I Am Not a Number. Lisa Heathfield

only just manage to pull her upright again. The crush is instant and people start to scream.

      ‘It’s okay,’ I tell Lilli. ‘They’ll make space.’ But it’s getting difficult to speak.

      People scramble on to the stage and the man with the megaphone falls and disappears. And I see now, through gaps in the shoulders, that there are soldiers with plastic shields and they’re driving themselves into the protesters, forcing us together.

      ‘I can’t breathe,’ Lilli says, as more bodies press into us.

      There’s yelling and it seems so distant as I lose my grip on Lilli’s hand. Everyone is pushing us, pushing everywhere, trying to run, but there’s nowhere to move. We’re all stuck and more people keep pounding into us and there’s nowhere for us to go.

      My breath is being squeezed from me.

      ‘Get back,’ someone shouts. A woman beside me falls and I try to reach for her, but she’s sucked under and trampled on.

      ‘Lilli,’ I say, but the word is only a pinch of letters.

       Mum. Luke.

      My sister has tears in her eyes, but I can’t hear her crying.

      We’re heaved forwards, my feet barely on the ground. My lungs are being crushed and there’s not enough air.

      I see Lilli lifted, pulled up. A man grabbing her with one arm, pushing her over the heads of others.

      ‘Ruby!’ she screams, but I can’t see her. My eyes hurt. How can there be so much air above us, just out of reach?

      We move forwards. I trip over something soft, but the pressure of the bodies around me keeps me upright. People are shouting, desperate. Get back. Make space.

      We move as a dying animal, down the side of the playground as people pile over the fence, stumbling and falling. There’s screaming as we spill forwards until there’s space, enough air now.

      ‘Lilli.’ My voice is too quiet. Yet my breathing is easier, just splinters in my lungs now. ‘Lilli!’ I don’t want to be crying, but everywhere there are people shouting and none of them are my sister. The man lifted her up and she’s gone.

      I’m being pushed further along and I look up as a soldier raises his baton and he brings it down on a man. I hear him hit him, a deadening thump on bones and I know I have to get away from here. But I can’t get through, because people are fighting back, charging into the soldiers. I’m stumbling over crushed banners and there’s nowhere to hide. And everywhere there are the distorted faces of the soldiers behind their transparent shields. Just their eyes through their helmets and they raise batons and they strike out and I’m too close as panic burns my chest.

      Someone in front of me falls, clutching his eyes. A soldier has a spray and I see him grab a woman by her coat and she begs as he holds the can close to her skin. And so I run. Past stumbling bodies, through a cloud of terror, wading through cries I’ve never heard. I’m at the fence with others and we’re clambering over it, someone helping me so I don’t fall.

      I make it to the alleyway, but I’ve left my sister behind and my phone is ringing and it’s my hands that take it from my pocket and my mum’s voice is shouting and I tell her that I don’t know where Lilli is. Terror seeps from me into the wall at my back.

      ‘Lilli’s here,’ I hear my mum say.

      She’s at home.

      I run, the phone in my hand, through the streets I thought I knew, past houses with doors closed to me. I see someone running towards me and I know it’s Darren and he reaches me and hugs me so tight.

      ‘You’re safe,’ he says and I don’t know whether it’s my lungs, my heart, or my head that hurts as he pulls me towards our home. Where my mum is standing in the doorway and she holds me before I’m even inside and when our front door shuts behind us the relief to be safe is bright.

      ‘Jesus, Ruby,’ Darren is shouting.

      ‘You said the protest would be okay.’ I can’t make sense of the words I want to say.

      ‘I never said that.’

      ‘This isn’t helping,’ Mum says. ‘They’re back now.’

      ‘Where’s Lilli?’ I ask.

      ‘In the sitting room,’ Mum tells me.

      ‘She thought she was going to die, Ruby,’ Darren says.

      ‘But they’re both safe,’ Mum glares at him. ‘That’s the most important thing.’

      ‘We could have lost them.’ Darren’s voice is still too loud. ‘You saw it there, Kelly. You saw what those Trads did. They took a peaceful protest and they turned it into a deathtrap.’

      ‘I’m not going to have this discussion now.’ Mum goes into the sitting room and I’m left with Darren in front of me, his anger sharp.

      ‘The soldiers were hitting people,’ I tell him. ‘But we hadn’t done anything wrong.’ He steps forward to hug me, but I won’t let him. Sirens call in the distance. ‘Why did they do it?’

      ‘I don’t know,’ is all he answers.

CHAPTER THREE

      ‘You told us that you’d had enough and we listened. Enough of broken families. Enough of soaring crime rates blighting our country. Enough of our people hungering for jobs.’ – John Andrews, leader of the Traditional Party

      I’m awake before my alarm clock and watch the sun start as a square of light in the corner of my ceiling, until it spreads across my room. I hold out my hands and stretch my fingers as far as they can go and then count them, slowly, feeling the sound of each number on my tongue.

      I breathe in until I can’t any more. Hold my breath. Hold it. Hold it. And imagine what it’d be like to not be able to let it out. My lungs would be crushed until I close my eyes and drift away.

      The door opens and I gasp for air.

      ‘Darren doesn’t want us to go to school,’ Lilli says. She walks across my room, lifts the corner of the duvet and gets into bed. I shuffle closer to the wall, but still her feet are cold against my legs. She sleeps with them outside her duvet. She likes to face the bogeyman straight on. ‘But Mum says we have to go.’

      I lean over her to turn on my phone.

      ‘What do you want to do?’ I ask her.

      ‘Stay here. But Mum says we can’t.’

      On cue, the door opens and Mum comes in, the purple band clear on her arm.

      ‘Up you get,’ she says, opening the curtains so roughly I’m surprised she doesn’t pull them down. ‘You can’t be late.’ As though everything is normal. That life hasn’t just spun away into a black hole.

      ‘Lilli doesn’t want to go,’ I say.

      ‘There are a lot of things none of us want to do,’ Mum says. ‘But we have to.’ She’s sorting through the pile of clothes on my chair, finding my school clothes. ‘This could’ve done with a wash.’ She holds up my sweatshirt.

      ‘Are you going to work?’ I ask. Lilli and I don’t move from the comfort of my bed.

      ‘Of course. It’s an ordinary day, Ruby.’

      ‘How can it be?’

      ‘It has to be,’ she tells me.

      My phone beeps, but Mum grabs it before I have a chance.

      ‘I’ll take this downstairs. You can have it when you’re dressed,’ she says and she’s out of the room before I can challenge her.

      ‘Just