I raise my hand slowly and touch her fingers very, very gently. I can feel her quickly clotting blood sticking to my skin. It’s hot, fresh. Something inside my chest curls up and dies. I want to cry, and I can already feel tears stinging, pricking the backs of my eyes. But I blink them away. I somehow know that I’ve got to be strong.
“Cheryl?” I ask as I hold her outstretched hand. Her fingers close around my own, gripping onto me softly. I want to hold her hand tight and never let go but I’m so, so scared of hurting her. Because not that I’m right next to her I realise just how fragile she looks. I blink down at the angry purple and red bruises covering her arms, at the cuts that rip through her flesh and the tiny rivers of dark blood that trace their way down her ruined skin. I just want to make her better. I want to brush away the cuts and bruises just like I could brush away the tears that are still pouring down her face with my fingertips.
“You’re hurt” I murmur, and she looks at me, her chocolate brown eyes brimming with fresh tears.
“Yeah. Damaged goods. But everybody is hurt, aren’t they?” she whispers, and she jerks her head so that for a brief moment all the amber streetlights of the city are reflected in her tears, and it looks as though she is weeping molten, burning gold. Up here on the roof, with the glowing lights playing on her skin and the icy cold night breeze teasing through her hair and creating a halo of chocolate curls entwined with the bronze lights, she looks more than breathtaking. She looks heart-stopping-ly, mind-numbingly stunning. But she doesn’t know it. Of cause she doesn’t.
I can feel her hot blood beginning to seep over my palm, and I suppress a shudder. She doesn’t notice, she’s shivering far too much. For the first time I realise that she’s wearing no coat or jacket, just a thin football shirt and a pair huge joggers. Her tiny, doll-like feet are bare, and I can see splatters of her own blood dripped on them
“Are you cold?” I ask her, gently touching her shoulder with my free hand, feeling her shivering, goose-bumped skin. She doesn’t flinch away this time. In fact, she almost seems to savour my touch. She glances up at me through her dark eyelashes, smudged with mascara and heavy, clinging teardrops.
“I don’t know” she says, and almost smiles “I just feel like I’ve broken some of me ribs”
“Oh god” I whisper, and she just shrugs, wincing in pain at the movement.
And then she leads me towards the chimney in the centre of the roof. Her bare feet must be horribly painful, and I try not to think about the soles being cut and bleeding, Cheryl’s beautiful face contorted in pain. She leans back against the rough and quickly crumbling brickwork, half sighing, half gasping with pain as she slides down the all into an awkward sitting position. I scramble to sit beside her on the frozen concrete, and her grip on my hand never once loosens. I rest my back against the brick chimney and feel the rough surface scratch at my leather jacket. Cheryl coughs, a wheezing, painful, rattling sound, her eyes closed and her thin, bruised chest heaving. I want to pat her on the back and tell her that it’s all going to be okay, but I’m so frightened that she’ll flinch away or that I’ll hurt her. When she’s finally finished coughing her breathing seems louder, more laboured. I’m scared.
“Are you okay? Do you want me to call anyone? Your mum-”
Cheryl almost laughs, her dark eyes un seeing, looking right through me.
“No. No, not them-” her lips barely move.
“An ambulance then? Please-”
“No! No! Oh please god, no!” The fear in her voice is genuine, undeniable.
“Cheryl-” I can feel her palm begin to sweat, mixing with her blood. Half of me is repulsed and wants to pull away, but I don’t think I could bear to detangle my fingers from around hers. So instead I roughly pull off my jacket and throw it around both of our shoulders. Cheryl snuggles closer to me, so close that I can taste the bitter blood in her mouth.
“Thank you” she whispers. “I’m warmer now, thank you Kimberley.” Her accent carves the words, twists them around her tongue and spits them out so elegantly that I hardly recognised my own name.
“No problem” I shrug, and she wriggles closer to me. Her breathing is fast and I can almost hear her heartbeat racing, pumping the adrenaline from the fight through her veins. She’s being so brave. I can tell by her shuddering bottom lip that it’s taking all her willpower not to cling onto me and sob her heart out. But I have to be strong too. I lick my lips and open my parched mouth.
“Did he hit you, your boyfriend?” I say it quickly, before she can take my breath away.
“No, you don’t get it. It’s not like that, he wouldn’t hurt me-”
“Cheryl, seriously-” I run a single finger curiously along one of the cuts in her arm, making her shudder in pain. I can see tiny splinters of glass, sparkling like diamonds, embedded deep in the cuts.
“Please-” her voice is slurred by the pain and blood loss.
“There’s glass in this Cheryl. Glass.” She bends her head, peering at her cuts in the half-light, squinting her eyes and sending another tear cascading down her cheeks.
“Oh god” she squeaks, digging her fingernails into the back of my hand.
“What did he do?” I ask her quietly, barely even opening my lips.
“Ashley did nothing. I dropped a bottle-” I run my eyes over her beautiful face, the sweeping cheekbones, the huge, dark eyes. She’s a terrible liar, but she cries like a tortured angel.
“Cheryl, please just tell me the truth.”
And she clings to me now, her nails in the soft leather of the jacket, scrunching the fabric of my school shirt and leaving bloody fingerprints on my skin. I don’t even notice. “I can’t-” she sobs.
“You can, please-”
“He’ll kill me, and he didn’t mean it, he was drunk, he never meant to hurt me-”
“I won’t tell anyone-”
“Anyone? Not me mam? Not school?”
“I won’t tell anyone” and even as my lips repeat the words, I know that there is no turning back. As her eyes swim with tears once again, I know, more defiantly than I have ever known anything, that I will never repeat what she says to me on the roof that night. Because we’re high above the rest of the city. Because it’s 4am and the world is stuck somewhere grey between night and sunrise. Because she’s more than tragically beautiful, and a million lights from the city are reflected back to me in the oily depths of her pupils.
“You promise?” she holds my hand. I cling onto her.
“I promise.”
