Girl A Page 2

  ‘Forgiveness,’ I said. The shape of the word lodged in my throat. I was still smiling.

  ‘Did you receive them?’ the chaplain asked. ‘The letters?’

  I received them. I asked Dad – my real father, you understand, and not the rot in my bones – to destroy each one when it arrived. They were easy to identify; they came resealed, with a stamped warning of correspondence from an inmate at HM Prison Northwood. Soon after my twenty-first birthday, when I was home from university, Dad came to me with a confession and a box, and all of the fucking letters stuffed inside. ‘I just thought,’ he said, ‘that in the future – you may be curious—’ It must have been the winter holidays, because the barbeque was in the garden shed; he helped me to wheel it out, and we stood in our coats, him with his pipe and me with a cup of tea, and posted them into the fire.

  ‘I think that you’re in the wrong story,’ I said to the chaplain. ‘There’s a narrative – you see it a lot – which builds up to a prison visit. Somebody inside, they’re waiting for somebody else to visit. To be forgiven. The visitor’s been mulling it over for years, and they can’t decide whether to do it. Well. In the end they go. It’s usually a parent and a child, or maybe a perpetrator and a victim – it depends. But they go. And they have a conversation. And even if the visitor doesn’t forgive the person, exactly, they at least take something from the whole thing. But, you see – my mother’s dead. And I never did visit.’

  I had the mortifying sense that I was going to cry, and I pulled my sunglasses down to hide it. The chaplain became a lumpy white spectre in the darkness. ‘I’m sorry that I can’t help you,’ I said, absurdly, and stumbled back down the aisle. The sun was finally starting to soften, and now it was time for a drink. I thought of a hotel bar and the weight of the first glass, settling heavy across my limbs. The warden’s assistant was waiting for me.

  ‘Are we all done?’ she asked. Our shadows were long and black on the tarmac, and when I reached her they became one strange beast. Her shift was probably over.

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I should go.’

  In the car, I checked my phone. Is there such a thing, Olivia had texted, as too jovial?

  I held Mother’s cardboard box in my lap and lifted the lid. A ragtag of possessions. There was a Bible, predictably. There was a hairbrush. There were two clippings, sticky with tape, which had been torn from magazines: one was an advertisement for beach holidays in Mexico, and one was for nappies, with a little row of clean, happy children laid out on a white blanket. There was a newspaper cutting about Ethan’s charity work in Oxford. There were three chocolate bars, and a lipstick which was nearly finished. As usual, she gave nothing away.

  The last time I saw Mother was the day that we escaped. That morning I woke up in the soiled bed and knew that my days had run out, and that if I didn’t act then this was where I would die.

  Sometimes, in my head, I visit our little room. There are two single beds, pressed into opposite corners, as far away from one another as they can be. My bed and Evie’s bed. The bare bulb hangs between them, twitching at footsteps in the hallway outside. It is usually dull, but sometimes, if Father decides, left on for days. He has sealed a flattened cardboard box against the window, intending to control time, but a dim, brown light seeps through and grants us our days and our nights. Beyond the cardboard there was once a garden, and beyond that, the moor. It has become harder to believe that those places, with their wildness and their weather, could still exist. In the peaty glow, you can see the two-metre Territory between the beds, which Evie and I know better than any other. We have discussed the navigation from my bed to hers for many months: we know how to traverse the rolling hills of plastic bags, bulging with items which we can’t remember; we know that you would use a plastic fork to cross the Bowl Swamps, which are blackened and congealed, and close to drying out; we have debated the best way to pass through the Polyester Peaks to avoid the worst of the filth: whether to take the high passes and risk the elements, or to pass through the tunnels of rotting materials beneath them and face whatever may be waiting there.

  I had wet myself again in the night. I flexed my toes, twisted my ankles, and kicked my legs as if I was swimming, as I had done every morning for the last few months. Two. Maybe three. I said to the room what I would say to the first person I met when I was free: My name is Alexandra Gracie, and I am fifteen years old. I need you to ring the police. Then, as I did each morning, I turned to see Evie.

  We had once been chained in the same direction, so that I could see her all of the time. Now she was tied away from me, and we both had to contort our bodies to meet eyes. Instead I could see her feet and the bones of her legs. The skin burrowed into each groove, as if searching for warmth there.

  Evie spoke less and less. I cajoled her and shouted at her; I reassured her, and sung the songs which we had heard when we still went to school. ‘Your part,’ I said. ‘Are you ready for your part?’ None of it worked. Now, instead of teaching her numbers, I recited them to myself. I told her stories in the darkness and heard no laughter, or questions, or surprise; there was just the quiet space of the Territory and her shallow breathing, rushing across it.

  ‘Evie,’ I said. ‘Eve. Today’s the day.’

  I drove back to the city through the early dusk. A thick golden light fell between the trees and across the open fields, but in the shadows of the villages and the farmhouses it was already dark. I contemplated driving through the night and hitting London before sunrise. Jet lag made the landscape bright and strange. I would probably end up asleep on a roadside in the Midlands; it didn’t seem such a good idea. I stopped in a lay-by and booked a Manchester hotel with vacancies and air conditioning.

  In the first bad year, we had talked only of escape. This was in the Binding Days, when we were only restrained at night, and gently, with soft, white materials. Evie and I slept in the same bed, each with one wrist attached to a bedpost, and our other hands holding. All day, Mother and Father were with us, but we went about our lessons (heavy in biblical studies, with some questionable world history), and exercise (laps of the yard, in vests and pants; on one occasion, some of the children from Hollowfield clambered through the nettles at the back of our property just to see us, and to guffaw), and mealtimes (bread and water, on a good day), without any restraints at all. Our famous family photograph was taken at the end of this period, before the Chaining commenced and we ceased to be portrait-ready, even by my parents’ standards.

  We talked of tearing the bindings with our teeth, or of slipping a knife from the kitchen table into a smock pocket. We could build up speed during a lap of the yard, then keep running, out through the garden gate and down Moor Woods Road. Father kept a mobile phone in his pocket; that would be easy to snatch. When I think about this time, I feel a terrible confusion, which Dr K – with all of her reasoning – never managed to resolve. It was on the faces of the police and the journalists and the nurses, although none of them could ever bring themselves to ask it. Why didn’t you just leave when you had the chance?

  The truth is, it wasn’t so bad. We enjoyed each other’s company. We were tired, and sometimes we were hungry, and on occasion, Father would hit us so hard that an eye was bloodshot for a week (Gabriel), or there was a guttural crack just below the heart (Daniel). But we had little knowledge of what would come. I have spent many nights combing through the memories, like a student in a library, wiping the dust from old volumes and examining each shelf, searching for the moment when I should have known: ah – there – it was time to act. This book eludes me. It was checked out many years ago, and never returned. Father taught us around the kitchen table, mistaking submission for devotion, and Mother visited us last thing at night to make sure the bindings were in place. In the early morning, I woke beside Evie, and the warmth of her body glowed against me. We still talked of our future.

  It wasn’t so bad.

  I spoke to Devlin first, and asked to work from London for a week. Maybe more.

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nbsp; ‘Probate drama,’ she said. ‘How exciting.’ It was early afternoon in New York, but she had answered right away, already half-cut. Around her, I could hear the hum of a civilized lunch, or a bar.

  ‘I’m not sure if that’s the word I would use,’ I said.

  ‘Well, take your time. We’ll find you a desk in London. And some work, no doubt.’

  Mum and Dad would be eating, and could wait. Ethan’s fiancée answered the phone; he was attending the opening of a gallery and wouldn’t be back until much later that night. She’d heard that I was in the country – I should come to visit them – they would love to have me. I left a voice message on Delilah’s phone, although I doubted that she would call me back. Last, I spoke to Evie. I could hear that she was outside, and somebody near her was laughing.

  ‘So,’ I said. ‘The witch is dead, it seems.’

  ‘Did you see the body?’

  ‘God, no. I didn’t ask to.’

  ‘Then – can we be sure?’

  ‘I’m quietly confident.’

  I told her about the house on Moor Woods Road. About our great inheritance.

  ‘They had twenty thousand? That’s news.’

  ‘Really? After our resplendent childhood?’

  ‘You can just see Father, can’t you? Squirrelling it away. “For my God will meet all your needs” – whatever it was.’

  ‘The house, though,’ I said. ‘I can’t believe that it would still be standing.’

  ‘Aren’t there people who enjoy those things? There are some tours – in LA, I think – murder sites, celebrity deaths, stuff like that. It’s pretty morbid.’

  ‘Hollowfield’s a little isolated for a tour, no? Besides, it’s hardly the Black Dahlia.’

  ‘We’re a little more downmarket, I guess.’

  ‘They’d be giving the tickets away.’

  ‘Well,’ Evie said. ‘If there’s a tour, we should certainly go on it. We’ll be able to impart some real gems. There’s a career there, if the law doesn’t work out.’

  ‘I think Ethan’s already cornered the market,’ I said. ‘But really. What the hell are we meant to do with the house?’

  Again, somebody laughed. Closer, now. ‘Where are you?’ I asked.

  ‘At the beach. There’s some kind of concert this afternoon.’

  ‘You should go.’

  ‘OK. I miss you. And the house—’

  The wind was picking up where she was, whipping the sun across the ocean.

  ‘Something happy,’ Evie said. ‘It should be something happy. Nothing would annoy Father more.’

  ‘I like that idea.’

  ‘OK. I’m going to go.’

  ‘Enjoy the concert.’

  ‘Well done, today.’

  The plan was this:

  Like undercover agents, we had been tracking Father’s footsteps. In the Binding Days, we had kept a record, noted in our Bible with a stump of school pencil (Genesis, 19:17; back then, we still had a taste for melodrama). When we could no longer reach the book, I committed Father’s day to memory, the way Miss Glade had taught me when I still went to school. ‘Think of a house,’ she said. ‘And in each room of the house, there is the next thing that you want to recall. Franz Ferdinand is slumped in the hallway – he’s just been shot. You walk into the living room, and you pass by Serbia on the way out, running. They’re terrified: war’s coming. You find Austria-Hungary in the kitchen, sat at the table with the rest of its allies. Who’s with them?’

  And Father occupied our house; that made decoding his days even easier. After so many months in a single room, I knew the sound of each floorboard, and the flick of each light switch. I could see the bulk of him moving through the rooms.

  We had done several all-night stake-outs from our beds, so we knew that he woke late. Even in the winter, it was already light when we heard his first, slow footsteps through the house. Our bedroom was right at the end of the hallway, and he was two doors down, so a night-time attempt would be no good; he slept lightly, and he could be on us in a few seconds. Sometimes I would wake to find him at our bedroom door, or crouching beside me, in contemplation. Whatever he was considering, he always resolved, and in time he turned away, into the darkness.

  He spent each morning with Mother and with Noah, downstairs. The smell of their meals permeated the house, and we heard them at prayer, or laughing about something which we couldn’t share. When Noah cried, Father took to the garden. The kitchen door slammed. He exercised: the grunts of it carried up to our window. Sometimes, just before lunch, he visited us, radiant, his skin sodden and red, a barbarian just done with the battle, wielding his towel like an enemy’s head. No, the morning wouldn’t do: the front door was locked at all times, and whether we went downstairs through the kitchen or right out of the window, Father would be waiting.

  This was a point of contention between Evie and me. ‘It has to be through the house,’ she said. ‘The window’s too high. You’ve forgotten how high it is.’

  ‘We’d have to break the lock on our door. We’d have to go through the whole house. Past Ethan’s room. Past Mother and Father. Past Gabe and D. Down the stairs. Noah sleeps down there – sometimes Mother too. There’s no way.’

  ‘Why haven’t Gabriel and Delilah left?’ Evie asked. And whispered: ‘It would be easier for them.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said. There had been one night, many months before, when I had heard something quiet and terrible at the other end of the hallway. A thwarted attempt. Evie had been asleep, and I had never mentioned it. Now, with hope hanging precarious between us, I didn’t think that I could.

  After lunch, Father was in the living room, and silent. This, I believed, was our chance. With Father still, the whole house sighed and slacked. Delilah’s whispers snuck down the hallway. Some days Ethan tapped on the wall, as he had done when we were very young and set on learning Morse code. Other days, Mother visited us. There had been a time when I pleaded with her to do something, but now I responded to her confessions in my head, and turned away.

  ‘It’s the only option,’ I said to Evie. ‘Once he wakes up, it’s out of the question.’

  ‘OK,’ she said, but I knew that she saw this as make-believe, like the other stories I told to her to pass the day.

  We had already discussed the window. With its cardboard cover, it was outside our scope of surveillance. ‘It opens,’ I said. ‘Doesn’t it?’ I couldn’t picture the latch, or whether the ground beneath it was concrete or grass. ‘Maybe I am forgetting,’ I said.

  ‘I don’t think it does,’ Evie said. ‘And it hasn’t been opened for ages, now.’

  We strained to look at one another across the Territory.

  ‘So if we have to break the window,’ Evie said, ‘how long do we get?’

  ‘It’ll take him a good few seconds to know what’s happening,’ I said. ‘And a few more to reach the stairs. Ten to get to our door, say. And then he’ll have to do the lock.’

  My neck ached. I lay back down. ‘Twenty in all,’ I said. The meagre number hung in the space between us. Evie said something else, too quiet for me to hear.

  ‘What?’

  ‘OK, then,’ she said.

  ‘OK.’

  Our other obstacle was the chains, which had once been my greatest concern. But Father was clumsy. After the discovery of the Myths, and what happened after it, he didn’t turn on the light when he left the room. I liked to think that he couldn’t bear to look at me, but he was probably too drunk to find the switch; either way, it didn’t matter now. I’d spread my fingers out as far as I could, so that he closed the cuffs around my thumbs and little fingers, rather than my wrists. So: it would have to be me, and it would have to be soon. ‘He messed up,’ I whispered to Evie, when I was sure that everybody else in the house was asleep. Her breath huffed across the bedroom, but she didn’t respond. I had left it too late. She was asleep, too.

  I contemplated the evening. It was dark, but it was still hot outside. I called room serv
ice, ordered two gin and tonics, and drank them naked on the bed. I had thought about going for a run, but the hotel was encircled by motorways, and I didn’t want to pick my way around them. Instead I would drink, and find company. I changed into a black slip and leather boots, and asked reception for a taxi and another drink.

  In the car, I thought that this was a good development: three drinks down, alone, Mother dead, and the strange city above and around me. I opened the car window as far as it would go. People queued outside dark doorways and sat on the pavements to drink. ‘There’s a storm forecast,’ the driver said. He said something else, too, but we were at a crossing, and it was lost in a gale of chatter.

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘An umbrella,’ he said. ‘Do you have an umbrella?’

  ‘You know,’ I said, ‘I used to live around here.’

  He caught my eye in the mirror, and laughed.

  ‘That’s a yes?’

  ‘That’s a yes.’

  I had asked him to drop me somewhere local and busy. He stopped outside another hotel, a cheaper one, and nodded. The club was in its underbelly, down a narrow staircase, with a dance floor at the back and a vacant stage above it. It was busy enough. I took a seat at the bar and ordered a vodka tonic, and looked for somebody who would be glad to talk to me.

  There had been times when Devlin and I had travelled so much that I would forget which continent we were on. I would wake up in a hotel room and walk the wrong way to the toilet, taking the route from my apartment in New York. I would come to in an airport lounge and need to read my boarding pass – really read it – to recall where we were flying next. There was always solace in sitting at a bar; they were the same the world over. There were lonely men with similar stories, and people who looked more tired than I did.

  I sent gin to the man six seats down, who was wearing a shirt with a golden pin of wings, and searching for his wallet. He looked happy to receive the drink, and surprised; moments later he touched my shoulder, smiling. He was older than I had first thought. That was good.