Jamie

I heard the lady say something. Like, hello, or nine nine nine, or what's your emergency, one of those. I know what she said, I just didn't really hear it properly because my ears were doing this weird thing, like a ringing sort of feeling, like when you've been somewhere really loud and then it stops and your ears are still kind of catching up.

I said: there has been a murder. The man of the house is dead.

I'd been thinking about what to say while I was still on the stairs, and that's what I came up with. I wanted it to be, like, clear. Proper. I didn't want to have to say it twice.

She went quiet for just a second. Then she came back with this really calm voice, like trained calm, you know, and she asked me loads of questions. What's the address. I told her. Is the person still in the house. Yes. Is the person breathing. I said I didn't think so. She said they were sending someone and could I stay on the line.

I said I'd rather not.

She said: can I ask who I'm speaking to.

I put the phone down.

So now I'm just sitting here on the sofa and the clock says quarter past eleven and the fridge is literally so loud, like I have genuinely never noticed that sound before in my entire life and now it's all I can hear, this constant buzzing that just doesn't stop. And the lamp is on, the one with the wonky shade that he never got round to fixing because fixing it would have meant admitting it was broken and apparently that's not allowed, and the light goes all uneven on the ceiling. There's this stain up there, slightly to the left, from when the bath leaked two winters ago. I used to look at it when I was little. It's still there. Everything is exactly where it always was.

Except the poker. Which is on the floor.

It's about a metre from where I'm sitting, maybe a bit more. It lives by the fireplace, like it has literally always lived by the fireplace, my entire life that poker has been in the same spot, and now it's on the floor and I keep looking at it and then away and then back at it again. I don't know if I'm supposed to pick it up. I think you're supposed to leave everything exactly where it is. I'm like ninety percent sure that's the rule.

My stomach hurts. It's been hurting since I came back downstairs, this kind of squeezing feeling just below my ribs. I don't know if that's normal. Probably it is.

I'm looking at my hands now instead of the poker.

* * *

He had this thing he always said, that the house ran on discipline. Like that was just a completely normal and reasonable thing for a house to run on. Discipline. He said it like it was so obvious, like you were basically an idiot for not already understanding that, and what it meant in practice was that everything had to be a specific way, all the time, no exceptions. Meals at the exact same time every day. Shoes by the front door, heels touching the wall, toes pointing outward, always the same angle, and if they weren't exactly right you had to do it again until they were. If he asked you something you just said yes or no, nothing more, because anything longer than that was what he called imprecision.

Which, okay. Great system. Really working out for everyone.

He didn't really shout. I know that's always what it is in films, like it's always a dad who shouts and throws things, but he wasn't like that. He just went really still and quiet and looked at you in this specific way, like you were a piece of equipment that had malfunctioned and he was calculating what to do about it. Not even properly angry, just sort of cold and patient. Like you were a problem, not a person. I've thought about why that was worse than shouting and I still can't fully explain it but it just was. It was the patience of it, I think. The patience was the worst part.

I stopped crying in front of him when I was seven. It just made everything go on for longer so I stopped.

He had loads of different things he did. He'd worked them all out over the years, like a whole list of them. Some left marks and some didn't, and the ones that didn't were the ones where he was being careful, and those were actually the scariest ones because of how much thinking must have gone into them beforehand. Like he'd planned them. Like it was a system.

I wonder sometimes if it was my fault. Not like, I know it wasn't, I know that, but sometimes my brain goes there anyway. Like maybe if I'd been more precise or whatever. Got the shoes right more often. I know that's not actually how it works. I know that. My brain just does it anyway, which is honestly so annoying, bruh.

I used to lie in bed at night and think about what it would be like if it just stopped. The whole thing. The house being quiet but in a different way, not the held-breath kind of quiet, not the waiting kind. Just actually quiet.

And then tonight something sort of settled. Like I'd been deciding something for a really long time without knowing I was deciding it, and tonight it just, I don't know, finished deciding.

* * *

So I looked stuff up at school. The legal stuff. Like what would actually happen.

I used the computers at the back of the library at lunch because Mrs Okafor doesn't really pay attention to what you're looking at as long as you're quiet, and I am always quiet, that's basically my whole thing. I found these legal websites which were honestly so hard to read, like whoever writes that stuff has literally never spoken to a normal human being in their life, but I went through it and I think I basically got the important parts. I deleted the history twice after and then I went and ate my lunch in the toilets because I didn't want to talk to anyone.

There's this thing called doli incapax, which I had to look up separately because it's Latin and we haven't done Latin, and it basically means the law used to assume that young kids couldn't really be proper criminals because they didn't fully understand what they were doing. Which honestly sounds like a really good rule actually. But it got abolished ages ago. Doesn't apply to me.

My stomach is doing that squeezing thing again.

I know what I did was wrong. I do know that, like I'm not saying I don't know that. It's just that when I try to actually feel it, feel it properly, it's like the feeling is there but really far away, like I'm looking at it through a really long tunnel or something. The word dead keeps not quite sticking. Like my brain knows what happened but it keeps sort of, like, sliding off the actual reality of it. In films it's always so massive when something like this happens. There's always music, and someone's crying so hard they can't breathe, and everyone understands immediately how enormous it is. My brain just keeps going, okay, and then moving on to the next thing. Maybe that's shock. We did shock in PSHE I think, or maybe science, I can't remember which. Mr Hendricks probably. He does all the body stuff.

What I can actually picture really clearly is the court. Like in proper detail. The wood panelling and the wigs and the public gallery with everyone staring. I know they read everything out loud in front of loads of people. I know about the reporting restrictions, like there are rules about putting your name in the papers when you're young, but I found this one website that said judges can basically just get rid of those rules if they decide it's important enough for the public to know. And I think a jury would probably decide mine was important enough. I'm like a hundred percent sure they'd decide that.

And homicide always goes to Crown Court. I'm pretty sure that's just how it works, like that's not even a maybe. And the sentence is this thing called detained at His Majesty's pleasure, which sounds almost polite, like he's invited you round for tea or something, but what it actually means is indefinite, which means no number, which means you can't look at a calendar and count down to anything. You just wait and they decide. There's no number.

The no number thing is honestly the most terrifying concept I've ever heard in my entire life.

And also the wigs. I keep thinking about the wigs. I don't know why, it's not even the important part, but they just seem like they'd make it really hard to breathe. Like, who decided that was a good idea. Who looked at a wig and went, yes, this is what justice looks like.

* * *

The clock says twenty-three minutes past now.

I just noticed my feet aren't touching the floor. I'm sitting on the edge of the sofa with my back straight, the way I'm supposed to sit, except the sofa is really deep and I'm not long enough for it so my feet are just hanging there, like three inches off the carpet, just pointing at the rug doing absolutely nothing.

The jumper's got dark patches on the front now. It was already massive when I got it, both sleeves rolled up twice and the hem past my hips, bought to last, and now there's this shape across the front, wider at the top than the bottom. I know I should probably take it off. I can't make myself actually do it.

Instead I'm counting the fireplace tiles. Seven on each side, white with a little blue diamond in the middle of each one. Fourteen total. I count them again. Fourteen. Obviously fourteen, they're not going to change, but I count them anyway.

I try counting the seconds between the fridge buzzes but there's no pattern, it just hums constantly. It's genuinely the most annoying sound I've ever heard. I've lived in this house my whole life and never noticed it once and now it's like it's the only thing that exists.

My head's starting to hurt a bit as well now. Behind my eyes.

* * *

The curtains go blue.

One second they're just the curtains, these kind of greenish ones his nan picked before she left that don't go with anything else in the room and he never changed them, and then they're blue. Pulsing, like, rhythmically, blue and then deeper blue and then blue again, and the whole room looks completely different, lit up from outside in this colour it's never been before.

Then I can hear boots on the front path. More than two people. Maybe four. Really heavy.

Then this knock that isn't really a knock, it's like someone slamming their whole flat hand against the door and the front window actually rattles, and then this voice, so loud, like way louder than any voice is supposed to be inside a house:

"POLICE. OPEN THE DOOR."

I don't move.

The door comes in. It's so much louder than I expected, the whole frame actually moves, and then they're just in the hallway, loads of them, torches and vests and stuff, moving really fast and talking to each other in these short words I can't quite make out, and the beams are going all over the ceiling and the walls, and I can hear them in the kitchen and going up the stairs, boots banging on every single step.

Then one of them is in the doorway of the lounge.

He's really tall. His torch goes all the way across the room, across the fireplace, across the fourteen tiles, across the poker on the floor, across the space like two feet above my head.

He's looking for a man. I can tell because of the angle he's searching at.

I put my hands up. Both of them. Slowly, like you're supposed to.

The torch comes down.

It finds me.

He goes completely still. The radio on his vest crackles with voices, and outside there are more sirens pulling up, more boots on the pavement.

He looks at the jumper. The patches on the front. The poker on the floor.

He looks at my hands.

I literally cannot feel my face right now. I don't know what it's doing.

"I couldn't take it anymore," I say. I didn't decide to say it, it just came out, totally flat, like the way I'd say it's raining or the bus was late or whatever. I don't know why it came out like that. That's just how it came out.

He puts down what he's holding.

He picks up his radio and his voice is completely different to how it was through the door, it's really quiet now, and I think he's making it quiet deliberately, and I think he's doing it because of me.

"Sarge. Cancel the armed response. Stand everyone down."

Something crackles back.

He takes one step into the room and then he crouches down so we're the same height, and I don't know why that makes my throat go all tight when basically nothing else tonight has managed to do that, but it does.

"The suspect isn't a man."

He's just looking at me. Patient. Like there's no rush at all.

"Good God. The suspect is a little boy."

Pause.

"What are you, son."

He already knows. I can tell by the way he's asking.

"Eleven years old?"

* * *

Quarter past eleven.

The house is quiet. Just the fridge.

He's asleep. I know because he always goes to sleep at the exact same time, every night, same as literally everything, and once he's asleep he doesn't wake up before his alarm because waking up before your alarm is apparently some kind of personal failing. His bedroom door is open a little bit and the landing light makes this thin line across the carpet.

The poker is in my hands.

It's so much heavier than I thought it would be. Like genuinely, I didn't think about the weight of it at all and now my arms are already shaking just from holding it up and I haven't even done anything yet. That feels like something I should have thought about. That feels like a pretty important thing to have not thought about.

I keep thinking about what Mr Hendricks said in science. Fight or flight. What your body does when it thinks it's in danger. Your heart rate goes up and your muscles get ready and your brain basically stops doing the normal stuff so it can focus on surviving. He said it was left over from when humans were being chased by things, like actual predators, and I remember thinking that sounded almost cool at the time, like, your body just taking over.

It doesn't feel cool. My heart is so loud I can actually hear it.

Through the gap in the door I can see the shape of him under the duvet. Rising and falling. Rising and falling. Completely still apart from that. Just breathing. Totally not knowing.

I think about whether this is my fault. Like not the thing I'm about to do, but all of it. All the years of it. My brain goes there even now, even here on the landing with my arms shaking, it still finds a way to ask whether I was the problem, whether I was just genuinely too imprecise, whether a better kid would have somehow made it different. I know that's not how it works. I know it isn't. But my brain asks anyway.

The thinnest line of light across the carpet.

I push the door open.

My arms are shaking so much. The poker is so heavy. I hold it with both hands and my mind goes somewhere else, somewhere really far away and completely quiet, like a place without any sound at all, and—

[end]