Girl A(22)

‘Stop it,’ he said. ‘Lex. Lex, please.’

He held his arms up to me, his whole body in appeasement. As usual, the sentiment didn’t reach his face. I leaned against the wall, as far away from him as I could get. Sweat shifted in my hair, down my back. The insect legs of it.

‘Don’t wake Ana,’ he said. ‘Please.’

‘Certain things …’ I said. I was waiting for my body to stop convulsing long enough to make the point. ‘Like what? Like how you were next in line to the throne? Truly – Father’s son?’

‘That’s unfair.’

‘You know, I always used to think that it would be you who would save us,’ I said. ‘I waited. I would think – he isn’t even restrained. Any day now. When he’s eighteen. When he can leave of his own accord.’

‘I tried, Lex. When we were little. Do you remember? When I still could. But by then – I was out of courage.’

We surveyed one another across the bed. He was smaller now. Ethan, with his deficit of courage, and a good face for sympathy.

‘That isn’t how I remember it,’ I said. ‘That isn’t how I remember it at all.’

He sat down on the bed and brushed the creases from the sheet. We listened for noise from Ana, but there were only the quiet floors of the house: the rugs and the bookshelves and the bay windows, undisturbed.

‘For what it’s worth,’ I said, ‘tonight – we talked about other things.’

He nodded.

‘Go to bed, Ethan.’

‘What I said before,’ he said, ‘about the governors—’

‘What about it?’

‘I won’t fail,’ he said. ‘Will I?’

‘I doubt it.’

Drunk, he smiled at me. Smiled all the way to the eyes. It was as if he was already forgetting.

‘Thank you,’ he said. He clambered to his feet and crossed from the bed to the doorway. I heard him retreating along the hallway to his bedroom, stumbling into a canvas halfway there, then the whispers of a mattress, of him and Ana. I sat with my back against the wall and my legs stuck out ahead of me, holding my throat where he had held it, tight then loose, confident in the control of my own fingers, the muscles obeying the motor cortex. I waited a while, until I started to enjoy it, and went back to bed.

When we were tired of the hospital room, Dr K helped me into a wheelchair, and we wound down the corridors. I liked the hospital courtyard, which was really just a balding garden between wards, populated by smokers and people making serious phone calls. The doctors demanded that I wear sunglasses whenever I went outside, but Dr K had recoiled at the frames provided by the hospital and promised to fetch me a pair of her own. I rolled out wearing pyjamas, blankets, Wayfarers.

This day, the detectives weren’t with us. ‘They’ve asked me to make a particular enquiry,’ Dr K said. ‘It’s a sensitive matter, I think.’

We sat side by side, her on a bench and me in the chair. It could be easier to talk about the difficult things, she said, when you didn’t have to look at one another.

‘It concerns your brother,’ she said. ‘Ethan.’

I had suspected that this was coming. In the detectives’ questions, Ethan was implicated by omission. It had been more than a month, I thought, since I had heard his name.

‘You see,’ Dr K said, ‘he wasn’t in the same condition as the rest of you. He was stronger. Nothing broken. He wasn’t even in chains.’

Beneath the blankets, I wrapped my fingers around one another, and checked the surface. Making sure that she couldn’t see them.

‘There were sightings – reports – suggesting that he had been allowed outside the house.’

I saw the detectives hunched around a television, watching a year pass on the same dull street. Scanning for Ethan’s gait.

‘The police are questioning,’ she said, ‘whether he suffered at all. Or whether his role was altogether different.’

A month of detective work, for this moment. They would be waiting for Dr K to call, after our meeting, with tight jaws and the necessary documentation.

‘Did he ever hurt you?’ she asked.

I tried to make my face like hers: like a house from the outside.

‘No,’ I said.

‘I shouldn’t have to tell you,’ she said, ‘that the time for protecting people has passed.’

‘There was nothing he could have done,’ I said. ‘Just like the rest of us.’

‘You’re sure?’ she said. I allowed myself to look at her, then, over the top of my glasses, so that she could see that I meant it.

‘Yes,’ I said.

The house in Oxford was beautiful in the morning. A long rectangle of sunlight cut into my bedroom and rested on the duvet. The Islip canvas in the guestroom was a river in motion, and Ana had placed it behind the bed, facing the window, so that it was hard to tell what was the effect of the paint and what was the real light in the room. I kicked off the cover and stretched into the warm day. For a moment I imagined that the house was mine, and empty. I would take a book from the study and spend the morning in the garden. There would be no need to talk to anybody all day.

Downstairs, Ethan and Ana were in the kitchen, standing close together at the counter, their bodies touching. Reconciliation.