Girl A Read online

  ‘Hello. Thanks for the drink.’

  ‘That’s fine. Are you on the road?’

  ‘I flew from Los Angeles today.’

  ‘That’s pretty dramatic.’

  ‘Not really. It’s a regular route. You’re not from around here either?’

  ‘No. Not any more. You’re a pilot?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Are you the main pilot or the second pilot?’

  He laughed. ‘I’m the main pilot,’ he said.

  He told me about his job. Listening to most people talk about their careers is tedious, but he was different. He spoke with sincerity. He talked about his training in Europe, and the first inevitable time that he flew alone. His hands reached for controls in the space between us, and when the disco lights hit them I could see small muscles shifting, just beneath the skin. It made you a drifter, he said, but a rich one. In those early years, he had lived in a state of anxiety, thinking always of the next landing, adrenaline pulsing through his body in the hotel beds. Now, he was arrogant enough to sleep well.

  ‘The main pilot,’ he said, still laughing. ‘So. Where next?’

  We danced for a short time, but we were older than the bodies around us, and neither of us was drunk enough. I was fascinated by a group of girls beside me, their limbs careening together. They wore a variation of the same, skin-slick dress, and laughed as one many-headed creature. Watching them, I touched the tired skin at my throat and at the corners of my eyes. The pilot was behind me, with his fingers slotted between my ribs.

  ‘You can come to my hotel,’ I said.

  ‘I fly back tomorrow. I can’t stay.’

  ‘That’s fine.’

  ‘I didn’t want you to be disappointed. Sometimes—’

  ‘I won’t be disappointed.’

  It had been raining, as the driver promised. The streets were shining and quieter, and neon floated in the puddles. There were only taxis left on the roads, but none of them were stopping; we needed a busier junction. I watched the lights of the city slide over his face, and took his hand. ‘There are things that I need,’ I said. ‘To make it worth my while.’

  ‘Really,’ he said. He had turned away from me, looking for a car, but I saw his jaw lift, and I knew that he was smiling.

  In my room, I opened the minibar for drinks, but he stopped me, and sat down on the bed. I removed my dress and peeled my underwear to the floor, then knelt down before him. He surveyed me, nonchalant, just as I had hoped that he would.

  ‘I want you to humiliate me,’ I said.

  He swallowed.

  ‘You see,’ I said, ‘it needs to hurt.’

  His fingers were twitching. I felt the familiar twinge in my cunt, like a new pulse. I arranged myself on the bed beside him, stomach down, with my head resting on my arms. He stood, came to me, with plans on his face. The turndown service had taken place, I saw, and there were chocolates on the pillow.

  When he had left, I ordered room service, and I thought about JP. It was as though he had been waiting for my attention all day, patient and just out of view. One more drink, and I might have called him. I had his work number, which he always answered. I could have been distressed at Mother’s death, alone in Manchester, and with no one else to turn to. ‘And I’ll be in London next week,’ I would say, as an afterthought. ‘Maybe even longer.’

  I had heard that he lived in the suburbs now, with a new girlfriend and a small dog. ‘Or a small girlfriend and a new dog,’ Olivia had said. ‘I don’t recall.’ I thought about the day that he left our flat. I had expected that he would rent a van or ask a friend for help, but he fit his belongings into two suitcases and a series of cardboard boxes, and waited on the street for his cab. It was raining, but he refused to come back in, as if the proximity would have made him change his mind. It wouldn’t. There was nothing that either of us could have done to change things. I pulled my legs up to my chest and felt the scars on my knee, the skin smoother there. Then I touched the scars from the other surgeries. My fingers followed their familiar route. The scars were immaculate; in dim light, you couldn’t see them. When I had pointed them out to JP, he was uninterested: ‘I never even noticed them,’ he said, and I liked him all the more for that. No, there was nothing that either of us could have done. To think of something else, I wondered if Evie’s party was over. It was late, and later still where she was. I turned off my light and set an alarm for breakfast.

  ‘Evie,’ I said. ‘Today’s the day.’

  The great expanse of the morning extended ahead of us, flat and barren. I had lived with the strange pain inside of me for many weeks by then, but today it felt worse; the blood smelt different. Then again: it was hard to distinguish that pain from the anticipation, which writhed in my gut like beasts breaking from eggs.

  I tested the handcuffs, as I had done every day since Father’s mistake. My left hand slipped through, but my right caught just beneath the knuckles. ‘Is it warmer today?’ I asked. I tried again, but it seemed harder still. My fingers were swelling with the effort. I had another idea: what Ethan, who had once loved to read about the Wild West, would have called a last chance saloon. But this idea was irreversible, and if Father visited us before lunch, I needed to be in chains. I would have to wait.

  I listened to Father awaken. His footsteps lumbered slowly down the stairs, and I wondered if we had made a mistake. Perhaps it should be now. Then he was in the kitchen, and I heard the murmurs of early conversation, words interspersed with breakfast and contemplation, and probably some silent prayer. I had long abandoned Father’s God, but still I closed my eyes, and prayed to older, wilder deities. I prayed for a while.

  I woke again in the middle of the morning. I had been in a dense, dark place, just beneath the surface of consciousness. Cutlery clattered in the kitchen. The smell of Mother’s baking padded up the stairs and curled on the floor of our room. There were a few scant strings of saliva in my mouth. ‘Your first meal out,’ I said to Evie; this was a discussion which usually escalated fast.

  ‘Tea at the Ritz?’ I asked. ‘Or the Greek tavern?’

  She tucked her legs closer to her chest and coughed, saying nothing, and I noticed the strange appearance of her feet, oversized at the end of each skeletal shin, like the shoes of a clown.

  I had learnt not to imagine my parents eating, but this would be the last day, and so I allowed it. They sat hand in hand at the kitchen table. Noah surveyed them blankly from his chair. Mother had made an apple pie, and she stood to slice it. The top was golden, and brushed with sugar, and there were soft dimples in the crust where the fruit had tried to bubble through. The knife caught on the pastry top, and Mother pressed harder. When she broke through, steam and the smell of hot fruit rose around the table. She cut Father’s slice, and served it on a warm plate, and before she helped herself she watched him eating. The crisp pastry and its viscous filling moving around his mouth. She feasted on his pleasure.

  That day they had a long lunch, and Noah wouldn’t settle. It was the middle of winter, I guessed, and by the time the living room door clicked closed, the light through the cardboard was dimming. The house was quiet.

  ‘OK,’ I said. ‘OK.’

  Before I could think any more about it, I pulled the chains taut.

  My left hand contorted through the metal and came free. Still my right hand was too swollen to squeeze through, however hard I pressed my thumb into my palm.

  Last chance saloon.

  ‘Look away,’ I said to Evie; even after all this time, there were some degradations which I didn’t want to share.

  When Delilah was nine or ten, she forced Mother’s wedding ring onto her thumb, and it became stuck. Delilah was rarely in trouble, and I was delighted. I sat in the hallway, at the top of the stairs, and watched events unfold in the bathroom. Delilah was sitting on the edge of the bath, in tears, and Mother was kneeling before her, running a damp bar of soap between her fingers. With disappointing efficiency, the ring slid over Delilah’s knuckle an
d landed with a tinny chime on the bathroom floor.

  I pulled my hand through the metal, right to the sticking point, and started to twist it from side to side. There was already an indentation left from the morning’s efforts; the skin there was bruised and close to breaking. I bit down on the sheet and moved faster. Unlike Delilah, I didn’t intend to cry. When the skin split, my hand, black-red and wet, grinded through.

  I laughed and cradled my arm to my chest. Evie’s eyes were frightened, but she smiled, and gave me a thumb-up. I crouched on my bed and reached out into the Territory, searching with my good hand for something hard enough to break glass. My fingers passed through warm, damp patches, and things that seemed to move against them. I recoiled, and swallowed, and kept searching. Old food and small, rotting shoes, and mould on the pages of our childhood Bibles. Everything soft and useless.

  Evie pointed, and I froze, expecting Father at the door. She shook her head and pointed again, and I followed her eyes beneath my bed. Underneath it – my whole arm shaking – my fingers closed around something hard. It was a wooden stake, grubby with old blood and its time in the Territory. I looked at it for a moment, remembering why it was there.

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Yes. Perfect.’

  I stood up, unsteady, and shuffled to the window. Father had put little effort into securing the cardboard, and the tape which sealed it had started to decay. I eased the last few pieces away, bit by bit, until I was holding the board. ‘Ready,’ I said, and set it down onto the floor. Light howled into the room. Evie buried her face in her arms. I couldn’t turn around and see the room lit by the day. It was time to go. I crossed the Territory; after all of our navigation, it was just three short footsteps to reach Evie’s bed. I took her hand, as I had when we slept in the same bed in the years before, when things hadn’t been so bad. She was still motionless: now I could see her spine and the exposed parts of her scalp, and how each breath was a little labour. I knew that once I broke the window, the seconds – our scant seconds, which we had spent so many months planning – would begin to pass.

  ‘I will come back for you,’ I said. ‘Evie?’

  Her hand fluttered in mine.

  ‘I’ll see you soon,’ I said.

  I lifted the wooden stake over my shoulder. ‘Cover your face,’ I whispered; then the time for quiet was up, and I swung the wood against the bottom corner of the window. It cracked, but it didn’t break; I swung it again, harder, and the pane shattered. Downstairs, Noah screamed. Beneath that, I could hear footsteps underneath our room, and Mother’s voice. Already, somebody was on the stairs. I tried to brush away the glass on the window ledge, but instead a shard lodged into my palm. There was too much of it, and there wasn’t enough time. I hauled one leg onto the ledge, and pulled the other after it, and sat at the window, facing outside. Somebody was at the door; the lock was moving. I had told myself that I wouldn’t look down. I pivoted around, and for a moment I was suspended, half inside the room and my legs in the winter air. ‘We’ll need to lower ourselves,’ I had said to Evie, ‘until we’re hanging, so that we reduce the fall as much as we can.’ The door opened, and I saw a flash of Father. The shape of him in the doorway. I let my body drop, but I was too weak to hang like we had planned it, and as soon as my arms locked, I fell.

  The grass was wet, but the earth was frozen beneath it. As I landed, something in my right leg collapsed, the way that a building falls in on itself when the foundations are blown. The crunch ricocheted across the garden. I fell forward, and the impact shot the glass further into my hand. The air was too cold to inhale, and I was crying, I knew. ‘God, get up,’ I whispered. Slowly, I straightened, and pulled my T-shirt down towards my knees, and there, at the kitchen door, was Mother.

  I waited for her to run at me, but she didn’t. Her mouth was moving, but I could only hear the blood in my ears. We looked at one another for a long last second, then I turned and ran.

  The garden gate was unlocked. I hobbled around the house, holding onto the walls, and then out into the road, following the white markers at its centre. The evening was a cold, dark blue. Here was the neighbourhood I remembered: Moor Woods Road and its quiet houses, each far apart from the next. Windows glowing like shrines in the gloaming. Father would be behind me. I couldn’t expend energy approaching a doorway: he would catch me there, before the residents could answer. I could anticipate the precise weight of his hands on my shoulders. I screamed, trying to summon them from their living rooms, from their sofas, from the evening news. Festive lights hung from trees and over front doors, welcoming their inhabitants, and I thought, stupidly: Christmas.

  The road curled downhill and my leg buckled, and I veered into the wall at the side of it, grasping at the wet stones. I steadied myself and kept going, in the shadows now, my feet slapping on frozen leaves and winter-long puddles. Pain was seconds away, like coming out of sleep; I was on the brink of it, and once it hit me I wouldn’t be able to ignore it again.

  I could see the end of Moor Woods Road. Beyond it, about to pass by, was a pair of headlights. I ran straight for them, my hands held up in appeasement, and the driver braked just before she hit me. The car bonnet was warm beneath my palms, and I left rusty handprints where I touched it. The driver was climbing out of her seat in silhouette; she moved tentatively towards me, and into the light. She was dressed in a suit and holding a mobile phone, and she seemed so bright, somehow, and clean, like a visitor from a bold new world.

  ‘My God,’ she said.

  ‘My name,’ I said, ‘is Alexandra Gracie—’

  I couldn’t get the rest of it out. I looked back, up to Moor Woods Road: the street was silent and impassive. I sat down in the road and reached for her, and while she called the police, she let me hold her hand.

  I woke once in the night, cold from the air conditioning, and folded the covers across my body. Already it was light outside, but I couldn’t hear any traffic. It was nice to wake like this, with many more hours before morning. I would feel better then.

  Just as I was falling asleep, my body started. I had been thinking of the fall from the window, fifteen years before. The impact, half dreamed and half remembered. A spectre of pain brushed my knee. Mother at the kitchen door. I rolled over. I stood in the garden in the dim winter dusk, in my sullied T-shirt and nothing else. My leg twisted behind me, like a ball and chain. It would have been so easy for her to stop me. This time, in the dream, I listened; I could hear her over my heart. ‘Go,’ she said. Further north they were preparing her grave, wielding shovels in the warm, pink dawn so that they could bury her before the sun rose. She said, ‘Go.’

  2

  Ethan (Boy A)

  ETHAN CALLED BACK BEFORE my alarm went off. He sounded like an advertisement for the morning: he had been for a run along the river; he was feeding the dog; he was cracking eggs for breakfast.

  ‘Tell me everything,’ he said.

  I did so. He enjoyed my discovery of the article about his work in Mother’s box of belongings; he asked me to recite it so he would know exactly which of his projects it referred to.

  ‘Oh, that. That’s a relatively old one.’

  ‘It’s a good job that she didn’t have access to The Times,’ I said. ‘And “The Problems with Forgiveness”.’

  He ignored me. ‘Will you be around for a while?’ he asked. ‘Being executor, and all.’

  ‘I can work from London this week. I’ll see how things go. We may need to visit the house, I guess.’

  I could hear him contemplating it, recalling the windows, the garden, the front door and the doors after that. Each of the rooms. I was ruining his morning.

  ‘We can find a time for that. Listen. Get a Friday-night train up to Oxford, stay with me and Ana. It’s been ages since you’ve been in the country. And it would be nice to see you before the wedding.’

  ‘It’s work-dependent. I don’t know how long I can stay.’

  ‘Well, tell them your mother died. You’ll get some leeway for that.’r />
  The dog was barking. ‘Fuck,’ he said.

  ‘I can go.’

  ‘Friday. Call me when you’re on a train.’

  At the beginning – and at the end, too – it was just me and Ethan.

  First born; last adopted.

  It was a few months after we escaped before arrangements were made. I remember very little about that time, and each of the memories seems exaggerated, as if I’ve taken somebody else’s story and imagined myself into the narrative. When they first woke me up, days after the escape and already a few surgeries down, they took me to a bath and washed me. My skin slowly came into view, whiter than I had remembered. It took hours, and each time they stopped I asked them to keep going: there was dirt in my ears, in the creases of my elbows, in the folds between my toes. When they finished, I held to the tub and refused to get out. ‘There might be more,’ I said, never wanting to leave the water and the warmth of it. It felt like the ocean would feel in Greece, where Evie and I planned to live.

  Thin, downy hair had grown on my face and shoulders. ‘Your body was keeping you warm,’ one of the nurses said, when I asked her, and she kept her face turned away from me until she could leave the room. My bruises faded to a dull jaundice spread, and some of my bones began to retreat, back beneath fat and flesh.

  I couldn’t believe that people didn’t enjoy being in hospital. That people could actually want to leave. I had my own room. I had three meals a day. I had patient doctors, who talked me through my body and why they had to open it. All of the nurses were tender, and sometimes, when they had left, I would cry in the clean, quiet room, the way that you cry when somebody is nice to you in the middle of a terrible day.

  At night, and asleep, I called for Evie. I woke with people above me, consoling me, and her name still in my mouth. She was in a different hospital, they said, and I couldn’t see her just yet.

  A week after I first woke up, I opened my eyes and found a stranger in the room. She was sitting on the chair beside my bed, reading from a ring-bound file. In the moments before she knew that I was awake, I examined her. She wasn’t wearing hospital uniform. Instead, she wore a sharp, pale dress and a blue jacket, and the highest shoes that I had ever seen. Her hair was short. Her eyes flicked through the words before her, and as she read, a line between them creased and softened, according to the sentence.