Try Not to Breathe

‘Does he hurt you?’

‘No,’ she’d sobbed, ‘no, it’s nothing like that. It’s not my dad I live with.’ She’d wiped her eyes with her fingertips. ‘Bob’s my step-dad. I’m talking about my real dad.’

‘Listen, fathers are complex beasts. It’s not your fault, okay? Let me give you a lift home and you can tell me all about it. Alright, Amy?’

‘Alright.’

He’d opened the passenger door for her, and she’d melted into the seat.

He’d swept an arm around her waist and led her into a gateway, brushed the hair out of her eyes and asked, ‘What’s wrong? Can I help?’

What she really wanted, what she was pretty sure she wanted, was for someone to desire her, to really want her. Someone to just take charge.

He caught her looking and smiled, just briefly, the corners of his mouth twitching as he looked back to the road. As he changed gear, he brushed her skirt further up her thigh with the palm of his hand, sending a shiver across her shoulders.

A breezy voice announced the arrest of a wanted rapist, the results of a successful school fundraising event and the timescale for extended roadworks on the A21.

‘What I can tell you about Amy,’ continued Dr Haynes, ‘is that she breathes by herself, she has awake time and she sleeps, she is off the feeding tube and we’ve registered a degree of brain activity that shows she is not “brain dead” as the papers used to love calling her.’

‘Sadly not, in fact very few can, but the more we understand about the process, the more we can help the others.’

‘When it comes to our understanding of the mind, we’re doing a poor job. I don’t mean psychology, I mean the nuts and bolts biology of the brain and how that governs behaviour, thought and communication. There’s so much we don’t know, but as soon as someone loses the ability to communicate in the ways that we’re prepared to accept, they’re lost to us.’

‘The stuff I’m doing now fascinates me because it challenges our understanding of the line between consciousness and death.’

She added a rosy blusher glow along her sharp cheekbones and used a pink and brown eyeshadow palette to fool the mirror that she had warm, sparkly eyes rather than black holes.