Girl A(12)

‘But did you ask them?’

‘It’s something I know,’ she said, and then, unexpectedly: ‘I’m sorry.’

That left Ethan and me. After many weeks of indecision, Mother’s sister, Peggy Granger, agreed that she would see Ethan through senior school. She had two older sons, and she could handle another boy. The expectation was that he would leave her home after three years, when he had completed the school examinations that he had missed, although Ethan – being Ethan – was out in two. Peggy had visited us just before things became bad, and I had answered the door, so I was sure that she still thought of me. When she was asked, she denied ever having been to Moor Woods Road. Besides, she said, and God forgive her, she wasn’t used to teenage girls.

In the London office, people wanted to know two things: first, how was Devlin? And, once I had told them that: why was I back?

Let me tell you about Devlin.

Devlin always had an exciting project – a new project – which would ruin your life. She had endured sleepless weeks, and clients like Lucifer (‘just as difficult,’ she said, ‘and just as charismatic’), and various uprisings from old, besuited men, all of which she had quashed. There would be moments, in the middle of a deal, when she would turn to me, and ask, quite nonchalantly, how I was. There was only ever one answer that Devlin wanted to hear: I’m fine. I am adapting to my third time zone in forty-eight hours; a typhoon has cut the Internet; I am tired enough to vomit with it. I’m fine. Devlin knew men who may (or may not) supply chemicals to Venezuelan drug barons; she knew the sultans of small Middle Eastern countries; she always knew precisely what to say. Her eyes and the hollows around them were the same shade of gun-metal grey. At forty-two, her heart – tired of two countries a week and five hours of sleep a night – rebelled against her, 35,000 feet above the Pacific and two hours out of Changi airport. ‘I knew that something was wrong,’ she said, ‘when I didn’t want the champagne before take-off.’ A doctor rushed in from economy, and Devlin’s heart settled. She woke back in Singapore, and asked for drinks for the whole plane – to make up for the inconvenience.

Afterwards, they performed some kind of operation on her heart, some deeply invasive surgery, and in meetings I noticed that she had developed a tic: she would touch her chest when she was angry or frustrated, as though she was reassuring a child. I often imagined the scar beneath her shirt, the strange contrast of the rumpled flesh and the clean, pressed cotton.

Devlin had suggested that we fabricate a deal which required me to be in London, but as it turned out, a real one came along. One of Devlin’s friends sat on the board of a technology company, which wanted to buy an exclusive genomics start-up, based out of Cambridge. ‘My understanding,’ Devlin said, ‘is that you send them some DNA, and they predict your future.’

A slew of information had arrived on Tuesday evening. It was midnight in London; I opened the files as she spoke.

‘Like a fortune teller?’ I asked.

‘A particularly sophisticated one, I hope. They call themselves ChromoClick.’

For the rest of the week, I slept under a thick cover of exhaustion, thrashing out of it every morning to the hotel alarm. I was in work in time for the start of London’s day, and at night I joined Devlin on her New York calls. When I left the office, in the empty time before morning, the City was warm and dark, and I wound down the taxi windows to keep myself awake.

I ignored calls from Mum and Dad. I ignored the two hundred messages from Olivia and Christopher in our group chat. Throughout the day, Dr K rang at intervals designed to surprise me, and I ignored her, too. The only person I contacted was Evie. Our plan for Moor Woods Road was coming into place: a community centre, populated by things of which Mother and Father would have disapproved. We plotted a children’s library; reading groups for the elderly; talks on contraception. Our suggestions became more ambitious.

‘A roller disco,’ Evie said.

‘An all-you-can-eat buffet.’

‘The country’s premier gay wedding venue.’

Bill called me on Wednesday. Had I made a decision regarding my role as executor? There was a client on the other line, and a junior waiting outside my door. Bill was an anomaly: it was impossible to believe that the prison occupied the same world as the office. ‘Give me until the weekend,’ I said.

Friday evening, and still thirty degrees. I stood on the 18.31 from Paddington, emailing Devlin my thoughts on the genomics company’s various misdemeanours, which had just been disclosed. A director had once left unencrypted hardware on a train, jammed with details of employees’ sexual orientations, health conditions, and ethnicities. ‘In short,’ I concluded, ‘there are issues.’ Olivia had screenshotted photographs of the wedding and sent them to Christopher and me with eviscerating captions. ‘Extremely strong canapés,’ she wrote. ‘Dress subpar. Gendered menu. What the fuck?’ I reviewed my message to Devlin. ‘For what it is worth,’ I added, ‘I am on a train. Will keep a lookout.’

I had asked for Ethan’s address, and requested that he and Ana didn’t meet me at the station. Their house was in Summertown, and I liked the walk: JP had studied here, and sometimes we had visited for a weekend. I wheeled my suitcase through Jericho and along Woodstock Road: there we were, at twenty-five, darting from the Ashmolean Museum, impersonating the death masks. Twenty-seven, and cutting away to Port Meadow with swimming costumes and champagne. Did she, I wondered – the small girlfriend – undress when he asked her to, and fill her mouth with it, carefully, before tasting him, barely concealed in the undergrowth? But she wasn’t at fault; she had come long afterwards.