She laid her hand upon it and it clicked open for her. Inside was clean, silent and cool. There was no sign of the destruction she'd wrought. It smelled faintly of disinfectant, not the overpowering stench of raw sewage. The stalls were all new, some of the fittings still had tape on them to protect them. She walked around the changing rooms, trailing her finger across the surfaces, drawing an imaginary rising line along the walls. They had erased every mark of her. There was no memorial, no sign, no indication that four girls had died here. Well, one of them was very much alive.
She kicked out at the door to a stall. It banged loudly against the side of the stall. She kicked it again, and again, harder, until it broke off the hinges and collapsed into the stall. She turned to look at herself in the mirrors screwed to the wall. Her hair was a winding mass of tendrils, her eyes were filled with blue fire, her hands bunched into fists.
Her reflection admonished her but she was in no mood to be censured. The mirror was only liquid slowed down, and she was the queen of all things liquid. "Pah!" She spat an incoherent command, and the mirrors flew apart into a thousand fragments, an explosion in a glitter factory, surrounding her in a rain of tinkling, sparkling fragments.
"Who's there? What's going on?" It was a male voice coming from the gym, the caretaker. She looked down. Under the shower of glass she had coated herself in tiny glittering fragments, yet there was no scratch upon her. She stared at the particles and they dropped or dribbled, running together, merging with all the other particles until there was a single amoeba of flat green glass where the central drain had been. Across the floor, tiny fragments of foil from the mirror drifted like silver leaf litter. She left it that way, shutting the emergency door quietly behind her, and leaving them to figure it out. Now they would remember her.
She went back onto the field, leaving the gate wide open, taking the route home. She walked the familiar path feeling like a stranger. Even her footsteps sounded wrong to her. She marched around the avenues and cut through the short cuts. Finally she came to her road, her house. Barry's Toyota was there. He would be home. So would Mum. She caught site of herself in a neighbour's window. She didn't look like the girl that lived there. She looked wild.
It didn't matter. You could always go home.
She sneaked around the back by the garage, lifting the catch over the gate as she'd always done. She closed it quietly behind her. At the back door she hesitated, but then smiled to herself. It would be OK.
She let herself in, she didn't need a key. Where was the smell of boiled potatoes? Wasn't Mum supposed to be cooking supper? Raised voices came from the sitting room. She moved carefully into the hall.
"I'm telling you I saw her. She was right there!"
Barry was trying to calm her mother down. "Could it have been another girl, the same age perhaps?"
"It was her! She looked older, yes, but I know my own daughter, for God's sake!"
"I never said you didn't'"
"You never believe me. You always try and second guess everything I say. I'm telling you she was there and you're telling me I can't believe my own eyes. I'm not mad!"
It was kicking off, no mistake. They could be at it a while. When her mother got going there was no stopping her. No wonder there wasn't any supper. Alex turned away from the living room and quietly mounted the stairs, much as she'd done a hundred times when her mother and father had been arguing. She went straight to the room at the back of the house — her room, her sanctuary.
She stood in the doorway and looked around. There was a desk with a new computer on it that hadn't been there before. Where was her bed? Where was her homework table? What had happened to her dresser, her make-up, her hair clips, her clothes? Where was her posters, God! They'd even changed the wallpaper!
She went to the wardrobe and wrenched it open. Inside empty hangers clinked slowly against one another. All her clothes, gone. She went to the desk opening the drawers, looking for her pants, her tights, her bras, anything that might vaguely have been hers. The room had been stripped, cleansed, disinfected like the changing rooms at the school. Every trace had been removed.
The only remnant she could find was a small silver ring her father had given her for her birthday. She wasn't allowed rings at school, so she'd left it on a hook inside the wardrobe. They must have missed it when they took everything else she had and tipped it into the bin.
She grabbed the ring from the hook and pressed it into her palm. She looked around at the empty room, her eyes welling, the sharp edges of the ring pressing into her hand. The room had been stripped, cleansed, purged of all trace.
She ran out, taking the stairs two at a time, burst through the kitchen, slammed through the kitchen door, banging it wide. She veered around, blinded by tears, fumbling with the lock on the back gate until her numb fingers flicked it open. Running into the street, a car blared its horn noisily as she ran into the road. Behind her she could hear them, questioning, searching. She blundered across the road, then cut down a shortcut, smudging tears from her eyes as she ran.
Far behind her she could hear them calling, "Alex! Alex! Come back!"
There was no going back. You couldn't go back. You could only go on. The world erased you until there was nothing left. You left no mark, no sign of your passing. They pasted you over, just like wallpaper.
Until there was nothing left.
I followed Amber through a run-down estate in London, somewhere off the North Circular. Litter accumulated in the gutters and discarded takeaways overflowed the bins. Groups of youths in hoodies watched with resentful eyes as we passed, probably wondering whether we were bailiffs.
We went through an underpass below the railway and emerged into a deserted industrial estate. Half-demolished offices were open to the elements, ragged edges of floors jutting out into space, demolition left unfinished as demand evaporated in the teeth of recession. From the buddleia and elderberry growing in the exposed concrete, it had been like that for some time.
"You take me to the nicest places," I said to Amber. She ignored me.
Our path wound around piles of rubble and oil cans used for long-cold fires. If there had been watchmen, they were made redundant when it became apparent there was nothing worth protecting. Panel after panel of cracked glass looked down on us, as if someone had carefully cracked each pane, individually, as an art-installation statement. There was no one to appreciate their care.
I stopped. "The place is deserted."
Amber paused and turned. "That's what you're meant to think."
She walked on until she reached a long building at the end of the row, surrounded by verdant saplings and nettles. It had been a factory; the ducting for the heat extraction and where the cables for heavy-duty power had been stripped for their copper could still be seen. Floor upon floor of machinery, all gone — presumably sold for scrap or exported to the third world.
We circled round the end of the building and pushed through a door that had been kicked in until it collapsed inward. Inside corroded pipework networked the ceilings but the floor was bare, apart from the occasional rusty bolts sticking up, or a fragment of discarded mangled ironwork.
Light permeated through the crazed glass, showing distorted outlines of the outside world and intensifying the shadows at the rear. We moved along the building to the far end where concrete stairs led to the next floor. Above was the same, another gallery of despair, the machinery removed, the wiring stripped. We wandered that floor then went back to the stairway.
"Do you know what you're looking for?" I was beginning to suspect that we were on a wild goose chase.
She mounted the next set of stairs quickly, and I followed. The floor above had sacks and old tarps hung against the windows. The shadows were deeper, but the story was the same. Everything had been stripped away.