“He fucking did it to me,” Luca mutters. Something warm and wet drips onto their hands. “He fucking reached over and he pinned me down with one hand and he grabbed onto me with the other and he fucking… he fucking…”
Oh God, she thinks. Oh God. How could anybody let that happen?
“And,” Luca whispers, sounding almost at the end of his strength, “I fucking… I mean, I couldn’t stop myself. I hated it, I utterly fucking hated it, I don’t like fucking gay stuff, I was watching a video of a girl, but he was fucking touching me and I couldn’t stop it. And he said… he said… See? You like it, don’t you? I knew you would.”
These are the last words that come out of him for a while, but not the only sounds. She holds him against her chest and strokes his hair. I’m sorry, she thinks. I’m so, so sorry. Forgive me. This is the key that unlocks all his strangeness.
“And that wasn’t the only time,” Luca goes on, as if what he’s told her already isn’t enough, as if he could have shrugged off a single rape and gone about his life. “I mean, I tried to be out as much as I could, but there’s only so much you can do, right? It was like he was watching me, like he was enjoying watching me trying to stay away. And all he had to do was pick a fight, clothes on the floor or pots in the sink or something, and I’d be fucking grounded, you know? I didn’t know how to… And the worst thing was, I’d get hard, you know? He’d be doing that to me and I’d get fucking hard. I mean, what the fuck is wrong with me? Who’d believe me when I said I didn’t want it if he told them—” He shudders against her chest. “I think that’s the worst bit. Wondering if maybe I did like it. I mean, boys can’t fake that stuff, can we?”
She strokes his hair, unsure if this is the right thing to do or not. She’s wondering how he got from there to here, if perhaps there’s some truth in the first story he told her after all. Did he turn on the man who raped him and beat him to a pulp?
“Anyway,” he mutters. “I was proper off the rails at school. Fuck knows what they all thought was going on. Probably thought I was reverting to type, you know? Kid from the rough part of town, single mum. They didn’t exactly have high expectations. But I had this one teacher, he was a good bloke, and I don’t know if they get special training or something, but he took me to one side one day, and—” suddenly there is a tinge of wonder in his voice. “It was like he already knew all of it, you know? He knew exactly what to ask me. It was like having someone open up the inside of your head and look inside. And I thought maybe—”
Is this what Willow’s mother does for the people she sees? Is this how it feels for them as they sit in her office and look at her over her desk and let her peek inside their heads? And if this is how it is, how does her mother stand it?
“So then there was the police involved,” Luca sighs. “I mean, I knew they’d have to be. I was sort of prepared for that. I mean, not like you can be prepared, it was just awful, but, you know, I knew I had to. But then, my mum—” He’s crying again. “They told her. They told her. And she didn’t… she said… she wouldn’t… she said he was a good bloke, and I was trying to… Like I’d make that up, for attention—”
She’s been so sad and angry about her own life for so long that she’d forgotten how it feels to have these emotions on behalf of someone else. If she stands up, she’ll be tall enough to take the roof off, tall enough to stalk across the countryside and find her way to the house where Luca’s mother lives. She will open up the top of her house, bend down and pluck her from the bed where she sleeps, bring her up towards her mouth and tear off her head.
“I miss her,” Luca whispers. “All I want is to go back and be with her and have our lives the way they were before. And there’s no way that’s ever going to happen. Even if he goes to jail. Even if they say I can go back and live with her again. It’s never going to be the same. Because she doesn’t think he did it. So whatever happens, this is what it’s going to be like from now on. Every single fucking day from now on, me and my mum, we’ll be further away from all right. I can’t even remember what all right looks like any more.” He pushes himself fiercely away from her. “That’s why I like you, you know. Because you’re like me. You’re on the wrong side of all right. But you’re so fucking tough, you know? I mean, I know you don’t talk, but you don’t fucking have to. You keep going. And you make it look easy.”
His words break over her head like cool water. She feels them soak into her skin. She’s always assumed everyone sees her as broken.
“I mean,” Luca says, “so many times I’ve thought about… but then I think, Well, if Willow can… I mean, I don’t want it getting out that some girl’s fucking tougher than me, do I?”
She can’t move for the wonder of it.
“That’s a joke, by the way,” Luca says. “I don’t actually mind a girl being tougher than me.”
He’s trying to sound like himself again, so they can both leave behind the story he’s told. Very gently, because she knows now how raw and tender he is beneath his shell, she puts her arms around him. After a minute, he does the same, and lets his face rest against the top of her head.
“God,” he sighs. “I’m so tired. I feel like I’ve run a marathon. Well, I’m saying that. I’ve never actually run a marathon. D’you think that fucking headcase is ever going to let us out, Willow? Or is this just where we live now?”
She doesn’t know what the Slaughter Man is going to do. Nothing about this evening has gone the way she imagined it would, nothing except the dark. She’d thought she would come into this darkness and be with Laurel, but instead she’s with Luca, leaning against her, warm and needy, as lost or as found as she is.
Pressed together, blind and wordless and exhausted, surrounded by their own ghosts, they sit for a length of time they have no way of measuring, and feel the gradual synchronisation of their breathing.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
She’s in a car park outside a hospital, and she knows she’s dreaming because every inch of the landscape provokes a strange sharp nostalgia that makes her heart sing and swell like a bird.
She’s alone, but somehow she isn’t lonely. There are other people in the car park, but if she looks too closely, they’ll melt into the concrete and disappear, because they’re not really here at all, they’re simply additional set-dressing for what she’s going to see. She is alone, and this is how it has to be, because although she’s dreaming, when she wakes she’ll be in the place where she’s no longer one of a pair, and it’s time for her to accept it.
The few cars she sees are ones she remembers from her childhood. There’s the Audi estate from when she and Laurel were small, the one that brought them home from the hospital, folded into car seats that looked like enormous shells holding a too-small pearl. They’d had that car until they were six, and she can still remember the number plate, which was Y626 KMK. She’d liked the double symmetry of it, had spent many happy hours on long journeys trying to work out the pattern that connected the 6 to the K, the 2 to the M. A little further on is the car that came after, the Range Rover they’d both disliked because it was hard to climb into and out of. The black Ford SUV. Finally, the car they have now, the fat wide Audi that brought her home from the hospital without her sister.
She stops by the window and looks inside, wondering if she might catch a single final glimpse of Laurel. No sign of her sister. Not even the sweet wrappers she’d left in the side pocket that they could none of them bear to remove, not even the half-drunk water bottle that rolled around in the footwell. Instead, she sees a discarded plush bunny, its fur white and pristine, its nose an impossible adorable pink. She yearns towards this toy so fiercely she thinks she might be able to reach in through the glass and pluck it out.
Another sign that this is a dream, as wish becomes will becomes action. The window’s now open, or perhaps simply not there, and her hands close around the plush bunny as if this is the treasure she’s been searching for all her life.
She’s too excited to wal
k to the hospital entrance. Instead she floats upwards into the air, pulling herself along with smooth strong movements. She sees the tops of the trees that grow around the edges of the car park, fat green clumps of dark green leaves that look almost artificially healthy, as if they’re models rather than the real thing. She wonders about sitting in one for a while, to savour the strange comforting warmth of this place that reminds her of the soft safe space beneath her duvet, scented with her breath and body, a cocoon built only for her. But then she remembers the plush rabbit in her hands and knows she doesn’t have time for this now. There’s something she has to do.
She comes back to earth outside the doors, which lead into a tall atrium filled with lifts. This is a place she remembers from the real world, and she feels dizzy with apprehension and for a moment the lights dim and she hears the clacking of beaks, the slow hum of the Slaughter Man as he prepares his instruments.
“It’s all right, love.” There are arms around her, a warm white expanse of bosom so welcoming that Willow thinks she might fall asleep even in her dream. “It won’t be like the last time. You’ve moved on.”
But I didn’t want to move on, Willow thinks, I wanted to stay where I was. I wanted to be with Laurel.
“It’s like having a scar that never quite heals,” the woman continues, and her voice is maddeningly familiar, so that Willow longs to be able to turn her face upwards and see who’s talking to her. Is it her mother? Is it Katherine? The vicar from Laurel’s funeral? Could it even be Laurel? “You’ll never be the same again. Some days it’ll give you trouble, and you’ll feel as if you’ve gone right back to the start again. But some days, you’ll be fine. You’ll never love anyone in the same way you love Laurel, but that’s all right. You’ll meet other people, and you’ll love them in the ways that are right for them.”
I don’t know what you’re talking about, Willow thinks. If she freed her face from the comfort of this woman’s vast pillowy breasts, would she be able to speak at last?
“You’ll get it eventually. Now it’s time for you to go upstairs.”
The woman disappears, and now Laurel’s in front of the lift. The doors slide open. Inside is a gaudy bronze space with tinted mirrors and a wide white velvet bench with twirly gold legs. A chandelier hangs from the ceiling.
This isn’t a hospital lift, Willow thinks sceptically. This is stupid. She goes in anyway, and sits down on the bench, balancing the plush rabbit on her knee. The doors slide closed, and the lift begins to move, even though she hasn’t chosen which floor she wants to go to.
“Don’t worry.” There’s someone standing in the corner of the lift, but she can’t quite resolve their shape into a definite person. They must be one of the background people, who she’s painted into the landscape to make it less eerily empty. “This lift only goes to one place.”
She wonders if she’s made a mistake after all, and this is a dream not of moving forward but of dying. Perhaps the white and gold and bronze colour scheme, the pristine purity of the white velvet, are signs that she’s making an ascent to some sort of afterlife?
“It’s all going to be afterlife from now on. That’s how life works. People die, but you keep living. Then one day it’s your turn to die and then they’re the ones living in the afterlife.”
That’s awful, she thinks.
“Death is only a change of state,” the figure says, and now she can see clearly enough to make out that he’s a man, tall and cadaverous, and with a hood pulled up over his face. “The energy we had locked up inside of us is released, but it can’t ever be destroyed. It’s just remade into something new.”
Something better?
“Who decides whether something’s better or worse than another thing? Is a fox better than a rabbit? Is a maggot better than a cow? Are you better than the wheat that made your bread?” He’s talking at her now rather than to her, as if this is a speech he’s given many times before, and now she thinks she knows who he is, but she doesn’t dare look too closely, because she wants to hear what he’s got to say. “We’re all simply expressions of energy. Life is the rejection of entropy, and we fight to live for ever, knowing the battle is futile and the war unwinnable. We were born in the hearts of stars; one day we’ll decay into low-grade heat. Everything that happens in between is a brutal miracle of life’s resistance. We can’t win the battle. Ragnarok waits for us all. The point isn’t to win. Only to try.”
You sound like my physics teacher, Willow thinks. Entropy and stars and low-grade heat. You sound like that day when he went off into this weird lecture and halfway through he started crying and then he told us his mum had died the week before.
“Well, of course I sound like him. I can only work with the materials you’ve given me. Nonetheless, I’m telling you something important. The universe rebels against its own destiny, and homo sapiens, being children of the universe, are rebels too. Fight it or accept it, we all know how the story ends. It’s what we do with the part in the middle that makes it all so interesting.”
And as the doors slide open, she catches a glimpse of his face beneath his hood, and she sees that he wears the bare bone skull of a crow that covers his head.
“My face isn’t important,” he says, seeing her trying to glimpse the face beneath the skull. “I’ll see you again one day. Until then, my advice is to try and find as much joy as you can.” He sweeps his arm out in a long, elegant gesture that verges on a bow.
Now she’s standing in a bright empty space with a polished linoleum floor. Ahead of her is the door that led into the Family Room.
No, she thinks, I’m not going back in there, I’m not.
But she has to. It’s the place where it all began, and it’s the place where it all begins again. The merry-go-round of love and fear, the joy of having perfectly counterbalanced by the pain of losing. She clutches the rabbit tightly by its ears, daring it to come to life in her hands and protest, to wriggle and kick and set itself free. But the toy remains lifeless and passive, and she knows there’s going to be no last minute reprieve. She pushes hard on the door.
She’s expecting to find her parents in there, perhaps sitting on the sofa or pacing impatiently around and waiting for her to join them. Instead she finds a room that’s almost entirely empty. There’s no sofa, no chair, no kitchen countertop with a microwave and kettle and tiny camping fridge. The only thing in it is something she doesn’t really have a word for, a thing like a giant rectangular sandwich box with its lid off, mounted on wheels and containing a small wriggling thing, pink and unformed. Stuck to the end of the box is a gigantic ribbon, a crude visual reminder that the thing inside is meant to be a gift.
No, she thinks, and closes her eyes so she won’t have to look.
Yes, she thinks, and opens her eyes again so she can peer inside.
The baby inside is fat and luscious, his chins quadrupled, his wrists and ankles plump little folds of flesh. When he sees her, he opens his eyes wide and flaps his arms and legs. The gesture is familiar even though she knows she’s never seen it before.
This isn’t what newborn babies look like, she thinks.
No, she thinks, but this is a dream. You’re making do with the materials you’ve been given. In his cot, the baby blinks solemnly, as if he can hear her thoughts.
And now she can feel her chest and stomach swelling, making room for all the love she’ll need for this new little one who will soon burst into her life, not to take Laurel’s place, but to make a new place, reshaping the world around him to accommodate his presence. Can she live with the terror of losing him? Her mother and father do that with her every day, so she’ll have to try and do the same. And besides – besides – those little arms, those huge eyes, the trusting way he’s looking at her.
She holds out the toy rabbit to the baby, watches as he takes it in his hands and brings one ear to his mouth, covering it with milky spittle, marking it as his own. Her fingers come to rest on his little chest, feeling the flutter of his tiny heart. Will it b
e strong enough to last? What if it breaks before he’s grown? What if…
I can’t do this, she thinks.
I can do this, she thinks.
Until the moment comes for real, she’ll have no way of knowing if she can do it or not. For now, there’s a new sensation, one at once strange and gloriously familiar; the sensation of her voice unlocking within her throat.
You’re going to need a name. Of course, it’s not for her to pick; her parents ought to be allowed to choose. But who said the universe was going to be fair? She’s stealing this one, and the hell with anyone who wants to stop her.
“Ash,” she says, her voice clear and bright in her throat. She closes her eyes so she can imagine the words taking physical form, like birds perhaps, fluttering around the cot and coming to rest against his skin. “Your name’s Ash.”
And the part of her that knows she’s dreaming sighs in surprise and wonders, Did I say that out loud? Did I say that in my sleep, wherever it is that I’m sleeping? And where am I sleeping, anyway?
So many places she might be. She might be in her bed in Joe’s cottage, the kitten curled tight and forgiving against the backs of her knees. She might be lying in the tight dusty space at the top of the haystack, where she and Luca will go when it’s time to say their goodbyes. She might be back at home, having made the leap forward through time and space past all the explanations and apologies they’ll both have to make. Or perhaps all of this is still to come, and she and he are asleep on the floor of the Slaughter Man’s workshop, waiting for him to return with Joe and Katherine, because of course he was never going to kill them. He shut them in, not to hurt them, but to keep them from themselves.
It doesn’t matter. All that matters is that she’s glimpsed the future, and seen something worth walking towards.
“Ash,” she says again, and this time she knows she’s speaking out loud. She can feel it, feel her voice coming back to her, the vibration in her throat, the warmth of the air as it moves past her tongue and out into the world.
The Slaughter Man Page 27
