The Things We Do to Our Friends(83)

Tabitha looked delighted, shifting her weight from one leg to the other, running her hands down the side of her legs and pulling the dress down over her hips. “Of course, of course. A new flatmate for us! You’ve always been our favorite! This is where you belong.”

Ava raised an eyebrow at me with interest, as if to say, Let’s discuss this further later.

“Anyway, so good to have you back,” Tabitha said. A very minimal statement for her. No mention of why I’d left in the first place.

I pictured her sneaking around, bold and brash. So many questions. How had she managed to get those drugs to Finn? How had she found that girl and convinced her to come over from France?

Who else had seen the video and what had she ended up doing to Jack the Pig? Was he coming after us?

She was clingy that night; she pulled me in, hugged me again. “It’s so good to have you here,” she whispered in my ear.





70


We ate—a feast of artichokes. Then, some restrained conversation about nothing much at all. We avoided the obvious topics.

I wanted to get to Tabitha’s room, but the rules had changed. The doors to the other rooms in the flat were closed to me again—Ava had shut them all shortly after I’d arrived. I excused myself to go to the toilet, and decided to look into Tabitha’s bedroom, because it felt like home.

I opened the door.

It wasn’t like that anymore. I was shocked at the state. I’d always found Tabitha’s mess comforting and romanticized it. That night, it was far beyond simple youthful chaos. Her things were everywhere and when I looked closer, I could locate the source of a smell—something that lived in the corner. It made me turn up my nose instinctively. Dust and body fluids dried and left too long; rising musk from a heap of clothes, or stock as it appeared to be. You could tell it was cheap, and someone had attempted to package some of it up roughly in paper and plastic.

Perfect Pieces.

When I got closer, I could see that the items were in far worse condition than Samuel would have allowed. They were ripped and dirty. Some looked stained with blackish substances—dried-on blood perhaps or who knows what else? And then the accompaniments: what looked to be letters, torn from a pad and left on the floor, stuffed in with the foul-smelling items. Letters with messy handwriting and featuring her imaginative spelling. They were scrawled, and it reminded me of those first few days when we’d met and Tabitha had stabbed her pen against the desks.

Abstract, disjointed tales and a complete change in direction to the easy smut we usually wrote. Her specialty seemed to be sparks of vitriol and secret promises of acts performed with barbed wire, or hot metal implements on soft skin and lips, then hard surfaces and pain to create images that left me hot in a shameful way, then so much talk of death and of torture. They were clearly real letters, addressed to real people who were buying those scrappy clothes. She’d become a violent pen pal without Samuel’s commercial steer. Perfect Pieces had lost any semblance of structure and descended into something else.

The mess meant it was fine to dive into it all and I moved the top of a pile to one side. First some of Tabitha’s little sketches, a self-portrait by Schiele copied, the rangy limbs well captured in pencil but with the head hacked off. Van Gogh with his auburn beard consumed in a red oil pastel attack.

I saw the printouts of chat rooms mixed in the pile, of the women tentative at first, and then adamant, describing what Jack the Pig had done to them with details and places, talking about how they’d walked away with injuries because he liked to hurt them. He’d taken pleasure in it; he could only enjoy it when pain was involved. Extreme acts. It made my encounter seem like nothing at all, but it had been something. They were anonymous—all tightly bound up in NDAs. I could perhaps recognize him from some of the more telling physical descriptions, but I couldn’t have proved anything—I wasn’t even a hundred percent sure what they were saying was about him. And the fact they were here printed out in Tabitha’s room, again, it didn’t mean she’d known what would happen to me in the cellar, not conclusively. But she would have suspected it, surely? Decided that if it happened she could punish later and that would be enough.

The fee had been so high. Far higher even than Tabitha had expected, I think. It was the kind of money where some collateral damage was to be expected. Move fast and deal with it afterward had been Tabitha’s tactic. Punish him once everything was paid up.

The photos of me were still there from before and I couldn’t resist looking. It felt like a lifetime ago, but I wasn’t happy or smug to see them anymore. They signaled, above all else, that I was the chosen one, that I wouldn’t be allowed to leave. Far too useful to be set free, unlike Imogen and Samuel, who had both been permitted their respective exits.

Ava poked her head around the door and grimaced when she saw me in the center of it all. “What are you doing in here? Come on.”

I knew what would happen.

My bag was in the corridor, sitting ready for wherever I was going to go, the next part of life, the next big escape. And even though I was ready, it was almost comical that I’d thought I could just leave Edinburgh and that would be enough for them. I let out a high laugh at the audacity and Ava looked at me like I’d lost my mind; she led me back through to the kitchen.

I’d brought two bottles of champagne with me.

“Let’s drink it on the roof,” I suggested. It was cold outside, but we liked the roof—we always had.