Edge

“Oh my God, it’s Chris. He’s coming.”
    Danny follows her look. The world lurches under his feet. It’s Chris all right. He’s pulled on a pair of jeans and is sprinting after them. He’s shirtless and barefoot. But it’s not his state of dress that concerns Danny. It’s the look in his eyes, the same pale, blue eyes that have bored right through him every time he has been interrogated over Mum’s whereabouts. He’s a wild animal, a predator who’s been tormented, wounded. An angry, dangerous wild animal. ‘”Come back here. You hear me, Cath, you come back here right now.”
    But mother and son are not going back. Though none of the people making their way to work around them know it, they’re running for their lives. In their desperation to put some distance between themselves and Chris, they are swinging their arms, their few belongings smashing into people as they pass, causing a stir. They ignore the shouted protests.
    “Run, Danny, don’t turn round,” Mum pleads. “I won’t go back. I refuse to be afraid any more.”
    They’re on the High Street heading for the tube. The pavement is crowded by now. At one point Danny stumbles into an elderly Asian man. Mumbling “sorry” he weaves in and out of the crowd after Mum. And all the while he can hear Chris shouting after them:
    “Cath, Danny, come back. We can work it out.” Then again: “Don’t do this.”
    But they are going to do this. Freedom is up ahead of them, at the end of a train line. Danny doesn’t want to work anything out, and nor does Mum.
    If she can refuse to be afraid, then so can I. There’s nothing to work out with the lean, blond man who has been manipulating their lives like a puppeteer. They’ve had enough of it, enough of Chris’s fits of temper, enough of the fists and the boots, enough of the terror. But it isn’t over. Chris is closing on them.
    He has nothing to carry, nothing to hold him back. Unlike him, they’ve got their lives in their hands. Suddenly Danny hears a scream....