Perfect Silence. Helen Fields

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. Promises had been made. They were just as swiftly broken. Fists had flown once more.

      At eighteen, Zoey had been wise enough to know when to cut her losses. She had walked out into the street to shout her opinion of her stepfather to the world, publicly enough that he wouldn’t dare retaliate. Then she had taken herself and her plastic bag of clothes to a shelter she’d heard about. Sporting the bruises that were her passport inside the safe haven, she had settled down while she waited in the endless queue for social housing. Scars were examined. An offer to prosecute was made. Still Zoey couldn’t be so cruel to her mother that she could put the man who kept a roof over her head in prison. Even if he deserved it a thousand times over.

      The sky came closer as she stared at the moon. A gust of wind danced through the branches of the trees above her, scattering a sheet of golden leaves over her body. A many-legged creature skittered over her neck, but Zoey didn’t mind. No point flinching now. In a while, all she would be was bug food. The road was long and straight, unadorned by regulatory white lines. She was in the countryside, then. The next car might not pass until morning. It would be an awful discovery for the poor driver, Zoey thought. Imagine starting Monday morning with such a monstrosity. That was if the car didn’t run over her.

      The last seven days of her life had begun with a mistake. How many times were children told not to get too close to a car asking for directions? She had been distracted, wondering what to cook for dinner as she made her way to the local supermarket in Sighthill. Zoey hadn’t noticed the car following her, although she knew now that it had been. There had been no sixth sense as she’d cut through a car park between tenements. It hadn’t occurred to her that the man who wanted to know how to get to the zoo might have a large knife up his sleeve, ready and waiting to poke into the side of her neck. Get into the car or bleed out in the parking lot, had been her options. She wished she’d chosen the latter in hindsight. It would all have come out the same in the end.

      In the passenger seat, knife pointed into her chest, he had told her to put on handcuffs. Her hands had shaken so badly that she hadn’t been able to close the locks until the fourth attempt. Just rape me, she’d thought. Just get whatever this is out of your system. Use me, then let me go. But let me live. Please let me live. I crossed so many days off in red pen. It’s not fair for me to die now. The man had driven her further away, beyond the scope of roads she recognised as she lay across the rear seat. No bravery had been lacking. She’d slipped a foot under the door handle and tried to prise it open, only to find the child locks engaged. Dark windows at the rear of the vehicle had ruined her chances of waving for help. Even attempting to hit the man over the head with her bound hands had won her nothing but a contemptuous laugh and an elbow in her eye.

      ‘Please don’t kill me,’ she’d said, as they’d finally pulled up into an overgrown driveway.

      ‘I’m not going to,’ he’d said. ‘But you’ve been a bad girl.’

      ‘What?’ she’d asked, her mouth dry with fear and the shameful knowledge that her bladder had allowed its contents to run away, even while the rest of her couldn’t.

      ‘I need you to say it,’ the man had said calmly. ‘You’ve been a bad girl, haven’t you?’

      ‘You’ve got the wrong person,’ Zoey had replied. ‘I don’t know who you think I am, but I’m not bad. I’ve never hurt anyone. If you let me go, I promise I won’t say a word. I won’t get you into trouble.’

      ‘But you are a bad girl,’ the man said. ‘You’re disrespectful. You’re uncaring. You only ever think about yourself. Say it.’

      ‘I’m not,’ Zoey had cried, slinking away from him in the back seat. ‘I’m not bad. You don’t know me.’

      At that, the man had climbed out of the front seat and opened the rear door. He was tall. His close-set eyes were such a dark shade of brown that Zoey couldn’t discern pupils from irises. He smelled.