Page 133 of Don't Tell Teacher

I get in my car and search for Olly Kinnock’s number on my mobile phone.

K, K, K …

There he is.

Oliver Kinnock.

I still have his number.

Lizzie

The front door is locked. This means Mum has gone. Thank goodness.

My hands shake so badly I can barely turn the key. The bus stopped at every red light in town, and I’m beyond stressed.

Inside the house, I race upstairs taking two steps at a time. We’ll leave all this chaos behind. Go far away.

I grab a scuffed Quiksilver backpack from my bedroom wardrobe and drag it downstairs, throwing things inside. This used to be Olly’s bag and it smells of camping – earth and damp.

Clothes, medicine …

Medicine causes the seizures.

Since they found the injection marks on Tom’s arm, I’ve been a lot more careful. I inject in his groin now and knock him out first, rather than wait until he’s asleep. Any movement risks bruising and swelling around the injection site.

A few hours after Tom comes around, I put more crushed-up tablets into his orange juice. Coupled with the stuff racing around his blood stream, this causes him to fit if I get the dose right.

The medicine doesn’t just cause seizures. It causes mood swings, drowsiness, aggression, a sickly pallor. I’m fascinated by the effects, seeing what each different tablet does and then trying out combinations.

Medicine … More precious than gold. The source of everything: praise, attention, identity.

And control.

The red metal security box sits on top of a pile of cookery books, too high for Tom to reach. I grab it, holding it briefly to my chest.

Inside are over fifty bottles and packets of prescription drugs, all collected from Olly, my mother and hospitals over the years.

I stash the empty bottles in another box in the back of the wardrobe and dispose of them in bulk whenever we visit London, dropping them in different waste bins. It wouldn’t do to throw them away with my rubbish. What would people think?

Now that box of medicine is a liability.

I can’t take empty medicine bottles with me and risk them being found on my person. And I can’t leave them here.

The solution is obvious in the end.

I soak the labels off so they can’t be traced. The cleaned bottles are with the bathroom waste now, stuffed under toilet roll tubes and sanitary products.

When I left Olly, I thought I might be noticed just for being a mother. A real person in my own right, even without a brighter, shinier human being to cling onto.

But it didn’t happen. So it started all over again, the medication and the control.

Of course, there’s no Olly to medicate now. Olly became dangerous. He worked out who I really was. So it has to be Tom.

I’ve already bought ferry e-tickets on my mobile phone. We leave from Aberdeen and will reach Stuart’s new home on the Shetland Islands by tomorrow morning. We’ll be safe from the British child protection services there and I’ll make a plan.

I can’t stay with Stuart long-term – he’s too logical. The sort of man who’ll see things that don’t add up. I need someone more romantic.

Like Olly. He was a hopeless romantic, willing to believe I was perfect. Buying into all my fantasies.

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