Girl A(6)

And Father occupied our house; that made decoding his days even easier. After so many months in a single room, I knew the sound of each floorboard, and the flick of each light switch. I could see the bulk of him moving through the rooms.

We had done several all-night stake-outs from our beds, so we knew that he woke late. Even in the winter, it was already light when we heard his first, slow footsteps through the house. Our bedroom was right at the end of the hallway, and he was two doors down, so a night-time attempt would be no good; he slept lightly, and he could be on us in a few seconds. Sometimes I would wake to find him at our bedroom door, or crouching beside me, in contemplation. Whatever he was considering, he always resolved, and in time he turned away, into the darkness.

He spent each morning with Mother and with Noah, downstairs. The smell of their meals permeated the house, and we heard them at prayer, or laughing about something which we couldn’t share. When Noah cried, Father took to the garden. The kitchen door slammed. He exercised: the grunts of it carried up to our window. Sometimes, just before lunch, he visited us, radiant, his skin sodden and red, a barbarian just done with the battle, wielding his towel like an enemy’s head. No, the morning wouldn’t do: the front door was locked at all times, and whether we went downstairs through the kitchen or right out of the window, Father would be waiting.

This was a point of contention between Evie and me. ‘It has to be through the house,’ she said. ‘The window’s too high. You’ve forgotten how high it is.’

‘We’d have to break the lock on our door. We’d have to go through the whole house. Past Ethan’s room. Past Mother and Father. Past Gabe and D. Down the stairs. Noah sleeps down there – sometimes Mother too. There’s no way.’

‘Why haven’t Gabriel and Delilah left?’ Evie asked. And whispered: ‘It would be easier for them.’

‘I don’t know,’ I said. There had been one night, many months before, when I had heard something quiet and terrible at the other end of the hallway. A thwarted attempt. Evie had been asleep, and I had never mentioned it. Now, with hope hanging precarious between us, I didn’t think that I could.

After lunch, Father was in the living room, and silent. This, I believed, was our chance. With Father still, the whole house sighed and slacked. Delilah’s whispers snuck down the hallway. Some days Ethan tapped on the wall, as he had done when we were very young and set on learning Morse code. Other days, Mother visited us. There had been a time when I pleaded with her to do something, but now I responded to her confessions in my head, and turned away.

‘It’s the only option,’ I said to Evie. ‘Once he wakes up, it’s out of the question.’

‘OK,’ she said, but I knew that she saw this as make-believe, like the other stories I told to her to pass the day.

We had already discussed the window. With its cardboard cover, it was outside our scope of surveillance. ‘It opens,’ I said. ‘Doesn’t it?’ I couldn’t picture the latch, or whether the ground beneath it was concrete or grass. ‘Maybe I am forgetting,’ I said.

‘I don’t think it does,’ Evie said. ‘And it hasn’t been opened for ages, now.’

We strained to look at one another across the Territory.

‘So if we have to break the window,’ Evie said, ‘how long do we get?’

‘It’ll take him a good few seconds to know what’s happening,’ I said. ‘And a few more to reach the stairs. Ten to get to our door, say. And then he’ll have to do the lock.’

My neck ached. I lay back down. ‘Twenty in all,’ I said. The meagre number hung in the space between us. Evie said something else, too quiet for me to hear.

‘What?’

‘OK, then,’ she said.

‘OK.’

Our other obstacle was the chains, which had once been my greatest concern. But Father was clumsy. After the discovery of the Myths, and what happened after it, he didn’t turn on the light when he left the room. I liked to think that he couldn’t bear to look at me, but he was probably too drunk to find the switch; either way, it didn’t matter now. I’d spread my fingers out as far as I could, so that he closed the cuffs around my thumbs and little fingers, rather than my wrists. So: it would have to be me, and it would have to be soon. ‘He messed up,’ I whispered to Evie, when I was sure that everybody else in the house was asleep. Her breath huffed across the bedroom, but she didn’t respond. I had left it too late. She was asleep, too.

I contemplated the evening. It was dark, but it was still hot outside. I called room service, ordered two gin and tonics, and drank them naked on the bed. I had thought about going for a run, but the hotel was encircled by motorways, and I didn’t want to pick my way around them. Instead I would drink, and find company. I changed into a black slip and leather boots, and asked reception for a taxi and another drink.

In the car, I thought that this was a good development: three drinks down, alone, Mother dead, and the strange city above and around me. I opened the car window as far as it would go. People queued outside dark doorways and sat on the pavements to drink. ‘There’s a storm forecast,’ the driver said. He said something else, too, but we were at a crossing, and it was lost in a gale of chatter.

‘I’m sorry?’

‘An umbrella,’ he said. ‘Do you have an umbrella?’