Girl A(100)

It was the kind of happiness which you try to preserve for more difficult days. I was blonde again: Ethan will approve, I thought. We drank through the afternoons and cooked extravagant dinners: a fish course, a meat course. Cheese. We sat on the veranda late into the night, talking or reading. Olivia didn’t ask about the events of the summer, and I didn’t speak of them.

‘When we’re old,’ Olivia said, ‘we can buy a taverna.’

‘Without any customers, though,’ I said.

‘God, no.’

‘We’ll turn people away,’ I said, ‘even when there isn’t a soul in the place.’

‘“Have you got a reservation?”’

On the day before the wedding, I woke to voices from the cove. An intrusion; maybe something left over from a dream. I climbed from bed and wandered to the bottom of the garden, coffee in hand. A yacht had moored at the bay, fifty metres out to sea, and the dinghy was already on the beach. A man sprang from the jetty, rolled in the air, and crashed through the water. When he surfaced, he shouted back to a group on the deck, at breakfast. English. I felt bitter disappointment. The magic was broken. The wedding guests had started to arrive.

That night, I kept Olivia on the veranda for as long as I could. Past midnight, and after the music from the yacht had died; into the second bottle and then the third. ‘I’m retreating,’ she said, close to two, her palms held up in defence. ‘And my strong advice is that you should, too.’

She returned one more time, with her toothbrush hanging from her mouth.

‘You know,’ she said, ‘you don’t even have to go to this stupid wedding.’

‘Goodnight, Olivia.’

‘Go to bed, Lex.’

Sleep was unfeasible. I cleared the table. I showered. I opened my bedroom window and lay on top of the covers, surveying the night. I was too drunk to read. The silence of the house extended on every side, out to the ocean and to the road; to Delilah and Ethan, alone in rented rooms; up to the town and to the venues in wait. It seemed that everybody else on the island was asleep. For something to do, I hung my wedding suit from the bedroom door and surveyed the hollow clothes, as if they might entertain me. Double-breasted blazer and wide, slack trousers. Flamingo pink.

Let them look.

When there was nothing left to do, I thought of the three a.m. things. My last meeting with Dr K, when I had told her that I was looking forward to landing in New York. My parents’ petition at the kitchen table, and the cross-mattress wrangling which would have led to it. What I had said to Delilah. Not in the Romilly, but the time before it.

It was the last of our miserable family meetings. Each session was held in some form of centre, with bright, obvious objects intended to distract us. There had been a facilitated conversation and a group exercise; now we were in Free Time. Ethan was revising, with a hand held to his forehead, and a pen tucked behind one ear. Gabriel was focused on his PlayStation: a biped rat was fleeing from a boulder, and was crushed on each run, without exception. I was beating Delilah at Scrabble.

‘What’s your house like?’ she said.

‘What?’

‘Your house. Where you live.’

‘It’s nice,’ I said. ‘Really nice.’ I thought about it. ‘I have my own bedroom,’ I said.

Delilah snorted. She was surveying her letters, in disgust.

‘Everybody has their own bedroom,’ she said. ‘What about your parents? Are they strict?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I mean, I can do what I want. Can you?’

‘Sometimes.’

‘Sometimes?’

She was watching me, her whole body still. Coiled. I returned to my letters.

‘I saw them, when they brought you in,’ Delilah said. ‘The people who adopted you.’

I looked up.

‘They’re kind of old,’ she said.

I thought of Mum and Dad: how they had accompanied me on the train to London that morning, with homemade sandwiches and two copies of the same newspaper. I was wearing a new dress which Mum and I had selected, at length, for this meeting, and which had started to itch as soon as we left the house.

Delilah wore ripped denim and a hooded sweatshirt.

‘I suppose that’s what happens,’ she said, ‘when you’re the last one left.’

I took the edge of the Scrabble board and threw it in her direction. The board missed her, and folded on the floor. Letters careened across the room. A few bounced from her face, and landed, anticlimactically, in her lap.

‘How did you get to survive?’ I said. My voice embarrassingly loud in that little plastic room. ‘When—’

Doors were opening; hands were reaching for us. In that moment, Delilah was wounded. She wiped her mouth with her hand, as if checking for blood. As if I had hit her.

‘You should have died in there,’ I said.

I started calling for Evie, then. It was the shock of her absence in the room. In each family, you have your allies, and mine was lost. After all of my efforts, I was alone and ashamed, with old parents and a cheap dress. I called for her as I had done in the early days in the hospital, like she was waiting just behind the windows. Delilah held to a minder, and Ethan held to his desk. It came to them slowly, in the nights that followed. I called for her like you only call for somebody you’re expecting to come.