Broken Dolls.

“Too many enemies”, she told me, as I asked her again why I couldn’t go home.

I looked around the bare-walled flat that we’d been holed up in all this time, at the duvet that she’d nailed over the front window, the two deck chairs we were living on, at the pile of newspapers on the floor. I’d been terrified, sneaking to the nearest shop with sunglasses and a scarf on like some sort of confused skier, but I’d made it and, despite some funny looks from the shopkeeper, I’d bought every paper in the place.

“I can’t believe it,” she’d exclaimed, “not even a mention!” Her eyes had looked heavy, they’d looked so disheartened at that moment that I didn’t think I’d ever see her real eyes again. I had watched and listened intently for a gasp or a double-take as she’d come across what she’d been looking for. That hadn’t happened. She had looked at the papers and I had looked at her looking at them, waiting, anticipating. Nothing.

“There must be something, mustn’t there? How can things like this happen without anybody knowing?” I hadn’t understood, I tried to make sense of the situation but I couldn’t. She looked at me with a mixture of pity and sorrow, and a lump formed in my throat. I asked her, “Do you think we’re all alone?”

“They must have more influence than I thought if they can keep something like this out of the press”, she said, her hollow eyes sinking deeper into their sockets. I could tell that everything was taking its toll on her, and I had wished that there was something I could do.

Now though, two days later, I still can’t help in any other way than pestering her into a temper, so that at least she shows some sort of emotion. Anything is better than the nothingness she has been showing me. The worst thing of all, the thing that would make all of this hiding meaningless would be if we just give up. We can’t do that, and I pray that we won’t.

“I need you to go out there again”, she whispers.

My mind erupts with panic. How can she expect me to go through all that another time. I know I didn’t explain to her exactly how I felt when I’d returned with the papers, she’d been too eager to feverishly look through them to pay me much attention, but I was sure that the look in my eyes would have been enough. Even if it hadn’t, she must have smelt the urine drying on my trousers. I’d tried to hold it in but I really had thought that I’d been caught, but it had been just a boy running in front of a car that had caused the skidding tyres to open my bladder.

It is night now, or near enough. The last of the daylight is just slipping between the high-rises and cranes that cram the panorama beyond the hanging duvet. She explained everything to me, spending most of an hour trying to calm me down and convince me that the ends justify the means. I have agreed. I will go back out there. In time.

She explained, “I know you’re terrified, and if I could go instead I would, but they will recognise me. You have to be brave. We know there’s nothing in any of the papers, we haven’t seen the telly but we can assume that there’s nothing on there either. We need to know where we stand. You can wait until it gets dark this time. I had to send you when it was still light the other day so the papers hadn’t all gone. What I need you to do is this…” So I had sat and listened and tried not to show my fear, and since then I’d been peering through the gap at the side of the duvet, watching for night to come.

“It’s time”, she said, startling me by just how close behind me she was standing. I looked out at the cityscape and saw that the sky was completely dark. I must have been daydreaming because it was pitch black now, but for the life of me I couldn’t think what I had been thinking about. It didn’t matter now, she was right, it was time.

I couldn’t even look at her while I wrapped myself up like a mummy, pulling the too-big woolly hat down to just above my eyes, and hiking the itchy scarf up to just below them, but I could feel her looking at me. I wasn’t going to wear the sunglasses this time, they would draw attention to myself in the dark, whereas nobody would recognise just a pair of eyes anyway.

As the door clicked shut almost inaudibly behind me, I felt somewhat relieved. I may well be out here, on the wrong side of that duvet hanging there like my own private shield, but at least I was no longer under her gaze. I understood that she was worried, terrified, apprehensive, but her fear coupled with my own made me nauseous. I took a deep, deep breath of the cold, dark air and muttered beneath the scarf, “It’s time”.

After crossing the balcony as quickly as I could I began to descend the stairs. I could have taken the lift, it would be safer than the graffiti-strewn stairwells of the tenements, with their flickering fluorescents rarely fully lit, and the more than likely chance of coming across somebody coming in the opposite direction. However, the lift had one drawback, but the biggest one. It is fully illuminated. If the doors open to the wrong person, then it will be over. The stairs would be worth the risk.

Finally, after six flights of dinginess I stepped back into the open, welcoming natural darkness, and again that fresh, cold air filled my nostrils, relegating the urinary stench of the stairs to a memory.

Before me, in between two other blocks of identical flats, lay about five hundred metres of grassy nothingness, intermittently dappled with broken dolls with upturned eyes, and punctured tyres, and patches of dead, yellow grass still growing back where a makeshift bonfire had stood last year. The openness I thought, as I began to cross it, should have made me feel vulnerable and exposed, but it felt safer there than anywhere I’ve been for the last few days, especially the claustrophobia of that flat. I was about halfway across when I suddenly felt the need to see it, to see her. I couldn’t stop or stay still, but I glanced upward over my shoulder to see if she was there. I tried to, but most of the windows were in darkness, and I wasn’t sure which one was the duvet-darkened pane of glass. I almost came to a stand-still, craning my neck to see, when a voice from what seemed like light years away came hovering on the breeze, “…let me in…” The noise startled me and I realised I was almost at the road, and it was time.

As soon as I reached the road I crossed over and turned right. There are hedges on that side to obscure any prying eyes from seeing me when I didn’t want them to, and it also meant that I was walking with my back to the traffic. After a couple of hundred yards or so I passed the newsagents on the left where I came for the newspapers, it seemed to have been much quicker in the dark to get that far. Once past the newsagents I passed a small park on the right, then a butchers and hairdressers on the left, and then, just before the road widened and all of the high street shops sprouted up from the pedestrianised road, was my destination. Following the late evening darkness of the butchers and desertedness of the barber shop, the light from this building seemed to spill out of every window, running from the cracks between the bricks and flowing over the pavement in front, like a beacon lighting my way. I was here, and it was now time.

I have no idea how much time has passed, or what time is it now.

When I first walked in here nobody seemed to even notice me, but as I pulled my hat off and began to unravel the itchy scarf from around my face the older man behind the big wooden desk had looked at me with a mixture of shock and delight. “Dear Lord,” he had exclaimed, “we’ve been looking for you, son.” From then until now it’s all been a bit of a blur. The older man led me to a little room with just a table and a few ugly chairs in it, with badges on the carpet. There we had been joined by a younger man in normal clothes, and a pretty lady who kept writing everything I said in a little notebook.

I had told them everything she had told me to say, I think. I explained that I had been with my dad in the street when all of the banging had started, and that when my dad had pulled the man’s funny mask off I had been looking at the mask, not his face. I explained how the man had been too busy looking at my dad to see where I was looking, and that once my dad had gone to sleep he had come after me, with his mask on again, and he thought I’d seen his face. I don’t know why that was such a bad thing. Then I told them how the lady in the mask had grabbed me and taken me away to the flat. I explained how she was very scared of the man in the mask and of them because she wasn’t a good person, but that I thought she was good because she had looked after me. I described how to get to the flat, how many flights of stairs to climb, and what colour the door was.

When I told them about the papers that I’d been sent for, the pretty lady told me that, “we had to keep as much of this under wraps and out of the media as possible until we found you, in case there was a hostage situation unravelling and the media attention could have placed you in further danger.” I don’t know what that really means.

Once I had finished explaining everything and answering all of their questions, they had left the room and every now and then someone would pop their head in and check I was okay. A young man with glasses had come in with a blanket and arranged two of the chairs facing each other so I could lie across them both and get some sleep. I’m not sure how long I’d been awake for, or if I’d slept at all since this all began, but I remember hearing sirens fading into the distance and thinking of my dad.

“Ben, my name is Detective Inspector Niall, I need to speak to you, are you awake?”

I opened my eyes and saw the man who was speaking to me, he had a suit on and a beard, and after I had stretched and woke up a little bit, he sat me back at the table on the ugly chair and told me about what had happened while I was sleeping.

He said, “As you know Ben we have been trying to find you for some time, your father is in the hospital and waiting to see you. We will take you to see him shortly. First of all I want you to know that you are safe now. The people who were robbing the security van are all either in custody or of no further threat to you; two men were captured during the ensuing chase directly after the crime, the man who your father tried to apprehend got away, and obviously you know what happened to the lady who was with them. We have been to the premises that you directed us to, Ben, and I’m afraid I have some news that may upset you, are you okay for me to continue?” I nodded, and Mister Niall carried on, “It seems that you got away from where you were being held just in time. When we arrived a man who we now know was the third man from the robbery was leaving the building. He panicked when he saw us and we now have him in custody as well. Unfortunately though we were too late for the woman who kidnapped you, and I’m afraid she was pronounced dead at the hospital a few minutes ago.”

“She knew he would find her”, I said, remembering her eyes and how she had always watched over me. “I wasn’t quick enough at getting here was I? I left her and now she’s gone.” He comforted me for a while. Then we started making our way to his car, and the pretty lady joined us again. Then we left for the hospital and the closer we got the more I just thought about dad and less about her.

We are parking outside the ward now, and I can barely recall the colour of her eyes behind her mask. I just want to see dad so much, and I’m about to see him again at last, and he isn’t still asleep. It is time.