Lucilla
by David A. Riley
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Table of Contents, parts: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11 |
Clouds hung over the rooftops like soiled linen stretched endlessly across the sky.
In sheer desperation, she flew fast beneath them, her body ragged from all its wounds but feeling triumphant. The crows that had attacked her had long since tumbled to the ground, dead, some of them dismembered by her claws. She knew she wouldn’t be able to last much longer, either. Her falcon body and its inadequately tiny avian brain couldn’t cope with her presence. She would need something larger or she would die completely this time.
Downwards in a long, parabolic swoop, she soared towards the rooftops. Somewhere down there she needed to find a refuge. Something with a brain large enough to accommodate her but not so mature that its host would resist her invasion.
Then she saw her. That girl would do.
part 2
During the next few days, Lucilla settled into the shelter. Though she refused to leave the building even to go out to the small back garden with its potted plants and plastic seats for some fresh air, she was in every other way no problem, tidying up after herself and doing as much as she could to help the smooth running of the place, though Miranda wondered if many of the others even realised she was there most of the time, she was so unobtrusive.
Miranda could not help liking Lucilla, even though after a few days she felt she still did not know her any better than the night they’d first met. Not that she was in a good place to do so. Dreams about her father continued to disturb Miranda’s sleep, and she felt as if her own psychological problems were enough for her to worry about.
Other than that, they were already shorthanded at work, with one staff member on maternity leave and another on long-term sick leave. She would have asked for time off but, in the late fall, they were always busy. Perhaps it was the build-up to Christmas and the financial worries that burdened families more than any other time that saw so many break down in violence. Whatever the cause, she knew she would have to stay on and “man the fort,” as Mary would put it with all the joie de vivre of a Girl Guide leader.
Despite her worries, Miranda was fascinated by how well Lucilla seemed to get on with the handful of children staying at the shelter. Meg Tattersall’s daughters were three and five years old. Kylie, the older of the two, a freckle-faced girl with ginger hair, took to Lucilla and was rarely away from her side.
In the hot-house atmosphere of the shelter, though, it didn’t take long for this to cause friction with her mother, who already had problems with doubts about her own self-worth. Despite medication from her doctor, Meg’s jealousy quickly grew out of all proportion at the burgeoning friendship. Only Mary’s timely intervention prevented it from spilling over into violence, although Lucilla seemed unable to understand what had caused it.
Miranda wondered if the girl was a complete innocent, impressed by how she had somehow managed to hold onto an almost breathtakingly childlike naivety after all she was supposed to have been through. Though bruises and even broken bones were common amongst most of the women at the shelter, stabbings like the one that Lucilla had suffered were rare, if only because these almost always led to custodial sentences for those responsible. As, no doubt, would happen to whoever attacked Lucilla when he was finally apprehended and charged with what he’d done. Despite the severity of her wound and the bruises that had now begun to fade, Lucilla seemed unaffected by them, outwardly at least.
“How are things today?” Miranda asked a week after Lucilla’s arrival at the shelter. She glanced at the wound on the girl’s arm. Lucilla had finally removed the bandage that had previously covered it, and Miranda could see for the first time the full extent of what had been done. She was surprised how long and savage it looked. Starting from just above her elbow, it extended downwards to within an inch of her wrist, a long, disjointed, jagged line, at one point splitting into two, held together by rows of stitches. Though starting to heal, the edges of the wound were brick-red and still looked sore. To Miranda it looked less like a knife wound than as if something much blunter had been gouged through her flesh.
Puzzled as she was by the wound, it was only after several seconds Miranda realised that Lucilla was watching her intently.
“It’s much better now,” the girl said, her voice soft. “It’s stopped hurting. I took the bandage off so the air could heal it.”
Which was the most Miranda had heard the girl say in one breath since she arrived at the shelter.
“That’s good,” Miranda said, unsure if she had made a mistake in letting the girl see her interest in the wound. “It must have hurt like hell.”
Lucilla shrugged silently, and it was obvious to Miranda she was unwilling to talk much more about it.
When she was alone in the office with her boss a few hours later, Miranda took the opportunity to ask if Mary had seen Lucilla’s wound.
“Is it healing all right?” Mary barely looked up from what she was reading, pen at the ready.
“Apparently.”
“That’s good.”
“Have you seen it?”
Laying down her pen with a sigh, Mary said, “What’s the matter, Miranda?”
“Lucilla’s wound. Claire told us she’d been stabbed. I’ve seen enough knife wounds to know this isn’t one.”
“It was what Claire told us when she brought her here. I assume she was informed by someone at the hospital or by the police. Surely they would know.”
“Can we be sure someone else told her? It may have been Lucilla.”
“And if she did, why would she lie?”
Miranda shook her head. “I don’t know. I wish I did. If you looked at the wound, though, you’d agree.”
“If it wasn’t caused by a knife, what do you think did it?”
“An animal. A claw, maybe... I don’t know.” Even to her she sounded unsure of herself and was hardly surprised when Mary laughed.
Exasperated at her boss’s reaction, Miranda said, “Take a look at it first, then laugh.” Embarrassed suddenly at her inability to express herself more clearly, Miranda stood up and left.
Less than an hour later, Mary called her into the office.
“I’ve taken a look.”
“And you agree with me?”
“Maybe. I’m not sure.”
Mary picked up the phone, speed dialling Social Services.
“Claire, is that you?”
Miranda took a seat opposite, listening.
A few minutes later, Mary replaced the phone. “Claire can’t remember who told her.”
“Can’t remember?”
Mary shrugged. “From what she said — which isn’t like Claire at all — all she could tell me was that she ‘vaguely’ remembers hearing about the girl being stabbed but can’t remember who it was who told her.”
“Couldn’t she phone the hospital for confirmation?”
Mary stared at Miranda with a look of waning patience. “Aren’t we in danger of making too much of all this? The wound is healing. In a few days’ time, the way she’s responding to being here, I’m sure Lucilla will feel like telling us more herself.”
“She still hasn’t told us who she is.” Which was something both of them had talked about already. “That needs resolving.”
“In time, Miranda. There’s no need to rush.”
Unsure why she felt there was more wrong with Lucilla than Mary seemed able to appreciate, Miranda reluctantly let it drop. She knew her boss well enough to realise when she had pushed her as far as she would go.
Besides, there were other, more urgent matters for her to attend to, not least finding somewhere for Alice Brown to move now that her husband had discovered where she was. There had been no urgency earlier in the week, while he was being held in police custody after attacking one of his neighbours who had tried to persuade him not to find his wife. Now he was about to be released on bail. It was only twenty miles to the shelter from where he lived.
Alice was already in the communal kitchen, her few possessions bundled in carrier bags around her feet as she waited for transportation to a shelter in Blackburn. She had been here three weeks and had started to forge strong friendships with most of the older women. Miranda tried to comfort her, but the distress Alice felt was obvious.
“He might not come,” Alice tried to insist. “He knows the police will arrest him again if he does.”
“We can’t risk it,” Miranda told her. “It’s the rules. You can’t stay in a shelter once your whereabouts are known. You must move to another. It’s for your own safety. Everyone else’s, too.”
Alice nodded as tears spilled down her hollowed, prematurely aged cheeks. She’d had a hard life, moving from one council house or flat to another, half the time her husband in prison or living with other women. But like the bad penny he was, he always returned when times were hard and he needed her. And, though Alice understood why she had to leave, that didn’t make it any easier for her to accept. This was probably the first place she had felt safe for years, surrounded by women who shared her problems.
Miranda glanced at her watch. Nicola had volunteered to drive Alice in her car and had gone to collect it. Miranda wondered whether it would have been better if she had said she would take her instead. Her Fiesta was parked only yards away. How long had it taken Nicola to get back here? She hoped the girl hadn’t taken the opportunity to do a bit of shopping, though Miranda would hardly have been surprised if she had. It didn’t take twenty minutes to walk to the multi-storey in town and drive back here.
A group of women had already gathered in the hallway to give Alice a hug and wish her well when she left. Miranda noticed Lucilla amongst them, almost hidden beside the taller women, a waif-like figure, so tiny she looked more like one of their children than a resident herself. Miranda wondered how long the girl had been involved with the man who attacked her. Where were her family? Surely, she must have a mother somewhere. Sisters perhaps? A father? But so far Lucilla had mentioned none of them to Miranda.
Nor had Lucilla said anything about her family to anyone else, so far as Miranda knew, which was strange. Once they had settled in, women at the shelter were usually only too willing to talk about themselves, to unburden their problems with others who had gone through the same brutalising mill. Not Lucilla-with-no-last-name; she remained a closed book to everyone.
Miranda heard a key in the front door. At last, Miranda thought to herself, though it had taken Nicola long enough to return. Miranda reached for Alice’s bags when the door burst open and Nicola, a startled look on her face, fell into the hallway, a man behind her. He was rough, unshaven, with stained sports pants and a hoodie top. Pushing Nicola ahead of him with the flat of a large, tattooed hand, he gave her an extra hard push at the last second that sent her sprawling into the gathered women.
“Where the hell is she?”
Miranda didn’t even need to see the white-faced look of terror on Alice’s face to realise at once who he was.
Karl Brown staggered forwards, belligerently drunk, his breath rank with stale beer.
“Where the hell is the two-faced bitch?”
Miranda saw her boss standing in the doorway to the office. She knew Mary would have already pressed the panic alarm. In a few minutes the police would be here. In the meantime, all they needed to do was minimise what harm the man could do. At least he did not appear to be armed. After the baseball-bat attack earlier this year, Miranda had a dread of something like that happening again. Clenched fists were bad enough, but it would take years for her to forget the pain of that day, when she had been left concussed on the floor, a hairline fracture to the side of her head.
Brown lurched forwards. One of the women tried to hold him back, but he cuffed her away with a backwards swipe of one hand that knocked her off her feet.
In a few strides, he would reach his wife. Miranda knew she would have to intervene to stop him. God alone knew what he could do if he was allowed to attack Alice. But fear held Miranda back. What happened last time was still too vivid. She could still feel the ache down the side of her temple.
Another of the women stepped in front of the man. Amazingly even tiny, fragile Lucilla stood there, too. At the last second, though, the first woman lost her nerve, shuffling back to leave Lucilla to face the man by herself. At which point Karl Brown reached down and grabbed the girl’s shoulder.
Miranda tried to move forwards. The man towered above the girl, and Miranda knew he could easily hurt her. His thick fingers, daubed with crude tattoos, clenched her shoulder as he tightened his grip. Lucilla swayed under the weight of his fist. Her own hands stretched towards him as if she thought she could hold him back with them.
Don’t, Miranda thought. You’ll anger him even more if you do. You’ll make him hurt you, you’ll make him want to hurt you.
Karl Brown didn’t hurt her, though. With a confused look on his face, he stared down at her. His hand dropped from her shoulder. At the same time a bead of blood appeared in a corner of his mouth. He licked it back, but another bulged from between his lips, larger this time, drooling down the side of his chin. At that point, Alice started to scream. The man’s face had become pale, a dirty, clay-like pallor bleaching his skin beneath the stubble.
A police siren howled outside the Shelter. Miranda caught sight of the flashing lights of the police car through the open door as two constables burst into the hallway, flinging themselves at Karl Brown. While they pinioned his arms to his sides, a third policeman read him his rights.
Whether from the alcohol he’d drunk before coming here or from shock at being arrested, Karl slumped between them. His legs buckled as they dragged him out onto the street, before starting to heave him into the back seat of their car.
It was over within seconds, so fast Miranda was barely able take it in, though she was aware of Alice sobbing somewhere behind her and of Mary telling everyone to calm down in her usual stentorian voice, telling them that everything was all right. Nicola sat nursing her knees at the foot of the stairs, obviously enjoying the concern of those around her.
* * *
Copyright © 2022 by David A. Riley
