She takes a long breath in. And she holds it. She holds it for so long that I’m scared her lungs might give way under the pressure. I’m scared her ribs are cracked and broken. I’m scared the jagged, splintered broken bone might puncture her delicate lungs, laced with tar and her own blood.
“Cheryl?” I whisper, and she finally exhales through her nose, her nostrils flaring and her chest heaving. She winces, eyes closed, pain and tears etching their way across her face.
“I dropped a bottle...” she repeats her exact words, but her accent twists them slightly differently now. Her voice is higher than I expect it to be. Maybe she’s still battling back tears. I can hear her gulp, and her throat sounds painfully dry. I want to interrupt her, ask her to tell me the truth, not just her well-rehearsed lies. She hesitates. Somewhere far below us I can hear a siren whining through the empty streets, and the blue lights from the police car flash across her face. Coppers. Cheryl’s eyes flash open. Her eyes are surprisingly clear, filled with blue lights and tears, and her bottom lip is grasped tightly between her teeth. As the siren rings through the perfectly still air, her grasp on my hand tightens for an instant. I can hear her breathing begin to speed as her heartbeat races away. She hesitates, but she does continue.
“I dropped a bottle-” I watch her lips move as she shapes the same words yet again, coated in glossy, deep red blood like expensive Italian lipstick. Hypnotising. “And it smashed. It went everywhere. He’s drunk, I swear to god he was so drunk, he doesn’t know he hurts me, he never means to hurt me-”
“What happened?” I ask her as gently as I can. I watch as she closes her eyes and allows a tear to trail down her cheek. It mixes with mascara and blood, turning what was once gleaming clear into a dull ruby colour and tracing a clean white line over her bloodied face.
“He just shouted. He just shouted at first. Of cause he was p!ssed off, I shouldn’t have broken it. It was all my fault, I try so hard and then I screw up. He’s got a right to be mad-”
“Not this mad. Not kicking-the-shiit-out-of-you mad.” I rest my head on her shoulder and whisper into her chocolate curls. I can feel her shoulder bone digging into my cheek. God, she’s so thin.
“I tried to clear it up, I hoped it’d be okay. The bottle was empty, but the glass went everywhere. All over the kitchen floor.”
I close my eyes and I can see it. I can see the thousands and thousands of sharp shards of glass all over the freezing, sticky kitchen tiles, like a dusting of ice, or glitter made from a million particles of diamond. I can imagine how they’d gleam under the bright electric light bulb and the moonlight spilling in from the curtainless window. And Cheryl would scramble onto her hands and knees, trying to clear it up before he sees. But it’s no good, of cause. A shadow would loom from the doorway, and Cheryl would involuntarily flinch. The image of a dog I’d tried to stroke once, when I was a child, flashes unbidden through my mind. I can remember the way the whites of its eyes flashed under the streetlights as I reached out to touch its thin, matted coat. I can remember the way its protruding ribs flexed and contracted, ready for my hand to turn into a fist and crash onto its body. I want to hold Cheryl tighter, and never, ever let her go.
“He just...” She rests her chin on her knees and doesn’t look at me. Her eyes are fixed on the glossy river, reflecting all the lights of the city like an oily mirror. She blinks. A tear falls from the corner of her eye. I’m silent. I try not to breathe until I become dizzy and tiny dots of white light appear in front of my eyes. I let the air rush from my lungs.
“Flipped?” I finish her sentence. She glances at me from under her impossibly long eyelashes, and I watch as her pupils flit over my face.
“Yeah” she murmurs. I can hear the raw emotion in her voice. I want her to continue, but I’m not sure I want to know. I don’t want to know how he hit her, the things he hissed into the darkness as she lay, bruised and bleeding on the cold tiles. And I can see it all anyway, even with my eyes open. All the lights of the city contort and twist into two figures, one rendered golden and glowing by the dozens of streetlights, the other created from all the shadows themselves, the black voids under cars and in dark alleyways. The figures combine, the golden lights falling to the river and shattering onto the smooth surface of the river and the shadows filling the sky like an ebony cloak. I blink, and the lights attempt to rise like stars into the heavens, but the shadows thrust them down, again and again and again-
