Читать книгу Tuesday Falling - S. Williams - Страница 31

Lily-Rose is getting dressed. Her clothes are too big for her now, and when she wears them, the impact of her recent experiences comes into sharp relief. She is a ghost inside her own skin. She puts on a pair of scuzzy old jeans, and uses a dressing gown cord threaded through the belt loops to keep them up. She doesn’t need a bra beneath her ripped black Joy Division tee shirt – since she stopped eating her breasts have almost completely disappeared. This is one of the reasons she still eats so little. She does not want her breasts to return. She does not want to be a sexual being. Over the tee shirt she wears a Russian army jacket with the collar cut off, and on her feet, a pair of Doc Martins. She does not look at herself in the mirror. She has broken all the mirrors.

When the police returned Lily-Rose’s computer she did not touch it. She was not sure if, when she started it up, knowing that everything on it had been examined, she would feel violated again. She wasn’t worried about them finding anything incriminating; the girl she met in the Pollyanna chat room was obviously very good at covering her tracks. But just the fact that strangers had electronically thumbed through her hard-drive. Her photos. Her texts. Her life.

Herself.

She wasn’t sure she could cope with it all.

In the end, she decided she couldn’t and, instead, used her iPad to re-connect to the Interzone. She created a new email address, which she gave to no one. Of course she didn’t. There was no one to give it to. Since her assault she has systematically shut down all her contacts with the school and the estate. It wasn’t hard. Most of her friends have abandoned her, seeing her as broken: damaged goods. Or worse, blaming her for bringing down trouble onto the estate. Her rape was in some way a difficulty that reflected badly on them. An inconvenience; rocking the boat, and allowing the corpse of fear to surface.

She collected all the information on the web concerning the girl the media were now calling Tuesday. She re-entered the anorexia/self-harm forums, the scar-bars she haunted after she was raped, searching for her.

This morning she received an email. It had no IP address and seemed to originate from nowhere. She opens it up and reads it.

The words make her break out in a shivering sweat but she reads it to the end.

Once Lily-Rose has finished dressing, covering her hands with a pair of fingerless grey mittens and wrapping a black keffiyeh round her throat, she leaves the house for the first time since her attack, and heads into town.