You Don't Own Me(45)

‘I’m sorry, but I’ve got something important to do. I’ll liaise with Stella and contact you again,’ I tell a surprised Eliot.

My body pumping with adrenaline, I turn to Stella. She is staring at me with her famous WTF expression. Maybe later, if this turns out to be a sick joke, we’ll laugh about this, but now I’m too frightened by Mark’s tone to do anything but run to Zane. ‘I’ve got to go. I’ll call you later, OK?’ I tell her quickly, and rush out of Eliot’s home.

The lift is old and it was slow on our way up so I don’t use it. I open the fire exit door and run down the three flights of stairs. Outside, I realize that it is going to take too long for me to call Noah and wait for him to come. As far as he was concerned I was going to wait for Stella to finish her massage and we would be an hour. Who knows where he’d be right now?

As if the Gods are with me, I see a taxi turning the corner into the street and its light is on. I run to the edge of the street and hail it. I get in quickly and give him Zane’s address.

‘Sorry, love,’ he says shaking his head. ‘Can’t take you there. There’s a huge jam in that area. Big accident earlier. People died,’ he tells me.

‘Just get me as close as possible, and please hurry,’ I say to him.

‘It’ll cost ya,’ he warns.

‘Charge me whatever you want, but please get me there as quickly as you can,’ I say anxiously.





Twenty-six


Aleksandr Malenkov

“Where there is only a choice between cowardice and violence,

I would advise violence.”

-Mohandas Gandhi

It is a winter afternoon. Big, soft, white flakes of snow swirl down from a black sky and fall on me. I quicken my footsteps through the deserted street when a bitter wind starts biting into my face. As I run up the stairs to the second floor and put my key in the door, I have no other thoughts than how glad I will be to get into the warmth of our home.

As soon as I open the door I hear it, the dull thud coming from the kitchen. It is not a good sound. I’ve heard it before. Many times before. Flesh hitting a hard, flat surface; like a wall, a floor. I fling my schoolbag on the ground and run towards the noise.

My father is kneeling astride mama and he is strangling her.

In the thick, iron grasp of his red, meaty hands, her neck looks as thin and white as a swan’s. The sound I heard is the weak thrashing of her legs against the floor. As if he was waiting for me to arrive before the real action starts, he turns his head slowly, a cruel smile creeping across his face. The spooky smile of a madman. Fear slams into my body.

‘Nooooo!’ I yell and, rushing forward pounce on him.

I rain blows on his head, neck, and back, but he was always a man possessed of extraordinary strength. Like the locking jaws of a pit bull that will not let go even after the dog he’s attacking has expired, his death grip cannot be disengaged. My mother’s eyes are bulging out of her head. He starts shaking her by the neck like a ragdoll. He is killing her right before my eyes.

I have to stop him. In desperation, I rush to the counter for something to bang on my father’s head. Something, anything. I could have come across a heavy bottomed pot, or even mama’s heavy rolling pin, but what I see is a knife.

Eight inches of shining steel.

My mother was cutting a chicken with it. The carcass lay decapitated and partly dismembered on the chopping board next to the knife. I swallow back the fear. I don’t think. I have to save mama or she will die. With my heart racing and the blood roaring in my ears, I pick the sharp blade up.

The handle has ridges that fit my grip perfectly.

Turning around I swing it downwards directly into my father’s broad back. It slices through his clothes and without any resistance at all embeds itself to the hilt into his dirty flesh. My father grunts like a hog in pain, but he does not let go of his quarry.

I grab the black handle with both hands and pull it out. Dark blood rushes out of the wound like a fountain of red. The jet of red splashes onto my legs and shoes as I raise the knife high over my head and, with a shout of blind fury and hatred, bury it into the side of my father’s bull-like neck. It makes a sickening wet sound. Squelch. Like when you kill a bug, but a thousand times worse.

Blood sprays everywhere: over my mother, the cabinet, the peeling linoleum, the walls, my father, and me. Everything is scarlet, like the brightest flowers in full bloom.

After that I go crazy. A red mist descends and I stab him over and over, compulsively, until he falls to the floor with a muffled thump. I kick him away and pick my mother off the floor. I cradle her lifeless body in my arms.

I don’t rock her, and I don’t shake her. I know it’s too late. She is gone. Her skin is as pale as a starfish, and her beautiful blue eyes are fixed and vacant. Like stones. Dead. I have never seen anyone dead in real life before and I know nothing will ever be the same again.