ELECTRICITY

BLACK CAT

Chapter One

I was thirty years old when they came to take me away again.

Sat in my booth having A Blank One, the din from the machines just getting too much and smothering me. Pulses and bleeps, whirrs and chug-chugs of slots spewing coins, the rat-a-tat-tats of guns and those lasers zapping away. Sounds sinking down the plugholes of my ears, making my eyes wander the signs on the walls:

UNDER 16S NOT ALLOWED IN WITHOUT AN ADULT TAKE A SEAT, REST, PLAY BINGO! CHECK IN, CASH OUT! JACKPOT 50 FULL HOUSE FORTNIGHTLY THESE MACHINES PAY UP TO 25 CASH!

The letters swimming in and out of my eyes, making me dizzy-as.

And that's when I saw them: two uniforms. They headed to Jim's office and I thought: here to warn us about some gyppos on the make, something like that. But next thing I know Jim's come round the Derby machine and he's pointing right at me.

I put my head down, pretending to count coins.

They tapped on the door and stepped in. The police-woman went Lily? and it looked like my name tasted proper bad in her mouth. The cloud on her face - it said it all.

I nodded, wondering what the fuck I'd done. Then the policeman asked me to confirm my full name and birth date and address, nodding away like he knew them all along.

And then one of them said it,

- Your mother's ill.

Mother.

I felt my head drop.

Then my eyes went and my arms were all heavy down my sides.

-She's been rushed into hospital. She's in a critical condition.

A hand squeezing me.

- She asked for you.

I wanted to lie down, right there and then. I wanted to go to sleep. Wanted these bastards to go back out of that door and leave me the fuck alone. Come on. Yes come on. An arm through the crook of mine. Come on, Lily. I wanted to smash them away. Find somewhere small and dark to curl up and hide. Never come out again. But something inside said you just couldn't.

They had me again.

I watched my trainers through the blur of my lashes. Moving out of the booth, over the carpet, over the pavement, into the car.

Sirens blared away like I was some kind of murderer.

- Do you really need to do that?

The policewoman turned around.

- We need to get there as soon as we can, I'm afraid. We did the full length of the promenade and I felt on show, people turning and staring. An old couple and some kids on bikes outside the chippy - their eyes on mine in the back seat. Their heads moved together, slow, and I wondered what they saw as I gawped back.

I curled up on the back seat and watched the upside-down sky outside the window. It was all murk up there, like dirty dishwater and the clouds were suds. I pictured my hands going into the water and felt cold, felt wet inside.

Because I knew where we were headed.

Over the moors. Along the same road that I'd come on when I was eleven years old. Brought to the care home down near the cliff-edge. Locked up until they could decide what to do with me. Taken away from her, from him, from that house. I remember my heart was hot with never wanting to see them again. The heat went from my chest to my body and I felt the warmth of myself because they were out of my life.

But that journey was in front of me now. I was going back in time.

A couple of hours of hills and cows and drystone fucking walls. The hills making me feel hemmed in. Like brackets in a sentence, but I couldn't find any words to put between them. And I knew I had to. Words that would make sense of the why-am-I-here?

I asked it when I was eleven and I was asking it now.

A couple of hours, then we'd start dropping down those steep roads and into the vale. And those places would be out there. The places that I dream about, though I don't want to dream about.

I hugged my legs. My lungs were folding over into themselves, tucking and pleating. I struggled to breathe. A rattling noise in the back of my throat. I took a quick look out: sheep with shitty arses staring at me, their eyes slitty and yellow like devils.

I grabbed the back of the headrest. I didn't want it all to go in reverse.

I didn't want to be that girl again.

Chapter Two

It had that same stink in there. TCP and Germolene. Underneath you could still smell piss and shit and puke. Bodies turning against themselves. The air warm as blood. Sounds ping-ponged off the walls, squeaky trainers and heels clackety-clacking on the shiny floor. The corridors were long and narrow, strip lights running down the middle of the ceiling. Plastic rectangles of white light. Men mainly, wandering about in their scratchy smocks. One with a piss-coloured bag on a tall stand, wheeling it along, doddering in his slippers - he gave me a dark look.

I'd been there a thousand times as a girl and I tried to trick myself that I couldn't remember any of it. But that smell did it. Flick-flickers of memories on the back of my eyelids. Those lights above, burning my staring eyes that I couldn't close - they were the white lines on the road as the ambulance sped. And the swish of the trolley rushing me down to Emergency - I could still feel it on my skin. Sometimes I was too far gone. I got used to coming round to the blue haze of nurses, to blood pooled in my throat.

The police took me into a darkish passageway. A young man was stood talking to a nurse. He looked away when he saw me, greasy black hair hiding a beardy face, scummy-as. But there was something about him. I watched his hands held in front of him, like he was praying. The police took the nurse into a room. The young man sidled off.

And stood on my own in that corridor, I tried to remember what she looked like. Hair long. Down-the-back long. And dark, very dark. Or was I remembering it wet? Or did she dye it? No, it was greying and she always wore it up. Piled high in a queer way that made people stare. A fifties or sixties hairdo. A Bet Lynch beehive. And her eyes were pale blue like the sky in summer, like a seagull's. But a sky that always said rain. I saw the storm clouds in the snarly skin around them.

I could remember curlers and platforms, bright-as-luck headscarves, and that it was always raining, always raging in that house. But I couldn't remember my mother's face.

They reappeared, all slumped and sagged, moving towards me with that look that says I'm sorry. I watched their mouths open and close. The nurse took my arm and led me down the corridor. We stopped beside a door.

- I'll be just out here if you need me.

I stepped in.

The walls were orange from daylight coming through the yellowy curtains. In the corner of the room was a table on wheels. And - yes - a shape beneath the bedsheets.

They said there was something wrong with her insides. She'd had cancer for years and they'd removed most of her guts. She'd a bag thing on her side but she hadn't passed anything for three weeks and hadn't told anyone. What they meant was that her body had filled with shit and killed her.

Shat her insides to death.

A red plastic chair and a locker next to the bed. There was no name, nothing in the room to say that this lump under the sheets was her. I walked over to the locker and opened the drawer. The letters on the cover were cold on my...