Free Nowhere Girl by Ruth Dugdall

who fixed things. I had answers, medical and moral ones. I had skills
.
    I wonder if my skills have gone, since I haven’t used them in so many months. In all the seventeen years that you have been alive I haven’t been the person I was best at being. Instead, I have been your mother and it seems I’m not very good at that. I’ve failed you
.
    I’m sorry, Ellie. You should be home. You should already be here and I don’t know what has happened, what has gone wrong, or what to do to stop it
.
    As Bridget waits for the police to arrive and take her statement, she does not cry. She simply stares at the words she has written to her daughter and hopes that Ellie can understand.
Ellie
    The caravan door swung open and Ellie’s moment of elation was stolen as soon as she saw the man, his size, his thick neck, and realised that it was the bulldog man from the fair. He had been directly behind her. Speaking with Malik, after he had dropped from the bar. And later, when she had followed Malik and his beautiful friend away from the ferris wheel, this man had been there, at a distance, but watching.
    “Where’s Malik?” was the question that came first, though there were others crowding in, like why was she locked in a caravan, and why she couldn’t remember anything of the night before. When the man stepped forward she had to steel herself to keep her stance, to keep her eyes fixed on his almost black pupils, squashed as they were in his doughy tanned face. His arms were thick and strong. She wouldn’t let him know she was frightened.
    “Malik is working,” the man said, and his voice sounded cautious, as if she were a wild animal he had caught in a trap that may bite. “He asked me to come and check you were okay.”
    “Of course I’m not fucking okay!” yelled Ellie, her resolve to keep control becoming lost to her fear and rage. “I’ve been sick. I’ve been locked in.”
    “I’m sorry,” he said. “But the door was not locked, simply stuck.” Here he turned, twiddled the caravan door as if to prove the point, and held it open for her. “Come on, girlie. I’ll take you to Malik.”
    “I’d rather just go home,” Ellie said, inwardly pleading that she had simply misunderstood and that it really was possible.
    “
Oui
, home, of course. Come on then.”
    She went to the open door, expecting fresh air and the gravel ground of the Glacis, but instead the door opened slap-bang into the open side of a van. Inside the van was a wooden bench and blankets on the floor.
    Ellie froze, adrenalin pumped her with fight or flight energy. There was nowhere to run, so she turned, prepared to fight, but the man was solid in front of her.
    “Get in the van,” he ordered.
    “Fuck off!” she yelled, loud, then she screamed and kept screaming, her legs kicked, her arms thrust from her body and she fought as hard as she could.
Bridget
    Bridget placed the notepad in the drawer and leaned back into the sofa, her body sinking into it gratefully though she still gazed towards the window, clutching the soft pink rabbit that Ellie had loved as a toddler and still kept on her pillow. It smelled of her daughter. Not the scent she now favoured or the acetone of her nail-polish remover that permeated her bedroom, it had her girl-hood scent, talcum powder and vanilla, and Bridget couldn’t let it go. She couldn’t get showered either, or change her clothes. She was still wearing what she had worn to Schueberfouer and deep in the weave of her jeans and jumper was the smoke, the oily stench, of the Glacis car park. It was as if to shower and change was to move time away from when she last had Ellie close, and she couldn’t do that, not until Ellie was home.
    Achim had visited all of Ellie’s friends, he had been to Joe’s home three times, and had finally accepted that she was not with him. Now he was back home, upstairs in his study, and she could hear him speaking on the phone, an insisting command that she was familiar with. He