We Have Nowhere to Go… If We Go Back, He’ll Hit You Again” the Girl Whispered. He Couldn’t Ignore It
There was blood on Anya Resnik’s mouth when she left the flat, but she did not wipe it away.
She had learned not to waste time on things that only proved what had already happened.
The kitchen light was still on behind her.
The broken plate lay across the lino in white pieces, one shard under the table leg, another near the washing-up bowl where the water had gone cold.
The kettle sat silent beside two mugs, one of them tipped on its side with tea spreading in a brown crescent across the worktop.
Craig Belmore was asleep on the settee.
That was the part people never understood about men like him.
They imagined rage as constant, a fire that stayed visible.
It did not.
Sometimes it snored with its mouth open while the television flickered blue over its face.
Sometimes it said sorry in the morning and asked where the clean shirts were.
Sometimes it held the door for a neighbour and laughed in the hallway as if the walls had not heard anything the night before.
Anya knew the difference between a sleeping man and a safe one.
Her left shoulder pulsed where he had shoved her into the kitchen doorframe.
Her lip stung where his ring had caught her mouth.
A bruise was tightening beneath her eye, hot and swollen, the skin already beginning to pull.
She had not looked in the mirror.
She did not need one.
For three years, her body had kept the record, even when no one else did.
She moved quickly because quiet was not enough.
Quiet could still make mistakes.
Quiet could still knock a shoe against the skirting board, or let a drawer scrape, or wake the wrong person at the wrong second.
She stepped over the broken plate.
She avoided the loose floorboard in the hallway.
She kept her breathing shallow as she passed the settee.
Craig’s hand hung over the edge, knuckles almost brushing the carpet, the fingers slack in sleep.
The empty bottle beside his shoe rolled a little when the wind pushed at the old window frame.
Anya stopped until it settled.
Then she went to the small bedroom.
Lena was already sitting up.
The room was dark except for the dull orange glow from the streetlamp outside, falling in stripes through the thin curtains.
Her daughter’s hair was tangled around her face.
Both hands held the ear of a stuffed bear that had gone flat from too many nights of being gripped too hard.
“Are we going?” Lena whispered.
The question struck Anya more cruelly than any shout could have done.
Not what happened.
Not why are you bleeding.
Not is he angry again.
Just are we going, as though the child had packed herself inside that sentence weeks ago and had been waiting for someone to open the door.
“Yes,” Anya said.
Her voice came out steadier than she felt.
“Shoes on, sweetheart.”
Lena obeyed at once.
That was another thing that hurt.
A five-year-old should have asked where.
A five-year-old should have whined about cold socks or looked for a favourite toy or needed to be coaxed.
Lena simply climbed out of bed and pushed her feet into her little shoes.
Anya packed in six minutes.
Two pairs of pants for Lena.
One pair of socks.
A small jumper with a rabbit stitched on the front.
The birth certificate folded inside a plastic sandwich bag.
A charger for the phone Craig had taken two weeks earlier after accusing her of talking too much to a cashier at the chemist.
£47 and some coins from the back of a drawer.
Half a packet of animal crackers.
She wanted her passport.
She wanted the folder of immigration paperwork.
She wanted the photograph of her mother in Chernihiv, standing beside a lilac bush in a summer dress, smiling as if the world had once been simple.
But Craig kept the important papers in a lockbox inside the wardrobe.
Anya did not know the combination.
Of course she did not.
He had made sure of that.
Control was not always a fist.
Sometimes it was a locked box, a missing phone, a purse checked every Thursday, a set of keys that was never where you left it.
She took what she could carry.
Before they left, Lena looked towards the settee.
Anya put one finger to her lips.
Lena nodded.
They moved through the hallway with the care of people leaving a house that might bite.
At the front door, Anya paused with her hand on the latch.
For one small, shameful second, she wondered if she should stay until morning.
The snow had started.
The buses might be difficult.
Lena’s coat was too small.
She had no phone that worked, no proper plan, no one waiting for her with a clean bed and a hot mug of tea.
Behind her, Craig made a thick sound in his sleep.
Lena flinched.
That decided it.
Anya opened the door.
The November night came in like a hand across the face.
Snow moved through the air in thin hard flakes, not pretty enough to soften anything, only enough to make the pavement shine.
The cold went straight through Anya’s denim jacket.
She pulled Lena close and shut the door carefully behind them.
Not too fast.
Not too slow.
A door could betray you if you let it.
They stood on the front step for a breath.
The rented block looked ordinary from outside.
Curtains drawn.
Bins by the wall.
A bicycle chained to the railing.
Somewhere nearby, a dog barked once and gave up.
Anya did not look back at the window.
Looking back made people weak.
At least that was what she told herself because she needed it to be true.
Lena’s zip would not go all the way up.
The coat had been too small since the beginning of autumn, but Anya had kept saying she would sort it next week.
Next week had become another place Craig controlled.
She tugged once, twice, then stopped before the noise of the zip seemed too loud.
Instead, she unwound her own scarf and wrapped it around Lena’s neck.
“Arms round me,” she whispered.
Lena obeyed again.
Anya lifted her.
Her shoulder screamed at the weight.
She did not put the child down.
The street looked longer than it ever had in daylight.
Snow had begun to collect in the cracks of the pavement and along the edges of parked cars.
A red post box stood at the corner, bright even under the bad light, as if the world still expected people to send ordinary letters.
Anya passed it with her head down.
At the first crossing, she stopped and listened.
No footsteps behind them.
No door opening.
No Craig shouting her name.
Only the wind, a distant siren, and Lena’s breath against her collarbone.
The bus stop was twelve minutes away if she walked quickly.
It took twenty-seven.
The snow thickened.
Anya’s shoes were not meant for ice, and twice she nearly slipped.
Each time, she turned her body so Lena would not hit the ground if they fell.
By the time the shelter came into view, her fingers were numb around the handles of the plastic bag.
The timetable inside the shelter was damp behind its plastic cover.
Anya read it once, then again, because fear made letters swim.
The last bus had gone forty minutes earlier.
For a moment, she simply stood there and stared.
Forty minutes.
That was all.
Forty minutes between leaving and being stranded.
Forty minutes between danger and another kind of danger.
The shelter smelled of wet coats, old smoke, and metal.
Snow had blown through the gap at the side and gathered on the bench.
Anya brushed a space clear with her sleeve and sat down, holding Lena in her lap because the child had finally fallen asleep.
Her daughter’s face looked younger when she slept.
That made everything worse.
Awake, Lena had learned to listen for the room.
Asleep, she was still only five.
Anya tucked the scarf more tightly around her and tried to think.
She could not go back.
That was the only clear thing.
Everything else blurred.
The shelter was near shops with shutters pulled down.
A takeaway sign buzzed faintly across the road, but the door was locked and the lights inside were off.
A car went past without slowing.
Then another.
No one looked at a woman with a child at a bus stop if they could help it.
That was another thing Anya had learned.
People noticed pain, then trained their eyes away from it.
It was not always cruelty.
Sometimes it was fear of being asked to do something.
A man stood at the far end of the shelter.
Anya had not realised he was there until he shifted his weight and the wet sole of his shoe made a faint sound on the concrete.
He was partly in shadow, collar turned up against the cold, his hands still at his sides.
Not drunk, she thought.
Not asleep.
Waiting, perhaps.
Or hiding from the weather like everyone else.
She pulled Lena closer anyway.
The child stirred.
For a second, Anya hoped she would stay asleep.
Then Lena’s eyes opened, unfocused and frightened.
“Mama?”
“I’m here.”
“Are we there?”
Anya’s throat tightened.
“Not yet.”
Lena looked at the road.
No bus lights appeared.
Snow blew across the empty lane and melted into the dark slush by the kerb.
The child understood too quickly.
She always did now.
Her small hand found the front of Anya’s coat and held it.
“We have nowhere to go…” she whispered.
Anya bent her head until her cheek touched Lena’s hair.
The words landed softly, but they went through her like glass.
She could lie about the next bus.
She could lie about a friend coming.
She could lie about everything being fine because mothers were supposed to build shelter out of their own voices.
But Lena was past believing in that kind of shelter.
“We’ll find somewhere,” Anya said.
It sounded thin, even to her.
Lena looked towards the dark road again.
Then she said it.
“If we go back, he’ll hit you again.”
The shelter changed.
Nothing moved, and yet everything did.
The wind pressed snow against the glass.
A drop of melted ice slipped from Anya’s hair onto her cheek.
The plastic bag crinkled beneath her arm.
At the far end of the shelter, the man in the shadows lifted his head.
Anya felt it before she saw it.
The attention.
The awful exposure of being overheard.
She looked towards him.
His face was not fully visible, but his posture had sharpened.
He was no longer just a man waiting out the weather.
He had heard every word.
Anya’s first feeling was not relief.
It was panic.
People who heard things could make them worse.
They could ask questions too loudly.
They could call someone she was not ready to face.
They could decide they knew the answer and move too fast.
They could make Craig angry.
“Sorry,” she said, because the word came out before dignity could stop it.
She had apologised for blood on floors, for dinners gone cold, for letters arriving, for Lena crying, for rain, for breathing in the wrong tone.
The man did not answer.
He looked from Anya’s split lip to the child in her arms, then down at the plastic bag half-hidden under her coat.
The birth certificate showed through the clear plastic.
The coins pressed against one corner.
The animal cracker box had softened from snow, its cardboard sagging.
All the proof of a life reduced to what could be carried quietly.
Lena began to shake.
At first Anya thought it was only the cold.
Then she realised her daughter was staring at something behind Anya’s hand.
A vibration.
Low.
Dull.
Wrong.
Anya froze.
Inside her coat pocket, something was buzzing.
For half a second she could not understand it.
Her phone was gone.
Craig had taken it.
Then she remembered the old spare mobile by the kettle, plugged in beside the socket, the one with the cracked corner and the battery that never lasted.
She must have snatched it when she grabbed the charger.
She must have pushed it into her pocket without thinking.
Now it was ringing.
The glow lit the inside of her coat.
Anya did not need to read the name to know who it was.
Lena made a sound so small it barely counted as speech.
“No.”
The man at the end of the shelter stepped forward.
One careful step.
Then another.
Anya’s hand tightened around Lena.
“Please,” she said, though she did not know whether she was speaking to him, to the phone, to the night, or to whatever part of herself was still tempted to answer.
The screen kept glowing.
The snow kept falling.
And at the far end of the road, a pair of headlights slowed beside the kerb.