Anna doesn’t know that I know her story. Well part of it anyway.
When I met her one busy afternoon in April a couple of years ago, she was a fraction of herself, folded and desperate to disappear from everyone staring at her. I thought I didn’t have the space for a new relationship, but the way her hair fell forward over her eyes reminded me of how shy I used to be, and I said hello.
She was all alone. Even in that tiny temporary accommodation, she looked miniature. I knew the feeling, having never grown much over five feet tall, with friends who could reach everything.
An hour later, we were in my car, having our first proper conversation. She didn’t have much to say, which I expected, so I did all the talking. I noticed under her swoop of hair, she had something in the corner of her eye that was bothering her. I wondered about taking her somewhere for help, but I worried about all the predators she could be left victim to in her vulnerable state, and I’d never see her again. I reached into my shopping bag behind her seat and pulled out a punnet of cherry tomatoes. I took the film off and offered the punnet to her. She hesitated, but took one, and while she was distracted, I looked closer at her eye. I blethered away to her to keep her at ease, and eventually I told her I thought she had something in her eye. I reached out. She flinched, but didn’t pull away when I located the object, and I began to worry that whatever it was had scratched her eye and left a mark. She teared up, and I made a mental note to get her some drops. She helped herself to another tomato. We were making progress.
I made some arrangements and found her a safe place to stay, with a clean bed and better food, and no eyes on her. Her story made me feel lucky that I had so much in life. Everyone had left her. They had moved out without telling her and when help finally came, they found her in a cupboard, lying in her own mess, and from what I could gather from reading in between the lines, her sister dead beside her.
Every time I visited her, she hid. I knew she was there, so I waited patiently for her to come and see what I’d brought her. I couldn’t help buying her things, and it made me happy to see her eagerly accepting my gifts and hiding them away for safety.
Sometimes if I forgot to be patient, she would scream. I had never heard a girl scream like that and I would spend hours holding her or patting her hair and comforting her.
When she was strong enough, space was found in a bigger house, and her housemates were such a mixture of personalities. Lavvy Brush had an equally rough start in life, but his screaming had calmed over the years. He was nicknamed Lavvy Brush because his hair stuck out everywhere like a toilet brush, and it was nice to have a new name without a history. The two other girls in the house had moved in first and were a bit spoiled and bossy, but the dynamic seemed to work. There were fights over who had eaten all the food, but they learned to get along, wordlessly sharing their stories of PTSD.
Today was a really hard day. Everything that could have gone wrong, went wrong, so I went to visit Anna. She had this way of listening without judging and sometimes she would just sing to me to make me smile.
As she jumped up into the collar of my jacket, she covered my belly in pee. I must have held her too long.
I wasn’t bothered. She was still my favourite guinea pig.