A Better Life

TRIGGER WARNINGS (Please read): Domestic abuse, physical abuse, emotional abuse, sexual assault, graphic violence, guns/gun abuse, stalking (implied lightly), forced abortion, death

by: Kajal Ramphul

At three in the morning, Isabelle slides silently out of bed and reaches under her mattress for the knapsack she’d managed to hide a few hours ago. It wasn’t the most comfortable to sleep on, but her room didn’t have many hiding places. No one in her family allows her to have secrets. 

She runs her hand over her stomach, thinking that she feels a small kick. Or maybe she’s imagining it, now that she knows. It’s one of the reasons she has to get out now, after seventeen years. 

“I’ll give you a better life,” she whispers, not moving her hand. “I promise.” Every night, she has dreams about her baby dying. She lies bloodied and convulsing on the floor, arms wrapped around her stomach. And she knows that her daughter is gone. “I won’t let that happen,” she swears. She knows the undeveloped fetus growing inside of her cannot hear her words of reassurance; she is saying them to herself. To make herself feel better, even though she knows it won’t work. She is too broken for it to work. 

Inside one of the cups of her bra is all of the money she has— forty-six pounds from when she’d covered her friend Lise’s shift at a nearby strip bar. She’d just had to serve drinks, but the entire experience was too overwhelming. Too loud and too dark and too chaotic with too many bodies brushing against her and touching her, sometimes intentionally, to get off. She couldn’t, she wouldn’t do it again. “I’ll find another way,” she continues monologuing, hand still circling her belly. She doesn’t know if she means it, if despite her best efforts, she will end up serving drinks or stripping or worse just to provide for her daughter. She knows she will. Anything for the baby. But at the same time, she can’t bear the thought. 

She pushes these thoughts away as she pulls something else from beneath her mattress. It’s a slip of paper, no longer than the tip of her pinky, with something scribbled across it in light blue ink. It’s a number. 

+33 (080) 8200-0247. She mentally repeats it four times, like she does every night. Technically, she has already memorised it, but she has to be certain. Then she crams the paper into her mouth and swallows it; it tastes bitter and slightly acidic, and she clamps her hand over her nostrils to keep herself from sneezing at the dust. She can’t leave any evidence behind for her stepfather or brothers to find. If they do, then…  she doesn’t want to consider what will happen then. 

She’s lived in the spacious Hampstead flat for her entire life, so she knows every panel of cherrywood flooring that creaks, the slight step upwards as the sitting room fades into the foyer, the times when the old radiator tends to click or pop or hiss (checking her clock, it’s due to start in four minutes), and the windows that rattle with the force of a storm when someone passes by too quickly. She’s mentally catalogued all of this in case she ever needed it, and as she wasn’t allowed to have very many hobbies, she never had much to do, except for to examine her home that never quite felt like home. 

Quietly, she slides across the floor, her feet wearing the soft slippers her mother always had on around the house. She wouldn’t have been allowed to keep them, after Alexandra died, but she’d kept them hidden, like most of her mother's things. Like the amethyst pendant around her neck she knew she’d probably have to sell later, to make ends meet. Like the box of letters from her secret lover that Isabelle had in her knapsack, unwilling to let that piece of her mother go. The part that had been able to love, even after everything that happened inside of this bloody house. 

She curses under her breath when she catches sight of the alarm on the door, waiting for a passcode. She’d somehow managed to forget that she didn’t have access to the code, that her family had agreed that it was best to “keep her safe.” Right. More like to keep her from escaping. She was only ever allowed to leave for school, which one of her brothers would drive her to and from, leaving her no time in between. It was why she had no close friends she could reach out to. Her family— no, not her family. Her hand drifts to her stomach yet again. This baby is her family, all she had left. Not her psychopathic stepfather and brothers that were borderline criminals. Fleetingly, she wonders if she can somehow make it to Canada. She has a passport, somewhere in the house, from before her mom died. She knows she has an aunt there, her name is Caroline. But she is her stepfather’s sister, and though they’ve cut off contact, Isabelle has no way of knowing what she will do if a pregnant seventeen-year-old covered in bruises and scars and cuts, some of them self-inflicted, shows up on her doorstep. She doesn’t want to take the chance of Caroline calling her stepfather or the Canadian authorities or a sanitarium. She can’t risk losing her daughter. Or worse, having her grow up here, in this miserable flat. 

A streak of red light from the alarm’s display screen casts upon her white slippers and pulls her out of her thoughts once again. She thinks she hears a slight creak coming from upstairs, a shifting of weight. Then a sigh. Of course, it could be the wind, but what if it’s not? Holding her breath, she types in her eldest brother’s birthday. 16 August 1998. It doesn’t work, and the screen vibrates softly. It’s not by any means a loud or particularly noticeable noise, and it’s obscured by the humming of the refrigerator, but her head still turns over her shoulders, fingers moist with sweat and heart thumping so anxiously she half wonders why no one else can hear it. It’s beating against her chest so intensely and quickly that she feels a particularly nasty cut on her left thigh start to throb. 

Wincing from the sharp burn, she tries her second eldest brother’s birthday— 3rd September 2002. The vibration is louder this time and her eyes widen and her breath grows more shallow. What can she try now? She won’t waste her attempts on trying her other brothers’, but she knows it certainly won’t be her own. She has only one more try. She has to get it right. 

She would try her stepfather’s birthday as well, he’s certainly narcissistic enough for that to be his PIN, but it was that a few months ago and would have changed. Her mother’s? She doubts he even remembered hers. Fingers trembling, she punches in the day of her mother’s car accident. The day she died. 

The machine stalls for a moment and she swears her heart stops, if only for a moment. She waits for the telltale buzz to signify her failure, for the fluorescent red lights and a siren-like sound to blare through the speakers. Both of her arms wrap around her stomach tightly and she feels a lump in her throat and her stomach knots and unknots viciously—

And then the screen fades to a soft pistachio colour and a crisply accented, automatronic voice says simply, “disarmed,” and she feels as if she can breathe again. She doesn’t have time to think about what it means. 

Isabelle takes one last look at the house, hefts her bag onto both shoulders and steps out of the door, feeling the biting chill of December air immediately invade her skin. She doesn’t own anything too warm, certainly not boots or a scarf of one of the Puffa jackets every girl in her year seemed to have. Right now, she is wearing thin black tights and a loose-fitting navy-blue tee shirt that is at least two sizes too small for her; the sleeves cut off right below her elbow and the shoulders are tight enough that she knows she will have marks. Shivering, she takes a shortcut through a dark alley to the nearest convenience store, biting her lip to keep from crying out when she trips over a stray branch and skins her knee. 

The store is open, and thankfully heated. She looks at the money she has left. First things first, she needs a phone. Something untraceable. She already has one, technically, but her stepfather pays the bill and gets notified of everything she does on it and would be able to track her calls and her location the second she turns it on. She has it on her, in the cracked white phone case with the orange stain one of her brothers literally found in the trash. It is sealed in a plastic resealable sandwich bag, which she intends on dumping in the Westbourne River to throw him off track. 

She picks up a cheap burner cell, costing a little less than ten pounds. She finds some lavender hair dye also; it can’t be very good as it’s priced at only six pounds, but she needs to change her appearance. She’s still pacing through the isles when she notices the hardware and utility section. Her hand hovers over a fixed-blade knife with a wooden handle. It’s five and a half inches long, meaning she needs an ID to purchase it. But the store itself is seedy, clearly cutting costs and falling apart. They look understaffed as well, she only saw two people in the entire space— a lady behind the cash register and what looked like a fifteen or sixteen-year-old in a hoodie half-heartedly restocking shelves with expired Jaffa Cakes and Relentless energy drinks. The former snuffed out her cigarette a few seconds after Isabelle entered the store; smoking was clearly against policy, but she did it anyway. Maybe she wouldn’t care about the seventeen-year-old with a knife either. Glancing around, she checks the price of the blade. Eighteen pounds. It’s quite expensive but something draws her to it. She wants to be able to defend herself. Swallowing hard, she picks it up and walks over to the checkout counter. 

“Do you have an ID?” asks the unimpressed-looking woman at the cash register. She’s of moderate height and build, with light blonde hair that crops short just under her chin, wrinkles around her eyes, and a name tag that reads ‘Tara’. 

“I’m paying with cash,” Isabelle says carefully, playing dumb. 

Tara eyes the knife and then Isabelle up and down. “Want to tell me where you’re going with a six-inch knife, honey?” 

Isabelle’s jaw clenches for a moment at the endearment and her eyes burn with anger until she remembers that she has a job to do and schools her face into an understanding smile. “It’s for… for my little brother’s camping trip next weekend. I’m his legal guardian.” She feels her face turning a little red, and hopes that Tara passes it off as from the cold. 

“You’re his legal guardian?” she repeats sceptically. In fact, it’s less of a question and more of an accusation. 

“I’m… older than I look.” Mentally, that’s not untrue. She’s seen way more than any seventeen-year-old girl should have, though, at the same time, she’d been painfully sheltered. 

“And how old might that be?” Tara is reaching for the landline phone now. 

“Nineteen,” she replies cautiously, arm swiftly reaching out for the cord to unplug it. Saying eighteen without proof was practically evidence that someone was lying, one year older was more believable. Her flat had thin walls, and she’d heard one of her brothers mention it on the phone when he was sneaking out to some secret nightclub. 

“Sorry,” she said, not sounding very sorry at all, “But I can’t sell you that until you can get me some proper identification, honey.” 

“Don’t condescend to me,” Isabelle snaps. 

“Well, I hardly know your name. Because you haven’t shown me any ID yet. Will you be taking the rest of this, or are you leaving?” Tara spits when she talks, and her breath smells more pungent than an ashtray. 

Isabelle pinches her nose for a moment, using her free hand to waft away the thick, smoky smell, before asking curtly, “Is there someone else I can talk to?”

“My boss will say the same—“

“What will your boss say about your constant smoking on the job?” 

“I didn’t—“ 

“Don’t deny it, you smell like a cigarette receptacle and there are at least twelve stubs under your chair.” 

There’s a tense breath between the two women and for a moment, Isabelle thinks she may have blown it, that Tara will snatch up the phone before she has a chance to pull the plug, that she’ll report her the second she leaves the store, that her leverage wasn’t strong enough. 

Then, the woman says, “Why do you want it?” 

“Does it really matter?”

“It does if you’re going to take that blade to the nearest orphanage and slit the throats of hundreds of children.” 

Isabelle digs her nails into her palm where there are familiar, crescent-shaped indents from every time she’s done so before. She reminds herself she has to stay calm. She can’t do anything else risky, well, riskier than purchasing a massive knife. 

“I want it because something terrible happened to me six months ago and I haven’t been able to sleep since. I want it so I can finally feel safe in my own skin. I need it. Just…” she heaves out a sigh, forcing herself to keep talking through the painful knot in her throat. “I need it. I won’t… I won’t kill anyone.” 

Tara stares at her for a while, seeming to understand, or maybe Isabelle was imagining it. Maybe she needed to imagine it, to feel less alone. It didn’t matter, because eventually, she slides everything over the counter in a white, cloth bag. “Thirty-seven pounds,” is all she says. When she passes Isabelle her receipt, she sees that there is a number scrawled across it, written in dark red and circled and underlined incessantly. It’s familiar to her. +33 (080) 8200-0247. She doesn’t mention that calling the number is why she purchased the phone in the first place, why she plans to cut and dye her hair in a bathroom, and why she needs the knife. She simply smiles and exits the store, letting the peeling plastic door swing shut behind her. 

She walks two blocks until she finds a public bathroom with a shower. She washes herself for the first time in over a week, uses the knife to cut the long, smooth strands into a choppy, short style, and phases in the dye until light brown is replaced with pale purple. After some consideration, she slides the blade into her waistband and pulls out the burner phone. It feels liberating, to have belongings of her own. To have a look that she’s chosen. To be virtually untraceable. 

Her fingers are shaking again, though if that’s from the cold or excitement or terror or a combination of the three, she doesn’t know. The first time, her hands are vibrating so quickly that she dials the wrong number. The second time, she accidentally hits the pound key and hangs up. The third time, she gets it right; they pick up on the second ring. 

“Hello, this is the Domestic Violence hotline,” says a female voice on the other end. Her tone is soothing, but it does nothing to calm her nerves. “If you believe that yourself or someone you know has been the victim of domestic violence, you—“ 

“I need somewhere to stay,” she interrupts. “I… I got out, but I have nowhere to go.”

There’s a beat of silence and then the sound of typing on a keyboard. “Can I ask where you are located?”

“Hampstead,” she answers quietly, sitting down and leaning against the wall of a storefront; it’s selling identical pans in about twenty different colours. Some plaster flakes off the wall into her hair, sticking there since it’s still wet. She barely notices as there’s more clicking on the other end of the line. 

Finally, the woman says, “There is a shelter for people like you in West Hampstead… it’s located at 26-30 Cotleigh Road. I’ll tell them to prepare a bed for you. Can you get there yourself, or should I send someone to get you?” 

“I can walk,” she says.” 

Forty minutes later, she’s walked to the address, a large, vintage-looking structure made of brick.  There are large, arched windows at the front, an ivory clock-tower poking out of the top, and smoke puffing out of the chimney. A paper banner taped across the rails of a balcony proclaims the building to be the West Hampstead Women’s Centre.   It feels warm, even before she’s stepped foot inside. She doesn’t know how else to describe it. Her flat, which was never home, was always cold, even with the heat on. This feels like it could be a home, eventually. And when she steps inside, it feels like the building has exhaled itself onto her, that she’s become a part of it. It’s a sense of belonging. 

There is a woman waiting for her when she steps inside, her name is Rose. She has greying hair and a kind smile. She shows Isabelle to her room, which is small, but not cramped. There is a bed and a dresser with four drawers for her things, not that she has very many. The bed is made up with crystal-white sheets and a duvet the colour of freshly picked sage, which she flops down onto, staring up at the copper light fixture. 

She runs her hand over her stomach again, feeling her baby move a little. It feels like excited butterflies flitting around. “We’re home, Lexa,” she says. “We’re finally—“

And then she stills, heart once again thumping erratically. Even the movement in her stomach ceases, as if her unborn daughter can sense that something is wrong. Terribly, painfully wrong. 

It’s because of the air, which has seemed to grow cold and icy, as if the darkest parts of winter have been breathed into the room, breaching its defences. It's because of the slight tremble that runs through her body or maybe through the entire shelter, she can’t tell which one. It’s because of the paint that chips off of the walls and the dust that slopes down from the ceiling, cascading to the ground into a pile of plaster and debris and stone. It’s because of the sound that echoes through the building, reverberating off of the slightly curved walls of the centre, tunnelling its way through her until it is all she can feel and all she can hear and all she knows. 

A flash of memory breaks through her walls, blinding her, and she makes a strangled sound. It starts to slip away, and pushing through the headache, she clings to the memory, to the familiar but different face. The face with the same light brown hair and green eyes and angular features as Isabelle’s. And then the sound again; she is too far lost to tell if it’s from the present or the past. It’s a sound she heard once before, nine years ago, and she was powerless to stop it. 

A gunshot. 

And through the haze of panic and screaming and running and fleeing, somehow she knows that it’s here to claim her, to devour her, to make her its own. Because without seeing it, she knows what the weapon looks like— a sawed-off shotgun that can hold four rounds and never holds any blanks. The one that’s always aimed to kill. 

Her mother did not die in a car accident. That was the story she was told so many times, but she was told something else and something else and something else until she’d forgotten the truth. Until it had repressed itself into the hidden corners of her mind, and she had betrayed the only person that she’d ever loved and who had ever loved her. 

She hadn’t remembered. 

Her hand moves to her waistband, reaching for the serrated knife, and then she hears it before she sees it— another shot. Another round fired and it’s louder and she’s dropped to the ground, knife forgotten and hands clamped over her stomach as she flings herself to the ground, rolling under the new bed. The sheets that were once pristine are now torn and slope over the side of the bed, and for a moment, Isabelle thinks that the silky white outline resembles a ghost. 

And then the footsteps come to the bed and familiar, scarred hands drag her out from under the bed and she tries to grab onto anything she can but her arms are restrained and she isn’t strong enough to escape and then she looks up and—

She stops fighting. Goes limp. Her green eyes meet dark black ones, black and hardened like stone or ice or anything else devoid of mercy. And his lips are twisted into a sadistic smile as he tightens his grip, which fits perfectly around her wrists, perfectly into the bruises and indents that are there from years of abuse and he throws her to the floor and starts hitting her and punching her and kicking her until she can’t feel anything but pain and her ears are filled with the sound of bones snapping  and cracking and popping. 

There is blood everywhere and she reaches for her knife but it is not there. It isn’t there and she isn’t safe and she can’t protect herself and she is still the weak, broken thing everyone always knew she was. 

He is yelling at her and she can’t register his words, which only infuriates him more. And she is screaming. All she can do is scream and fold her body over itself. 

“The baby,” she is trying to say. “Your baby. Please.” But of course, that’s not what comes out and he can’t hear and even if he could he wouldn’t care because the baby is nothing and she is nothing and he thinks he is everything. It doesn’t matter that he is the one who forced himself inside of her all those months ago, that he is the one who refused her the pill and locked her up and ruined her and broke her. He doesn’t care about any of it at all. She isn’t his own blood and maybe that means that her baby is tainted, to him. To her, Lexa is perfect but her daughter won’t get the chance to live if she can’t fight but how can she fight when he is upon her strangling her and hitting her, hardening with ruthlessly inhuman pleasure. 

Her breathing is cut up and ragged and for a few fragments of a few seconds, she isn’t breathing at all. And then she sees it. 

A glint of silver in her periphery. But it’s too far away and there is an arm around her neck and cool metal pressed against her forehead—

But if she dies, her daughter dies with her. 

Her stepfather thinks she has given up, because he has never had someone else to live for. Somehow he still doesn’t. So she starts kicking and thrashing and forcing herself out of his hands, clamping her teeth around his ankle like a feral animal. The gun slides out of his hands from the shock. Gagging on the taste as she blindly swings all of her limbs towards the knife, rolling towards the blade. She reaches it and plunges it upwards—

It grazes the side of his rib and cuts through his shirt. But she has missed. She has missed and the knife is gone, flung across the room, and her only chance and her daughter’s only chance is gone, but she can’t let it be gone, she has to find a way. 

But he is holding his weapon again, pointing it not to her head but to her stomach, and at that moment, she reaches for it, locking her hand around its barrel, struggling to rip it from his grasp. It’s thrust back and forth and twisted away from her but she can’t let go. If she does, he can still kill her. She knows what she needs to do. 

She knows, and maybe there’s a sick, twisted part of her that doesn’t entirely hate it. For what he did to her mother. For what he did to her. To what he wants to do to her daughter. Her life. And maybe she’s okay with being damaged if it means that she gets her revenge. If she can keep Alexandra safe. 

But the gun is still between them, and her stepfather is strong, and it’s sliding his way, and she’s losing momentum as she grows more and more exhausted. She’s dizzy, from losing so much blood. The colours of the room and the colours of his skin and his eyes and his hair and every detail seem to blur together like a messy palette of paint or the landscape outside the window of an accelerating train, until the features that were ingrained into her nightmares are no more than a muddle. She’s screaming. He’s screaming. Distantly she registers that someone must have called 999 by now, and that since he’s wounded from her knife, she might have a chance at getting through the door at least, at slamming it shut, at hiding somewhere, at waiting it out. Her grip doesn’t loosen, though. He is more present than she is, even with the cut, which only grazed him. He shoves the gun violently at her, still not letting go, and its front smashes into her rib cage, causing her to keel over and cough. Her uncut nails scrape at his weapon, desperately trying to keep it on her side, but again he angles it and again, she thrusts forward, reaching for it, wrapping around it, pulling it. He has to die. He has to die. He has to die. 

And then she feels it. A sharply acute pain that starts from deep within and climbs through every bone, every vessel, every cell, until she knows something. And she starts to sob again, one arm still clamped around her stomach even though she knows that it’s useless. Her cries are suffocating and heavy and even though her stepfather’s punches have lessened and she can feel oxygen trickling into her lungs, she is choking on the air and her limbs feel heavy and she’s screaming a name. The name of her daughter. 

She is gone. Her daughter is gone. She doesn’t know how she knows, but she does know it,that Alexandra is gone, and she is never coming back. All movement seems to still and nothing else seems to matter; even though she is still fighting with her stepfather, she is on autopilot, overcome with rage and loneliness and pain and a deep sadness that overtakes her. She is drowning in it, in that sadness, and all of her physical pain seems to disappear and she needs to hurt, needs to hurt someone else, needs to hurt herself, and she sinks to her knees, still weeping and flailing and fighting and drowning and choking and struggling and screaming her baby’s name. 

And then the gun goes off.