Girl A(72)

I mentioned Bit by Bit to Dr K in passing. We were talking of Hollowfield, and how little of it I remembered, and she held up her palm and frowned. ‘Let’s talk about this shop,’ she said. ‘And what it meant to your father.’

‘He didn’t like it,’ I said. ‘I think that much is clear.’

‘And why do you think that was?’

‘His own enterprise hadn’t worked out. He was jealous, I suppose.’

‘Wasn’t this the ultimate reminder of his failures?’ Dr K said. ‘Which he had just tried – had relocated – to forget?’

‘It was just a shop.’

She rose from her chair, as she did when she was animated, and walked to the window. It wasn’t the long window of Harley Street. This was in our early days, when we met in a hospital in South London. Her office was on the ground floor, and she had to keep the blinds closed; the doctors liked to smoke just beside it.

‘Entertain me, Lex. Slip into his head – oh, I know, it’s an unpleasant place to be – and consider the litany of his failures. The coding classes. His employment in IT services. The Lifehouse. The fall of his idol. Failure on top of failure. Men like your Father are odd, delicate things. Easily cracked – just a hairline fracture in the porcelain.’ She turned back to me, smiled. ‘You don’t realize that you’ve broken them until the shit floods out.’

‘Lots of people fail,’ I said. ‘Every day. All of the time.’

‘And everybody’s brain is wired that little bit differently.’ She shrugged, and returned to her chair. ‘I’ll never ask you to pity him,’ she said. ‘Only to understand him.’

We sat as we often did, in deadlock, each of us waiting for the other person to speak.

‘I ask you,’ she said, ‘because I think that it might help you.’

It was a weekday evening, in my first year back at school. I still had to attend a physiotherapist appointment and finish my homework. ‘Are we done?’ I asked.

She gave it a final try. ‘Do you remember when the shop opened,’ she said, ‘in relation to the Binding Days?’ I was already standing, pulling on my coat.

‘I need to go,’ I said. ‘Really. Dad’ll be waiting.’

He wasn’t. I sat in the hospital reception, watching the strange cast pass through the sliding doors, hidden by the water fountain in case Dr K emerged from her office and found me in the lie. When I thought of Father, all I could see was the collection of photographs published by the papers after the escape. Here was Father at the pulpit (The Preacher of Death); here was Father on Central Pier (They Were Once a Normal Family). His real face – the tics of pleasure and disappointment – eluded me. He would have liked that, I thought. The idea that he couldn’t be captured.

Of course, Dr K was right. Bit by Bit had opened a few months before the Binding Days began. The last time I had walked by, in the days when we were still walking, the shop window was broken. The crack had been taped up with cardboard, and a cheerful note: Still open for business.

For a fortnight, my world was compressed to the office and the hotel. Black taxis moved me between them, turning on their lights when I approached. I slept little enough that there was no discernible ending or beginning to the days. The numbers at the bottom of my screens blinked from one date to the next.

I kept the probate documents in the safe in my room, to alleviate the strange fear that I’d return to find them gone. I requested that Bill reschedule our visit to Hollowfield, and he was silent; for a moment, I thought that he would refuse. An article had appeared in a tabloid, under the headline ‘Hollowfield’s House of Horrors: Where Are They Now?’ I imagined the members of the council assembled around it, wondering which of us had been paid for the commission. It was a double-page spread, with the famous garden photograph in the centre. Our forms had been removed, leaving seven black silhouettes and the letters of our pseudonyms. In the margin, the journalist summarized us. Ethan was ‘an inspiration’. Sources close to Gabriel reported that he was ‘troubled’. Girl A was ‘elusive’. Bill sighed. He would give me one more week.

Jake signed the documents on behalf of ChromoClick at eleven forty-seven, thirteen minutes from our client’s deadline. It was a subdued gathering. Devlin was in New York. ChromoClick’s solicitors dispersed. When I asked the night secretary for a bottle of champagne and two glasses, she sighed, and walked slowly to the firm’s kitchen. When she handed me the bottle, she scowled. ‘Congratulations,’ she said.

Jake stood at the window of our meeting room. When he turned to me, he was grinning. ‘There aren’t many moments like this in a lifetime,’ he said. ‘Are there?’

I knew precisely how much richer he had just become. ‘I think you’re doing well if you get one,’ I said. ‘Cheers.’

‘Do you get your life back now?’

I laughed. ‘This is my life.’

‘And you don’t get tired?’

‘Sure. But I don’t mind it. There’s always something to think about. Somewhere else to go. I’ve been bored in the past – really bored, in fact. And – well. This isn’t so bad.’

‘Your boss seems like a pretty hard taskmaster.’

‘She’s been in this firm for thirty-five years,’ I said. ‘I don’t think she had much of a choice.’