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Do you have a recurring dream or nightmare that distresses you? Describe that dream below. What does this dream tell you about your innermost fears?
The dream is why I’m here. Why I’m doing this.
I never had a recurring dream as a child, not once. Then suddenly, just over a year ago, it started. Not just occasionally but night after night after night. Dreams where I saw Barry’s face. Only it was Barry like I’d never seen him. Barry like he would have looked if he’d known the truth. If he’d found out what I did. Baffled, furious. Dangerous.
Sometimes it stopped there, sometimes I could wake myself up before it went any further, and if I could it was still bad, really bad, but it was bearable. I could force myself not to think about it for the rest of the day.
But most of the time it didn’t stop there. Most of the time I couldn’t wake up. Couldn’t stop him doing all those things to me I told K he had. As if my subconscious or my Shadow or whatever the fuck it is really hated me – making my own lies come true just to torture me. The weight of him, the smell, the beer on his hot breath, his voice spitting that it didn’t matter how much I cried he knew I wanted it. Calling me Princess and Sabrina but never Daisy. Never Daisy because fucking his daughter would be oh so wrong but I wasn’t his daughter was I? I was Sabrina and fucking her was what she deserved. What she wanted. I’d wake up in that narrow bed with the sheets soaking and my heart going like I was about to die.
K knew something was wrong but I couldn’t tell her because that would mean owning up. Admitting it was all a sham. So I asked if I could be called something else and not Sabrina. It was the only thing I could think of that might break the spell. I couldn’t tell her why – all I said was that I didn’t like Sabrina any more. And that just made itworse, because she couldn’t understand why I would say that when I knew how much it would hurt her. Because Sabrina wasn’t just my name, it was the dead girl’s. The sacred lost dead girl who couldn’t be talked about, whose pictures had to be hidden away as if she’d never even existed, because I had taken her place.
The first time I brought up the name thing K started crying. It was like cruelty to animals. But the dreams kept coming and I was so desperate that a couple of weeks later I tried again and I could tell that she’d been expecting it and had steeled herself. So we talked about it ‘like grown-ups’, and she understood, or she said she did, and we decided, together, that I’d be Sam instead, because of the initials – Sabrina Aoife Madigan. Which was sort of like keeping Sabrina, only not. That’s what I told her, anyway. And it seemed to placate her.
But it didn’t stop the dreams.
The dreams kept coming. And it was only doing what Leo used to do that made it better. The cutting. It took the edge off. Shifted the hurt somehow. I didn’t know, of course, when I was a kid, that that was what Leo was doing. It’s only looking back now, when I’ve done it myself, that I can see the signs, and remember the marks, and what he used to do to hide them. But it makes sense. It explains him, in a way.
With the blade in my hand I felt like I’d taken back some small bit of control. And I liked the way it made me feel. Not just the secret and the pain – the release. After a few weeks I was starting to enjoy it. And that was when I knew I needed help.
***
‘Well, thatisa first.’ Baxter sits back and stares at his screen. ‘For a teenager.’
Morris looks up briefly; when the Madigan lead panned out he was quietly transferred to Baxter’s team. But that’s OK. For now. ‘What’s that, then?’
Baxter gestures at his screen. ‘As far as I can tell there’s no Sabrina Madigan the right age and profile on any social media platform, not even bloody TikTok.’
Roberts looks up from his desk. ‘Could be pretending she’s older?’
Baxter shakes his head. ‘I tried that – widened the age range to early twenties. Still nothing.’
‘Maybe she used a different name?’
Baxter gives him a withering look. ‘Well, like,obviously. But how the hell can we track her down on that basis? She could be literally anyone.’
‘What about Kate – any sign of her?’
‘Nope.’
‘If neither of them are on socials, that has to be deliberate,’ says Roberts. ‘I mean, I can’t see most kids of sixteen keeping off that stuff without dire compulsion, can you? It’s like Dreamies for teenagers.’
Baxter didn’t have Roberts down for a cat person, but it takes all sorts.
‘But they had a dire compulsion, didn’t they?’ says Morris. ‘They were on the run.’
Baxter raises an eyebrow. ‘Well, we’ll just have to hope they haven’t done a bloodyThelma and Louise.’
***
Adam Fawley
26 July 2024
18.56
Alex is watching me as I send an update email to Harrison. It’s the first bath-time I’ve managed all week, and I have to get my priorities right. She really can get all that into one look. So I make a big show of turning the phone off and leaving it on the kitchen table.
‘I’ll pour you a glass of wine,’ she calls as I go up the stairs.