Lucilla

by David A. Riley

Table of Contents, parts: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11

part 1

“Make sure the front door’s locked, will you?” Mary Milligan paused halfway up the stairs, her arms hooked under four boxes of A4 paper. “One of Alice’s neighbours rang to say her husband has found out where she is. He’s threatened to force his way in.”

“Is he drunk?” Miranda asked, and she turned the dead lock before securing the safety chain behind the heavy door. She glanced through the fisheye lens, but the lamplit street looked deserted. Only parked cars, one of them hers.

She remembered Alice’s face when she arrived at the Women’s Shelter a week ago, fresh from hospital. Bruises on her round, childlike face had left a patchwork of purples, browns, and jaundiced yellows. Despite telling herself that it was ridiculous, that she should be able to deal with issues like this, Miranda felt an instinctive dread of the brute who had punched his wife so viciously that only the intervention of the police saved her life.

After three years of working at the Women’s Shelter, she knew she should have become inured to such things; but she hadn’t, thankfully, perhaps. Unlike Mary, who had run the shelter for over a decade and seemed able to take everything in her stride.

“Drunk?” Mary emitted a brittle, artificial laugh, edged with sarcasm. “Men like that use drink as an excuse when they have to go to court and face up to what they’ve done. Believe me, it doesn’t take getting drunk for the likes of the Karl Browns of this world to turn his fists against his wife.”

Miranda said nothing. Mary loved to lecture, seemingly indifferent to how many times she may have trotted out the same tirades. After working with Mary for as long as she had, Miranda had heard them all.

She glanced at her watch. It was nearly six; almost time to be going. It had been an exhausting day and she was ready for a few hours’ relaxation and the mug of hot chocolate she would eventually have before bed.

That or the half-bottle of Chardonnay left in the fridge.

All she had left to do now was finish some paperwork, then she could go.

As she stepped into the office at the back of the building, she jumped when the telephone rang only inches from her. Thoughts of Karl Brown had certainly begun to affect her nerves. In all fairness to herself, she remembered that it was only a few months since an earlier husband had managed to barge into the house armed with a baseball bat, which he swung on anyone he saw inside the building while screeching to be taken to “that bitch of a wife.” Miranda had taken a blow to the head when she tried to disarm him. Four other women managed to hold him down till the police arrived, summoned by the panic alarm that Mary had had the presence of mind to trigger.

Miranda still suffered occasional migraine attacks from the blow. Sometimes, for all that the refuge had security doors, she felt so bloody vulnerable here. Though she was careful not to let this become obvious to anyone else, especially the women sheltered here. That would have been unforgivable.

Steadying her nerves, Miranda reached for the phone.

“Hi, it’s Claire at Social Services.”

Miranda recognised Claire Simpson’s voice straight away, simultaneously realising that any thoughts of getting away in the next few minutes had probably gone. “What can we do for you, Claire?”

“I’m sorry to ring so late. It’s a bit of an emergency.”

Isn’t it always? Miranda thought.

“A young woman has been passed on to us by Social Services at Preston. We need to fix her up with somewhere to stay for the night. If you have the room, that is.”

“We’re nearly full, but we might be able to squeeze one more in at a push. We could put an extra bed in one of the larger rooms.”

“That would be fantastic. I know it’s a nuisance, but these things hardly ever happen at convenient times, do they?”

“Is it bad?”

“Pretty bad, Miranda. The police are looking for the man now. Seemingly he threatened to kill her.”

The way Claire said “seemingly” struck an odd chord with Miranda. “Are there doubts about his threats?”

Claire sighed. “Maybe. She’s been hurt. That’s true enough. She turned up at A and E with cuts to her arms that needed stitches.” Claire hesitated for a moment. “The thing is, no one really knows who she is or where she lives. She’s confused or won’t tell us. All she’ll say is that whoever attacked her will kill her if he finds her.”

“Sounds like she could do with police protection rather than boarding in a place like this. We’re not equipped to deal with threats like that, not if they’re serious.”

“That’s just the point. No one’s sure just how serious they are. For all we know she might have hurt herself.”

“In which case I’m not sure she should come here at all. You know we don’t accept people at risk of self-harm.”

At that moment Miranda heard her boss reach the bottom of the stairs and called out to her. Passing her the gist of the message, she handed Mary the phone, hoping she would agree with her reluctance. To her surprise, though, Mary said: “Bring her ’round. We’ll find room for her somewhere. No probs, Claire.”

As Mary replaced the phone on its cradle, Miranda said, “Are you sure we should be taking her in? Isn’t she a risk?”

“What would you have me do, Miranda? Ship her off to a psychiatric ward because Social Services aren’t sure what really happened? Or put her out on the street? Really, Miranda, I thought you had more compassion than that.” Mary impatiently brushed her fingers through the greying, short-cropped hair above her ears. “We’d better get ready for her. She’ll be here soon enough. Room Four will do. There’s only Olivia and Glenda in there, and there’s more than enough space for a third bed. I’ll speak to them while I get some sheets if you’ll root out the spare bedstead.”

With that, she hurried upstairs, leaving Miranda with the realisation that any thoughts of getting away within the next half hour had gone. Not that she would have minded normally, but she felt exhausted today. Since the attack last month, she still found it difficult to sleep, at least without several glasses of wine to dull her thoughts. A year ago, this would have seemed unthinkable but, bit by bit, she had begun to feel affected by the tales of violence from the women here. Like Chinese water torture, it had begun to wear her down, and she knew she might sometime soon have to think about a change of career.

Academic theories were all very well, but the harsh reality of male violence was something she found impossible to deal with, resonating as it did with memories of how her father had behaved with her mother. The callous cur had been the epitome of professional respectability to anyone outside their family: chairman of the local golf club, a prominent member of the Chamber of Commerce as well as a leading town councillor and one-time mayor.

Unlike some of the brutes she had heard of here, he had never provided evidence of what he did. If he hit her mother it was always to the abdomen or hard enough to hurt but not bruise, though twice when Miranda was away at university her mother had “slipped” and broken her arm. It seemed a godsend when he succumbed to cirrhrosis of the liver, dying after months of invalidism, a broken, bitter wreck of a man.

Miranda pressed two fingers to the bridge of her nose, pinching it hard. She had to stop dwelling on old memories. All they did was depress her. And she knew she was prone to that already.

With the help of two residents, Miranda managed to manhandle the spare bedstead up the stairs to where Mary had cleared space in Room Four, a large, square-shaped room at the front of the house, its bay overlooking the street, along which most of the other premises housed solicitors, accountants or semi-governmental agencies.

They had barely finished putting everything in place when the doorbell rang.

“Sorry it took so long,” Claire said when Miranda answered it moments later, still breathing hard from rushing downstairs. “Traffic was horrendous.” A thin, waif-like girl stood beside her, a professionally fastened bandage covering most of the lower part of one arm. “This is Lucilla.”

Rarely had Miranda seen anyone less substantial than the girl. Was she a size zero, like one of those anorexic horrors she sometimes saw in magazine photographs? But, strangely enough, there was nothing bony or malnutritioned about the girl’s face, Miranda thought. Perhaps it was the girl’s pallor, which was understandable after what she was alleged to have gone through.

But everything about Lucilla looked colourless, too, from the pale blonde hair that hung to her shoulders, to her light beige coat and bleached jeans, as if she had deliberately tried to make herself as bland as possible. Stood next to Claire, who was almost six feet tall, most women looked short. Lucilla looked more like a worried child pretending to be a woman, and Miranda supposed she was probably less than five feet tall, perhaps no more than four eight or nine.

Miranda offered the girl her hand. Surprisingly, when the girl responded, her fingers felt like a bundle of dead leaves beneath Miranda’s own. And, though she resisted the temptation, Miranda felt an irrational urge to wipe her hand down the side of her skirt afterwards.

Mary Milligan strode towards them from the staircase. “Lucilla-with-no-last-name, I believe,” she boomed. Mary’s gaze managed to be benevolent, stern, and understanding at one and the same time. And a bit of an act, Miranda thought, hoping she was not being uncharitable. “Perhaps you will remember what your last name is when you’ve been with us a while?” Her smile broadened.

Lucilla nodded. Barely.

“She’s very tired,” Claire told them and passed to Miranda a carrycase she was holding in one hand. “Just a bundle of clothes, that’s all, I’m afraid. Not even a credit card.” Miranda wondered if the girl was even old enough to have one. And, though she knew that girls could get involved with violent, abusive men at any age, she wondered how much truth there was in the girl’s story.

Now was not the time to ask. She assumed Social Services had done their bit to verify what she had told them. If Claire Simpson was satisfied, that would have to do for now. Besides, Miranda knew it was up to Mary to decide on matters like this. It was silly of Miranda to worry when Lucilla would probably be gone by the time Miranda came in to work tomorrow, like so many others.

Even so, when she finally drove home to the quiet solitude of her one-bedroom flat, Miranda could not help thinking about the girl. Lucilla had such a sorrowful, wistful face that it felt even more wrong than usual to see it touched by fear. Although Lucilla said little, and what she did say came in such quiet tones that Miranda struggled to hear, she could not help being impressed by the girl’s sincerity.

Something bad had happened to her, Miranda was sure. Nor did she doubt Lucilla’s fear of being found by whoever it was who was looking for her. If only the girl would tell them her surname — or at least the name of the man — then the police might stand a chance of finding him. As it was, on what little they had to go on, Miranda doubted that much of an effort would be made.

* * *

That night, Miranda dreamed about her father for the first time in years. A tall, thin-featured, sarcastic man with broad shoulders and an arrogant beak of a nose which, thankfully, she had not inherited, he had had a way of talking down to her as if he knew even before she opened her mouth that what she had to say was of no importance to him. And that was probably true, she thought, even when she passed her exams and was accepted to university. Only one person’s views had validity in their household so far as her father was concerned, and those were his own.

In her dream, he was still as he had always been till the sickness set in. Her mother was there too, slumped on the sofa, doubled-up. Punched once more, Miranda knew, which was when her dream-self found a baseball bat. It was the same one, she was sure, that had been used against her at the shelter last month. Angrily, she raised it into the air but, the more she struggled to swing it down against her father’s head, the more sluggish she became, till she found she could barely move. Frustrated, she shouted at him, but even her words wouldn’t come. His smile grew contemptuous as he stared at her.

When she awoke, it was still an hour before dawn, but she could not sleep anymore. Her heart was pounding, and she was covered in sweat as if she had been running. She felt sick at the memories of the man she had grown to hate so much that she found it difficult even now, after all these years, to regard other men without suspicion.

Miranda climbed out of bed and padded, stiff-legged with sleep, into the kitchen where she made herself a mug of coffee before going into the living room. She turned on the TV for the early morning news, as much to pass the time as from any interest in what was being broadcast. Several mugs of coffee later, feeling leaden and depressed, she dressed for work, wishing there were some way to burn all those memories of her father from her mind.

* * *

Proceed to part 2...

Copyright © 2022 by David A. Riley