I was eight when Jeremy allowed me to accompany him to play with the neighbourhood gang. We left home and tracked alongside storm drains to the basketball courts, the surging water instilling a sense of adventure as I scurried to keep up with my older brother. The others teased Jeremy for bringing me, a baby. It petered out quickly when Chris, inarguably the coolest kid, told them it was okay.

I was elated that summer morning – princess of the courts. We shot hoops and played handball before reclining in a shady corner of the asphalt to unwrap soggy sandwiches. After lunch, we set about collecting sticks to build boats for a race in the storm drains the following day.

The sun sank, and Jeremy called me to go. I pouted, having almost finished my raft. Chris offered to walk me home in a half hour; he had finishing touches to add to his own creation. Jeremy shrugged his acceptance and started home, leaving us alone. I wish I’d listened to my brother.

Obviously I couldn’t tell anyone what happened – they would think I was disgusting. I knew that even before Chris reminded me. Only he knew what a rotten girl I was, but he would still be my friend if I kept my mouth shut. I trudged home beside the storm drains. The magic had gone from the water; it was only a grey current filled with litter and dead birds knocked from their nests by hail.

I knew I had to act normally to avoid suspicion, so I continued going to the basketball courts to play. I tried to stick close to Jeremy, but Chris found ways to get me alone – cheating during hide-and-seek and, in later years, following me to the toilet. He would always grip my arm, waiting until I feebly repeated my mantra, ‘I’m not telling,’ before letting me go.

After years of cat-and-mouse and ‘I’m not telling’, Chris finally seemed to lose interest. I still watched him warily as our basketball court antics evolved from games to stolen cigarettes and reckless dares. By sixteen, I had taken to leaving home for long walks in the summer rain, knowing I’d be safely alone. I lapped the basketball courts, wrestling with guilt that swelled in me as I had recently noticed Chris hanging around some young girls.

One night as I sloshed home beside the roaring storm drains, I saw a familiar figure in the twilight. He was walking in the same direction and hadn’t noticed me. I don’t remember how the rock ended up in my hand, but I know the fury that filled me was white-hot – blinding and absolute. I mentally measured the distance to Chris with a startling new awareness of physics, so certain of the rock’s trajectory I wasn’t even surprised when he tumbled unconscious into the raging water.

‘Where have you been?’ Jeremy asked when I returned home. I hung my dripping umbrella in the foyer and smiled.

‘I’m not telling.’

In the mirror, she made herself look. At her waning, wrinkled flesh, scar-ravaged and misshapen. Her life recorded in every cleft and valley; happiness, fear, disease and plenty, each claiming their place.

At least, she no longer had to hide. Lewis was gone and she didn’t have to pretend anymore. To put up with his pity, to make like she didn’t notice his quickly averted gaze, the quick hiss of breath if he walked in on her getting dressed. Revulsion disguised as forbearance. A discarded pillow – faded, sagging and lumpen in all the wrong places. That’s how, he had come to see her.

She stared at the glass. Single now. No longer a pair. A couple. A twosome. A double act. One sided. Lopsided. Unbalanced. Abandoned.

She had received the diagnosis on the same month that Lewis had left her that first time. In many ways, it had felt like the start of it all. The two events were fused in her mind, even though rationally she knew he wasn't to blame; that the tendrils for both had lain unnoticed and unacknowledged – in her body and in their marriage. But it was easy to feel that one darkness had fed into the other, that his walking out on her, had been the ground zero from which the other weed has grown and flourished in her flesh until it was too entangled to kill off without poisoning the earth around it.

He had come back of course. Out of pity and guilt. But it was too late by then. The damage was done. Her flesh excavated and sewn back together into an approximation of what had been. He had tried, she reflected. As far as he was capable, which wasn’t much.

No one would miss him. He had left home and betrayed her too many times. There had been too many second chances and he had failed her, every time. His deadbeat credentials were too well established. There would be no bothersome questions. Only relief that she had finally let him go.

A post on social media – he left me again and this time I’m not taking him back! And that would be that. There would be hearts and likes and care emojis. You go girl! You’re so much better off! He didn’t deserve you! No, he hadn’t.

Later, maybe in a month or two, she would post a picture of her new vegetable bed. Riotous with produce, fed with only the best organic feed. People loved her posts about rural living. How she still carried on despite the cancer. Despite her mastectomy.

#ruralliving #simplepleasures #cancersurvivor #thriving #livingmybestlife. Fifty thousand followers and counting.

She lifted her mobile and snapped a photo of her chest. A daily record for Insta ever since she had lost her left breast to cancer. Your daily reminder that you are beautiful whatever you look like. Don’t let anyone tell you any different!

#sixtyandbeautiful #onebreastandbeautiful #postremissionlife

She smiled. Lewis was compost and the world was calling.

Wally’s depressed. Last night he was trying to yank himself off, but it came to nothing. After ten years his memory is going; the girl he used to talk about, he don’t see her with the same clarity anymore. She’s a blur in his dream now. I can sense that. In the silence you hear and feel it all; in confinement you know everything about the nothing that is your existence. How footsteps can be strong, or fake-strong, or just fucking scared. Thomson, the night screw, Monday through Wednesday, he wears knee highs with toe caps. I think he was sexually abused as a kid and consequently is on a power trip. He’s in denial, and he’s a cunt, and I’m going to kill him.

He stands outside my door after lights out grinding some imaginary cigarette butt into dust with his big boots, or is it one of my testicles he’s thinking about? The idiot thinks his late-night provocation gives him an edge, but he’s an easy mark. I don’t have to do much to wind him up; a smile, a wink, sometimes a lascivious pout. So, like I said, after lights out he gets his own back outside my door. It’s hardly subtle messaging. I don’t know why he wants to chance his arm. He’s younger than me by about ten years, I’ll give him that, but he hasn’t killed people like I have. He really doesn’t have the requisite experience to be threatening someone with my record, and I’m proud of my violence. I keep going like a Duracell until there are brains on the ground. I’ve done it before, so it’s easy, rinse and repeat as they say on the adverts. He’s brave on the other side of a locked door, but little does he know I’m bringing my release date forward, which will come as a rather alarming surprise.

Wally is depressed, like I said, and he’s a rat. He talks to the screws for favours. Tells them what’s going down. They even invented some health condition, sleep apnoea or something where they have to check in on him every couple of hours. That’s when Thomson gets his dirt. Right now I can hear Thomson outside my cell. In a few minutes he’ll sniff, maybe even force a fart out to wind me up and then he’ll walk over to Wally’s and open the door and walk in. Only tonight it won’t be Wally, it will be me, because Wally is in my cell with some quality porn, a portable DVD player and some head phones. While I’m destroying Thomson’s head, Wally will be in heaven then I will be putting on a uniform and some heavy duty size 11’s. In the morning they’ll think Wally’s dead, for a short time anyway, cos they won’t recognise Thomson. They’ll need dental records for that. With any luck I’ll be ‘on my way’, as the Proclaimers put it so musically.