When I was young, back when the BBC played the National Anthem and then shut off the signal every evening and a satellite didn't need to actually do anything to be awesome, the news looked rather different. They couldn't just drop a correspondent into the scene for a live report, and without 24-hr rolling news they didn't need to. The Falklands War kept them quite busy that year, so the disappearance of a man and his daughter a day's walk away was just a rumour where we lived.
When a similar-looking girl the same age went missing too, nobody joined the dots. When the missing daughter's body was found and the coroner reported what had happened to her and a third girl went missing, word got around, but all we got was a reminder to be careful and be sure to be home before dark. Bad things, we all thought back then, skulked in the shadows and hid away from sunlight. There was still school to attend, and there were still friends to be visited and so on, and as long as I went straight home from school I had plenty of time to be in before dark, so that was fine.
It was on my way home from school that I suddenly found myself facing the missing father of the murdered girl. I froze, staring at him. He stared back at me. He seemed angry. He also seemed wrong, the way my grandfather's mottled skin, bowed neck and shaking hands seemed wrong. I could recognise illness, even if I couldn't name it, and I recognised illness in the man in front of me.
Then he called me her name. I tried to back away, tripped over something, maybe a manhole or maybe my own feet, and fell. He stepped forward, starting to say something, and then stopped as someone stood between us. From lying behind her, it was hard to be sure but she seemed about my age and size and to have the same sort of hair as me. He glared at her and raised a threatening hand.
"You're not so scary, really," she told him, standing firm. "You look big from down there on the floor, but you're just a man." Her voice dropped with each word, from defiance pitched to carry down to a calm put-down. It dropped lower still, becoming a hiss I could barely make out: "I'm not afraid of you, and I won't fall down for you."
At that point, my instincts took over from my conscious mind and I twisted away and set off like a sprinter from the blocks. I barely remember anything from the first push off the ground until I made it home, but I remember locking the front door behind me and running for the shower, feeling icky and gross as if he'd touched me all over and covered me with some sort of slime. I didn't recover my composure until long after the hot water ran out, then I turned off the cold shower, stepped out of the cubicle in my soaking-wet school uniform, drenching the carpet as I went, and got changed.
By the time the rest of my family got in, my uniform was drying and I'd calmed down, and two more bodies had been found: the second missing girl, in an overgrown field corner several miles away, and the man, in a quiet street between my school and my home. He'd bled out from an incredible number of wounds, including several on his arms where he'd cowered behind them.
No more girls went missing, and that was that.
There are just a couple of things that bother me, thinking back over it, two little details that have floated around in my mind, surfacing at quiet moments and nudging me.
One thing is that when she hissed at him, I'm not quiet sure she didn't say "I won't fall down for you again."
The other is that when I remember standing in the shower, turning round and round, looking up into the jet and down to the plughole, waiting for the water to make me feel clean, I sometimes remember waiting for the water to run clear ..... not pink.
