Girl A(90)

‘What is this?’ I said. ‘Ethan. What is it?’

He half turned to me, so that he could whisper. ‘He’s calling it a ceremony,’ he said.

‘It’s OK. You can turn around.’

‘You look ridiculous.’

‘Well, you look like you’re dead.’

I waited on my bed for Evie, trying to formulate a plan. I could hear her coughing from the bathroom. The panic of the opportunity. I lifted the corner of the cardboard at the window. Beyond it there was only the black-blue of the closing dusk, and rain on the panes.

The door swung back open, to fuchsia.

‘Do you like it?’ I asked Evie, and she cocked an eyebrow. It was something we had been practising through our listless days: the raised eyebrow.

‘No. Me neither.’

In our party dresses, we descended the stairs. Ahead of me, wet hair slapped between Evie’s shoulder blades. The living room emitted a soft, warm light, but otherwise, the house was dark.

We were the last to arrive. The room had been rearranged to a makeshift aisle, with the sofas facing one another, and Father at the top of it. He had assembled a strange pulpit: a cassette player and the Bible; a page of handwritten notes and a clutch of heather. Gabriel and Delilah already sat on one sofa, with Noah between them. I knew from looking at them that we were coming to the end of ourselves. The details of bones protruded beneath their clothes, and their eyes were wide and wild. Gabriel’s face seemed different, misshapen, as if the bones had shifted. Where’s Daniel, I thought, and the words settled into a refrain in my skull: Where-is-Daniel?

‘Good evening,’ Father said, ‘to our little audience.’

He gathered his notes and closed his eyes, and I tried to get underneath his lids. He was delivering an address to the Lifehouse, with hot crowds pressing around him, and children held aloft. Stragglers spilled onto the high street, so that they had to divert the traffic.

He opened his eyes.

‘We are so incredibly alone,’ he said. ‘That’s inevitable. If you’re not shunned, you’re not living according to God. If you’re not questioned, or isolated, or persecuted, you’re not living according to God. That’s the burden we bear. But, you know, truly – I have never had to bear it by myself.’

He pressed Play. There was the rustle of the cassette turning, and then a sad, beautiful song adjusted the room. It wasn’t religious, but an old love song, a vestige of a world outside the house, which was still turning. It had been so long since I had heard music that I gave in to the lull of it, and when he glanced to the door, I saw that Father was crying.

Mother came slowly from the hallway. She wore her wedding dress, which I knew from cheerful yellowed photographs. The dress had yellowed, too, and now her flesh bunched over the top of it. On her way past, chiffon brushed my foot; until then, I hadn’t been convinced that she was real. She didn’t look at any of us. She kept her eyes on the altar, and she returned to him.

At the top of the aisle, Father enveloped her hands in his.

‘We’ve been married twenty years,’ Father said, with fissures in his voice. ‘I loved you at the beginning. And I’ll love you right to the end.’

He took her unresisting into his arms. He covered her. Her face moved in and out of the lamplight, gold and then grey, and things moved across it, each of them beneath the surface, failing to emerge into an expression.

Again and again, Father played that song. ‘Everybody,’ he said. ‘Everybody up. Everybody together.’ Evie and I stood and danced, clicking our fingers and twirling the material of our skirts. She kept having to retreat to the sofa for breaks. Delilah spun between our parents, stroking Mother’s rags. I danced as close to the threshold as I could, squinting to see the locks on the front door. Five footsteps. A second, to flip the latch. Two more for the chain.

I swayed closer to the hallway. Four footsteps, now. Father’s eyes were closed against Mother’s head, and her hair was stuck to his lips. He was rotating away from me, on a slow pivot. I would have my seconds.

I stepped out of the room, into the darkness between the kitchen and the door. Here it was: the body-clench, belly-thump of adrenaline. I looked to the locks.

‘Lex,’ Mother said. ‘Oh, Lex.’

As they turned in the dance, she had come to see me. My parents’ bodies came apart, and something sour filled the space between them. Father reached to cut the music. Mother held out her arms, palms up, and waited for my hands to fill them. ‘Why don’t we stay here,’ she said. ‘Like this.’

Father was surveying the route of my dance, as if I might have left footsteps on the carpet. His smile was starting to change.

‘Actually,’ he said, ‘I think that it might be bedtime.’

He nodded to Ethan, who started to gather us, first me and then Evie, who was holding the sofa, breathing hard.

‘Come on, Eve.’

He guided us from behind, scruffs of skin in his hands. Just before we were through the door, Evie stretched out an arm and wedged herself in the room.

‘Where’s Daniel?’ she said.

‘He’s sleeping,’ Father said. Mother nodded, as if the music was still playing. Not assent, but an old song, on repeat: Yes, yes. He was sleeping.

We slept more and more. The scant light in winter compressing the days. Evie woke herself in the night, coughing, her body bucking against the chains. Go back to sleep. What else to say? Go back to sleep. My mind had started to betray me: saviours came from the blackness, bearing water, blankets, bread. Miss Glade or Aunt Peggy, whispering in strange, gentle languages which I didn’t understand.