Emily is six and looking out through the mesh fence from the top step of a slide. The playground below is a-chatter with children.
I wait in a parked car across the street, ready to pull a balaclava over my head. I stop and gaze at the crumpled photograph in my lap, press my finger to its flawed silk sheen.
This child has eyes like lost moons. And I wonder at how looks can deceive and how the curse shows only vaguely on the pretty ones, the ones who can carry pigtails and LauraAshley and still smile in daytime, the ones like Emily.
She slides down, careless, squealing into the sprung-Tarmac throng of thirty other kids, their mums and dads and minders, all with versions of the same smile. What a great disguise it makes.
I nod to myself. I have known that smile. Knowing the smile is one thing; we do not know what happens behind closed doors.
Soon, my pretty one, you’ll be with me …
… For I am here to take you, just as I took the others.
The diversion starts. Today, it is a smoke bomb, army surplus. I bought it at a discount on the Internet.
Children scatter, shouting in panic. No one’s hurt, but it’s enough to split child from parent, Emily from her watching father, the way hunters cut their target from the pack.
My balaclava hides my face. I am out of the car, ready.
She is running right at me.
They always run right at me. I am uncertain about God, but in thirteen snatches, and with all the directions panic could have sent them, they’ve always run right at me. And I think this is His doing, His guiding hand, for this is work he cannot do Himself in a godless world.
“Emily,” I yell. I have my arms outspread as if I could catch anything – an express train if it came my way.
I embrace her. She’s screaming.
“Don’t worry. Don’t worry, I’ve got you.”
I am saying this to a girl who’s screaming because a woman in a balaclava has grabbed her in the playground. She’s kicking me. She bites me. So full of life, this one. I pick her up, her arms pinned down at her sides, and start to carry her away.
Lydia – my assistant who set the smoke bomb so precisely – reaches the car before me. She holds the back door and I bundle Emily in and Lydia grabs her. When I turn, the father is thirty feet from me, sprinting and shouting, and there’s no way I can get to the driver’s door and open it and get away in time.
So I pull out the gun.
He stands, freeze-framed as if on a paused DVD, as if time has stopped, as if it might rewind…
He hit me first, my father. And my eyes were not lost moons, but bloodshot, hot-wired in red raw sockets.
He cried to himself afterwards. Every time. I was a little older than Emily, but it took me seventeen more years to realise his regret meant nothing… nothing except transference of the guilt.
How could he be guilty? I thought.
It had to be me. It had to be me. You understand the meaning of dependant. You don’t understand how you can ever be independent.
All grown up, I danced on his grave, but it did not set me free.
And maybe that’s why I do these things. Maybe I am some sad psycho, like the newspapers say, driven by hate to take these children. Maybe.
If that’s what I have become, I can live with it…
The barrel is absolutely still; my hands on the grip are absolutely still; the man before me is absolutely still – a standoff that cannot last and cannot end well.
We have discussed this moment, Lydia and I, in case it ever came. It will be murder, of course. Every element is there, a checklist to meet the legal definition, all a court would require, and we will be declared guilty, equally condemned.
Will we be seen as justified? Maybe.
Lydia says, in the end you cannot care about what anyone else sees.
She is right, of course.
In a just system, I would not be here, with my finger on the trigger, outlawed, ostracised, excommunicated, alienated, excluded, sexually dysfunctional, living on the highs of snatching children, the warped adrenaline rush. No… I would be as middle-class as my upbringing was supposed to make me. I would be a sweet housewife, a loving mother, enjoying the suburban sex that comes as regular as the Sunday papers.
But it is not a just system, not for me, not for Emily. My father buggered all ideas of justice out of me.
Lydia says, pull the fucking trigger if you have to.
I’m ready…
But this time, I don’t have to. Whatever guilty love this one has doesn’t extend to rushing the barrel of a 45. He backs away, and lives, and I stop thinking of my own dead father long enough to uncurl my finger from the metal.
As we roar away in our borrowed car, Emily is whimpering. Lydia reaches over from the back seat and puts her hand on my shoulder.
“You really wanted to kill him, didn’t you?” she says.
I don’t look round. I don’t try to comfort the weeping child. It’s impossible and whatever this trauma is, it will pass and be less than the hell we’ve taken her from.
“Wanted to kill him, but I didn’t,” I say.
In fifteen minutes, Emily’s name won’t be Emily. Not far from here, there’s a safe house, where Emily’s mother waits, already renamed, about to be reborn.
