Girl A(92)

There are things that your body doesn’t allow you to forget.

In the late afternoon, Father came to our room. The noise of the key in the lock. He had been outside, and he smelt of the cold. His face was flushed and happy. ‘My girls,’ he said, and touched each of us on the head.

These days, he spoke less of God. He talked of more modest things. He was contemplating a holiday, he said. We had never been on an aeroplane. That had to be addressed. Did we remember the weekend in Blackpool? How the sea looked in the mornings? I nodded. We could get more T-shirts, Father said. A different design, this time around. We would need seven of them, he said, and in my head, I said: six.

‘This family’s been through so much,’ he said, and when I turned to look at him, standing at our window with his face turned to the scant light, I knew that he believed it.

Across the room, I saw Evie shaking her head, her eyes locked on my bed. Her whole body was contorted in terror.

I traced her stare.

There it was: the corner of the book jutting out from beneath my mattress.

Our book of myths.

Father turned back to us. He eased himself onto my bed, and the weight of his body rolled me towards him. He laced his fingers through my hair. ‘Alexandra,’ he said. ‘Where should we go?’

I closed my eyes.

‘I don’t know.’

‘But you and Ethan know all about geography. Don’t you?’

‘To Europe,’ Evie said.

‘See. Eve knows where she’d like to go. You had better have a think, Alexandra.’

‘Or to America,’ Evie said, her eyes wet with fear, trying to keep his eyes upon her, shaking with the bravery of it. ‘They have Disney.’

‘Yes. You’d like that. Wouldn’t you?’

‘Yes,’ I said.

He sighed, and stood.

‘My girls,’ he said, again, and leant to kiss me.

I felt his body stop, his lips suspended against my skin.

‘What’s this?’ he said.

He reached for the corner of the book and tugged it. Here the beautiful cover and the golden pages. He opened it in the middle and stared blankly at the story, as if it was something he couldn’t understand. His face was beginning to change, veering between shock and triumph. It settled at a kind of madness, as if a revelation had come to him, and I thought of Jolly at the pulpit. But Jolly had only ever pretended to be mad. Father was different.

‘All of this family’s misfortunes,’ Father said. ‘And now we know.’

Get it over with, I thought. Quickly. How does it feel? Will you be able to stand it? And stand it defiantly – do you have that in you? You. Always so eager to please.

He wrapped his fist around my neck. Between his arms, I saw Evie struggling against the chains, her whole body taut. Don’t look, I wanted to say. You won’t be able to unsee it. And Evie was so young. She was so good. It was suddenly very important, that she didn’t look – one of the last few important things. I tried to say it with my eyes, but it was impossible. Still she was fighting.

‘Do you want to die?’ Father said. ‘Do you want to die and go to hell?’

He threw me back to the mattress. There was no need to pretend any more, and I started to laugh.

‘Where are we now?’ I said. ‘Come on. Where are we now?’

He walked from the room, his whole body trembling. In the few seconds before he returned, I looked across at Evie. ‘Lexy,’ she said.

‘You’ll be all right,’ I said. ‘You’ll be OK, Evie.’

‘Oh, Lex.’

‘It’s OK. But promise you won’t look.’

‘I’ll try.’

‘No, Evie.’

‘OK. I promise.’

‘OK.’

When he came back, he was holding something in his hand. A kind of wooden baton. From the cross, I thought. From the kitchen wall. From the Lifehouse. He bent over me and unlocked my wrists, a last tenderness to that, and I hauled myself up to face him.

‘God,’ Father said. ‘God, I loved you.’

He hit me in the stomach, and something there collapsed, burst, changed state. Then there was the sensation of my body being opened, the dumb vulnerability of it, with its nerves and its holes, and the soft insides.

And that was it. After that, Evie stopped speaking, and I knew that soon – very soon – we would need to escape.

Coldness and damp. The floor was soft and the last scraps of linoleum shifted beneath my feet. I stepped between weeds and new shoots of grass, where the moors had started to reclaim the house. Everywhere was the sound of dripping water. Through the darkness, my torchlight lit tumours of mould growing from the ceiling, reaching for the last ruins of the kitchen, the hobs bloody with rot and the fridge on its side on the floor. Particles of dust fluttered in the air, invisible until the torch beam moved between them.

A rat dashed from the hallway and I danced away from it, too frightened to yelp. I wondered then if Emerson had been a rat, if we had called him a mouse because the thought of a rat was too horrifying to sleep with.

‘Evie?’ I called. ‘Evie? Please?’

I passed by the living room and cast the light up the staircase. It was too dark: the beam hit the first few steps and faltered against the blackness. I knelt to examine the bottom stair. The first layer of wood had decayed, exposing the soft underbelly, yellowed and beginning to rot. I pressed my back to the wall and let it take my weight, body stiffened and one breath for each stair climbed. Floorboards creaked in the rooms above me.