Girl A(85)

‘Alexandra?’ Father said.

‘Yes?’

‘Back to your rooms. Contemplation.’

Not today, then. I adjusted my calculations.

In our room, we sat in my bed, Evie’s spine against my ribs. She took the myths from beneath the mattress. I read and she turned the pages, as if we were at a piano. Midway through the siege of Troy, I reached the end of a paragraph and the page didn’t turn. I shifted the book from her hands, gently, so that she wouldn’t wake up, and turned to the illustration of Thyestes’ feast. The smell of baking rose from the kitchen. Maybe just from the pages. I wasn’t interested in Thyestes’ feud with his brother, or how he came to eat his own sons. I just wanted to look at the pictures of the banquet.

Leaves scuttled across the window. Evening arrived, darkening the corners of the room. I thought that it was September, or maybe October. We should be summoned soon, for dinner or for prayer. I crossed the Territory and eased open the bedroom door. Across the gloom, the hallway was empty. All of the doors were closed.

I returned to my bed.

At some point I was asleep, because the noise woke me. A man crying out, once. I came to midway through it, so that I couldn’t understand what he had said. At the end of the hallway, where Gabriel and Delilah slept, there were a few frantic thuds, the house reverberating with them. Then a softer sound, the noise of a more malleable thing.

Evie stirred, and I pulled the covers over our heads.

There was a new noise, now, something human and wet. A kind of gurgling. Over it, the tone of Father’s voice, continuous, calm, as if he was coaxing a small child into something which it didn’t want to do.

‘What’s happening?’ Evie said, and I started; I had hoped that she was still asleep.

‘Nothing,’ I said.

‘But what time is it? Night-time?’

‘It doesn’t matter. Go back to sleep.’

I lifted the corner of the duvet, and listened.

That night, Mother didn’t visit us, and Father didn’t fasten our bindings. Still he spoke, late into the night, in that same low, slow tone. I lay with my hands over Evie’s ears. The room became cold, and in time the gurgling stopped.

I talked about that night only once, with Ethan. He visited me at university, and we met at a tea shop in the centre of the town. I hadn’t wanted him to see my room, with decorations from the Jamesons and photographs of my friends. He would find something to ridicule. It was March, on the cusp of rain. Tourists were fumbling for anoraks. I saw him before he saw me, walking easily across the cobbles with a newspaper in his hand, amused by something on the back page.

‘Is it always this dreary?’ he said, when I was close enough to hear him, and I was glad that we embraced, so that I didn’t have to think of a clever answer.

We sat in the window, facing out to the street. In that first hour, we were at our best. We talked about my degree and the odd cast of college. We talked about the students in his class, and how so many of them reminded him of one of us. We talked about my visits to London to see Dr K. The grandeur of her office there. ‘She did well out of you,’ Ethan said, and I shrugged.

‘Do you tell people where you’re going?’ he asked. He laughed, anticipating his own absurdity. ‘Who you are,’ he said, cinematic-dramatic.

‘Not yet,’ I said. ‘But I think that I will.’

He raised an eyebrow. ‘That’s unexpected,’ he said. ‘From you.’

‘Well, I have friends here.’

‘Oh, I don’t blame you. It’s an excellent story. You get to be the one who escaped, after all.’

‘I wonder about that, though.’

I was warm and content. It was good to sit here like this, with him, talking as friends. As friends, I wanted to confide in him.

‘There was a time,’ I said, ‘in the last year. In the last few months. I don’t remember. Somebody else tried to escape, I think. Gabriel. Maybe even Delilah. I heard this scuffle, on the stairs. Somebody stopped them. After that, there was this terrible noise, like someone being – I don’t know – like one of them was injured.’

He had ordered a second scone, and he took a bite.

‘Do you remember?’ I asked.

His mouth was full. He shook his head.

‘The next day,’ I said. ‘Father brought home the chains.’

He swallowed. ‘That,’ he said, ‘I remember.’

I turned away and watched the rain coming down, sliding across the window and jumbling the view, resting on the pavement and between the cobbles. ‘That night,’ I said. ‘I thought that I heard you. I thought that you might have been the one to stop them.’

‘I don’t remember this at all, Lex. There were all sorts of kerfuffles in that house. It could have been anything.’

‘But it’s strange, isn’t it?’ I said. ‘That after those noises – literally, the next day – Father changed his approach?’

‘Lex,’ he said. In the time that I’d looked away, his face had altered. ‘Now that you’re here – now that you’re a little older – isn’t it time to stop making things up?’

The chains were three millimetres thick; one point five metres long; a bright, zinc-plated finish. They were sold as suitable for fixing hanging baskets, or chaining dogs. At Mother’s trial, the prosecution referred to this fact on several occasions. An easy headline.