She's not There

SHE’S NOT THERE F E BIRCH Copyright © 2023 FE BIRCH The right of FE BIRCH to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the written permission of the publishers. Red Dragon Publishing LTD ISBN: 978-1-7393036-0-0 This book is a work of fiction. Any resemblance between these fictional characters and actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental Dedication For Joan and Edward Harrington, my grandparents for the giving me the love of books. Prologue It was in the man’s eyes as he looked into hers, and she knew. Men like him spotted kids like her because it was there, always in their eyes. Men like him knew when they’d found one and wouldn’t let them go. It was always telling, in the eyes. ‘Come with me, pretty,’ he said, grabbing her puppy-fat hand in his rough paw. She imagined his hand as a glove because it didn’t feel like any hand she knew. It was hard and bumpy on the inside in that bit where his fingers started. Bumpy like speed bumps, sleeping policemen who never woke up, who could never rescue her. They couldn’t stop him, wouldn’t stop him, and she would feel his long, long fingers touching her forever. She would feel his calloused hands upon her for a lifetime. He took her by the swings, near to the shuggy horse with the metal handles which were too hot to hold on a baking summer day, gusseted in a gold sheen that looked like a pool of fabric draping the beast. The expressionless gardener, a sullen man who wore no other face, didn’t glance or bother to see. He’d seen it on similar days with similar girls. Different faces, but all had the same eyes. He turned away, closed his own eyes and his mind, and left the park, leaving her alone with him. ‘I don’t like the bushes,’ she squealed, tugging away from the man as he pulled her into an area where white flowers with thick petals hung with a perfume that clogged up her nose. A magnolia tree. He squeezed her hand tight and she gasped, couldn’t breathe as she felt her pulse in her wrist and her head, thump-thump, thump-thump, like she might pop, burst like a balloon, and fritter away in the wind, scattered like the petals. He grabbed her thin arm above the elbow, and gripped it like a mangle, twisting, pressing the blood from her limb until it tingled with a thousand pins. ‘Ouch! You’re hurting me!’ she squealed, a tinny tiny mouse-squeak. He showed her his yellow horsey teeth, lips parted with a smile that wasn’t a smile; a door that wasn’t a door, but an entry to another world, a different place, somewhere behind the white-petal bush. Somewhere like a Narnia through a wardrobe but not. Somewhere she knew she didn’t want to go, didn’t have a choice but to step into. He bent down, his face to hers, and he breathed sour cigarette breath at her. She saw his thick tongue, a slimy slab of ham, wet, with a smell like a taste that made her gag. ‘My little warm dumpling child…you…you will do as I tell you. Naughty girls like you deserve all you get.’ He turned her around and pushed her in the low of her back above her school skirt waistband. She juttered forward, stuttering steps into the soft dark earth with her black gym plimsolls. He pushed her down, palm flat on her shoulder so her knees buckled like one of the collapsing donkey toys her granny had bought her for Christmas, all jangly joints held taut and tight until she pushed up the little round bottom base to make the poor donkey quiver and wobble and fall. And she fell. Like donkey. Her round, pudgy, baby-fat knees pushed into the soft earth, two little dimples like the dimples in her cheeks and two little dimples in the small of her back. She knew she’d go home dirty and mother would have to Brillo pad her in the bath to make the stains disappear from her knees. And she’d have tears in her eyes as mother told her off. Again. For playing in the bushes. But she couldn’t, mustn’t, tell because it would all be too bad. The man told her to turn around and lay down, so she lay flat on the soft earth. As he touched her with his bumpy lumpy hands, she imagined his fingers leaving prints on her skin. She was six now, a big girl, not a baby anymore, even though she still had baby rolls. She was a big girl who knew about fingerprints because she’d heard mother say that’s how they caught the burglar who stole Mrs Fraser’s television and ornaments and money from the secret biscuit tin she kept hidden in the coal house. The burglar lived over the road from them; an incomer who mother said had been to prison and had come to their village to hide. But mother said there were no secrets in their village, and it was no place to hide. The man squidged her cheeks to make the kissing lips so he could put his tongue into her mouth. When he’d finished kissing her, he did other things. Other things she wouldn’t want to remember, not ever, so she closed her eyes to not see and closed up her nose so she couldn’t smell. She lay on the soft, brown, clumpy earth like it was a princess bed scattered with long white petals. She sniffed the air that wasn’t full of him and she smelt soft talcum smells from the flowers. She dreamt of floating away on a