Girl A(91)

Sometimes, it was Mother. I thought of how she had loved us best, when we were inside of her, silent and entirely hers, and I allowed her to care for me. Sometimes she brought milk, or scraps of food. She fed us by hand. Other times, she brought a towel and a plastic bowl of water. She knelt by my bed. She talked to herself quietly, as if she, too, was a child. All the time, the towel moved across my body, between the collarbone and the ribs, over the empty pockets of skin at my chest and buttocks, still distended, anticipating flesh, and down between my legs, where there was always a mess, an embarrassment, my body unable to stop its attempts to be human. In these moments, softened by her tenderness, I understood what defeat would feel like. Not to think of escape, or protecting Evie, or the requirement to be clever. The pleasure of that. I would slip into it, like clean sheets.

Dark, flimsy dreams. I woke up cold with old sweat and reached across the bed, waiting for my hand to touch Evie’s body. Further; further. The other edge of the mattress. I sat up and fumbled across the covers. A cold, tidy space. She was gone.

‘Evie?’ I said.

I tore from the bed and across the room and hit the one switch I knew, by the door. The hot little room, empty and exposed. Everywhere the warm, sour smell of the bar. The bathroom was dark, but I opened the door anyway, and the shower curtain after that.

‘Evie?’

I started to dress.

Downstairs, the landlady was at the cash register. The overripe smell of yesterday’s drinks.

‘Excuse me,’ I said.

She glanced up, said nothing.

‘Has my sister come through here?’

There were little stacks of change spread along the bar. She frowned. I had interrupted her calculations.

‘My sister,’ I said. ‘I arrived with her. She was here at breakfast, today.’

‘What?’

She looked at her hands. Her palms were grubby from the notes. It was as if she was trying to grasp something – some final sum – before she could give me her attention.

She shook her head. ‘Nobody’s come through,’ she said.

I checked the breakfast area. I walked to the toilets and opened the three cubicle doors. I returned to our room. The crumpled duvet, and no sign of a note. I thought of the streets to the house. The curve of Moor Woods Road, as it rose towards the moor. I pulled on my shoes.

I stood in the empty road. There was the tap of water dripping from the rooftops, and a rivulet of it somewhere beneath me, in the drains. Dark but for the streetlamps. Two o’clock in the morning, and the whole town asleep. Even the drunks had retreated.

‘I need to go back there,’ she had said.

The hired car was still in the car park, glinting. She had left on foot. I contemplated her, ill and confused, fixated on the house. I could be there in twenty minutes. Half an hour, maybe. She was unwell. I could catch her before she reached Moor Woods Road.

I set off in the centre of the street, following the white lines. Jolting at the movement of myself in the black windows. At the end of the shops, I followed the road down across the river. I could hear the noise of it before I saw the bridge. There was a straggle of limbs caught between its banks, the water lumpy over boulders and a few stray shopping trolleys.

I passed the mill which marked the edge of the town, and began to climb.

It was still drizzling beneath the trees. On either side of the road were empty fields, extending fast into darkness. Everywhere the damp, fleshy smell of the earth, like long-dormant things coming to life. I scanned each turn of the road for her: a thin figure, bent into the night. I had expected to catch her by now.

Moor Woods Road rose ahead of me. I passed beneath the final streetlamp and paused at the edge of its light.

Everything more frightening at night.

I thought of small, mundane comforts: the phone in my pocket, and drinks with Olivia and Christopher, early the next week, where I would narrate this story over the last spritzes of summer. ‘And then,’ I would say, while they watched me – mouths agape, providing me with just the right reactions, the way that good friends do – ‘I headed for the house.’

With the phone, I lit a ring of road ahead of me.

It wasn’t far. When I remembered the day of our escape, I was sure I had been running for ten minutes or more. In fact, it was a few hundred metres to the house. I passed the field where the horses had lived, and cast the feeble light over the fence. It lit a patch of cracked earth, then faltered against the darkness. It was an absurd idea, I thought; the horses would have died years before.

‘Evie?’ I called, across the field.

I turned back to the road. It had always been so quiet here. Too quiet for anybody to come by accident. The community centre would need extensive advertising. We would need to ensure that there were funds for that.

The house waited, silent, the rooms of it looming behind the long-rotted wood. I stood at the end of the driveway, facing it.

‘Evie,’ I said, and then, as loud as I could: ‘Evie?’

The front door was long boarded-up. I stepped over the flowers and pushed at it, first with my hands and then with my whole weight. Scratches of paint shed in my hands, but the door held.

The kitchen, then.

I waded through the wet grass, following the walls of the house. There was a padlock looped between the back door and its frame, but it was rusted and severed, and came away in my hands. I let it fall onto the grass and swung the door open.