The Things We Do to Our Friends(50)

It was a bridge, I realized that straightaway. We were standing on a shaded walkway, one of the long bike paths that wound away from the city center, next to the Water of Leith. Down in the shadows with a river gushing close by—it felt very far away from the city, where we’d been just seconds ago.

We pressed our backs against the slimy stone of the underside of the bridge, and I slid down to the ground to sit, trying to get my breath back.

She was silent.

“What was that?” I asked her.

“That went well, I think,” she said, panting, ignoring my question. “Also, I don’t think he followed us. We really were quick, weren’t we? Ava said you were nice and fast! Did you run in school or something?” She chattered away at me.

I shook my head. “I don’t understand what just happened. What did you do to him?”

“I think you got the pictures, didn’t you?” she asked with sudden urgency, ignoring my question.

“Yes.”

“Okay. That’s good.” She turned to look at me, her face a greenish pearl in our shadowy hiding place. “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you in advance, but I thought it would be smoother that way, and it was quite smooth, wasn’t it?”

“Tabitha—” I reached out, gripped at her arm, and then spoke very slowly, like she was a child. “Was that…acid?”

She smiled broadly. “No, no. I’m glad it came across like that, though. That’s ever so good.”

“What was it, then?”

“It’s this stuff off the internet.” She said the word “internet” with a turned-up nose.

I was slightly relieved that she hadn’t made it herself in some kind of science experiment.

“Anyway, it would have felt like acid to him at the beginning, just searing, all-consuming pain.” She said this as a statement, then continued, as if she was reading it from a book. “He wouldn’t have been able to open his eyes at all. For a second or two, it would have incapacitated him. The pain gives way to feelings that I’ve read about: he would have thought that his face had been scarred beyond recognition, a life-changing injury. Then, a larger fear—blindness, I think, although that one might come first. It depends how vain he is.”

She took the flask out of her bag and gave it a little shake. Whatever was in there looked harmless enough, like water. It wasn’t bubbling or anything.

“How do you know this?” I asked.

“Oh, it’s just what I’ve read.”

“And then what? Will he be okay?”

“Yes, yes, don’t fuss. He’ll be tons better in a few hours and fine by tomorrow. I discussed it all with the client. We felt it was a nice ending.”

We sat there in silence under the bridge. I didn’t know what to say. The setting was almost peaceful. A dog walker approached us and only glanced at us quickly before looking away, which signaled to me that we probably looked unhinged.

Tabitha brushed herself down and stood up. “Come on. You can come back to ours if you want to have a bit of a rest.”

I shook my head.

“Okay, suit yourself,” she said. She held out a hand. “Camera please?”

I passed it to her.

“Thanks,” she sang, backing away from me. “Good job today. I know that was a lot, but I just wanted to show you what happens when we go further.”

I went back home and filed away whatever had just happened. I believed her claim that he’d never report us to the police. Still, I felt uneasy about her actions for a few weeks afterward. Because it had been terrifying and unexpected and risky and, in a way, it reminded me of other events, but there had also been something invigorating about the whole thing. The absolute sense that we were above the law.

I wasn’t sure how to feel on balance, but as long as the justification was there, that he deserved it, I could try to forget the strange viciousness in the execution.





41


The city—dark and cold—was a grumpy old man who’d been freshened up. Old buildings that I considered mine stood with battered window frames and bricks worn away. They were coated in sheets of tiny white lights which made me marvel at how good Christmas was at covering up the cracks.

After lectures, trudging from the Old to the New Town, to visit Tabitha, I peered into each window of the flats to see the trees.

I hadn’t paid much attention to them the year before, but that Christmas they mesmerized me. Each room held a towering sculpture of a fir, always by the window so passersby stopped and stared. Not like any I’d ever seen before: their decorations glinted and the colors matched. They didn’t bend and buckle organically like proper trees; instead, they were uniformly trimmed and symmetrical. No tatty strings of lights or mismatched decorations, and the branches were coated with frosted quilts of cut glass blown into perfect spheres. There were many cherubs perched atop those trees—fat and ruddy.

Tabitha bought a chunky Norway spruce because she said we’d earned it, and we lugged the great thing up the stairs. Like her neighbors, we decorated it with expensive decorations and old treasures she’d hoarded away.

There was no mention of Servants’ Christmas. After last year, this was a relief. She made a big thing out of her shopping, and I remember that she bought present after present for us that year. However, with all that ended up happening, we didn’t open the gifts. They sat there for weeks, in gold wrapping paper with floppy bows, and I never did find out what happened to them after Christmas.