Free Tuesday Falling by S Williams

swing next to Lily-Rose. It has not rained in this part of London yet, and the air feels as though it could ignite with the flick of a lighter. The detective rubs his face and wonders if he will ever sleep again. Both he and Lily-Rose gaze at the messages that have been spray-painted onto the side of the building in front of them.
    ‘Well this is something, isn’t it?’ he says gently. Lily-Rose has not looked at him. She rocks gently back and forth. After a minute, she begins to talk in a quiet voice.
    ‘All the people sitting here, yeah? Every single one of them has been raped and shat on by someone on this estate. They’ve lived in shame, shut away in their own heads, hurting themselves over and over again, trying to make sense of what happened to their lives.’
    ‘She brought you together, didn’t she? Tuesday hooked you up?’
    Lily-Rose spits on the floor in contempt and then grins at nothing, looking straight ahead. The grin contains no mirth.
    ‘
They
hooked us up.
They
put us together when they taped us and raped us.
They
lit the fuse. They just didn’t realize they’d made a bomb.’
    Loss doesn’t really know what to do so he continues to swing gently. The motion is making him feel as if he’s made of air.
    ‘But where did you get all the names, Lily-Rose? All the …?’ he points at the crowd around them, at all the phones showing the same awful things. Lily-Rose sighs.
    ‘Look, Detective Loss. You’ve had your go, yeah? You’ve had your chance, and I couldn’t even leave my flat. I was gang-raped and beaten unconscious, and it was filmed and shown all round school, and the only thing I wanted to do was find a way to kill myself without breaking my mum. I was fucked up so bad that I was ashamed of my own flesh, as if there was something wrong with
me
.’ She emphasizes her point by punching her own thin frame.
    Loss doesn’t look at her. If he looks at her he will fall down at her feet, or try to take her in his arms and protect her. Try to turn her into his daughter, to ease the pain that is threatening to split his head open. Do something that will not help either of them.
    ‘I hated my body so much I began to think it was a separate thing from me. That it somehow belonged to
them
. That I had to punish it, or cut it off, so it didn’t infect me.’ Lily-Rose is crying, but her eyes are hard.
    ‘Half the people here cut themselves to try to feel something other than the pain of what happened. They do it in secret, as though it’s way dirtier than anything that happened to them. They do it so much that it becomes the only way they can feel. Fucking hell,
Detective
, what do you expect us to do? Therapy? That’s therapy.’ She tosses him her phone, showing the footage from behind Candy’s
.
Loss looks at it for a moment, then hands it back.
    ‘Those weren’t the boys who attacked you, though, were they?’
    ‘Me. Her. Whoever. They all belong in the same gang. They’re all part of the same crew.’ Loss doesn’t know which ‘her’ Lily-Rose is referring to, but looking round at all the girls in the courtyard he guesses it doesn’t matter.
    ‘Well, I have to say this approach is novel.’ Loss focuses on what’s in front of him. ‘I guess you knew most of the names, between you all, but where did you get the phone conversations from?’
    They both stare at the tag of Tuesday sprayed on the wall in front of them, until DS Stone catches Loss’s eye. He places his feet on the ground, stopping the swing.
    ‘Stay strong, Lily-Rose. There’s a storm coming, and I don’t think it’s going to stop for anything.’
    Lily-Rose smiles at nothing straight ahead of her.
    ‘That’s the bare truth, Detective.’
    He gets up and threads his way to his DS.
    ‘Well?’
    ‘At approximately nine o’clock this evening Lily-Rose and all these others left the Cross-Harbour Community Centre, and walked
en masse
back to the estate. It seems that all the people at the Centre had at some time