The Rabbit Girls(58)

‘Hilda called you?’ she tries to say, but is abruptly stopped as he kisses her. She tries to fight, at least she thinks she tries to fight. But suddenly her limbs feel like jelly. What is the point, she thinks.

Axel guides her behind the bench and she realises what is happening. She is stuck, no one can see her.

There is a point, she thinks, and Eva believes her. Eva knows. Miriam pushes against his chest; her whole being pushing against him. Nothing. Like pushing a wall. He is still holding her wrist so tight that she cannot move under his hands.

He turns her around so that she is facing the wall, a picture hangs there, it’s of the sea at sunset and two people paddling along the shore. He presses himself into her and her cheek touches the cold wall, the picture hangs in a pine frame and the back of it is bowed so that it touches the wall too.

He breathes heavily into her ear, she feels his breath and shivers, a full-body revulsion, trying to tug her arm free, he places it in the small of her back.

‘Now then, this is a familiar sight,’ he says, kissing her cheek and moving her slightly to the right, away from the picture and closer to the corner. He touches her neck with his hand and runs a fingernail along the crevice of her throat. ‘Very familiar.’ He swiftly kisses her on the cheek. ‘I have missed you, Mim.’

She looks away, trying to turn her head, but he forces his body into her and she feels crushed between him and the wall; suffocated.

Then he pulls her skirt up and a ‘chink’ of metal chimes on the floor. She doesn’t notice it until he pauses, he pulls on her so that she almost topples backwards and collects the item that fell.

‘What’s this?’ He holds a glinting bit of gold in his hand, but it’s too close for Miriam to see clearly. He glides her down the wall to the floor. She is completely covered, by his body and the bench. He is right on top of her. She sees a ring, her wedding ring, at eyeline now.

‘What is this?’ he says and tugs at her wrist hard. Her ring, she must have forgotten to remove it from her skirt when she took it off days ago.

Miriam can feel the cool dampness of the floor on her cheek. He grabs at her underwear as she tries to turn to move him off her. He holds her chin and guides it to face him, pulling on the muscles in her neck until they tremor in pain.

‘You know how much I need you,’ he says and allows her chin to rest back on the ground. ‘My wife. I cannot live without you, my love.’

She looks at the floor, it is cut into squares all neatly in a row, flecks and tiny outlines that look like scattered daisies. At walking height, Miriam thinks, the floor is plain green. But it isn’t. She looks for patterns, she counts the flowers, tiny white blobs she can see. She struggles to move herself, to move away from him. He holds her hand against her pelvis, pinning her down, positioning himself over her.

‘Hush, hush,’ he says, breathing hard.

Then the pain.

It moves within her like a red-hot wave, again and again.

Not ceasing.

Each crash tumbling over the last.

Red. Black, then, finally, white hot.

A tiny scream escapes from her lips with spittle and she watches as the flowers all bleed into one another. The floor, after all, is just green. He leans over her, pressing his entire body on hers and she, once again, feels unable to breathe. He is hot from the shower, fresh and clean.

‘I have missed you so much.’ He says and uses her to move himself up. He stands and she hears him rearrange his clothes before bending to her again. He picks up her hand and kisses her knuckles.

‘I will never hurt you, Mim. I love you.’

Then cold steel, a band, is forced on to her finger. Her wedding band, in its rightful place, back on her finger.

She lies alone for a moment, expecting his return. But he has gone, she hears his footsteps receding. She quickly pulls herself up on the bench, then leans on the cabinet.

The picture. The couple on the beach, the clearer-than-clear sea, has shifted on its hinge and now looks as if viewed from the cabin of a boat. She straightens it and, staying close to the wall, staggers away.





23





MIRIAM


A man dressed in blue scrubs sees her. She keeps walking, but he must ask her something, though she can’t quite hear him. She just knows she needs to put one foot ahead of the other. But the man is at her arm and with gentle pressure guides her through the empty hallway.

‘I’m Karl, a porter here, are you a patient?’

She shakes her head.

‘You look like you’ve had a bit of a fright.’

She realises her tights are ripped, her skirt is too high, she tries to pull it down, but her jacket hangs at a strange angle over her shoulder and she can’t make the angle with her arm, which feels heavy and numb, to pull her skirt lower. She leans into the man’s shoulder.

‘I need to go home,’ she says.

Many people speak to her. Touch her. Then they start speaking of her as if she were no longer there. When she can locate the voice to the person and the person to the location in the small cubicle space she says quietly to no one in particular:

‘I’d like to go home.’

‘We’d like to examine you, if we may, to see if you have any injuries. You’re obviously in shock,’ says a nurse, taking Miriam’s arm out of its jacket and attaching a cuff and a cold stethoscope to the flex of her arm.