Libertine and Coraline

They Were The Girls Behind the Railings.

Before they became the strange sisters who emerged only after darkness, before they developed their private language and learned to recognise monsters wearing human faces, Libertine and Coraline were simply children.

Children nobody came for.

Children who learned very early that adults often lied.

Libertine lived in what had once been an isolation hospital. She was a runaway. She ran. 

From what, she didn't say.

The building sat upon a hill like a forgotten prison. Long corridors, peeling walls. Doors clicked shut loudly behind children who cried for mothers who never arrived.

At night the screams echoed.

Not loud screams.

Not the screams of films.

The small ones.

The desperate ones.

The exhausted cries of children who had finally realised nobody was coming.

Some called out for Mummy.

Some called out for Daddy.

Some simply called out for anybody.

The darkness swallowed every name.

The nurses disliked crying.

It disturbed the order of things.

One night Libertine cried too long.

The night nurse was occupied elsewhere, entertaining a lover in an upstairs room while responsibility wept beneath them.

The little girl was dragged from her bed.

Punishment was swift.

The ancient bathroom.

Cold.

Clinical.

A place that smelled of antiseptic and loneliness.

The door locked behind her.

There she sat among cracked tiles and rusted pipes, listening to the darkness breathe around her.

Listening to distant children sob.

Listening to her own heart.

By morning she no longer cried.

That was the first lesson.

Nobody was coming.

Coraline's lessons were different.

Her hospital specialised in skeletal disorders. Coraline was twisted, bed shaped, nothing aligned. 

At least that was what the Doctors claimed.

The reality existed somewhere between medicine and nightmare.

Ancient doctors walked the wards like minor gods. Men whose methods belonged to another century but whose authority remained unquestioned.

Children disappeared behind swinging doors.

Orange rubber hoses hung from hooks, everyone wore a green mask.

Foot-long syringes gleamed beneath harsh lighting.

Nobody explained much.

Nobody asked permission.

The children were given medication beforehand.

Most drifted into unconsciousness.

The doctors preferred them quiet.

Preferred them still.

Preferred them compliant.

Then came the treatments.

Or experiments.

The distinction often depended upon who was telling the story.

Hours later the children would be returned on metal trolleys.

Laid carefully back into their beds.

The twilight hours were always the strangest.

Coraline remembered those moments most clearly.

Awakening to the fading orange light beyond the windows.

The distant sounds of nurses changing shifts.

The vague aches that never entirely disappeared.

The confusion.

The fear.

The feeling that something had happened to her while she had been absent from herself.

Occasionally a chocolate bar would appear beneath her pillow.

A tiny offering.

A sweet apology nobody spoke aloud.

As if sugar could negotiate with suffering.

As if kindness could be retroactively inserted into cruelty.

Children accept strange bargains.

Adults teach them to.

Years later Libertine would describe childhood as living behind railings.

Coraline understood exactly what she meant.

There were always railings.

Sometimes physical.

Sometimes invisible.

The green cast-iron fence surrounding Libertine's institution became the boundary between worlds.

Inside was routine.

Medication.

Punishment.

Observation.

Outside were cows grazing beneath open skies.

Fields stretching towards horizons.

Ordinary life.

Reality.

Every afternoon she watched a farmer working beyond the fence.

He always waved.

Always smiled.

A simple gesture.

Meaningless to most people.

Everything to a lonely child.

One afternoon Libertine decided she would leave.

Not someday.

Tomorrow.

Tomorrow she would run.

She knew the route across the fields.

Knew which gate remained unlatched.

Knew where the hedgerows provided cover.

The plan became a tiny flame she protected inside herself.

Because hope, she discovered, behaves much like madness.

Both begin as whispers.

Both survive in secret.

Both alter the way a person sees the world.

Years later, when Libertine and Coraline sat together in their crumbling house speaking their strange language, people assumed they were broken by their childhoods.

Perhaps they were.

But they were also forged by them.

The hospitals had taught them something valuable.

Something terrible.

Institutions could hide cruelty behind professionalism.

Authority could disguise neglect.

Smiles could conceal indifference.

And monsters rarely looked like monsters.

They looked like doctors.

Nurses.

Managers.

Neighbours.

Respectable men.

That was why, when they eventually encountered the shadow of Dr Jimmy moving through the world, they recognised him immediately.

Not his face.

Not his name.

His pattern.

The sisters had spent their entire childhood studying the architecture of cruelty.

And once you learn that language, you never forget how to read it.