After lunch, Father was in the living room, and silent. This, I believed, was our chance. With Father still, the whole house sighed and slacked. Delilah’s whispers snuck down the hallway. Some days Ethan tapped on the wall, as he had done when we were very young and set on learning Morse code. Other days, Mother visited us. There had been a time when I pleaded with her to do something, but now I responded to her confessions in my head, and turned away.
‘It’s the only option,’ I said to Evie. ‘Once he wakes up, it’s out of the question.’
‘OK,’ she said, but I knew that she saw this as make-believe, like the other stories I told to her to pass the day.
We had already discussed the window. With its cardboard cover, it was outside our scope of surveillance. ‘It opens,’ I said. ‘Doesn’t it?’ I couldn’t picture the latch, or whether the ground beneath it was concrete or grass. ‘Maybe I am forgetting,’ I said.
‘I don’t think it does,’ Evie said. ‘And it hasn’t been opened for ages, now.’
We strained to look at one another across the Territory.
‘So if we have to break the window,’ Evie said, ‘how long do we get?’
‘It’ll take him a good few seconds to know what’s happening,’ I said. ‘And a few more to reach the stairs. Ten to get to our door, say. And then he’ll have to do the lock.’
My neck ached. I lay back down. ‘Twenty in all,’ I said. The meagre number hung in the space between us. Evie said something else, too quiet for me to hear.
‘What?’
‘OK, then,’ she said.
‘OK.’
Our other obstacle was the chains, which had once been my greatest concern. But Father was clumsy. After the discovery of the Myths, and what happened after it, he didn’t turn on the light when he left the room. I liked to think that he couldn’t bear to look at me, but he was probably too drunk to find the switch; either way, it didn’t matter now. I’d spread my fingers out as far as I could, so that he closed the cuffs around my thumbs and little fingers, rather than my wrists. So: it would have to be me, and it would have to be soon. ‘He messed up,’ I whispered to Evie, when I was sure that everybody else in the house was asleep. Her breath huffed across the bedroom, but she didn’t respond. I had left it too late. She was asleep, too.
I contemplated the evening. It was dark, but it was still hot outside. I called room service, ordered two gin and tonics, and drank them naked on the bed. I had thought about going for a run, but the hotel was encircled by motorways, and I didn’t want to pick my way around them. Instead I would drink, and find company. I changed into a black slip and leather boots, and asked reception for a taxi and another drink.
In the car, I thought that this was a good development: three drinks down, alone, Mother dead, and the strange city above and around me. I opened the car window as far as it would go. People queued outside dark doorways and sat on the pavements to drink. ‘There’s a storm forecast,’ the driver said. He said something else, too, but we were at a crossing, and it was lost in a gale of chatter.
‘I’m sorry?’
‘An umbrella,’ he said. ‘Do you have an umbrella?’
‘You know,’ I said, ‘I used to live around here.’
He caught my eye in the mirror, and laughed.
‘That’s a yes?’
‘That’s a yes.’
I had asked him to drop me somewhere local and busy. He stopped outside another hotel, a cheaper one, and nodded. The club was in its underbelly, down a narrow staircase, with a dance floor at the back and a vacant stage above it. It was busy enough. I took a seat at the bar and ordered a vodka tonic, and looked for somebody who would be glad to talk to me.
There had been times when Devlin and I had travelled so much that I would forget which continent we were on. I would wake up in a hotel room and walk the wrong way to the toilet, taking the route from my apartment in New York. I would come to in an airport lounge and need to read my boarding pass – really read it – to recall where we were flying next. There was always solace in sitting at a bar; they were the same the world over. There were lonely men with similar stories, and people who looked more tired than I did.
I sent gin to the man six seats down, who was wearing a shirt with a golden pin of wings, and searching for his wallet. He looked happy to receive the drink, and surprised; moments later he touched my shoulder, smiling. He was older than I had first thought. That was good.
‘Hello. Thanks for the drink.’
‘That’s fine. Are you on the road?’
‘I flew from Los Angeles today.’
‘That’s pretty dramatic.’
‘Not really. It’s a regular route. You’re not from around here either?’
‘No. Not any more. You’re a pilot?’
‘Yes.’
‘Are you the main pilot or the second pilot?’
He laughed. ‘I’m the main pilot,’ he said.
He told me about his job. Listening to most people talk about their careers is tedious, but he was different. He spoke with sincerity. He talked about his training in Europe, and the first inevitable time that he flew alone. His hands reached for controls in the space between us, and when the disco lights hit them I could see small muscles shifting, just beneath the skin. It made you a drifter, he said, but a rich one. In those early years, he had lived in a state of anxiety, thinking always of the next landing, adrenaline pulsing through his body in the hotel beds. Now, he was arrogant enough to sleep well.
‘The main pilot,’ he said, still laughing. ‘So. Where next?’
We danced for a short time, but we were older than the bodies around us, and neither of us was drunk enough. I was fascinated by a group of girls beside me, their limbs careening together. They wore a variation of the same, skin-slick dress, and laughed as one many-headed creature. Watching them, I touched the tired skin at my throat and at the corners of my eyes. The pilot was behind me, with his fingers slotted between my ribs.
‘You can come to my hotel,’ I said.
‘I fly back tomorrow. I can’t stay.’
‘That’s fine.’
‘I didn’t want you to be disappointed. Sometimes—’
‘I won’t be disappointed.’
It had been raining, as the driver promised. The streets were shining and quieter, and neon floated in the puddles. There were only taxis left on the roads, but none of them were stopping; we needed a busier junction. I watched the lights of the city slide over his face, and took his hand. ‘There are things that I need,’ I said. ‘To make it worth my while.’
‘Really,’ he said. He had turned away from me, looking for a car, but I saw his jaw lift, and I knew that he was smiling.
In my room, I opened the minibar for drinks, but he stopped me, and sat down on the bed. I removed my dress and peeled my underwear to the floor, then knelt down before him. He surveyed me, nonchalant, just as I had hoped that he would.
‘I want you to humiliate me,’ I said.
He swallowed.
‘You see,’ I said, ‘it needs to hurt.’
His fingers were twitching. I felt the familiar twinge in my cunt, like a new pulse. I arranged myself on the bed beside him, stomach down, with my head resting on my arms. He stood, came to me, with plans on his face. The turndown service had taken place, I saw, and there were chocolates on the pillow.