Girl A(10)

‘I can work from London this week. I’ll see how things go. We may need to visit the house, I guess.’

I could hear him contemplating it, recalling the windows, the garden, the front door and the doors after that. Each of the rooms. I was ruining his morning.

‘We can find a time for that. Listen. Get a Friday-night train up to Oxford, stay with me and Ana. It’s been ages since you’ve been in the country. And it would be nice to see you before the wedding.’

‘It’s work-dependent. I don’t know how long I can stay.’

‘Well, tell them your mother died. You’ll get some leeway for that.’

The dog was barking. ‘Fuck,’ he said.

‘I can go.’

‘Friday. Call me when you’re on a train.’

At the beginning – and at the end, too – it was just me and Ethan.

First born; last adopted.

It was a few months after we escaped before arrangements were made. I remember very little about that time, and each of the memories seems exaggerated, as if I’ve taken somebody else’s story and imagined myself into the narrative. When they first woke me up, days after the escape and already a few surgeries down, they took me to a bath and washed me. My skin slowly came into view, whiter than I had remembered. It took hours, and each time they stopped I asked them to keep going: there was dirt in my ears, in the creases of my elbows, in the folds between my toes. When they finished, I held to the tub and refused to get out. ‘There might be more,’ I said, never wanting to leave the water and the warmth of it. It felt like the ocean would feel in Greece, where Evie and I planned to live.

Thin, downy hair had grown on my face and shoulders. ‘Your body was keeping you warm,’ one of the nurses said, when I asked her, and she kept her face turned away from me until she could leave the room. My bruises faded to a dull jaundice spread, and some of my bones began to retreat, back beneath fat and flesh.

I couldn’t believe that people didn’t enjoy being in hospital. That people could actually want to leave. I had my own room. I had three meals a day. I had patient doctors, who talked me through my body and why they had to open it. All of the nurses were tender, and sometimes, when they had left, I would cry in the clean, quiet room, the way that you cry when somebody is nice to you in the middle of a terrible day.

At night, and asleep, I called for Evie. I woke with people above me, consoling me, and her name still in my mouth. She was in a different hospital, they said, and I couldn’t see her just yet.

A week after I first woke up, I opened my eyes and found a stranger in the room. She was sitting on the chair beside my bed, reading from a ring-bound file. In the moments before she knew that I was awake, I examined her. She wasn’t wearing hospital uniform. Instead, she wore a sharp, pale dress and a blue jacket, and the highest shoes that I had ever seen. Her hair was short. Her eyes flicked through the words before her, and as she read, a line between them creased and softened, according to the sentence.

‘Hello,’ she said, without looking up. ‘I’m Dr K.’

Many months later, I understood that it was spelt as a word – Kay – but by that time we knew each other well, and she liked my interpretation: ‘It’s far more concise,’ she said.

She set down her folder and held out her hand to me, and I took it. ‘I’m Alexandra,’ I said. ‘You probably already know that.’

‘I do,’ she said, ‘yes. But it’s better to hear it from you. Alexandra, I’m one of the psychologists who works with the hospital and with the police. Do you know what that entails?’

‘The mind,’ I said.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘That’s right. So while all of the doctors and the nurses will be looking after your body, we can talk about your mind. How you’re feeling and what you’re thinking. Both what has happened, and what you would like to happen now. Sometimes the police might join us, and sometimes it will just be me and you. And when it’s like that – when it’s just the two of us – whatever you say to me is confidential. It’s a secret.’

She stood up from the chair and knelt at the side of my bed. ‘Here’s the thing,’ she said. ‘A promise. I can understand minds, and I can work with them. I like to believe that I can make them better. But I can’t read them. So we’ll need to be honest. Even about the difficult things. Does that sound OK?’

Her voice was starting to distort. ‘OK,’ I said.

She said something more, but she was in motion, tipping away from me, and when I next woke it was night-time, and she was gone.

After that, she visited each day. She was sometimes accompanied by two detectives; they were there when she explained that Father had killed himself shortly after I left the house. The first team of respondents found him in the kitchen. Despite multiple attempts, it was not possible to resuscitate him.

Did they try? I wondered. Then: And how hard?

Instead, I asked how he had done it. The detectives looked at Dr K, who looked at me. ‘He consumed a toxic substance,’ said Dr K. ‘A poison. There were many, many indications that this had been planned, and planned for some time.’

‘There was a large supply in the household,’ one of the detectives said. ‘We speculate that this might have been the endgame.’

They looked at one another again. There was a relief to them, as if they had got something out of the way which had gone better than they expected.