Into the Water(75)

He smiled at me. I remembered how we used to think he was handsome, and it turned my stomach. ‘I didn’t take Katie from you,’ he said. ‘Katie wasn’t yours, Lena. She was mine.’

I wanted to scream at him, to scratch his face. She wasn’t yours! She wasn’t! She wasn’t! I dug my nails into my hands as hard as I could, I bit my lip and tasted the blood again, and listened to him justifying himself.

‘I never thought of myself as the sort of person who would fall for a girl. Never. I thought people like that were ridiculous. Sad old losers who couldn’t get a woman their own age.’

I laughed. ‘Exactly,’ I said. ‘You thought right.’

‘No, no.’ He shook his head. ‘That’s not true. It isn’t. Look at me. I’ve never had any trouble getting women. They come on to me all the time. You shake your head now, but you’ve seen it. Christ, you did it yourself.’

‘I did fucking not.’

‘Lena—’

‘Do you honestly think I wanted you? You’re deluded. It was a game, it was—’ I stopped talking. How do you even explain something like that to a man like him? How do you explain that it was nothing to do with him and everything to do with you? That – for me, in any case – it was about me and Katie and the things we could do together. The people we did them to were interchangeable. They didn’t matter at all.

‘Do you know what it’s like when you look the way I do?’ I asked him. ‘I mean, I know you think you’re hot or whatever, but you have no idea what it’s like to be like me. Do you know how easy it is for me to make people do what I want, to make them uncomfortable? All I have to do is look at them a certain way, or stand near them, or stick my fingers in my mouth and suck and I can see them go red or hard or whatever. That’s what I was doing to you, you retard. I was taking the piss out of you. I didn’t want you.’

He scoffed, gave this unconvinced little laugh. ‘Right, OK,’ he said. ‘If you say so, Lena. So what did you want? When you threatened to betray us, when you went shouting your mouth off so your mother could hear – what did you want?’

‘I wanted … I wanted …’

I couldn’t tell him what I wanted, because what I wanted was for things to go back to the way they were. I wanted us to go back to the time when Katie and I were always together, when we spent every hour of every day with each other, when we swam in the river and no one looked at us and our bodies were our own. I wanted to go back to the time before we came up with that game, before we realized what we could do. But that’s only what I wanted. Katie didn’t. Katie liked being looked at. For her, the game wasn’t just a game, it was more. Right back at the beginning, when I first found out and we were arguing about it, she said to me, ‘You don’t know what it feels like, Lena. Can you imagine? To have someone want you so much that he’ll risk everything for you – like, everything. His job, his relationship, his freedom. You don’t understand what that feels like.’

I could feel Henderson watching me, waiting for me to speak. I wanted to find a way to say it, to make him see that she was getting off not just on him but on her power over him. I’d have liked to be able to tell him that, to wipe that look off his face, the one that said he knew her and I didn’t, not really. But I couldn’t find the words just then, and in any case it wasn’t the whole story because no one could deny that she did love him.

There was a pain behind my eyes, a sharp pinch that told me I was about to cry again, and I stared down at the ground because I didn’t want him to see the tears in my eyes, and I saw that lying in the dirt, right between my feet, there was a nail. It was a long one, three or four inches at least. I moved my foot slightly so that I was covering the tip of it, then I pressed down to raise up the other end.

‘You were just jealous, Lena,’ Henderson said. ‘That’s the truth, isn’t it? You always were. I think you were jealous of both of us, weren’t you? Of me, because she chose me, and of her, because I chose her. Neither of us wanted you. And so you made us pay. You and your mother, you …’

I let him talk, I let him spout his deluded bullshit, and I didn’t even care then that he was so wrong about everything, because all I could focus on was the tip of that nail, which I’d levered up with my foot. I slipped my hand under the table. Mark stopped talking.

‘You should never have been with her,’ I said. I was looking behind him, over his shoulder, trying to distract him. ‘You know that. You must know that.’

‘She loved me, and I loved her, completely.’

‘You’re an adult!’ I said, keeping my eye on the space behind him, and it worked – for a second he glanced over his shoulder and I let my arm slip lower between my legs, stretching out my fingers. Cold metal in my grasp, I straightened my back, prepared myself. ‘Do you really think it matters how you felt about her? You were her teacher. You’re twice her fucking age. You were the one who was supposed to do the right thing.’

‘She loved me,’ he said again, hangdog. Pathetic.

‘She was too young for you,’ I said, gripping the shaft of the nail tightly in my fist. ‘She was too good for you.’

I went for him, but I wasn’t quick enough. As I sprang to my feet, I caught my hand under the table, just for a second. Mark lunged at me, grabbing my left arm, yanking it as hard as he could, pulling me halfway across the table.