting her face down at the roadside, humbled by the devastating scale of it. Until that day, she had believed herself to be something of an expert on pain. There had been broken bones, a burst ear drum, a busted nose, but none of it had prepared her for how much torment the human body could withstand before death descended.
Picking her face up off the hard ground, she forced her unwilling right knee forward a few more inches. Someone would come, she thought. Soon, someone would come. But she’d been thinking that for days. Where were those movie-screen nick-of-time rescuers when you needed them?
Ripped from her normal life on a Sunday afternoon, it had been a week since her nightmare had begun. Time had transformed as if in a fairground mirror, bloating grotesquely with slowness as she waited pathetically for her imprisonment to end, and splintering into nothingness when the end – her end – was finally in sight.
Zoey had lain for days on a cold, hard table in low light. The cruel joke was that she had been kept fed and watered, relatively unharmed until the end. The sickness was that she had allowed herself to believe she might survive. Years of watching horror movies, of smugly knowing which victim would die and which would live, and still she had fallen into the age-old trap. She had allowed herself to believe what she was told in order to get through the next second, the next minute, the next hour without terror consuming her.
Zoey had a new perspective on fear. There was plenty she could teach the other women at the domestic abuse centre now, not that she would ever get the chance. A bolt of pain shot from her spine through to her stomach, as if her body had been pierced by a spear. The scream she let out sounded more animal than human as it bounced off the asphalt and echoed down the country road. No one was coming. With that thought came a new clarity. She hadn’t been dumped at the roadside in the middle of the night to give her a chance for survival. This was her final punishment. It was her grand humbling.
Her decision wasn’t hard to make.
Zoey put her face to the pillow of road and allowed one leg after the other to slide downwards until she was laid out flat. With the last of her strength she pushed herself onto her side, rolling further into the road, then gravity completed the manoeuvre onto her back, away from the trees at the verge. It didn’t hurt. The good news – and the bad news, she supposed – was that all the pain had gone. All sense that her body had been torn in two had dissolved into the cool October air. If there was nothing else left, she could stare at the moon one last time. Complete dark. She wasn’t within the boundaries of the city, then. No light spilled to dampen the shine of the stars. Scotland’s skies were like nothing else on earth. Zoey might not have travelled much, but she never underestimated the blinding beauty of her homeland, never tired of the landscapes and architecture that had birthed endless folklore and song.
The stars had come out for her tonight. Perhaps they were doubled or trebled by the tears in her eyes, sparkling all the more through the brine, but it was a night sky to die for. She wasn’t a bad girl, she thought. No point pretending any more.
‘I’m good,’ her lips mouthed, even if there was no sound left to escape them. Had there been enough blood in her muscles to have fuelled the movement, she would have smiled, too.
Happier times. There had been some. Early days when her mother had doted on her father, before her brother had left home. A day when her father had pretended it was their six-monthly trip to the dentist, only to take the family to a dog rescue centre. They had spent the afternoon cooing over every mutt before finding a scruffy little terrier forgotten in the last pen. They had called him Warrior, a sweet joke, although he had proved a fiercely faithful pet from that day on. Every day Zoey wondered if she would tire of walking, feeding and grooming him as she’d seen her friends grow bored of the neediness of animals they’d been given. Not so. Warrior had remained by her side from the age of five until she was twelve. He had slept on her bed and quieted her crying when the big girl from over the road had bullied her every day for a month until her father had a quiet word with the girl’s parents. Warrior had let her carry him around the house like a doll when she was sad. He sat on the doormat of their house Monday to Friday at half past three waiting for Zoey to walk in from school. It had always astounded her that dogs could tell the time. And Warrior had pressed his furry muzzle into her face as she’d cried when her father’s car had been hit by a vehicle containing a man with more alcohol in his bloodstream than anyone had a right to. There had been no trip to the hospital, no long farewell, only a police officer at the door, solemn of face and softly spoken. Her mother had evaporated in grief.
Eighteen silent months later her stepfather had arrived. A year later her brother had celebrated his sixteenth birthday by signing up to join the army with their mother’s consent. Zoey had hated her for it. She wondered if she would be able to find forgiveness with her last breath, but forgiveness required effort and concentration. It needed to be nourished by hope. There was none left where she was lying. Her brother’s escape had been her entrapment. There was no barrier left between Zoey and her mother’s new husband.
The fists her brother had tolerated until he could leave were turned to her. Her mother, a shard of broken china, said and did nothing. Perhaps she didn’t care. Perhaps she was only grateful the blows did not touch her. The bruises were limited in their geography. Zoey’s face remained untouched until the school summer holidays came around and then it was a free-for-all, the fear of prying teachers alleviated a while. Zoey had cried her tears into Warrior’s warm fur, and shivered into his skinny but comforting frame in her bedroom at night. Until her stepfather had found the love she had for the hound too much joy for Zoey’s life. He had declared himself allergic, and the dog food too expensive, in spite of their large house and his good income. Letting out the odd, badly faked sneeze, he had said the dog must go.
That day had been etched in Zoey’s memory like the scene from The Wizard of Oz, only Toto had not escaped from her stepfather’s clutches to return to her. Warrior was pulled from her arms as she huddled on her bed, declaring that she would die if they took him.
‘Stop making such a fuss,’ her mother had said. Those five words had been a death sentence for whatever mother-daughter bond still fluttered like a fragile butterfly in the summer of Zoey’s childhood. Her stepfather told her Warrior had gone to the dogs’ home. He would go to a loving family better suited to him, he’d lectured. Zoey sat down that night and calculated how many days it was until her own sixteenth birthday, when she could flee as her brother had. Seven hundred and two. She had marked each one down in a notebook, ready to cross off with a red pencil as she waded through them.
What a waste of a life it had been, she thought. And the horrible truth right now was that if she could have even a tiny percentage of those bruise-filled, hate-inducing days back, she would take them with a grateful heart.
By seventeen she had been living with a college friend until the girl’s mother had lost her job and couldn’t feed or house Zoey any more. She had tried and failed to study and pass exams, but the constant moving between sofas was too exhausting. In the end she had given her mother one last try.
