London, 10:13 PM
The last of the budget comittee trailed out of the chamber like ghosts - wrung dry, overcaffeinated, drunk on their own bureaucratic self-importance. I stayed back, quietly packing up my notepad, tabled and the thick red folder labeled DEFENCE (UNDER REVIEW) in discreet white Arial. The Chancellor had smiled at me for too long when I voted against the North Sea wind tariff rollback. I smiled back like a woman who wasn't keeping count. But I was.
Outside, the air was unusually warm for March. Westminster's collumns loomed behind me, lit soft and yellow like a museum of the dead. The weight of the building never failed to register - too many ghosts in the bricks, too many secrets coded into the damn mouldings. Too many secrets most people tend to ignore, but I knew - it was the symbol of English colonial erasure, both from within and outside the island borders. The revulsion I felt coming and leaving this building became a sacred ritual akin to performing my duties, asphyxiating... just like my father's hands on my throat once were. Before my mind could go wandering in the dark places of my upbringing, I chuckled to myself as I sped up my pace, heels clicking over the pavement, coat collar up.
Each step away from the Parliament was a breath back into myself. I kept my shoulders square. Hellen Ross didn't slouch. Elen Ross didn't show fatigue. Elen Ross - the name I had given the Reform Party, the Press, the United Kingdom - had never been a street plug, a runaway, or a girl who knocked out her father with a frying pan.
I caught my reflection in a shop window by the Thames. Suit perfect. Makeup holding. Polished. Lethal. Not bad for a ghost.
Flat 4C, Grosvenor Road
I unlocked the door, threw the keys on the table, and stripped off my coat in one fluid move. lit only by the spill of sodium-orange streetlamps pushing through the slats of the blinds. The flat smelled faintly of bergamot and old paper—my own doing. I headed for the kitchen, it's white walls and cream tiles creatively bankrupt, in lack for better terms. At the counter, a half-burnt candle sat crooked in a brass dish, near an ashtray with some lipstick-stained cigarette remains from three nights ago. No lights. The city buzzed faintly outside, red brake lights smeared on wet concrete like blood dragged by a careless hand. I poured a glass of water—cold, metallic—and sat cross-legged on the couch, kicking off my shoes. The leather groaned beneath me like an old friend too tired to argue.
The walls were wrapped in tapestry: green, with the red dragon print repeating all across the canvas like a 404 error. I chuckled at the thought. A small living room, in which every object had to earn its right to exist: the marble coffee table, the row of books organized not by author or theme, but by emotional utility—some to keep me angry, others to keep me sane. Russian authors like Dostoyevski and Bulgakov, modern Welsh literature, dark romance titles like Haunting Adeline. Each served its own purpose in my crumbling emotional landscape and increasingly fading private life.
London had grown quieter since I took office - less protest, more fear. Even among the Reform diehards, something was shifting. They had yet to put their finger on it, but they felt it. Everyone did. The people were beginning to sense it.
They didn't know what yet. But they could feel the wind of change.
I laid my head back and closed my eyes. Sleep found me fast. It always did when I didn't want it to.
Dream - Cardiff
And, just like that, I was back. Back in that damned house in Butetown. Dark. Obsolated. Deprived of warmth. Deprived of love. Intoxicated by the stink of bleach and warm cider. By the cigarette ash that ground its way into the carpet. A burst of shouting in the hallway, then the thud. He was home.
My mother froze in the kitchen, hands trembling over the stovetop. I was eleven. I stepped between her and the door as it cracked open.
"What's this, then?", his voice echoed, thick, ugly. The reek of his sweat hit first, followed by the stench of the booze on his clothes. Bonkers, the kind of foul smell that made me gag even in my dreams.
"She didn't mean it", mom whispered. Too late. He was already swinging. Fist to jaw. Then to stomach. Me, screaming. Mom collapsed against the fridge, her shoulder smacking metal.
I didn't think. I didn't plan. I grabbed the cast-iron pan from the stove and swung as hard as I could. I saw a bump forming where I struck him, as he screamed in pain. I ran. He ran after me. My escape was blocked by the closet and the coffee table as I was stuck into a corner, watching the monster get closer. I instinctively placed my small hands above my head, bracing for an impact that... never came.
I opened my eyes. Mum, behind his back, holding a rope to his neck with one hand, as the beast struggled until its body went limp. With a loud thud, his head hit the floor. Mum knelt besides me, sobbing and laughing all at once. We sat on the floor, hands slick with blood and oil, panting. She grabbed my hands. I looked at her. She looked at me. We didn't say it, but we both knew: it wasn't over. It had just begun.
Flashback - Lisbon
When the plane left British airspace, I felt genuine relief. The ghost of me, left behind the borders of Wales. Looking over my city atop of this international plane, I don't know what kind of expression I was making. But I swore... a silent vow, to come back when times are better. In this plane, flying towards the capital of Portugal.
The heat hit me like an open oven door the moment I stepped out of the airport. Not the usual mild, polite warmth of Cardiff in July, but a bold, unashamed blaze that soaked straight through my cotton shirt before I'd even found an Uber. This city was something else, something more dangerous.
Looking back, Lisbon was supposed to be a pause button. Instead, it was chaos. Nights blurred: Bairro Alto bars spilling with techno, sweat, strangers' hands on my hips, the metallic taste of coke numbing my gums. Lines racked out on the screen of a cracked iPhone 7, bathroom stalls foggy with perfume and piss. I hooked up with men whose names I never caught, women who bit down hard enough to leave bruises. I thought: if I keep moving, no one can extradite me. If I keep snorting, nothing can catch me.
Then the call. 3:14 AM, still wired, legs tangled in sheets with someone I couldn't remember. Mum's voice came raw over WhatsApp. I remember scrolling the glowing screen with shaking fingers, trying to mute notifications from people asking if I was out tonight, while Mum broke down, begging me to come home. I hung up. Threw the phone against the wall. Screen shattered. My reflection in the black glass stared back: twenty; so young, yet so washed out, so rotting in my own skin.
The next morning I walked into a rehab center tucked above a bookstore in Bairro Alto. White paint peeling, the waiting room decorated with motivational posters in Portuguese and English: You are not broken. You are becoming. A nurse took my details. I lied on the intake form. Name: Elena Ross. Nationality: British. Addictions: "just coke sometimes." She didn't believe me.
My first night, I lay in a bunk, phone face-down beside me, its cracked screen still buzzing with missed calls. From the window I could see the Ponte 25 de Abril bridge glowing red in the dark. Lisbon slept. I didn't. Detox felt like drowning on dry land. But something in me—small, feral—wanted to surface.
Every morning after, I woke to a bitter Nespresso from the vending machine, wrote in a cheap spiral notebook, and stared out at tiled rooftops. The old novelists had their candlelit garrets. I had my busted phone charger, nicotine gum, and borrowed Wi-Fi. Still—I was writing a new self. Not Alwenna Rees, the runaway. Not the addict. Someone else. Someone that could outlast England.
Joselina, my sponsor, told me over black coffee: "You are not a victim. You are a fuse."
She was right.
---
When I woke, London was quiet again.
I stood and went to the window. Big Ben blinked its hollow golden eye. Parliament slept. But I didn't.
I had work to do.
The kind that doesn't go in folders.