The Things We Do to Our Friends(68)

She displayed her wares proudly. Laid out to the side of the room, I saw a fussy spread, like a doll’s tea party. A vast feast lying there untouched. Cocktail sticks with sweet chunks of pineapple skewered next to greasy cubes of Cheddar.

She passed me a plate from the table, and I thought she was about to pick some pieces of food for me, like I was an invalid, but she didn’t.

“I’m not hungry,” I said.

Her smile faltered only for a second. “No problem! No worries at all!”

I was expecting the others to be there. To see Imogen scurrying around with napkins, laying them out for us, brandishing coasters, hissing at me to use one. To let my eyes wander and savor the slow dance of Ava as she stretched her spine out by folding it down vertebrae by vertebrae along the window seat. But when I walked in, I knew it was not to be. I felt the silence in their absence. I was quite sure that it was just Tabitha and me.

“Thanks for coming round.” She beamed at me.

I was transported back to when I’d been summoned here for the haircut. It was the same sense of tingly anticipation that wasn’t unpleasant.

We sat, and I saw there was something that wasn’t usually there just to the side of the room. A television on one of those old-fashioned stands with wheels on.

I had no idea where it had come from. I had never seen Tabitha watch television before, or known her to show any interest.

“This is something for you,” Tabitha said.

“What is it?” I asked, excited that she’d done something for me, wondering what it could be.

“I ‘did’ a present for you. And I hope that will mean you’ll stay. Now I’ll show you.”

A present.

Tabitha loved to dish out presents as a means of control; generally, she’d tease it out with more of a preamble, but then and there, she was brisk.

She handed me a small bowl of popcorn and pointed the remote at the screen.

It crackled to life.

The footage was rough, and I struggled to work it out, but the basics were clear enough. It must have been shot on a camcorder; the picture darted about like an amateur recording. The colors were strange, perhaps because of the lighting, although I could tell it was outside, and the scene opened on the back of a head and then panned away so you could see the road. Somewhere remote.

A car in the middle of the road, blocking it completely, and the back of the head was clearer as the person filming moved away. The head had long blond hair in a French plait. I wore my hair like that quite a lot.

The person holding the camera moved back. Whoever was filming seemed to be stepping away so they were hidden.

And there was a pause.

Another car pulled up. A far fancier one, and they had to stop because the road was blocked by the first car. A man got out and my blood ran cold.

Jack the Pig got out of the car. He went up to the blond head, to the girl, to Tabitha.

Her voice—you could just about hear it as she spoke.

I heard the breathy words “broken down,” but it was strange. When she spoke, I could hear it didn’t sound like her. She was altering her voice, and Tabitha had always been an excellent mimic.

Then the scene changed.

Blackness first, then a bright strip of light. The action had moved inside, and the person filming panned out so I could see they were somewhere else. I wasn’t entirely sure where, but there was a lot of metal everywhere, sheets of it, and hooks hanging and then flesh.

Dead pigs.

A slaughterhouse.

Jack the Pig, close to a large, shiny hook as the camera pulled away, and I could see he was tied up. Was he naked? It was hard to say for sure, the camera was jerky, but he certainly wasn’t wearing much. You could see a lot of his body, and his shoulders were peppered with an angry rash.

Tabitha came into the frame. She had her back to the camera, but she was holding what looked like a cattle prod and she jabbed it in the small of his back, pushing him toward the hook.

He swayed. He turned to face her by twisting his head over his shoulder and peering closely.

I heard him almost growl at Tabitha. She steered him away from the hook now. Most of the pig carcasses were hung up in the background—I could see them clearly because they were longer and pinker than I had expected—and with Jack the Pig in the frame there was an overwhelming amount of the color pink so it was hard to work out what was going on and what skin belonged to whom.

One carcass lay there on the floor, severed from the snout downwards to create something like a fleshy sleeping bag for him.

He kind of stepped in, shuffling in his restraints, even though he didn’t fit, prodded by a relaxed-seeming Tabitha, his body shaking. It wasn’t fear, it was the same fizz of rage he’d had in the cellar, but then it had all been directed at me.

“I hardly touched you,” he spat at her.

It didn’t make sense until it did.

I could hear her instructions as she asked him calmly to lower himself into the carcass. She had made her voice sound like mine, with that slight awkwardness. The halting way she finished each sentence.

You know the way the sound of your own voice is excruciating when you hear it played back to you? The sound of someone else “doing” your voice is even worse, I can assure you of that.

The plait too. I reached to my own plait, and at that point I looked to her. I wanted to rip the remote control out of her hands and throw it to the floor. Smash her to the floor too. Pull at her lips with my hands and rip the smile from her face.