I’m sorry, I said inside my head.
‘Don’t cry,’ she said. ‘You’re safe now. You’re going to be all right.’ She placed her hand over mine. I was aware of its weight, its heat. ‘They’ll never find us here. It’s too rundown, too overgrown. There are too many rooms. They’ll lose interest. I know what they’re like.’
That’s not what I’m frightened of, I said inside my head.
She couldn’t hear a thing, of course, and yet she held herself quite still as she looked at me, and her look didn’t waver, not for a moment. She didn’t even seem to blink. She had lines in the thin skin below her eyes, which made me think that she had slept too little in her life, or seen too much. ‘You really don’t recognise me, do you?’ She tucked a strand of her bracken-coloured hair behind her ear. ‘Well, maybe it’s no wonder,’ she added, half to herself.
Faint cries reached me from outside. The window was a mouth belonging to someone in great pain.
‘Listen to me,’ the girl said.
I was receiving images of mud and roots, a clearing in the woods, and all from ground-level, as if my face had been forced sideways into the dirt. Men stood round me, a boy too. Thick fingers held his shoulder. A dog panted in my ear, its breathing coarse and hot. Far above me, out of reach, I saw a tree’s branches shifting against a darkening sky, and it was beautiful up there, and quiet, a kind of paradise. I was seeing through the eyes of one of my companions, a person was calling out to me, and there was nothing I could do.
‘Listen,’ the girl said.
And she began to speak to me. She had been with me all along, she said. She had made her share of mistakes. She had been too slow sometimes, too indecisive, which was only to be expected, perhaps, and once or twice she had lost me altogether. But when I slipped just now. When I fell. That was her. She’d pushed me.
What are you saying? I said inside my head.
There had been someone right behind me, she told me. One of them. I shouldn’t worry, though. Everything would be fine now. She was going to take me home. That was why she had appeared. That was what she did.
I still didn’t understand.
Later, she withdrew into the middle of the room, an elbow cupped in the palm of one hand, the fingers curled against her chin. She needed to go out for supplies, she said. I would have to stay put. I wasn’t to leave the room, not under any circumstances. She moved towards a second door, which I hadn’t noticed until that moment. Still sitting on the ground, I drew my knees up to my chest, then laid my forearms over them and lowered my head.
‘That’s right,’ she said. ‘You rest for a while.’
The door closed behind her. Her footsteps receded.
As soon as she had gone, I began to doubt her existence. She seemed so convenient — too good to be true. Had I invented a saviour for myself? Was the only kindness imaginary?
Dusk crept into the room as though it, too, were seeking refuge.
The last of the light picked out a cobweb, its fragile hammock slung high up in one corner. The smell of earth grew stronger, earth that had never seen the sun.
When I finally heard noises, I flattened myself against the wall, expecting men with weapons. The door opened. The girl backed into the room. She had a rucksack over her shoulder, and she was dragging some lengths of material. Velvet, she said. She thought they might have been curtains. She had found a few hessian sacks as well. If we used the sacks as a kind of mattress, she said, we could pull the curtains over us like blankets and it might just be enough to keep us warm. She was sorry she’d been so long. She hoped I hadn’t worried.
While I arranged the bedding on the floor, she opened her rucksack and unpacked a wedge of cheese and a loaf of bread with a jagged crust. There was also a brown-paper bag filled with apples, some pickled onions in a jar and a flask of wine shaped like a teardrop. We could not risk a candle, she said. Someone might see it from outside. We made do with the dim glow that filtered through the window, starlight reflecting off the snow.
She watched as I washed the food down with gulps of rough red wine.
‘Good,’ she said. ‘That’s good.’
After we had eaten, she wrapped up the rest of the food and put it in her rucksack, which she hung on a nail behind the door. Undoing my boots, I climbed into the bed and lay down on my side, one hand beneath my cheek. I was still receiving pictures. They belonged to the operating theatre or the mortuary, the bloodshed casual, plenteous. My whole body flinched each time they came.
She gave me something she called dwale. She kept it in a small glass bottle that she wore on a cord around her neck. The liquid tasted of alcohol and stale herbs. It would help to calm me, she said. I watched her settle beside me, on her back.
Night had filled the room. The darkness of her face against the lesser darkness of the air. Her even breathing. A silence had descended, a silence that didn’t necessarily mean peace. Through the window came the smell of snow. Clean, vaguely metallic. Like stainless steel.
My mouth had dried up. I had no spit.
Though the cries had stopped, I could still hear them.
I was exhausted, and yet I couldn’t seem to sleep — or if I did drift off for a while I was always on the verge of witnessing some terrible atrocity, violence the like of which I had never imagined before, let alone encountered. In my dreams people kept telling me not to look. If I didn’t look, they told me, I would be all right. But I couldn’t help looking. There was a part of me that was inquisitive, perhaps, or weak-willed, or even missing altogether. I was the woman who became a pillar of salt. The warrior who turned to stone.
All night she lay beside me, and I drew comfort from the warmth and nearness of her body. When the cold of the floor rose up through the layers of sacking, I pressed myself against her, the backs of her thighs on my lap, her hair in my mouth. She didn’t seem to mind. As for me, I was used to sleeping next to strangers. I’d been doing it for weeks.
At some point she realised I was still awake and started telling me a story.
‘The night you were taken from your family,’ she said, ‘was the night I came into the world.’
I stared at her, wondering how she knew that, but she didn’t notice. She was looking at the ceiling, her profile showing as the finest of silver lines.
She had been born on a houseboat, which was where her parents had lived back then. Her father worked as a lock-keeper. At midnight, when she was five hours old, she had opened her eyes for the first time. It had been snowing all evening.
It was raining where I was, I said inside my head.
Her mother wrapped her in a shawl and held her up to the window. She had watched the snowflakes come showering out of the sky like white flowers, snowflakes landing on the canal and vanishing. She had no memories of that night — her parents had told her about it later, when she was older — but she sometimes wondered whether that was where it all began.
Where what began? I said inside my head.
The first time it happened, she had been standing on the towpath. She remembered the warm air on her bare arms, the drowsy sound of bees humming. It must have been summer. She couldn’t have been more than four or five. A dandelion floated out over the still green water. She had only stared at the delicate, almost transparent ball of seeds for a few moments, but when she returned to herself again she was standing on the other side of the canal. She had a tickle in her nose, as if she might be about to sneeze, and both her feet were wet. She began to cry. Her father appeared on the deck of the houseboat, his face the colour of a peeled apple. How did you get over there, Odell? She had no words for what she’d done.