Girl A(81)

At some point I dipped into sleep, and Evie woke me a few minutes later. She had rolled across the divide, and pressed her body into mine: nose in hair, arm against ribs, her ankle twisting around my shin.

‘I’m cold,’ she said.

‘It’s boiling. Are you OK?’

‘Maybe it was the flight.’

‘Come here,’ I said, and turned to face her. When I wrapped my arms around her, her skin was cool. I tugged the duvet up to our eyes, and she laughed.

‘How will the house look?’ she whispered.

‘Insignificant,’ I said.

‘I hope so.’

‘What we really need here,’ I said, ‘are the Greek myths. They were much better than the Atlas.’

I liked to exaggerate the importance of Miss Glade’s gift to my and Evie’s survival. We had, after all, paid a high price for our stories.

‘Do you know why I think that we liked them?’ Evie said. ‘They made us feel better about our own family.’

‘You’ve told us little about this time,’ Dr K said. ‘When you were fourteen. Fifteen.’

‘I don’t remember as much of it.’

‘That’s understandable. Memory’s a strange thing.’

This was a month after we first met. I remained in the hospital, but I had started to walk. I had an earnest physiotherapist called Callum, who looked like a Labrador. He celebrated each of my steps with an enthusiasm which I found difficult to take seriously. In each session, I scrutinized his face for mockery, but I never found it.

Dr K and I sat in the hospital courtyard. The square scrub was still frozen at mid-morning, hemmed in by the wards. The sun somewhere unseen above us, bleaching a corner of the sky. I had walked here myself, lurching on the crutches, and now I was tired and quiet.

‘The things that you’ve told me about,’ Dr K said. ‘The lighting. The absence of any point of reference for the date, or the time. They’re old disorientation techniques. It’s OK to be confused, Lex. But you’ll need to try.’

One of the detectives hovered around us with a notepad open in his hand. ‘It’s the critical period,’ he said. ‘Those last two years.’

‘We’re aware of that,’ Dr K said. ‘Thank you.’

She stood from our bench and knelt down before me. The hem of her dress touched the soil.

‘I know how difficult it’ll be,’ she said. ‘And your memory won’t always help you. You see – it protects you from the things that you don’t want to think about. It can soften certain scenes, or bury them away for a long, long time. A shield, of sorts. The problem, right now, is that it’s protecting your parents, too.’

‘I want to try,’ I said. Ever eager to please. ‘But maybe not today.’

‘OK. Not today.’

‘Did you bring any books?’

She straightened up, smiling. ‘Maybe.’

‘Maybe?’

But she was thinking of something else. Her hands were encased in black leather gloves, and she twisted and unravelled them, as if she was weaving.

‘It’s a particular interest of mine,’ she said. ‘Memory.’

The detective was watching us.

‘We’ll be able to use it,’ she said.

The crawl of somebody else’s hair against your skin. It was the first thing I was aware of, before the room unfurled from the darkness.

The ceiling in Moor Woods Road was white, too.

And in the first few moments you might try to stretch, forgetting that you couldn’t. And then you could begin the first checks of the day: for new pain, and secretions in the night, and the rise and fall of your sister’s ribs, shallower some days than others.

I lifted my arms, waiting for the present to return to me.

The walls were papered with flowers; Father would never have entertained wallpaper like that.

Evie was awake. She lay on her side, watching me. ‘Hey,’ she said. So much older, now.

She rolled across the division between the beds and rested her head on my chest. It had been a few years since I had shared a bed, and there had been times when it felt like my whole body craved the comfort of it. To sleep, I would twist my limbs together, pretending each belonged to another person. There had been a time – after I first moved to New York – when I had tried to stop this exercise. It wasn’t possible. It was the kind of indulgence which I allowed myself: the only person to witness the humiliation of it was me.

Breakfast was included with our stay. ‘Typical Lex,’ Evie said. We sat in a dim room beyond the bar, facing one another, with a view to the car park. A dim concrete light fell across Evie’s face. She tucked her legs beneath her on the chair and traced the crescents of last night’s drinks on the table. She wasn’t hungry.

‘You’re sure?’ I said, when the food came. There were cold triangles of toast assembled in an elaborate silver structure, and a pool of grease on my plate, which shifted with the tilt of the table. A smile blinked across her face.

‘Positive. But thank you.’

‘OK. Let me know if you change your mind.’

She was still looking at the table. ‘You always worried about me far too much.’

‘Somebody had to.’

She looked up. ‘Do you remember Emerson?’ she said.