Born Scared

ME: Yeah.

DOC: We can do this, Elliot. We can do everything possible to make you better. But we have to do it together. We have to do it between the three of us – you, your mum, and me.

And Ellamay, I added silently.

Thank you, she said.

You’re welcome.

11

MY EVERY DAY AND NIGHT

It’s twenty-one minutes past three now, and I’m back in the hallway, making some final adjustments to my Wellington boots. They’re actually the Doc’s boots. He left them at our house once – I don’t know why – and they’ve been here ever since. They’re far too big for me, which is why I’ve had to customise them by stuffing the toe-ends with scrunched-up newspaper. I used to have my own pair of Wellingtons, but it’s been so many years since I wore them – so many years since I’ve needed them – that I don’t have a clue where they are. In fact, it’s quite possible that Mum got rid of them a long time ago. And even if she didn’t, and I did know where they are, they’d be at least a couple of sizes too small for me by now.

I don’t feel very comfortable in the Doc’s Wellingtons, but they’re the only boots I could find, so I don’t really have much choice.

The gloves and the coat and the hat I’m wearing aren’t mine either. They’re Mum’s. As with the boots, I used to have my own coat and everything, but if you hardly ever leave the house – and I hardly ever leave my room, let alone the house – there’s not much point in having outdoor clothing. And besides, I can always borrow Mum’s if I need to. She’s only a bit bigger than me, so they’re not too bad a fit.

Although, having said that . . .

What are you doing now? Ellamay says.

‘These gloves are a bit loose. I’m just going to try padding them out a bit with a few scraps of wadded-up newspaper. It won’t take long.’

That’s enough, Elliot.

‘What?’

We have to go. You can’t keep putting it off.

‘I’m not –’

Yes, you are. You know you are.

She’s right, of course. I keep trying to convince myself that I’m ready to do this, that I’ve got my fear under control . . . but the truth is, I’m as terrified now as I was twenty-one minutes ago. All I want to do is go back to the sanctuary of my room and stay there for ever. It’s the only place I feel safe, the only place I ever want to be. My room.

My everything.

My world.

The countryside can be a scary place when darkness falls. Before I had my own specially modified fear-proof room, I’d often lie awake at night just waiting for the horror-sounds to begin. The piercing screech of an owl, the scream of a fox (like someone in terrible pain), the pitiful cries of rabbits being killed . . . and monkem noises too – gunshots from night hunters, the shattering roar of a speeding car or motorbike, drunk monkems passing by, shouting and laughing. And on top of all that there’s the constant sound of army manoeuvres up on the moors – the distant pop-popping of gunfire, the rumble of tanks, soldiers’ war cries, the whizz-bang of flares going off . . .

And even when the night is silent, it’s a silence of darkness and dread, a silence that’s always waiting for the next unholy scream.

But I don’t hear anything of the night any more.

My fear-proof room is one hundred per cent soundproof.

I don’t know exactly how it works, but basically the walls and the ceiling are made up of several layers of various kinds of stuff that either absorbs or reflects sound, and the only window is quadruple glazed. The window looks out over the fields at the back of the house, but I very rarely actually see them because there’s a blackout blind that totally obscures the view. I can raise the blind if I want to – and occasionally I find the courage to have a quick look – but most of the time it stays down, shielding me from the outside world.

The room’s painted white all over. I chose white because for me it’s the colour that comes closest to nothing. It’s the most non-scary colour, the colour that doesn’t fill my head or my heart with anything. I can lie on my bed staring up at the ceiling, sometimes for hours on end, and I don’t have to worry about the sky of whiteness invading my thoughts and feelings. It leaves me alone . . .

It leaves us alone.

Me and Ellamay.

Solitude becomes us.

My room has everything I need. I’ve got my own bathroom – shower, basin, toilet . . . but no bath. Baths are too scary. You can drown in a bath. I’ve got a kettle and cups and stuff, so I can make myself a hot drink whenever I want (tea or hot chocolate only – coffee makes me twitch and shake like a mad thing). I’ve got a little fridge (cold drinks, milk, yoghurt, butter), and a little kitchen area with plates and cutlery and a bread bin, so I can have a sandwich or something whenever I feel like it. I’ve got a bed, of course, and all my own furniture – settee, armchair, desk. I’ve got a laptop, a 24-inch flat screen TV, a landline phone and a mobile. The landline is set up so it only receives incoming calls from Mum (and instead of ringing, a green light flashes on and off when she calls), and the mobile is for emergencies only.

I’ve got all the clothes I need in here, which isn’t a lot, and I’ve got all my ‘school’ stuff too – pens, notebooks, textbooks. (Mum tried her best to get me into the local school, but after two disastrous attempts – both of which traumatised me for weeks – she accepted that normal schooling was out of the question for me, and since then she’s taught me herself at home.)

Most importantly of all, I’ve got all my ‘non-school books’ in here too, the books I just like reading. Two walls of my room are completely taken up with bookshelves, and the shelves are packed solid with thousands of books. I don’t know exactly how many I’ve got, but the last time I counted them – just over a year ago – the total was 1,762.

So that’s it, basically.

That’s my world.

My sanctuary.

My every day and night.

12

THE MOTHER

Jenner glanced at his watch again.

It was 12.28.

They were parked across the road from the house, and so far things hadn’t been going quite as Jenner had planned. For a start, he hadn’t given any consideration to the possibility that the mother might not be at home, so when they’d arrived at the house twenty minutes ago and seen that her car wasn’t there, it had completely thrown Jenner off balance. And for another thing, once he’d decided that the only thing to do was wait, and hope the mother came back soon, he’d begun to realise that maybe their Santa Claus outfits weren’t such a good idea after all. As disguises, plain and simple, they were excellent. No one who saw them in their Santa gear could possibly give a meaningful description of them. Unfortunately, no one who saw two cheap-and-nasty Santas sitting in a parked Land Rover would ever forget them either, especially if they’d tried making conversation with them, which several curious passers-by had already done.

But there was no point in worrying about it, Jenner told himself. It was what it was, and there was nothing they could do about it. And besides . . .

‘About bloody time,’ he said as a silvery-grey Volvo pulled into the driveway.

‘Is that her?’ Dake asked.

‘Of course it’s her. Who else is it going to be?’

‘I don’t know, do I?’

Jenner watched as the mother got out of the car and scurried over to the front door, digging into her handbag as she went, looking – no doubt – for the door key.

‘She’s left it running,’ Dake said.

‘What?’

‘The car . . . she’s left it running.’

13

MOLOXETINE

My fear pills are a drug called Moloxetine. It’s not a commonly prescribed medication, and I only ended up taking it after the Doc had tried me on just about every other anti-anxiety drug he could think of. None of the others had been right for me. Some of them just hadn’t worked at all, and others had helped a little bit, but not enough to outweigh their sometimes quite drastic side-effects – hallucinations, mania, aggression, extreme fatigue, hyperactivity, acute diarrhoea, vomiting, panic attacks, severe depression, suicidal thoughts . . .

As I said to the Doc once, ‘I’d rather be terrified all the time for the rest of my life than wake up every morning wanting to kill myself.’

My fear pills don’t stop me being scared. I still live in constant fear, and my life is still ruled by that fear, but with Moloxetine . . . well, it’s hard to describe exactly what it does for me, but basically it makes everything feel not quite so terrible. Of course, there’s a massive difference between feeling ‘not quite so terrible’ and feeling ‘good’, or ‘okay’, or ‘not too bad’, but the way I see it is that any relief, no matter how small, is a lot better than nothing. It’s like offering a coat to a naked person caught outside on a rainy winter’s day. The coat’s not going to solve their problem, it’s not going to stop them being cold and wet, but they’d have to be pretty stupid to not wear it.

The very worst of my fears, the thing I dread more than anything else, is the fear of fear itself. It’s a truly monstrous thing, like a howling demon whirling around inside me, an insatiable beast that keeps getting bigger and bigger all the time . . . bigger, faster, stronger, hungrier. It feeds on itself, so the bigger it gets, the more it needs to eat, and the more it eats, the bigger it gets . . . and if it isn’t kept under control, it can end up dragging me, screaming, to the very edge of my sanity.

Moloxetine helps to keep the beast at bay. I know it’s still there. I can hear it sometimes, a distant low growl, and every now and then I can taste the foul odour of its demonic breath creeping into the back of my throat. But as long as I keep taking my fear pills – six a day at regular intervals, regardless of how I’m feeling – the beast doesn’t get any closer. But if I’m late taking a tablet, or I completely forget to take one – which usually only happens when I’m feeling so (relatively) good that I can’t (or don’t want to) have anything to do with not feeling good . . . when that happens, the beast comes back with a vengeance.

It’s as if it’s there all the time, skulking around inside me, locked in a cage of Moloxetine’s making, just waiting . . . waiting . . . waiting for its chance to escape and come after me. And if the Moloxetine begins to wear off for any reason, the lock on the cage begins to weaken, and the longer I go without the drug, the weaker the cage becomes – the lock cracks and crumbles, the door swings open . . .

The insatiable beast is set free.

Which is why it’s so important that I never run out of pills.

Because if I do, I have to face the beast.

‘It’s coming, Ella. It’s getting closer. I can smell its breath.’

Me too.

‘It stinks.’

It’s only a smell, Elliot. It can’t hurt you.

‘Yeah, but the beast can hurt me. It’s hungry. I need to put it back in its cage before it’s too late. I need the last pill, Ella. I need to take it now.’

Silence . . . the silence of Ellamay’s thinking.

Then, All right. Take it. We’ll just have to hope that we find Mum and Shirley sooner rather than later.

‘And that they’ve got my prescription.’

Yeah.

I take the pill bottle from my pocket, shake it

like this

then I unscrew the cap and carefully tip the last remaining tablet into the (slightly cupped) palm of my hand.

Mind you don’t drop it, Ella says.

‘Yeah, right . . . like I hadn’t already thought of that myself.’

She gives me an imaginary cuff on the back of my head.

‘Hey! I nearly did drop it then.’

Sorry.

I pop the pill in my mouth and swallow it dry.

Bye-bye for now, Mr Beastie . . .

Bye-bye.

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