Lost Girl

by Nevill, Adam

  ‘So the bigger picture, who can feed themselves now? The British and French, Canadians, Scandinavians, Polish, Russians, Japanese and Koreans. But what still remains in Mexico, Central America, the Caribbean, every single country but France that borders the Med, India, Pakistan and the Middle East, are all on their way to final collapse because of water, or a distinct lack of it.

  ‘We can only surmise that our own summers and winters are now standard too. But we’ll fall apart from within, even before we have a major food or water crisis here. The population is at least one hundred and twenty million now. We don’t even know exactly how many people are here, with more and more coming in every day, but it stopped being ninety million a long time ago. And the people won’t stop coming. Most of Central Africa and North Africa, southern Europe, is still on the move. Asia too . . . where are they going to go? Look at India and Pakistan. We’re already going the way of America, as well as much of Europe unlucky enough to not be Scandinavia or an island. You’re an intelligent man. You must have seen this coming from way back when.

  ‘So try and imagine the numbers . . . every man, woman and child on the move across the next four or five decades in Africa, Asia and the Middle East. Can any more be taken in, and absorbed in the bits and pieces that will still be functioning? Nine billion. Nine billion of us at the last count, and nearly all in the areas that will fail to support human life beyond a bit of hunter-gathering and cannibalism. You do know what happened on Easter Island, to the Mayans, and to the Vikings in Greenland? Well multiply that, Daddio, into the billions until only tens of millions would be left standing. Inconceivable.

  ‘And it would all be in full swing by the end of this century. Your daughter might still be around then. Her children will be for sure. You ever figured out what’s coming to our children and grandchildren? We have. And it cannot happen. Our child cannot go out like that. Yasmin cannot see that: total collapse.

  ‘A few more years like this, maybe a decade. Then a decade of it being worse. Then another decade of it being even worse than that. Cumulative collapse. Can technology keep pace with such disruption? Afraid not. Never has done. Not really. You must have known all of that vision of the future stuff they piped out was bullshit. We’re maxed out. We can’t even cope with our own public health requirements in a heatwave. The statistics are false. At least one million people died this summer across Europe. We’ll never generate enough juice to air-condition every home, only some, and we know how much resentment that causes. The speed of climate change has taken us all by surprise. It just has this momentum, you know?’

  He grinned. ‘And you really can’t believe anything you hear any more, out there. We all educate ourselves with online rumours from the indie journos. But here’s another rumour: everything is actually far worse than you think and have been told. Much worse. There are going to be very few winners. The needs of the many cannot be met, blah, blah, blah. That is what it has come down to, but the needs of the few can be met. Something drastic is required that doesn’t involve the nuclear option, before the nuclear option is standard practice. How many years away is that? Or is it weeks these days? India and Pakistan? Jesus Christ, they’ll kill us all. The Chinese are already taking what they want from what’s left around them in Asia. Can you see the US standing in the way when Japan and Taiwan finally get rolled? Who knows?

  ‘But a pandemic is a solution, an accidental lifeline for the species. If you like, the final solution. Think about it. Fucking brutal. Cold, but . . . Refugee problem: numbers reduced and better managed. Food shortages: solved. Land and housing shortages: solved. Water crisis: managed. And globally. It is going to be horrible, and you’re best off out of it, but our girl will be all right. You have our word on that.

  ‘Now, I think I’d like my breakfast. Karen has requested a few minutes with you, before . . . well, we all live in a time of inevitability. And for what it is worth, I did try and put in a good word for you, considering your grievances, and on behalf of this charming old-fashioned model of justice and fairness that you still hold dear, and have carried like one almighty cross for years. But, my pleas for clemency fell upon deaf ears. Sorry. But look at it this way, soon the pain stops.’ The man rose from his garden chair and walked to the door.

  The father scratched through his near-numb mind for something to say. ‘They’ll kill you all! And Penny.’

  The man paused, still smiling. ‘Why ever would they do that?’

  ‘The man who gave Karen up, he is one of them. He told me how this would go down, today. How they close the book when things go bad. How they cauterize loose ends. Your head will be separated from your shoulders this morning. Many people, good people, will soon know where my daughter is, and who took her. You think I’d come here without insurance? You think I care about what happens to me? The police know. The good ones. There are still good men and women out there who helped me. So you’d better hope the bug kicks things up a gear real quick, because if you somehow survive this morning, you’re both going to prison. Try covering your mouth then, cocksucker, when you’re in a cell with the swine.’

  It was hard to read the man’s face as he departed the room. He seemed embarrassed for the father, as if he had behaved in an undignified manner in a public place. But there was also a new preoccupation in what little the father could see of the man’s eyes: doubt.

  THIRTY-SIX

  ‘You frightened her.’ Karen Perucchi closed the door and came further inside the room. ‘Have you any idea how much?’

  Amidst the smell of rubber, stale electric engines, cement and his own sweat, her perfume wafted across to the father, reinforcing the sense that all the ghosts from his past were assembling in his final hour. And Karen had changed a great deal since he’d seen her last. A lot of work had been done to her face to reshape her eyes and lips, and she was thinner too. Too thin, as if she’d withered every ounce of fat from her frame. But she didn’t walk easily in the heeled mules, as if unaccustomed to the elevation, and her newly sculpted face seemed marginally askew atop the bony shoulders. The temptation to bite one side of her mouth in testing situations still pinched her inflated lips, and just below the unnaturally smooth planes of her refashioned features, there still lurked a hardness, and a suggestion of innate hostility.

  She came to him determined and on the attack. ‘You look terrible. Did you even consider what her reaction would be? But from what I remember, you always were incapable of thinking about anyone apart from yourself. I mean, what were you going to do, use an explosive on the doors with a child inside the house?’ She shook her head, closing her eyes to add emphasis to her outrage.

  ‘She is not your child!’

  Karen flinched, then instinctively bit the inside of her cheek.

  ‘You stole her! You took a child from her parents! For revenge! Because you were disappointed? Because you couldn’t handle rejection? Because you are fucking crazy, you abducted a child! I knew you were damaged, but this . . .’

  Karen’s mouth tried to smile, but became a rictus. Her eyes did not even come close to supporting the intended expression. Nostrils thinning, she inhaled deeply. ‘None of that matters any more, the whys and wherefores.’ She shook a thin arm in the air as if to dismiss these trifles for which she was now being held to account. ‘And do you know something? When I look at her now, I don’t even think about you.’

  Dumbfounded, the father gaped. ‘Are you . . . insane? It’s not about you. This is not about how you ever felt. You took a child. Her mother . . . her real mother and her father are going to be murdered in your home. Murdered because of you!’

  Karen closed her eyes and spread her twitchy fingers in the air, in line with her hips, as if engaged in some calming technique. ‘I doubt we will ever agree on who is to blame for that, for anything. I mean, how could we?’ She then laughed loudly, as if at his idiocy. ‘But did you know that I lost a child? Your child, our child? Mmm? I miscarried, and I couldn’t even share it with you, couldn’t turn to you w
hen I needed your support. Because you’d run away.’

  The father swallowed, even now still able to be concussed by these revelations of the life, all of the life, that he had been unaware of.

  ‘But I am not going to revisit that, revisit how much you hurt me. All that matters now is what is best for Yasmin. Have you understood nothing of what my partner explained to you? Yasmin’s best interests are never going to be served by you. My God, have you taken stock of yourself lately? How far your life is off track? Even here, the moment I stepped through that door I could see how murky, how discoloured, how all wrong, you were.

  ‘And what would she think of you, if she knew what you have done? Do you honestly think you are fit to be a father? That you are capable of caring for a child? Yet you still intrude here, after all this time, to endanger her life, so that you can stake some claim to a privilege that you forfeited a long time ago?’

  The father pulled with all of his strength against the chair, which shifted slightly upon the cement floor. ‘She is mine! Mine . . .’ He roared into the cool air and drowned out the distant, incessant hushing of the wind. The skin on the underside of one wrist slit open. A fresh shock of agony circling his ankles turned down the amplification of his rage, quickly, and left him panting with pain upon his chair. His body shuddered as if a large cloud of bubbles were rising through his blood; when they reached his head his vision nearly whited-out.

  Through the soiled wrappings of his indignity and despair, he was also aware that Karen was taking a moment to revel. An opportunity she had probably secretly craved since he’d walked out on her. And there was nothing he could do about it.

  ‘You and your wife, that boneless bitch . . . The best kind of family? A family for that special little girl? For Yasmin?’

  The father received the sense that she was pointing angrily at the closed door to the room, but he could no longer bear the sight of the woman before him and he kept his eyes on the cement floor. Yet her voice still came to him just like the voices of all those who had become empowered in the endless crisis, twisting the truth and adverse circumstances, remodelling perspective to suit their own interests. ‘The myth of this primacy of natural parenting that you cling to will soon quite literally be that, a myth. My partner and I are all that girl will ever need. And I will give her what you could never provide. You still have no idea, no idea how lucky she is to be here, with us.’

  Her confidence rose with the volume of her voice as she reassured herself that she was right and justified in her actions, as she always had done, and always would do. ‘You think I am going to let the mistakes you made have any bearing on my daughter’s future?’ Karen’s voice became a distant cry beyond the narrowing red walls of his mind, and the father wished for profound deafness, for a stroke, for death.

  ‘Yes, my daughter! My daughter will want for nothing. Know that. She will have a better life than you can imagine. The past doesn’t even figure here. Not any more. What’s best for my child is my only concern now. And you must know that what’s best for her is not you. Or what’s left of you.’ Seemingly relieved that, at last, he must surely be getting close to an understanding, Karen lowered her voice and the father sensed that a smile of satisfaction had relaxed her bitter face. ‘And this . . . this scourge is no accident either. It is a blessing. A gift from out of the chaos. It will be terrible, but there will be resurrection. A controlled rebuilding. Yasmin won’t suffer. She will survive and live a long life, healthy and protected. Always. With us. My girl will survive. My family will survive. And I will let nothing endanger my family.’

  If he had been looking he knew he would have seen Karen widen her eyes, challengingly and characteristically, at the conclusion to the words that he presumed had been prepared ahead of their confrontation. He guessed that she had prepared her outfit and appearance too, after he had woken the household and been taken down. She had spent hours preparing herself so that she would look her best during their final conflict. He guessed she’d been near-trembling with excitement at the prospect of facing him to tell him that she had won, that he had been wrong, and that she was better; it was all that really mattered to her. Competitive to the last, she hadn’t changed in any meaningful way. And though he deeply regretted killing a woman, the father knew that he could do it again.

  His eyes rose again, but could only look at her in the way a wounded, cornered child would look at an adult deranged by fantasies and rage. He spat at the floor. ‘Penny is not yours. She never will be. She is not your daughter.’ He shook his heavy, so tired head. ‘And I will die knowing that, as will you. As will you, devil.’

  The door opened and the masked face of her fiancé appeared. ‘They want to come in now, Karen.’ He spoke like a PA delivering an instruction to his employer.

  Distaste stiffening Karen’s plumped mouth, a nervous blinking followed this reminder of who else was on her property, and of what was about to be done in her home. A quick anxious tapping of one hand with an index finger, and then she turned her head towards the door and nodded. ‘I’m nearly done.’

  The door closed.

  Karen looked at the father for the last time. ‘You could have been someone. But my daughter will be.’ Fond of dramatic exclamations, she turned and swished to the door. ‘Better to be a devil than a dim, sentimental fool.’ The door closed and he was alone again.

  The father wondered why she’d let him live two years ago. Maybe because a double murder and a kidnap would have drawn more attention; she’d have thought through every angle for sure. But he understood that there had been another motive: she had wanted him to suffer, to hurt with the worst kind of agony: the loss of a child. Her sense of herself was godlike, as were her ideas of punishment for those who dared to wrong her, or to simply defy her. There was no great revelation to be sifted from the situation either; he was just another soul, lost within a herd of animals stampeding away from the forest fires, whinnying before flood water, or sinking knock-kneed and bone-thin to the dusty ground from hunger. People were murdered every day, left to starve, enslaved, drowned, crushed, killed randomly by pandemics, even by viruses imparted from the mouths of their loved ones whom they nursed. Only the cruel and ruthless, the conscienceless, appeared to triumph in what was left. And, for his species, that was perhaps the most terrible tragedy of all.

  His thoughts seem to derail, then become too active, as his mind accepted the end. But he spared a thought for the monarch that was coming, King Death in its rags, with the black seeds that fell from its bony fingers, and he thought it tremendous in its scything indifference. And the father prayed that King Death would be thorough with all those who had crowned themselves upon this terrible earth.

  And maybe none were worthy of inflicting life upon a child. Perhaps oblivion was for the best. The world had cored him, desiccated his flesh, salted and hung him up to wither. He’d had a good run and was amazed at how far he’d come, to within inches of his daughter. And she was alive. At least there was that.

  A tired, old voice spoke aloud inside his jumbled thoughts. It’s over. Shaking with cold, he acknowledged that death was the only mercy for him now.

  The door opened and the men came in. Their faces were concealed with Balaclavas. Without speaking they laid out a plastic sheet, unfurled the body bags and unzipped them. They set up a small camera on a tripod. From a black case an object inside a dirty cloth was retrieved and unwrapped. A machete was unsheathed. Old steel glimmered.

  One man left the room and returned with Miranda. Her head was concealed by a black hood, and her long body was limp and held beneath the arms as she was dragged into the makeshift abattoir.

  At this moment of their death, the father prayed that she would never wake again, and he released a sob and its sound shocked him. He prayed that his wife, the mother who had brought Penny into this life, would never know how close she had been to her little girl at the end.

  When they cut his ankles from the chair and pushed him off the seat, onto his knees and up
on the plastic, the father knelt beside his inert wife and tried to reach her with his bound hands. She was too far away, just like she’d been for most of the last two years. He thought of his daughter instead. And he recalled a memory of holding her hand as they walked along the red sand of a distant, windswept beach, looking for shells, so many years gone.

  Inside the room the lights flickered.

  ‘Daddy loves you,’ the father said to the image of the girl who had never stopped smiling inside him. She was nearby, but she had never been further away than she was now.

  And then he closed his eyes on the whole damned world.

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  The ceiling lights went out.

  Each passing moment seemed to expand from the centre of his mind, humming as if it carried volts through a cable, and still he waited for a cold incision through his neck. He kept his head down, and his eyes clenched as tightly shut as his jaw, for fear he might soon look back upon his kneeling body from where his head bounced and then settled upon the floor.

  The father attempted to stop the rotations of his final thoughts, because the sole image he would die cherishing would keep him buoyant until the very end. The last of him would be her.

  Behind him a heavily accented voice said, ‘L’Homme devant la mort. Yonah Abergil.’

  The door opened again, and the smell of wet air and the rushing of the wind came into the garage.