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I’d heard stories about girls going missing while they were walking home somewhere on their own. I used to sit next to my Mum whilst Crime Watch was on, and each time such a case came on she would grab my arm and force me to look her straight in the eyes.

“Never let that happen to you or your sister. If something were to happen to you I don’t know what I’d do.”

Cheryl took Mum’s words to heart and was always protective of me, even though I was barely five minutes younger than her. I was meant to be the eldest but Cheryl cheated. Her umbilical cord had wrapped around her neck and she was struggling herself so she had to be the first to be taken out. Sometimes it angered me that she took out the older twin card so much, but Cheryl was the feisty one, the one you wouldn’t mess with. So I felt safe.

In my old life I’d seen countless horror films where abduction played a central role and heard all the stories about girls being snatched and never seen or heard from again. Now I was one of those girls.

The people who had taken me at first appeared to be normal and kind. It sounds ludicrous that I thought that, but at the time they seemed that way. I was introduced to a man and a woman nearing the end of their thirty’s. I had been lying on a iron wrought bed in a windowless room and they had been sat right next to me, looking at me intently.

Mark and Angie.

They looked so normal, so suburban.

Angie looked like the kind of woman that joined other housewives for yoga every Tuesday morning with skinny latte in hand, her blonde hair looked well cared for but her face had deep lines that spoke of hardship and loss. Her husband was tall, dark and grave: the kind of man who was born in a suit and died in a suit.

For seven years they would be the people who unlocked my door, brought me food, occasionally let me out of the cellar room they had built especially so I could walk up and down the first floor corridor to stretch my legs. They didn’t let me further than that until the fourth year of my stay. By then I was trusted with being able to sit in another sealed room that used to be Mark’s office.

It was the only room I was ever let into that had a window, but I was only allowed to sit by the window once every three weeks. In a way I preferred not to look out. As much as I longed for the sunshine on my skin and to see what the world outside was like and if the sky was still blue, it hurt too much. It was not a world I was currently part of and had no place in.

They had been married since they were 18; at least that’s what they told me. They never really told me why they’d taken me off the street. But I had a feeling it had to do with a young blonde girl of about my age, whose photographs hung on the wall of the corridor that I was allowed to pace twice a week. There were photos that showed her in every stage of her life. Her in the hospital still pink with a pink tag on her pudgy arm, taking her first few steps, the first gap in her teeth, going to primary school and then pictures of her in a Secondary School uniform grinning proudly, but there were no more photos after what must have been around the age of sixteen. It was as if her life stopped at the day of her sixteenth birthday.

I looked strikingly similar to her, but I put it down to coincidence.

There wasn’t a day when I thought of escaping.

I tried so hard to get back home but the room I was kept in was so far down in the ground I could scream and cry all night and nobody would have heard me. For the first five months that was all I did. Scream and cry. But nobody heard. I lost my voice after a while and Mark and Angie were glad of it. There was no window, no cracks in the walls. No way out. When I was let out of my little cell Mark and Angie’s eyes never left me, there was nowhere to go they said. They told me I was as far away from Sheffield as was physically possible without leaving the country.

My school uniform and my favourite coat were taken from me and presumably burnt. I cried a little, even though it felt silly and petty but the coat was one of the few things that I had left from home. They had taken my school bag too and seemed rather happy to find that I had my passport with me. I was meant to be going on a school art trip to Florence in three weeks and needed to make a photocopy of it. I heard them talking one night outside my door saying that the police would suspect that I had been taken abroad. They sounded very pleased with themselves. Also Angie had given me a pile of clothes that still had a lingering scent of rose perfume. They fitted me well and some of the things even resembled my taste in clothes.

It was then that I started to feel very frightened.

Angie and Mark’s moods were as changing as the wind. Some days they were happy, some days so sad and angry. Angie would sit in the cellar prison looking at me and sobbing her eyes out. But sometimes at night she would sneak down and bring me the scrapes of their evening meal for me to eat. Other days she would slap me and pull at my long hair in a fit of anger. Mark would come in after her and in a rage would smack me straight across the face, other days he would try and hold me while big fat tears ran down his cheeks.

One day he was so angry and distraught that Angie had to step in screaming, before he did so much damage that they would have to take me to a hospital.

My only privilege was reading. Angie brought me stacks of books that I was allowed to keep as a comfort. But books that spoke about the world and the wonders that it held only made me cry more. Every atom of my body longed to get out, to go back home. To tell Oliver I was sorry for missing his birthday, to be held by my parents again and to see my sister. I had stolen a pen I had found on the floor of the corridor one day, and on the white pages in the novels I wrote letters in tiny print. I wrote to Cheryl, telling her it wasn’t her fault and how much I missed her, how much I missed the simple things like watching Doctor Who together and baking. I wrote long letters to Oliver, telling him not to forget and not to worry about me. I missed listening to music with him, skiving school and hiding out in the cafes in town. The letters to him were always the hardest to write because there were just too many words and memories between us. What I didn’t know was that for all the memories I had collected of him, I would be deprived of seven years worth of friendship and care.

One day when I was in the hall, with Mark always watching me, I heard Angie in the living room watching TV. It was the familiar voice on television that caused me to sprint as fast as my malnourished body could into the living room, where on the screen I saw the achingly familiar faces of my parents and sister. They were holding a photo of me and pleading that anyone who had any idea of my whereabouts should get in touch with the police, especially now that two years had passed and they missed me so much.

Mark had dragged me back to my room and I had screamed the whole way, hitting him as hard as I could, scratching whatever skin my hands came in contact with but it was all futile, there was no getting away.

Five years passed and I had no contact with the outside world. No way of getting out and slowly I was loosing grip on the strong hope that I always carried around with me. I had hoped that Mark and Angie would let me go, but the idea never dawned on them. Their treatment got no better, it only got worse. The meals became less and what little food I did get not even a dog would have eaten. They let me into the actual parts of their house, but only so I could clean them and do the dirty work they hated.

But sometimes I was allowed outside into their enclosed back garden with high walls and shrubs. I had exhausted the books that their abysmal and injured household had to offer, and Angie refused to go to the library in case anyone grew suspicious. They let me read the newspaper after a while, when I stopped getting mentioned so much.

Sometimes I’d lose it and scream at them, demanding to know why they were doing what they were. I never got an answer, as if I wasn’t worth their attention, when obviously I was because they had chosen me as the girl to take off the street. I was too similar to the girl in the corridor for it all to be an accident.

Oh how I hated them. They denied me the life that I had deserved to have. I was not a bad person. I wasn’t always right and correct in what I did. I did say mean things about some girls sometimes and I had lied to my parents about where I had been before, but I knew that I was a good person. I loved my family, went to school, got good grades and was kind to people. I gave any change I had to the homeless people in Sheffield and I always bought the Big Issue. I worked at a youth disability centre for work experience and I was thankful for my privileged life.

I was a good person, a free person who didn’t deserve to be locked up like an animal in a dark damp room with the only form of interaction being with two people who hated me and yet seemed to need me.

They said they were doing me a favour keeping me away from the world where there were drugs, paedophiles, terrorist attacks, thieves, alcohol and pain.

They said they were saving my life; they were keeping me safe and pure.