Breakdown Read Online Free PDF Page A

and stay next to the flames. They die away. Nobody tends them. I start to get cold again. If there was wood nearby I’d risk another slap to get it. Lenny watches me.
    â€˜Got to watch you,’ he says. ‘Tarquin says.’
    â€˜I know.’
    â€˜I’m not going to hit you, though.’ He toes away the iron bar Kaylem rolled at him. ‘Even if you tries to escape. I won’t hit you, Miss.’
    â€˜OK.’
    â€˜But please don’t try. You might get away and then they’ll beat me.’ He sits scrunched up as well, his too-big head on his scrawny knees. The dog nuzzles him. Lenny watches me with his oversized eyes and I think:
I can’t escape right now. I’m too weak. It’s too cold, and it’s night, and there’s dogs, and Nan’s dead.
But I will.
And I don’t care who they beat.
    But I don’t say anything. I just watch him back with my eyes all squinty.
    Not that I want
him
beaten.
    â€˜I really ain’t going to hit you,’ says Lenny and he rolls the bar even further away to show me he ain’t.
    â€˜I wish you
could
get away, though,’ he says, quite unexpectedly. ‘If you could, I’d go wiv ya.’
    I look at him then, my eyes open despite the smoke. ‘What’d I want to take a kid like you for?’ I say.
    He shrugs. ‘Don’t know,’ he says. ‘You mightn’t.’
    â€˜You’re damn right.’
    There’re some ideas you have to kill dead.
    Lenny sighs. He scratches the dog’s head, lifts up one of its ears and whispers into it, ‘You’d like to go wiv me, wouldn’t ya?’
    Then he just carries on watching me with those eyes in that face on that scraggy neck, like he really thinks there’s some kind of paradise that I can escape to and am refusing to take him there on purpose.
    I sigh and look out over the stadium. It’s very dark. They’re still shouting and drinking at the far edge. I wish I could sleep. I wish I could curl up in an even tighter ball and never wake up.
    But the kid’s got me thinking. I could escape. Maybe not right now, but tomorrow, when it’s light, when the dogs have gone to ground. Maybe at dawn. What I need to do is find out how. I remember what Careem said to Tarquin: ‘
You get to take her back and have her for the rest of tonight. After that I’ve got something else in mind.
’
    Maybe Tarquin won’t come back and I can give this kid the slip.
    But if Tarquin does come back and thinks I’m gonna be so grateful he pulled me out of the river that I’m gonna be his for the night, he’s got another think coming. And if he tries it on by force, I’ll kill him.
    I really will.
    But then again, maybe he might help me. He did pull me out of the river and he did say: ‘
If your legs work, get up and get going.
’
    It’s Careem who’s gonna be the biggest problem.
    â€˜What time do the gangs get back?’ I ask.
    â€˜At dawn, Miss.’
    â€˜What does Careem do with girls like me?’
    Lenny shrugs.
    What would Nan tell me to do?
    I think of Nan and her life: and how as a girl she had everything and how she lost everything, including everyone she loved, except me.
    She survived though. And her favourite advice was always, ‘Think first.’
    Oh Nan.
    I try to think. How big is this place and how much do I know about it? I try to remember.
    Nan told me how the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park was the new jewel in the Crown of England. How it cost the country hundreds of millions of pounds. How it featured myriad colours and all the colours whirled to form wheels in pinks and blues and greens and oranges that changed throughout the stadium as they were picked out in paintwork, glass, fabric and lights.
    Doesn’t look anything like that now.
    Raw sewage running down between the seating aisles, sheds and shelters of rusty tin, plastic sheeting for roofs, people curled