Tick tock, tick tock, goes the clock.

It sits neatly on the wall, just at the periphery of my vision.

At the other side of my bed there is a pool of light, a window. I can detect a soft, muted mass there. I think it might be the colour green. It brushes gently against the glass, whispering, when everything else in this small, white room is still and silent.

There are voices, footsteps. I hear them just outside the door.

The two doctors step inside the room and I strain to catch their movements, a blur of white. They come every day at about this time, when the light is a little softer. This is how I know it is the afternoon.

My heart pulses faster. Will this be the time they notice I am still here behind the invisible, soundproof partition that now separates me from the real world?

To them, I am in a vegetative state, lying on the narrow bed, eyes wide open, frozen. Still as a corpse.

But inside my head I am standing tall, hammering my splayed fingers and flat palms against the non-existent glass. Screaming to be let out.

Look at me, I yell. Look at me!

But they hardly ever do. Look at me, that is. They talk about me, observe me from a distance, but they don’t touch me or look me in the eyes.

If they did, a doctor or a nurse might see the slightest flicker of an eyelash, an almost imperceptible tremor of a finger. Dear God, even the cleaner might spot a spark of life if she’d only look at me occasionally.

‘It’s the cruellest thing,’ the female doctor says softly, taking a step closer to my bed. ‘That she still looks so alive, I mean.’

I am alive, I scream. I AM alive.

I summon every ounce of effort and determination I have in me and send it to the hand that lies motionless on top of the pale blue blanket. My left hand. The hand they can see because it is right in front of their unobservant faces.

All I have to do is move a finger, shift my palm. A millimetre of movement, a mere twitch would be enough. If they could only spot it.

Anything that can tell them I am very much still here. Frozen solid, but very much alive. A prisoner, buried inside my own flesh.

‘There’s nothing left of her, she’s just a shell,’ the male doctor states quietly. ‘It’s been that way since the day she had the stroke.’

‘I don’t envy you,’ the woman sighs. ‘You’ll have to speak to the family soon.’

‘There is no family,’ he replies. ‘We don’t know who she is yet.’

The door opens again, and then closes.

The footsteps walk away and the room falls quiet.

Now the only sound that fills the room is the raspy sigh of the defibrillator that is keeping me alive. And in between each raspy sigh, there is silence.

I can’t breathe without one machine. I can’t swallow without another.

Breathe, I tell myself. This can’t be real. It can’t be happening.

But it is. It is happening.

And it’s very, very real.

---

What I can still do is think. And I can remember. Somehow, I can remember the past with a clarity I didn’t possess before.

Yet I know instinctively that if I remember too much, too soon, the pain will be too intense and I will close down completely. And then what will happen to my beautiful girl?

Everyone gave up on Evie some time ago. The official police line is that it continues to be an open case and any new information will be investigated, but I know they’re not actively pursuing new leads, because they haven’t got any.

No evidence, no sightings. Nothing.

For months after it happened, I slavishly read all of the comments people posted underneath the online news reports. They talked as if they had personal knowledge about Evie’s ‘terrible, neglectful mother’ and her ‘unhappy home’.

Others openly discussed how Evie could possibly just disappear like that. Everyone an expert.

European paedophile rings, a child serial killer, Romany travellers passing through – all those terrible theories of how and why Evie had gone. I’d heard them all.

Eventually, and without exception, they all wrote Evie off.

Not me. I have chosen to believe that Evie is still alive, that somewhere out there, she is living and breathing. I have to hold on to that.

That’s why I must not panic. Even though I cannot move a muscle or utter a sound, there has to be a way for me to help them find her, save her, while I can still remember everything so clearly.

There is only one thing for it: I must think back, right to the very beginning.

Way back, to before it even happened.