Zoe Markham - Under My Skin

Take one broken girl. Add a generous helping of pain and terror.

Simmer for six months.

Needles, a homemade drip attached to the frame of an old standard lamp, the dimmest of light bulbs, and a bright, blinding torch for when he needed to check my eyes. A room that never got warm, blankets that scratched and burned at my skin as my cells imploded and pores bled. Scrap metal, boiled, sharpened and seared through bone to force it back into place. Limbs that jerked uncontrollably one minute, and seized completely the next. Wires, everywhere, pretending to be veins, trying to trick my body, trying to make me into something I should never have become. Lying flat, not seeing anything other than a damp, water-stained ceiling week after week. Pain. Endless pain accompanied by endless doses of morphine that never touched it. Fear – of what the pain would do next, of what he would do next, of what I was turning into. A hideous, stumbling experiment, brought to life in the darkness. Screams. A million screams in a place where no one would ever hear them.

It wasn’t really me. That’s what I have to tell myself, or I can’t handle the flashbacks. That person, that thing, down there, wasn’t me . But I still can’t go into the basement. It doesn’t matter that the equations, the test tubes, the conical flasks and the bottles of god only knows what are all hidden away underneath this beautiful cottage in the middle of this beautiful countryside – that’s just a matter of aesthetics. There’s no more damp, cramped flat in the arse end of London, but the principle remains. And it’s a nasty principle, however you look at it.

A distraction, that’s what I need. It was never easy in the flat, because there was no room to move, no space to think. Here though, I’ve got nothing but room – and I obsessively, determinedly, clean and tidy every damn inch of it until everything looks nice; until everything looks normal. I find the radio and turn it up far too loud, wanting the inane chatter and cheesy, commercial music to fill my head, willing it to take up as much room in there as possible. I dust, I polish, I hoover. I fluff cushions. I sweep the fireplace. And I don’t stop until my arms and legs start to tremble and my heart starts to pound so hard in my ears it blocks out the radio. And when I can’t do any more, I sit and I cry like a baby – for a thousand different reasons. I even cry for the fact that I’m crying.

‘You’re pathetic, Chlo,’ I tell myself. ‘You’re absolutely bloody pathetic. What was the point of coming through it all, just to end up like this?’ I don’t want the end-product to be this whiny, self-indulgent, sickly creature. I know that I need to heal mentally as much as physically; but I just don’t know how the hell I’m supposed to do it. I lie back on the sofa, refusing to think about anything at all until the pounding in my ears eases, and the trembling in my limbs settles. I lose track of time, but as my body slowly recovers in its own way from the morning’s unusual exertion, angry growls start to bellow forth from my stomach. It must be protein o’clock, and as I realise that I’m going to have to go and mess up my now immaculate kitchen all over again, I start to laugh. And it feels better than crying.

*

I throw a pack of chicken breasts into the oven this time, thinking it’s probably healthier than frying them. I mean, I don’t actually have a clue what I’m doing; Mum always used to cook for us, or if she had to work late she’d leave money for pizza. It suddenly hits me that I’m going to have to cook for us tonight – that I’ve been somehow shifted into the role of housewife here, and I couldn’t be any less qualified for it. I see a panic attack racing across the horizon towards me, and I desperately look around for something to fight it off with. My new phone’s sitting on the windowsill, still attached to its charger, and I make a grab for it. I could text Dad, tell him to get a takeaway on his way back tonight. Or maybe I shouldn’t disturb him on his first day. I could save him some of the chicken. I’m starting to get dangerously close to setting off an ‘I can’t do this’ loop of destruction in my head, when I see the note he said he’d left; it was neatly folded up and tucked underneath the phone. Not the most obvious of spots, but he must’ve known I’d be playing with the phone at some point.

Chlo,

I’m getting an early start. Didn’t want to wake you. Don’t open the door, don’t answer the phone, keep the curtains closed tight and ring me if you need me. Eat well, and stay warm. I’ll pick up groceries & a takeaway on my way home.

Dad.

Well, that’s my dinner worry solved for today at least.

If we had the internet, it’d be easy; I could just look up some simple recipes. Dad doesn’t think I’m ready to get back online yet though. And he’s right. The temptation to email Tom and tell him everything would be pretty hard to resist. I mean, I write emails to him in my head every day:

Dear Tom, you’ll NEVER believe what happened…

I can remember his email address, but not his phone number. He was on speed dial on our landline, and just ‘Tom’ on my mobile. I can’t dredge up any more than a zero and a seven from the tangled mess of my memory. Some days I try, for hours at a time. Other days, I try for hours at a time not to.

I look down at the phone in my hands, and I wonder…

No… he wouldn’t be that careless, or that clueless…

… would he?

My fingers fumble through the options almost of their own accord, and as I press the web browser symbol, I get that familiar panicky sensation of ice flooding my stomach.

Mobile data is disabled for this device. Please check your settings.

That should be where I stop, but I follow the prompts and check the settings all the same. It’s like drinking, or smoking, you know it’s bad… you know it’s only going to hurt you… but you do it all the same. When I see Please enter your password to change your mobile data settings I’m genuinely relieved, glad that he’s taken the choice away from me, because I don’t think I would have been strong enough to make the right choice on my own.

I can’t stand the thought of anyone seeing me like this; I don’t want to catch the look in their eyes: revulsion, fear, disgust. I’m genuinely terrified of what their reaction would be. And it’s not just the look, it’s what they’d say. Would they call out? Cover their mouth with their hands just a split second too late to stifle their gasp of horror? Or would they just fire a horrified whisper to the friend beside them, pulling them in close and hurrying by? Maybe there’d even be some pity there, which I think would somehow be even worse. I could never go out, never talk to someone the way I look now. But if I was behind a screen… well, I could be anyone. I could make a fake profile on Facebook, friend Tom and see what he’s doing, find out who he’s hanging out with now, if he still thinks about me. I could open a Wattpad account and share everything that’s happened to me, pretend that I’ve got this crazy, twisted imagination and it’s all just fiction. Maybe people reading it would get hooked, and become as curious as I am to find out how it all turns out. Or maybe they’d just think I was sick in the head and move on to safer ground and some One Direction fan fiction.

Either way, I don’t have to worry, because Dad’s locked me out of the internet as securely as he’s locked me in the cottage. It keeps me safe. It keeps me so lonely that the coldness inside is actually starting to burn . And I’ve got nothing in the world to do but stare through the little window of the oven and wait for my chicken to cook.