When he had left, I ordered room service, and I thought about JP. It was as though he had been waiting for my attention all day, patient and just out of view. One more drink, and I might have called him. I had his work number, which he always answered. I could have been distressed at Mother’s death, alone in Manchester, and with no one else to turn to. ‘And I’ll be in London next week,’ I would say, as an afterthought. ‘Maybe even longer.’
I had heard that he lived in the suburbs now, with a new girlfriend and a small dog. ‘Or a small girlfriend and a new dog,’ Olivia had said. ‘I don’t recall.’ I thought about the day that he left our flat. I had expected that he would rent a van or ask a friend for help, but he fit his belongings into two suitcases and a series of cardboard boxes, and waited on the street for his cab. It was raining, but he refused to come back in, as if the proximity would have made him change his mind. It wouldn’t. There was nothing that either of us could have done to change things. I pulled my legs up to my chest and felt the scars on my knee, the skin smoother there. Then I touched the scars from the other surgeries. My fingers followed their familiar route. The scars were immaculate; in dim light, you couldn’t see them. When I had pointed them out to JP, he was uninterested: ‘I never even noticed them,’ he said, and I liked him all the more for that. No, there was nothing that either of us could have done. To think of something else, I wondered if Evie’s party was over. It was late, and later still where she was. I turned off my light and set an alarm for breakfast.
‘Evie,’ I said. ‘Today’s the day.’
The great expanse of the morning extended ahead of us, flat and barren. I had lived with the strange pain inside of me for many weeks by then, but today it felt worse; the blood smelt different. Then again: it was hard to distinguish that pain from the anticipation, which writhed in my gut like beasts breaking from eggs.
I tested the handcuffs, as I had done every day since Father’s mistake. My left hand slipped through, but my right caught just beneath the knuckles. ‘Is it warmer today?’ I asked. I tried again, but it seemed harder still. My fingers were swelling with the effort. I had another idea: what Ethan, who had once loved to read about the Wild West, would have called a last chance saloon. But this idea was irreversible, and if Father visited us before lunch, I needed to be in chains. I would have to wait.
I listened to Father awaken. His footsteps lumbered slowly down the stairs, and I wondered if we had made a mistake. Perhaps it should be now. Then he was in the kitchen, and I heard the murmurs of early conversation, words interspersed with breakfast and contemplation, and probably some silent prayer. I had long abandoned Father’s God, but still I closed my eyes, and prayed to older, wilder deities. I prayed for a while.
I woke again in the middle of the morning. I had been in a dense, dark place, just beneath the surface of consciousness. Cutlery clattered in the kitchen. The smell of Mother’s baking padded up the stairs and curled on the floor of our room. There were a few scant strings of saliva in my mouth. ‘Your first meal out,’ I said to Evie; this was a discussion which usually escalated fast.
‘Tea at the Ritz?’ I asked. ‘Or the Greek tavern?’
She tucked her legs closer to her chest and coughed, saying nothing, and I noticed the strange appearance of her feet, oversized at the end of each skeletal shin, like the shoes of a clown.
I had learnt not to imagine my parents eating, but this would be the last day, and so I allowed it. They sat hand in hand at the kitchen table. Noah surveyed them blankly from his chair. Mother had made an apple pie, and she stood to slice it. The top was golden, and brushed with sugar, and there were soft dimples in the crust where the fruit had tried to bubble through. The knife caught on the pastry top, and Mother pressed harder. When she broke through, steam and the smell of hot fruit rose around the table. She cut Father’s slice, and served it on a warm plate, and before she helped herself she watched him eating. The crisp pastry and its viscous filling moving around his mouth. She feasted on his pleasure.
That day they had a long lunch, and Noah wouldn’t settle. It was the middle of winter, I guessed, and by the time the living room door clicked closed, the light through the cardboard was dimming. The house was quiet.
‘OK,’ I said. ‘OK.’
Before I could think any more about it, I pulled the chains taut.
My left hand contorted through the metal and came free. Still my right hand was too swollen to squeeze through, however hard I pressed my thumb into my palm.
Last chance saloon.
‘Look away,’ I said to Evie; even after all this time, there were some degradations which I didn’t want to share.
When Delilah was nine or ten, she forced Mother’s wedding ring onto her thumb, and it became stuck. Delilah was rarely in trouble, and I was delighted. I sat in the hallway, at the top of the stairs, and watched events unfold in the bathroom. Delilah was sitting on the edge of the bath, in tears, and Mother was kneeling before her, running a damp bar of soap between her fingers. With disappointing efficiency, the ring slid over Delilah’s knuckle and landed with a tinny chime on the bathroom floor.
I pulled my hand through the metal, right to the sticking point, and started to twist it from side to side. There was already an indentation left from the morning’s efforts; the skin there was bruised and close to breaking. I bit down on the sheet and moved faster. Unlike Delilah, I didn’t intend to cry. When the skin split, my hand, black-red and wet, grinded through.
I laughed and cradled my arm to my chest. Evie’s eyes were frightened, but she smiled, and gave me a thumb-up. I crouched on my bed and reached out into the Territory, searching with my good hand for something hard enough to break glass. My fingers passed through warm, damp patches, and things that seemed to move against them. I recoiled, and swallowed, and kept searching. Old food and small, rotting shoes, and mould on the pages of our childhood Bibles. Everything soft and useless.
Evie pointed, and I froze, expecting Father at the door. She shook her head and pointed again, and I followed her eyes beneath my bed. Underneath it – my whole arm shaking – my fingers closed around something hard. It was a wooden stake, grubby with old blood and its time in the Territory. I looked at it for a moment, remembering why it was there.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Yes. Perfect.’
I stood up, unsteady, and shuffled to the window. Father had put little effort into securing the cardboard, and the tape which sealed it had started to decay. I eased the last few pieces away, bit by bit, until I was holding the board. ‘Ready,’ I said, and set it down onto the floor. Light howled into the room. Evie buried her face in her arms. I couldn’t turn around and see the room lit by the day. It was time to go. I crossed the Territory; after all of our navigation, it was just three short footsteps to reach Evie’s bed. I took her hand, as I had when we slept in the same bed in the years before, when things hadn’t been so bad. She was still motionless: now I could see her spine and the exposed parts of her scalp, and how each breath was a little labour. I knew that once I broke the window, the seconds – our scant seconds, which we had spent so many months planning – would begin to pass.
‘I will come back for you,’ I said. ‘Evie?’
Her hand fluttered in mine.