The car comes to a halt. She can feel Sacha's eyes on her, but she keeps her gaze fixed on the building. The windows are boarded up and signs reading 'DO NOT ENTER' have been attached to the standard-issue temporary fencing. The whole place is crumbling. She blinks, then almost laughs. She's outlived it.
"Are you okay?" Sacha asks, breaking her trail of thought.
"Fine." She murmurs in response, then reaches to unclip her seatbelt.
"You can't go in, Jac. It's all fenced off!" Sacha protests.
"I'm just going to look." She glances back at him, taking in the frown lines and worried expression of her oldest friend. She hesitates, then gets out of the car.
The sky is overcast with dark grey clouds. Despite the threat of rain, it's warm. The type of cloying humidity that makes you feel trapped. It's fitting, she thinks to herself. She's always felt trapped here. Like a spider under a glass, at the mercy of others.
The gravel crunches under foot as she walks closer. She looks back to the car, where Sacha remains. He tilts his head, asking if she wants him to join her, but she shakes her head in response. She brings a hand up to touch the metal fencing, feeling the vibration as the panel rattles.
The red paint of the front door is peeling. She swallows, remembering the day she arrived. Nobody had wanted her, so she had been sent here, with all her worldly belongings contained in a black plastic bin bag. A familiar numbness begins to creep over her. A sense of resignation. The numerable foster placements that inevitably fell through, the failed run-away attempts; she always seems to end back here.
She follows the perimeter of the fencing until she finds a gap and squeezes through, ignoring Sacha's shout.
Now, she has reached the back of the building. She presses on, ignoring the feeling in her gut that's telling her to run away and never look back. There's something about the threat of danger that makes her feel alive.
She spots a ground floor window that, unlike the others, is not boarded up. The heavily graffitied plywood lies discarded in the dirt. Angular fragments of fractured glass line the window frame, like shark teeth. The room behind this window is the kitchen. Or was the kitchen, she corrects herself. It serves that purpose no longer.
She peers in, hesitates, then climbs through the opening with her hands burrowed into her jacket sleeves to avoid laceration. She winces, not quite managing to avoid slicing her outer left thigh. She bends her knees to soften the impact and drops down into the room with as much grace as she can muster.
It smells of ammonia and damp. The room has been gutted, except for a sink in the corner. She closes her eyes and brings a hand to her temple, feeling the beginnings of a migraine.
She assumes the building has been taken over by squatters, or found new purpose as a drug den, but she hears no signs of life as she strains her ears, listening out. Steeling herself, she presses on. The door from the kitchen emits a high-pitched creek worthy of a haunted house as she nudges it open.
The familiar sight of the corridor meets her, and she becomes aware of the sensation of her heart beating in her chest. She treads softly down the corridor, one finger trailing along the wall, dislodging years of dust as she goes.
She's cut off from the sound of the outside world here. No longer can she hear the passing of cars, or the birds in the overgrown shrubbery. She tries not to breathe too loudly. To break the silence would be disrespectful. This is the ceremonial burial ground of stolen childhoods.
The further she steps from the kitchen, the darker her surroundings become. As she reaches the bottom of the staircase, she fumbles in her pocket for her phone and pulls it out, turning on the torch. She casts the beam of artificial light around and kicks an empty bottle of corner shop vodka aside, flinching as the sound of glass rolling over the floorboards cuts through the silence.
On autopilot, she begins to climb the stairs. One foot at a time, until she reaches the landing. She stands, statue like, eyes flickering between the bedroom doors. Memories of their previous occupants begin to drift back to her.
She's sat in the corner of the communal area, eyes fixed on the book held in her hands. She's not reading though. She's paying attention to the procession of people who have just entered the room. A new kid is being shown around. She takes one quick glance, not wanting to appear outwardly interested. It's a girl. She looks around her age, perhaps a little younger. She has spots, and thick framed glasses, and she looks afraid. She feels her heart sink. You can't afford to look vulnerable here.
Later that night, she hears her crying through her bedroom walls.
It's the sensation of something touching her foot that reanimates her. She lets out a sharp shriek, looks down in alarm, then breaks into a run. It takes a moment for her brain to process that it had been a rat.
Her breath is now coming in quick gasps. She realises too later that, in her panic, she had darted straight into the room that used to be hers. She feels dizzy as she takes in the stained mattress, pushed up against the same wall where her bed used to be. She tugs at her hair and sinks to the ground, no longer trusting her legs to support her. Her heart has been replaced by frantic moths hellbent on escaping her thoracic cavity. She can't think. She can't breathe. It feels like she's dying.
She scrunches her eyes shut and screams.
The next thing she is aware of is somebody frantically shaking her shoulder. Her eyes fly open in alarm, and she is met with Sacha's wide and worried eyes.
"What the hell did you go in for, Jac?" There's no malice to his voice. He has an arm wrapped around her, supporting her. "It's alright, I'm here."
"I can't do this – " She manages to gasp, unable to shake the feeling that the walls are closing in on her.
"It's alright. Let's get out of here."
She grips onto him, needing something to ground herself. Her knuckles are white.
"You're alright." Sacha soothes again. "Just breathe, Jac. Let's get back to the car."
She ducks her head to the side and retches, catching Sacha's sympathetic grimace in her peripheral vision.
Gradually, she begins to regain a sense of control over her body. Still trembling, she lets Sacha guide her back down the stairs. Climbing back out the broken window is easier than climbing in, which is fortunate, because it feels like her head is spinning a hundred miles a second. With a pang of guilt, she spots a large rip in Sacha's tartan jacket, which she assumes was the result of his rescue mission.
They don't speak again until they're both sat back in his car. It's Sacha who breaks the silence first.
"Perhaps coming back here wasn't a particularly good idea." He broaches the subject.
She scoffs at the understatement, and picks at a loose thread. "I thought it would help." Her voice is quieter than usual, quieter than she was expecting. She doesn't like sounding meek. "I thought… I wanted it to make sense."
Sacha is quiet for a moment. She keeps her eyes focused on her lap, once again aware that he's looking straight at her. "You've achieved so much with your life, you know?"
He pauses for long enough that she feels pressured into looking up, giving him a quick, jerky nod to indicate that she's listening.
"This place, your past, it doesn't define you. You've been telling people that for years. I want you to believe it."
She nods again, so he continues. "Sometimes things don't make sense. Bad things happen to good people. There's no reasoning behind it."
She closes her eyes, letting his words wash over her. When she speaks, she sounds exhausted. "But that's the thing. It can't accept that it was all for nothing. All that damage. I needed to turn it into something better. What was it all for!?"
