Greg Forshaw

pinging

Content warning: this story deals with the theme of grooming and sexual abuse.

Weren’t that the front door? (There’s no bell.) I hold my breath but how can you better hear what’s already happened? Course, I’m across all the knockings of nature, not sleeping nights, newish here — and that noise weren’t natural, were something human. Duh, someone. Someone at the door at this hour.

‘Who’s there?’

Bit princess not to get it. Plus there’s no one else in the Manor. Not my house, ovs. Never my house. None of the three I’ve had already this school year. Not complaining! Happy after Ellie and Will’s to get a room. That were in the place. You had to share. Weren’t no headlights neither. Or even a bulb in the ceiling. It were bare above and bare below - me on a mattress on the floor, unholding my breath, just my skin and owt in it and nowt beyond it. No one’s sister nor project.

What a hater! Though I was so Ellie and Will’s way of giving something back. And they give me a room to myself in a terraced house in a town of terraces, old red brick walls and new white PVC windows, square and solid and bigger inside than it seemed from the street. In bed there I loved the headlights, the constant headlights on the ceiling, because Ellie and Will’s were in Holgate, near the railway station, and I were tucked up tight at home at last. Safe. Somehow to close their front door were to open something else, something also bigger inside, also unbelievable, like the fam of all England.

Autumn Term. The SOE girls dropping into the Forbidden Zone was couriers and radio operators. Their project were to connect the Free French to each other and to London with olden wifi in suitcases. They sent data about factories and timetables and troops. In return they got orders to do sabotage and murder. Their broadcasts was also detected by enemy vans, spike-ears quivering, yellow-eyes unblinking, as they de-effed the girls. Life expectancy were barely a summer break. Take it back!

At Ellie and Will’s something opened in me too. I were more princess. La la la! Online at least. They had wifi and I got my own YouTube channel, broadcasting myself as the SOE lot had done anything but (their fists was a side effect, not front and fucken centre). I lalalaed, ‘I’m just a girl who likes makeup!’ Except I’m not.

‘Lucia?’

That’s me. Fancy name for an orphan, right? Or so my fellow unwants lol’d.

‘You know you can tell me anything,’ Ellie said.

‘K.’

‘And?’ Ellie waited. All that autumn.

‘I love your L’Oréal Lash Paradise mascara!’

Ellie and Will saw this as forbidden-zone fronting and was searching for something real as their hair-trigger hugs. As they give back, little by little I took myself off. Started staying away. Staying over at the place. There I met a blonde girl who sleeps in tinfoil-lined sheets. Met another blonde who daren’t answer a knock at the door. Girls, always girls, living like the world’s counting down their summer break.

Sasha were neither of those two. She were a non-blonde friend of Seb and he subscribed to my YouTube. Seemed pervy, him wanting makeup hints. (Thought he were after sugar-pics.) Seemed less pervy him wanting to meet up IRL. (Thought he were after sugar-me.) And still I agreed, and still I breathed again when Sasha were with Seb. He wore sunnies at night, she didn’t like makeup neither.

‘People don’t care how you look, Lou-Lou, they care how they look!’

I thought Sasha were a mate. She drove us out to the car parks of Clifton Moor then let me loose. Easy, her Mini, an automatic. Learning before hot-boxing, we wasn’t murderers! Owt extra, like getting sabotaged on bath salts or meow-meow, we drove the place. Miles from Ellie and Will’s, it were a run-down town house, not quite a squat, till I were a squatter. Cupboards full of cake but it soon made me shiver, like there was spare shadows there as well as the mattresses.

No boys though, not even Seb. Nor showers neither. ‘Do people care how you smell, Sasha? I’m minging!’

My connects was clean, lol. To stay free you keep your networks separate. Sims and socials and especially IRL. If I made any friends in the new school, and Seb were one, then Ellie and Will would have found him and me immediately, and they did look. Except they didn’t know Seb. Double didn’t know Sasha. She give me a pay-as-you-go flip for phoning her. A handset is forever pinging the network with its location and yours. De-effed! But no contract means no backstab.

I were in with the Tinfoil Blonde. Eyes like two bluescreens, she saw stories, felt rain when there weren’t any. The Bacofoil were an umbrella against electric messages from radios and handsets and such.

‘So where’s safe for you?’

‘Off the grid!’

Umbrellaed they never was, the SOE lot, though thanks to the BBC last-minute sabotage and murder rained down on them. If de-effed, the girls got water-boarded in Fresnes Prison then sent to Ravensbrück concentration camp. Pearl survived, Odette too. Noor didn’t. Lilian neither. Nor Yolande, nor Andrée, nor Vi. They seemed so alive — and was stripped of that, dropped into France because they spoke French! Everything else was taught them. Said loads that you could cram killing but not a language. That school I could have stuck, lol. Maybe it’s them at my door, my front door — the authorities? I can’t hear owt now.

Ellie and Will was fostering because they couldn’t have their own fam. Instead of turning away from the world, they turned to us. To me. Cuckoo in their nest on finding they could have their own. And they was, come Spring.

They briefed me. Did it like they just done it, hand in hand, red-faced, huggy after. When Will and then Ellie went back downstairs, I followed as far as the landing, listening in.

‘Is she happy for us?’

Take it back!

‘Isn’t everything code, Ellie? She wants to be happy and wants no one to know it.’

They made over the other spare room into a nursery, asked me to pick up a paintbrush, pick out a theme. Peter Rabbit? Tracy Beaker? Harry Potter? The room were south-facing, full of sun, and empty as yet. Full and empty like the future. Like a baby. A girl it’s going to be, so the paint were pink, so I left them to it.

‘Let me get you, Lou-Lou.’ Sasha held up her handset.

Sugar-pics was the least of their project. ‘Extra phone!’ I said as she swiped through me me me on this massive screen.

‘Plenty more where that came from.’

I mean, it or me me me? Loads of likes though! From the men we was to meet. As well as the pressies, there’d be lifts there and back.

‘And all we have to do is,’ Sasha paused, ‘whatever we want, you know! We’re not some schoolie virgins, are we?’

(Actually—)

‘And we’re not some princesses either about free rooms and food, are we?’

(Actually—)

‘Should I bother?’ I asked Sasha beforehand.

‘Nah, you’re natural enough, girl.’

Their projects got peroxided. Some was even into it, sick little startups, competing to change for the worst. Like the rest of our lives was going to be shit anyway so let’s get to it. La vie est dur, Pearl said. Which is French.

‘Or maybe mascara and lippy, Lou-Lou?’

The car that come for Sasha and me were a taxi, actually. Off the clock, our chauffeur cracked the doors for us — Sami, balding, best smile, worst aftershave in the world. Take it back! It were four of those Tree Air Fresheners. All la la la inside. He’d never let me drive it.

‘Any requests to get you in mood, girls?’

(Extra pop on Capital FM.)

We zipped through town and out west and everywhere I looked there was unwants walking, walking. A school night for the schoolies.

The house had a party on. Not too noisy, not in all the rooms, just the one with a fish tank, like people IRL with kids owned the place. There was only men there, lol, speaking a language that weren’t always English. Snowy pr0n on the tv. Tequila shots set up, six-packs of crisps, boxed phones like Sasha’s.

She sat on someone’s lap. Her bf. I sat next to them, and a guy stopped fiddling with the satellite to get beside me. Naz were an engineer and Sami’s brother. They was related and so was we, me and Sasha, a fam. We sisters drank the drink. I watched the angelfish, flick of a tail quick as the brother’s hand on my thigh. Then back for longer. Staying. Heavy and hairy.

Sasha didn’t wait for dark. I wasn’t looking. Heard clothes moving, bodies too, condom wrappers or crisp-bags or both. To get away I went upstairs with the brother. I knew he were the enemy.

‘She’s a terrible little girl, is Sasha,’ Naz said. ‘Are you?’

There were nowt bar us in the spare room. Empty and full. I were trembly as tequila on the lip of a shot, and slow, slow. I weren’t slammed. But I went downstairs with a bf. Did he ask? I were focusing on swapping my flip for an iPhone 4. (Like the 7 were on sale!) Still, there’s a compass and the inter-web’s faster than me.

‘See you soon, Lou-Lou!’

Seb waited in for us and that evening, all evening, he sat on the stairs by the front door. When I went out the bathroom window, I stopped being a little girl. Things happened to them. A dangle and a scramble down to the flat roof of the kitchen extension, then wall to wall and gone. I stopped to hear if Seb had heard. Caught only the cold ear and eye of nothing. Didn’t unwants run away in summer? The night had no ceiling, were sucking at me, extra and unlit.

The headlights led back to Holgate. Fast-food stands and slow taxi ranks. But once I got the station, I went in because I thought of the Tinfoil Blonde. Paul’s on the railways. Has a house in the sticks Selby-way. He were off the grid. No electricity meant no umbrella needed. She didn’t think I were listening because no one did, and there weren’t a pin on her Nokia brick.

I waited till the trains was running again before I powered up my iPhone. No connect to me. No GPS neither. And my location wouldn’t be news if I were being pinged. How far could an unwant get? If I were being pinged, they’d have found me already. If they was looking. No one were looking. No one were listening. Missper, they called it, the coldest eyes and ears. Missing Persons being so blah.

‘Hi, Paul? Millie give me your number?’

‘Who’s that?’

‘Millie or—’

‘Bacofoil!’

‘She said you’d be ok with me staying?’

‘Staying, sure,’ he said. ‘Where’s this?’

‘Outside York?’

‘Oh, the Manor. I’m not there.’

He didn’t mind if I were though. I took the bus a few times - Taddie Rd, town, A19, town, Taddie Rd - falling asleep criss-crossing the county in that safe warmth. I finally woke at the right stop and left the rush-hour road. Off the grid weren’t all that. As I went east and the sun went south, I could turn to see the red river of tail-lights flowing back back to Holgate, a second coat on that pink nursery.

The key were where Paul said it would be and so were Paul. Only the name were a lie. A barely one-storey building, low in a lonely landscape of wind and sky and moony trees. I brought cereal and bread, there were more than cake in the cupboards, my puppy fat were so little girl. I took the room on the far right.

If they ping me, there are way less towers in the countryside, and they’d de-eff me to a bigger area. So I’m safer.

Way less houses too. Or none. So I’m not.

But it’s hard powering down. I miss being an inter-spider with the wide vibrating at me. I miss switches that work and warm food or cold food or enough food. Near the place there were this Metro where we ate for free. Round the back, over the wall, sarnies and salad with no life expectancy. There’s nowt like that round here. Nowt like nowt. Only spare mud and un-colours and stray soggy dogs (which is what everything smells of). Can’t imagine it ever being green again. The sky’s always white, frowning with cloud, and I can never see the planes, the constant small planes overhead.

Things I don’t miss one bit - blonde unwants fishing for likes. Umbrellas and sunnies. Taxi rides. You’re lovely. It’s wet, it’s bright. I’ll walk. The world as it is. The countryside seems less pr0n. Not fronting. No project.

Spring term. To take my mind off my stomach, I visit this forest I found. Talk about green - piney but not chemical like Sami’s car. Take it back! Everything’s chemicals. These just aren’t fake enough to give you brain ache. I mean, it can’t be because of that.

Today I’m fuzzy on why one path’s dry and ferny when another, not ten feet off, is a sluggy swamp. Until my head’s up so fast I nearly faint. A preying bird of blood-red and black, better than any of the Lizzies I might see at RAF Riccall beyond the forest. None of the other girls flies from bases this far north.

I’m still on my bed when I hear it again.

Knock-knock-knock!

‘Who’s there?’

Can’t be chance I were finding out about goldfinches not four hours back on the brothers’ iPhone. Can’t be sure they didn’t install de-effing malware. Can’t be surprised by the pounding, as yellow-eyes have just searched the ceiling, my ceiling.

‘I said-’

Hearing the knocks nearer now — inside? — they’re less knuckle- than wood-on-wood, like the handle of something.

‘Öff die Tür!’

WTF? I’m out the window. There’s a detector van parked up, disguised with the Simpsons fam. The Manor’s front door has been forced and fake light from a torch beats inside like brain ache. Then I’m running for my life, at last, for aren’t I a girl as good as any other?

I make for the forest, not arsed about paths now. The opposite. Into the trees. They’re a grid too. There’s no living off it. I crouch under an evergreen, the lowest branches brushing my shoulders, the highest better than antenna. Do I hear the girls? No way! They aren’t here yet, their voices. Noor and Andrée and Vi’s. Not their voices, lol, but the cat and mouse messages they tap out, and no less them for all that. Their fists, knock-knocking at the edge of the universe. Everything they ever broadcast still riding the radio waves.

I hear an engine, hear it stop. Then his torchlight pinballs from trunk to trunk.

‘Lou-Lou?’

Once he’s passed, I double-back to the van and turn the handle. The door opens as doors can do. Small inside, believable. I sit in the driver’s seat. My hand finds the ignition key and full beams find the enemy holding the forest road.

Nowt human.

Or everything.

He touches his groin on seeing his little girl. Say she’s starved and loveless. Say she’s unfamiliar with a manual van. Say she floors it and sends his perv soul home to hell. She’s not me. Then he’s in the mirror and the night takes him.

Greg Forshaw lives in York. His stories have appeared in Eclectica, The Reader, Brittle Star, Stand, Dream Catcher, and Litro USA. A short film he co-wrote about the Hillsborough Stadium disaster, Saturday, premiered at the Sundance Film Festival.