If only somebody could hear her. If only somebody could do something.

Veronica. Veronica can hear. Veronica will hear. Veronica has promised.

Terry’s fist hits her hard across the mouth. Then he wraps a scarf tight around it, muffling her desperate shouts, catching the blood.

Simone

At some point, it struck Simone that nobody was coming to rescue her.

Not only from the chair to which she was tied. Not only from Terry. But from her life, from her choices, from herself.

No bell had sounded down below. There was no banging on their door. No benevolent, rescuing neighbour charging up the stairs. No social worker.

Or parents. No parents had marched onto the estate to insist she return to them. No parents had snatched her away from the drink and other substances. Nobody before that had noticed the scars on her wrists, or grabbed hold of them, or kept her above the ground.

Nobody was coming. Then. Now. Ever.

Simone had stopped screaming – a futile effort in any case given the scarf around her mouth. She had stopped trying to tip the chair and drag it to the window. And in the abruptness of the silence that followed, she found herself leaning her head backwards, searching through the ceiling for sky. She could have been in an empty field somewhere. Not a single noise crept under the door from the living room. A while ago she had heard the slamming of the front door, so Terry must have taken Jasmine out, and now it was strangely, piercingly, quiet. Simone absorbed the quiet. She allowed it to flow through her sore limbs, to soothe her bound wrists, to slip itself beneath her skin and take her back to a time before the volume of life blocked out everything.

Maybe this was why her father had hidden behind his own closed door. Maybe his life had grown too loud, too engulfing. Though they should have told her. Whatever was going on, they should have told her instead of shutting her out. Simone’s mind flies to the years in which Dominic was a baby – locking him in his room, quite literally shutting him away. Which was worse? Perhaps her own parents had imagined that what they were doing was some kind of protection too.

It wasn’t so awful really. In the dearth of parental love she hadn’t seen it at the time, but as a child there was so much that she did have: safety, a flat, an education, options. Yet it had been so easy to shed those things, softer than they’d seemed. It had been so swift. So simple.

With a profound aching, she wishes she could go back and shake that naïve, sixteen-year-old girl and tell her that things could be a hell of a lot worse. She wishes she could tell her that okay, her parents weren’t perfect, but hey, they probably had issues of their own, and she was wasting time trying to get them to notice her, or to save her; because nobody is going to save her. Nobody is going to rescue her. Nobody is going to come.