"Adella Lau don't you dare take up that tone with me young lady, sit back down!"
I glared back at Nana Ru from where I stood by the back door, arms crossed, a sulk on. She'd caught me trying to sneak out for the third time that week and her patience - not that she had very much - was finally beginning to wear out.
I'd argued back the first time, I'd put up a fight the second, but now I just stood there, wordless and rolling my eyes at her because there was nothing she could say to me now that she hadn't spent my whole life drumming into me.
"I might not have managed to save Lawrence but I can still save you!" she said, all dramatic sniffles and a hand to her cheek.
"Nana i have to go to school..." i sighed though I knew there was no point putting up a real fight. If she thought she was doing what was best for me then there was no way she would buckle or relent.
"Well you have those idiot lads to blame for that... They don't think, thats the problem Della, they're so selfish..." and so she began again, the story of those selfish lads and their fighting, which was always awful and never warranted. Which she'd warned my poor poor mother about, who she wishes now she'd done the same to. Locked her up, kept her away from it all.
I'd look back one day and be grateful. That's what she always told me, that was how this speech always ended, but i couldnt help question how true any of the things she told me really were.
Because I hadn't always lived with my Nana Ru, though she'd confiscated me years ago, all of my earliest, and most fond of childhood memories were spent with Isabelle at the Balcony, with my brother Larry and her sister Lyra.
I could still remember every detail of happiness that we had shared together. I still cherished every memory I had from those few years I lived with my family.
And I still clung to them now, because up until this new wave of fighting had errupted, I'd been able to sneak away to the Balcony afterschool with Izzy, or meet Larry by the gates for a cig.
I'd been able to slip away from my Nanas somewhat iron grip on my life for just long enough to get to know my real family well enough that I knew when Nana Ru was lying to me.
This morning she was lying to me.
This morning she was laying the violence and the fear on thick to try and keep me inside. To try and keep me from trying to get to my brother again.
That was all I'd really wanted to do since the fighting had started, get to Larry, be with him again in case something happened. One of these nights something would.
Every night I tuned into the police radio and every night the callouts got worse. The rumours which were confirmed by their voices crackling and all their pointless code words.
I'd learned the language of the feds when I was younger and now I lived through it.
I spent every night living through it, messing with the tuning dial, ears pricked and listening, always listening.
It had become my method of closeness, especially now that I was being kept under house arrest. Especially now when my Nana Ru was the only person I'd spoken to in weeks. Now that I couldn't hear the rumours which shot through school, now that I couldn't sit next to Isabelle in tutor and quiz her on the facts and the fake news threaded through them.
Now the police radio was all I really had and I listened to it in the mornings when I was eating my breakfast, in the afternoons when I'd nothing to do but lounge around reading, trying to concentrate on anything other than the lingering sense of dread which was haunting me.
"Della you don't understand, I wouldn't be doing this if it wasn't to keep you safe, I promised your mother..." and so she started again, and when I pushed myself up and rolled my eyes and tried to go upstairs, back to my room, back to bed, she carried on. Following me up the stairs, tea towel in hand, still rattling off on one about what was best for me and what exactly it was that she hated the most about my brother and his reckless friends.
"Your mother was ever such a bright girl, she had so much potential and those men, those men tainted her, they stole her away from us," she wasn't sad she was bitter. She wasn't mourning her daughter, she was just bitter.
I leant in my doorway blocking her so that she couldn't follow me into my room and I looked up at her with stubborn black eyes.
"Theyre my family Nana, I love them," i said before I closed the door on her and locked it, crawled back into bed and pulled the covers up over my shoulders with nothing else to do but lie there waiting for sleep.
I hugged my little radio to my chest and tuned back into the police radio, listening for any familiar adresses, for any familiar names but it was quiet and there was no mention of Bottlemen or Reids or Lewis and I fell asleep before I heard any news of my family. And I fell asleep before I heard Nana Ru leave the house, so when I awoke I awoke to darkness in a lonely jet black night.
If I'd heard her leaving, if I'd known where she had gone, I'd have tried to sneak out again. If I'd been able to predict how long she would be gone for I'd have left and returned before she'd suspected a thing. But i didn't take those sorts of risks with Nana Ru anymore because she had a tendency to call the police and whip up a panic and I knew the last thing Larry and the lads would want was the police poking around, looking for a teenage girl who wasn't really missing.
So i didnt leave, i just left my room. Wandered downstairs dragging my blanket with me to the kitchen where I collected a tub of ice cream from the freezer, and I did as I always did in the dead of night when I couldn't sleep and I'd nothing else to occupy my mind.
I shrunk into the sofa and turned on the telly, watched whatever music documentary they had on the arts channel and tried not to think about Larry too much. Tried not to worry about where they'd been and what risks my brother might have been taking.
I'd heard over the radio about a fire which had been set last week and about bedroom windows smashed and shot to pieces. It worried me to think of my brother moving in those circles though I knew it was Larrys circle to move in. It worried me to think that one day he might wind up in the line of fire. It worried me that one day he wouldn't get lucky.
That one day we'd wind up at a funeral again.
I drifted in and of sleep listening to suits discussing The Undertones till 3am but when the flickering glow of the television screen woke me up once again I tuned into something else and my blood ran cold.
It was something like the rattling of a lock on a door, something like metal chinking in the kitchen or just beyond the kitchen window.
I chewed my cheek and tried to come to my senses. I chewed my cheek and moved slowly, softly. When I pushed myself up from the settee I was careful to switch the television off without a sound. I was careful to open the curtains in the front room slowly, quietly, delicately.
I was careful not to make a sound between the window and the gap between the settee and the wall as I slunk between them. Slid down against the wall on my side.
It was a hiding place I'd arranged just for moments like this one. Because I'd always sort of known that when a war broke out I'd wind up out the loop, in danger but cut off. Trapped by my nana Ru who thought she was doing the best she could but was actually throwing me in harms way.
Her efforts to protect me would kill me if the wrong person lingered on the thought of me for too long.
So I'd practiced sucking my stomach in and wedging myself between the sofa and the wall, holding my breath, staying perfectly still. Now when I hear the breaking of the lock on the back door I was glad of all the times I'd spent paranoid and practicing.
I heard footsteps but no voices, no whispers no nothing. Just footsteps, someone wandering around and wandering through my Nanas house. Their shoes scuffed, they dragged their heels but that wasn't enough to work out who they were. To work out if they were good or bad, friend of foe. They didn't touch anything and when i heard them open the door and step down into the living room I held my breath listening to them. Listening to their breathing, listening to them listening. Were they listening for me?
My chest ached with the tension taking over me, my heart hurt and I found my mind racing with the fear. My only lasting hope that the lads were having the house watched. That there was someone in a car on the street outside who was watching this scene play out. Who knew i was home, who could see the stranger standing in the center of my living room, looking for me.
They kicked the settee and bruised my ribs but i didnt cry out and I didnt move a muscle, I just closed my eyes, forced myself to relax, forced my muscles to give in so that I was lying there on my side no longer rigid but malleable. Next time they knocked that sofa i would move with it and it wouldn't hurt and they wouldnt notice the reisitence so they wouldn't notice me.
I listened as they picked things up and moved things around and paced a little more. I bristled when i heard a second pair of shoes. My heart skipped a beat when I heard a third.
"Theres no one here," i didnt recognise their voices but I knew they were Reids the moment they opened their mouths. I sensed it.
"The old woman must have fled with the kid," a second voice cut through the ringing and the burning in my ears and I felt my heart flicker and thud and struggle just like the rest of me to remain quiet and still and subtle.
"Of course she fuckin has," spat a third, "we should have killed them both whilst we had the chance, you should never have made us wait!"
I swallowed a lump in my throat and tried not to dwell on his words. Tried not to think about what they meant.
That whilst me and Nana Ru had been arguing, bickering between the two of us, there had been three men parked outside, watching us. Waiting for the opportune moment to slit our throats and hang us out to dry.