‘I know Amber said those terrible things,’ said Sorcha, her hair twisting in her hand, ‘but she didn’t mean them.’
‘Why would she say them, then?’ I asked.
Sorcha twitched out a little distressed shrug. ‘It’s just showing off that she’s not scared – but it is scary, you know?’
Her gaze sought my own.
‘Yes. It’s scary.’
‘I mean, everyone’s been saying Katie ran away, but what if… what if she didn’t? What if something has happened to her and nobody is looking for her?’
‘Who told you no one’s looking for her?’ I asked, trying to sound calm, but my spine chilled with a frisson of alarm. Only Ben and I had been in the office when the policeman had arrived to say that they were investigating the possibility that Katie had left willingly due to trouble at home and that we could scale down the security measures the governors had put into place.
Sorcha shrugged. ‘Isn’t it obvious? They stopped coming around asking questions. She’s not in the news any more.’ She swiped at her face. ‘It just… terrifies me that she could be out there and nobody is looking for her.’ She glanced up at me, her eyes filled with the heartbreaking seriousness that only children can possess.
‘Yes,’ I said, and with real feeling. ‘It terrifies me, too.’
I was writing a reply to an email from a girl who was convinced she was pregnant as a consequence of wearing her boyfriend’s underwear. It was quite amazing, the number of letters I received in this vein. It’s like the Internet never happened, though it may be that my correspondents are clever enough in their own way: Internet searches can be traced. Can I get pregnant from a toilet seat, a dirty towel, if I don’t have an orgasm, if it’s my first time? Am I safe if I drink a bottle of gin and sit in a scalding hot bath afterwards? If I take a contraceptive pill beforehand?
Am I safe?
These letters depress me immeasurably for all the obvious reasons.
All of these prepubescents and their endless terror of pregnancy. But I suppose I can see it. Social stigma, tearful parents, fleeing boyfriends, finally being shunted into a council rat trap with a screaming incomprehensible little monster, their frustration aggravated as opposed to palliated by the odd benefit payment.
Maybe if we all, men too, looked after everyone’s kids then I wouldn’t feel like I do, and they wouldn’t feel like they do – an idealistic thought, I acknowledge, but it keeps recurring.
‘The whole reason you want kids,’ I said out loud to myself, in the mistaken belief that this will make me take what I am saying more seriously, ‘is so you can make it up to yourself for having such a lousy childhood. And that’s selfish.’ Maybe so. Maybe. Well, no maybe about it, really. It’s not some deep-seated instinct. Just a psychological gratification, sharpened by the fact that I can’t have children.
I looked at the clock. It was already 3 a.m. I hit Send on the email, CCing in my private work account. Then I encrypted the work file, turned the light off and headed upstairs to bed.
I fell asleep straight away.
I dreamed of Bethan Avery.
In my dream I was lost in a maze, a dread-haunted Demeter searching for her Persephone.
There were corridors everywhere – a hospital that looked exactly like Addenbrooke’s – vast, sprawling, a lino-floored labyrinth. There is a monster in the centre, I understand in my own dream logic, a minotaur that is always searching for me.
The place was full of bustling faceless figures. None of them seemed to pay me the slightest attention as I drifted along, my quest offering no real impetus, instead just a woolly sense of foreboding. If I glanced from side to side I could see strange things through the windows to the wards – doctors and nurses slithered in and out of their uniforms as though shedding skins, and open doors breathed, slow and deep, as if nameless things slept behind them.
‘I don’t know where we are,’ I told a young woman who confronted me in the corridor, arms folded.
‘I know.’
‘I’m looking for Bethan Avery.’
She glared back at me, dark eyes bright in their surrounding thicket of clumpy mascara, her peroxide blonde hair a messy halo around her head, and for a nightmare instant I thought she would hiss at me like a serpent.
‘The world passeth away and the lust thereof,’ she answered. And then she let out a single mirthless bark of a laugh, and there was something familiar about it.
There was something familiar about her.
‘Please,’ I said.
She frowned. ‘I don’t know where she is,’ she said, tapping her sharp teeth with her pen. I thought this terribly unhygienic, even by dream standards, but held my peace, tantalized by the possibility of a forthcoming clue. ‘Why are you asking me about Bethan Avery anyway?’ she snapped, her mood changing, brittle with malice, with fear. ‘Who are you?’
And though I had been offered no violence, when I awoke I was shaking, like a leaf in a storm.
I lay there on my back in my lonely bed for a long time, meaninglessly following the twitching shadows of the tree branches that the streetlights cast on to my ceiling.
Now I was awake I understood that I had indeed known that girl, but had not thought of her for years and years.
Angelique.
After that, sleep was a lost cause.
9
Katie thinks that somewhere in the house above she can hear the doorbell ring. It’s a deep sonorous chiming, and it plays in several rooms at once, through some kind of intercom system. She presses her throbbing, bruised ear against the drainage pipe, where it stands proud from the cool stone, and listens. Her walls are lined with decaying soundproofing material, but the exposed pipes carry vibrations and voices down to her, here in her prison.
As she recognizes the doorbell, tinny and faint, for what it is, alarm, confusion and a dart of incredulous hope pass through her, each in quick succession.
In all the time she has been here, she has never heard anybody come to the door before.
She listens intently. He must answer it, surely; she knows he is up there, as she heard him walking over the trapdoor just a few minutes earlier, his heavy tread smothered by the covering rug.
Within her breast she feels a tightening dread, a profound nausea. She faces a choice, one with possibly terrible consequences. She has to take a risk. Who knows if she’ll live long enough for another such opportunity?
The chimes sound out again, and the cold rusty metal scratches at her sore ear.
But there is only a perfect silence in reply, like a held breath.
Perhaps about sixty seconds later, the phone rings. It’s the house phone, as it is louder than any mobile would be and, like the doorbell, it carries through several rooms and down the pipes, down to her – it’s the ghost of a phone call.
She has only ever seen a couple of rooms in the house other than the big living room, and those in snatches, when she was first brought here, kicking and biting against her gag, her leggings soaked where she had wet herself in terror, the hood over her head having fallen askew. He had stunk of stale cooking and sweat, the house of mould and dust. The rooms were big, wood-panelled, with gigantic stone fireplaces and antique ornaments. This and the intercom make her think that it’s a big house, the sort of place that should have servants, but for all of his talk of gangs, she has only ever seen him here.
The phone rings and rings, and then stops. Then it rings again.
Katie has been trying, not very successfully, to manage her hope. You need hope to survive – she knows this, instinctively, but she also knows that to allow yourself hope is to invite her twin, despair. For instance, she could believe, if she let herself, that this determined assault by the outside world on the house after so many weeks of silence was a sign that they had tracked her down, thought to look for her here. Police and scientists and clever, driven detectives in long coats had been pounding beats, questioning suspects and viewing CCTV until they found something that had led them to the door of this house.