by JA Huss
Besides. I am Christine, and he is Danny, and together we can do just about anything we set our minds to.
But then he surprises me by asking, “Do we need guns?”
And I surprise myself by answering, “Not yet.” But it’s a lie. Because I don’t actually believe that. I’m taking a chance with this plan. I’m hoping that the ties that bind are still strong and still matter, but I can’t know that for sure until we get there.
He sends a text to the driver and we wait at the curb in front of Debenhams until the car pulls alongside and we get in, me handing the driver a piece of paper with the address on it.
Danny eyes that piece of paper, then eyes me, but he doesn’t reach for it.
Is this behavior disturbing? Or comforting?
I go with comforting. Because it says he trusts me. And trust is the only thing that matters right now.
It takes forever to get outside London traffic, so then it’s another hour to get to the actual place we’re going. Danny’s restless and silent the whole time. Sometimes playing on his phone, sometimes looking out the window. Sometimes rummaging through the backpack he brought with him from the yacht, which doesn’t contain anything useful, per se. Like there’s no gun in there. There’s no knife in there. But he’s got snacks. And at one point he offers me a water, which I take, and a pack of unsalted cashews he took from the jet, which I decline.
I am starving but too nervous to eat, not knowing who and what is waiting for me on the other side of this long, boring ride out into the countryside.
But it is quite picturesque. Quintessential English in all directions.
And then, before I’m ready, we’re pulling up to the gate of the house, which is open. Almost welcoming. Which is a lie. But we pull through and continue down the driveway until all my time is up and we have to get out.
Which we do. Danny zips up his jacket, but I leave mine open because I’m suddenly hot and sweaty, even in the biting Surrey wind.
I wipe the palms of my hands on my jeans and walk toward the front door like I know what I’m doing. And when I get there, I stop, look over my shoulder to find Danny at my back, gather up all my courage, and knock.
CHAPTER TEN - ALEC
“No,” I say, returning from outside.
“No what?” Eliza asks. I find her in the kitchen, which has clearly been renovated and made suitable for the twenty-first century. Or else the First Duke of Whatever the Fok who once lived here was very ahead of his time. She’s making a cup of tea, using the electric kettle. How very goddamn British of her.
“What you said. About the baby. No.”
She places down her mug and squares off to me. “Which part? Can you be specific? I’d like to know exactly which thing you think you’re giving me an ultimatum on, so that when I tell you to go fuck yourself, I can be precise.”
“You said that there’s no way you’ll let me raise it. No. If it’s my child, I will, by God, raise that kid in whatever way I see fit.”
She places her hands on the massive farmhouse table in front of her and leans forward. “Will you now?”
“You’d certainly better believe I fokken will.”
“Hm,” she says, turning to pour the water from the kettle over the tea leaves in her mug. The steam rises as she pours, like some kind of genie in ethereal form, come to spy on our conversation. She turns back, pulls out a chair from the table, and sits with her hands around the sides of the mug. It’s still drafty. While I was out, the rain started again. She’s put on an oversized sweater. The sleeves are too long for her arms and they cover her hands and almost all of her fingers. She looks like an urchin from Oliver Twist. Yet another case in which her Dickensian upbringing peers out from behind her crafted façade.
“Hm? Fok does that mean? Hm?”
“Nothing. Where did you go?
“When?”
“Just now.”
“Around. Down the lane. Why?”
“Did something happen?”
“What do you mean? Like what?”
“I don’t know. Like Saul becoming Paul on the road to Damascus.”
“Fok are those cunts?”
“Charming.” She blows on her tea and takes a sip. “I guess what I’m saying is that I’m surprised you feel so strongly about wanting the responsibility of caring for a child.”
“Why?”
“Because, my precious, you’re the most selfish person I’ve ever known.”
Sometimes I have to stop when Eliza talks to me like that. No one talks to me the way she does. Not even Christine or Danny ever talked to me the way Eliza does. But, for some reason, when she does it, it doesn’t really bother me. I do not welcome it, and if she didn’t, I’d be just as happy. But I don’t have a problem allowing it.
She’s never done it in front of anyone else. Nor would she, I don’t imagine. She knows that if she did, I’d have no choice to take action. Action that no one would be pleased about. And so, for some reason, we’ve fallen into a pattern where she gets to do it in private and I allow it. I think it’s the tacit agreement we have that lets her continue to know she’s special in my world.
I take off my newly rained-upon jacket and place it on the back of the chair across from her that I sit down in. “I’m going to tell you what will happen next.”
“Are you now?”
“Tomorrow, we’re going to leave this place and we’re going to Nara.”
“Are we then?” She takes another sip of her tea. I choose to ignore her annoying and rhetorical questions and I don’t say anything. After a moment, she asks, “Why Nara?”
“I have a house and no active concerns there at the moment. It’s safe and I can have medical staff on site.”
“Nara’s the place where they have the park with all the deer, yes?”
“Once we’re there—”
“Don’t like deer.”
“Once we’re there—”
“Knew a lad once called Trevor. Got bit by a deer tick and developed Lyme disease. Nasty business that. Don’t you have an apartment in Tokyo or someplace a little more cosmopolitan?”
“Will you fokken stop taking the piss?” I slam the table so ferociously that it jolts the mug sitting way across the other side. She sits back. Looks at me. Nods. I go on. “Once the baby comes, we’ll make decisions about what happens then. But, for now, this is what we’re doing. How pregnant are you?”
“Quite.”
“You know what I fokken mean.”
“About eleven weeks, I suppose.”
I start working the math out in my head. “We’ve only been here…”
“It didn’t happen on this jaunt, darling. I imagine it happened on that stopover between the States and Joburg that you took a few months back. Almost three months back, to be precise.”
I pause to think about that. I barely even remember it. It wasn’t official business. I was just getting away. Things with Christine were… complicated, and on my way back to South Africa, I had my pilot land at Heathrow. I called Eliza from the plane and told her to meet me at the airport hotel.
Savagely romantic.
“Yeah, all right,” I say. “Well, this is what’s happening now. So…” I stand, pull my cell phone from my jacket pocket.
“Who are you calling?”
“Whoever I need to. We can arrange for your shit to be sent, after.” As I’m pressing ‘send,’ she steps around the table, pulls the phone from my hand, and ends the call before it can commence. “Oi, give me my phone,” I say, reaching.
She places it down on the table and puts her arms around my waist. She kisses me lightly on the lips and looks into my eyes.
“Alec?”
“Yeah?”
“Do you love me?”
I squint. Not only was I not expecting the question, I don’t have a ready answer. She’s never asked me before. It’s never come up. If I’m honest, I don’t know if I’ve ever even considered it.
“What?” I say in response.
“Of course I would.”
“OK, well, that’s not really fair. You’re a sociopath. I think you just like killing people. You don’t need an excuse. But the bigger question remains… do you love me?”
“I… I feel like…”
“I didn’t think so.” She smiles. I would call it a sad smile, but it’s not. It’s just… accepting. “Which is fine. Because, honestly, Alec… I don’t love you. I don’t. And I know you don’t care. Which is perfect. Because if you did, you wouldn’t be you and this wouldn’t work. But, dear heart, I’m not sure that I see us raising a child together and living happily ever after. Happily ever afters are for romantics and simpletons. And we are neither of those things. Are we?”
“I’m not trying to be something I’m not or suggest that I’m interested in living a fiction. I’m just—”
“You’re just feeling guilty. But—and please consider seriously what I’m saying—you’re feeling guilty about a whole raft of things that have nothing to do with me. And since you’ve gone and gotten your life right cocked up and aren’t sure you can fix it this time… you’re trying to fix it with me. And Alec, my angel”—she takes a deep breath—“I don’t want to be someone’s fucking consolation prize.”
I’m just about to respond when I am reminded of a short-short story that I once heard described by an oke I knew. He said it was “the scariest thing he could of.” He was a monstrous naaier who was unintimated by anyone or anything. Not even me. Which was a shame for him. Had he been more easily intimidated, he might still be alive today.
But in the moment right before my hands tightened around his throat and he took his last breath, he said, “I ain’t scared.”
“Good for you,” I told him.
And then he looked up at me, smiled, and said, “The only thing what’s ever scared me is this thing I heard once… ‘The last man on earth sits alone in a room. Suddenly… there’s a knock on the door.’” His smile widened and he continued, “Just hope, bru, that—one day—when the knock comes, you ain’t the one sitting in the chair.”
It was such a curious thing for him to say in that moment that I laughed slightly.
And then I choked him to death.
It’s an odd thing to be remembering now. Except maybe it’s not. Because here, in the middle of this isolated estate, miles from nowhere, alone with Eliza in this place that no one knows about…
Suddenly, there’s a knock on the door.
CHAPTER ELEVEN - DANNY
I wait, standing behind Christine, as the sound of footsteps approach the door from the other side. She’s nervous. Been nervous this whole car trip. And I have a million questions, all of which I’m holding inside. But they are about to explode because I have a very bad feeling about what’s happening right now.
The locks disengage.
Christine sucks in a breath of air.
The door opens inward.
Christine exhales.
And the woman on the other side is someone I know. Someone I was just asking about back in Hilo, in fact.
“Well, look at this,” Eliza Watson says with a smirk. “I’ve been wondering you would find us.”
CHAPTER TWELVE - ALEC
“Expecting someone?” Eliza asks, with a wry smile.
“Fok are you smiling at? What’s going on?”
“Honestly, I smile when I’m nervous, and right now things feel like they could go any number of terrible ways, don’t they?”
I stare at the main entry door all the way across the other room. It sounds like someone is pounding on it violently. And while that’s likely just an illusion created by the reverberating bounce of sound in the wide-open space, it’s also just as likely that there is some kind of violence fueling the knock. Violence fuels every moment that exists in my life.
No one knows I’m here. The only person who even knows about this place is Lars. But there’s no way my brother has come.
Unless…
I snap out of my momentary stupor, realizing that whoever is here, if they wanted to do harm, they wouldn’t be knocking. So they’re probably not here to kill me.
Probably.
But before I can step to greet the arrival of this unexpected guest, Eliza is breezing across the floor and has her hand on the great, primeval doorknob.
Time slows. I can hear my breathing filling my lungs. Eliza’s hand goes to turn the knob and she looks back at me over her shoulder with a shrug in her smile and a raise of her eyebrows. And when she opens the door…
There is Christine.
If you had asked me to lay odds on who it might be, I honestly would have wagered at about a million to one against it being Christine. After everything. After… all of it. She’s possibly the last person I would have said would come looking.
And yet, for whatever reason, I am not surprised at all.
She looks a bit like a drowned rat. Her white sneakers are all muddy from having trekked up to the door in the rain. Her tight blue jeans look as though they’re being shrink wrapped to her body. She has on a yellowish windbreaker that calls to mind the dress she used to wear every day. The dress that would allow her to pretend that no matter what was happening it would always be sunny.
Fokken irony, that.
Her wet hair is matted to her cheeks and the rain on her face makes it impossible to tell whether or not she’s been crying. Neither that she has or hasn’t would shock me at this point.
And now something that confuses me happens.
The knocking continues.
The door is open, Christine is standing here in the rain, and yet I can still hear the knocking. A bang, bang, banging that causes me to look around and see from where it’s coming.
Christine and Eliza don’t acknowledge it. Through the open passage to the kitchen, far across the great entry hall, they are just… talking. I can’t hear what they’re saying. I can’t make out what’s going on.
And quite without warning, I cannot see them as well as a moment before either.
I can’t hear them. I can’t see them. I only know that they are close.
And from somewhere I can’t understand, the knocking continues.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN - CHRISTINE
She hasn’t changed much. It’s only been a couple years since I saw her last but from what I’ve heard she’s been quite busy these past two years. And I don’t know why I expected her to… I don’t know… look more… motherly. Since she is now, in fact, a mother. As evident by the tow-headed, blue-eyed, pig-tailed toddler clinging to her knee at the moment.
But Eliza is Eliza is Eliza. Through and through. She might be more beautiful now than ever.
I hold in my jealousy and my rage. I check all my hidden feelings of betrayal because, like it or not, that’s how we got to this moment in the first place.
She is why I betrayed Alec. And now she will be the way I get him back.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN - ALEC
“Mr. van den Berg, sir. Mr. van den Berg? Are you all right, sir?”
That does not sound like Christine.
One: the accent is not American. It’s very distinctly Saffie.
And two: it’s an oke’s voice.
Where am I? What the fokken hell is going on now?
“Mr. van den Berg, sir. Are you all right?”
&nb
sp; My eyes spring open and I sit up. Oh, shit. That’s right. I know where I am.
Fok my poepol.
My ribs remind me quickly that they’re not all hundreds just yet, the hint of residual pain through my torso the last vestiges of the careening fall I took a few months back. Me and Lars, tumbling over the edge of that fokken waterfall back in the States like goddamn Sherlock Holmes and Moriarty at the end of The Final Problem.
Which one of us was Holmes and which Moriarty, I can’t be sure. I think perhaps we were both Moriarty. Both of us the villain.
“Yeah, Liam, I’m fine,” I call back through the closed bedroom door.
“May I come in, sir, and make sure?”
I sigh, because it’s been like this for a while now. Ever since I awoke from whatever comatose state I was in for however long I was in it, Liam and the other laaities who have been tasked with looking after my wellbeing refuse to take my word for it when I tell them I’m OK. Whoever is responsible for my being here has instructed them to ensure that I’m “proper cared for.”
They’ve apparently also been instructed not to tell me who the fok it is that brought me here, how the fok I was rescued from that tumble, or what the fokken plan is in my being here or for how long I am expected to stay. All I know for certain is that young men with guns are very eager to make sure I’m comfortable and well fed and seen to. And they’re also nervously emphaatic about not allowing me to leave the property. And since they’re the ones with automatic weapons and I’m only armed with silk pyjamas, I suppose they get final say.
“Yeah, man,” I say. “Come on in.”
The door opens, gingerly, and the laaitie called Liam who has, I reckon, been assigned as my principal caretaker, peeps his face through.
“Everything’s fine, sir?”
“Yeah, man. Aces. Why?”
“You were making… quite a bit of noise, sir.”
“Was I?”
