I watched Daddy as I had watched Cathy.
I wondered if he had come back for us and if that was why he had been found. I thought on what Vivien had said. And on what Ewart had intimated.
There was quiet from the other room. A silence that was unnerving. I cursed myself for being such a coward.
Then a whole lot of waiting. Mr Price leaned on the counter and he watched Daddy as he tried to keep his eyes open.
Then he came back and he stuck his blade into the softer place beneath Daddy’s left kneecap. And then his right. Long, red socks. Price returned to the counter.
Tom’s eyes were wide open now. It seemed as if he could not blink at all. Everything about his countenance was dry, parched, and guarded. His eyes were open wide but his mouth was shut tight. His lips were white: the outermost, cell-thin layer of skin had died and crumbled while we had been standing here. If he smiled the dead skin would crack. If he licked his lips, the dead skin would form a pallid, sticky paste.
Blood was pooling on the floor at Daddy’s feet.
The door swung open.
My sister cast a long shadow. It was heavy, the colour of charcoal, the kind of shadow that can only be cast by fire. It flickered and spat. Its source, held in Cathy’s left hand, had been hidden behind the door frame. She pulled it into view: a rag, doused in oil, tied around a bed post that she had pulled clean off its frame. Looped over her wrist was the wire handle of a tin bucket that swung dully as she moved her arm. It was filled with oil, and but a precarious two feet from the flaming torch.
In her right hand she held a shotgun, its butt locked to her side by her elbow, two thin fingers resting on its trigger.
Her hands and arms were coated with a thick layer of blood. Not her own. It was deepest red at her thumbs and fingertips, and lightest and brightest as it moved up her forearms.
It was as if she had plunged her limbs deep into that man’s guts.
I imagined him stretched out on the bed exhibiting a rough, gaping, bloody hole.
I could not imagine how she had done it.
She stepped into the room. She was still naked. She had found the bucket, the oil, the shotgun. She had not stopped to clothe herself.
And she shone. She had poured oil onto her own skin, and over her head onto her face and her thick, now slicked, black hair.
The man holding me loosened his grip. He recoiled like a spider from the light. I took my chance and leapt to the other side of the room, away from Mr Price, his surviving son, and his men. I took a place between Daddy, bloody, pinned to the oak board, and Cathy, her back as straight as the two barrels she pointed at Mr Price’s breast.
The scene had changed: the tempo, the climate, the aspect. The presence of the flickering flame shifted the saturation. Reds were now hot. Blues became muddy. Whites took on a tempered orange sheen. The skin of men’s faces, pulled back in dismay, tarnished and bruised in the new shadows. The slate tiles rippled between matte and satin like a frozen-thawed-refrozen layer of black ice.
‘One of you will untie my father,’ she said, simply.
There was silence. Nobody moved.
‘She doesn’t have the first idea how to use one of those,’ said a squat, bald man who had not spoken before.
Cathy shot him.
At that range the shrapnel had little time to spray. The full cartridge tore through his stomach and took out a cupboard door behind. The man dropped to the ground and shook a violent shake.
Her aim was natural. I expected no less.
Tom’s jeans darkened at his crotch as his piss spread. One of the men rattled the handle of the back door. It was locked. Cathy shot him. He too crumpled on the floor.
‘Stop!’ shouted Mr Price. ‘Tony, do as she asks.’
Tony was a tall man with faded tattoos the length of his long torso. He took the knife from his employer’s hand. He used it to cut through Daddy’s bonds, beginning at his ankles, then moving to his wrists. It was slow work. The knots were tight and the ropes were tough.
Free, Daddy fell away from the table top and shrunk against the back wall. Blood rubbed against the paintwork and soaked through to the plaster. Tony returned to his master’s side.
‘He’s already dead, Cathy,’ said Mr Price. ‘He’ll bleed out. There’s no helping him.’
‘I can see that.’
The torch was burning lower, closer to the bucket of oil.
The crowd quaked. Men shifted uneasily, dancing on the spot with a desire to run but with no chosen nor possible direction.
Keeping her eyes on Mr Price at all times, Cathy said quietly, only to me, ‘It’s your time to leave.’
I glanced at Daddy. He was fading fast, slipping between states.
I saw the door behind my sister, open, and from there just a few steps to the front door, then the outside.
I remembered what she had said to me earlier that evening. I remembered my promise.
In a single, smooth motion Cathy flung both bucket and torch into the air on a trajectory towards Mr Price.
As flame and oil converged at the height of their arc I slipped through the open door and threw myself out of the house into the cool evening air. Fire erupted behind me. I could hear it and feel it. I could see its luminous contours on the damp grass at my feet.
I ran. I ran and I ran. I ran through the night and noted nothing that I saw. Not the pools of water lying about the land, nor the dark storm clouds in the sky, nor the droplets of rain shooting sharp and fast, spitting at me then dripping down my face.
I ran as quickly as I could, as quickly as I had ever run before, through this landscape that I knew but did not in this moment see. I might have run for hours. I ran until I fell.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Smoke moved over the water. The shadows were long, thin teeth, and light curled around the trees, between trunks and crooked, clad branches. It made parchment of the leaves. It made dust of the morning dew. The water below shone brighter than the sky above and it illuminated the smoke from beneath like a vivid moon behind papyrus clouds.
There was murky water on my tongue. It flowed into my cheeks and out again and the taste of wet then drying earth lingered with each flushed mouthful. The pool padded against the left side of my face and entered my nostrils and eased down my throat. I sipped on dirt and tasted iron blood.
The fire had been built of many parts. It had been built of gas and light and sparks, of flames and ripples and currents. It had devoured damp air and sapless wood and engulfed a small pocket of the cool night. I had run a long way. I had stopped here and settled. I had stooped for water, any water I could find, and raised it to my lips with two cupped hands, trembling, and I had lain my head on the shore for a while, just for a while, and I had slept, it seems, and woken, before I had noted the place.
I could still smell the fire though I was far away. Resin from the burnt embers stuck at the back of my throat, from the rafters of the roof and the ash floorboards. And the sight of it, too, was stuck somewhere at the back of my head, behind my eyes, the sight of those curling, forked tongues licking familiar figures. And the sound of it still thick in my ears: a hiss, a groan, a beat, as beams bent and broke. My skull was full.
The smoke was mist, not smoke at all. It rose from the reservoir in the morning calor. The reservoir was five miles from the copse, perhaps nearer on a direct path, over hedges, ditches and planted fields. That was the route I had taken, I think. My course had been as straight as a train track. I had not swayed from side to side one bit, I think, though my steps had undulated as I had jumped over banks then down to the boggy parts to trudge through acrid organic tar, the aggregate sludge of every autumn rotting. Either the night had been caught with haze or it had been my memory that had reduced solid shapes to spectres. All was unknown, I recall, though I had trodden those tracks many times before. But the levels look different after dark, and the world is distinct for each individual, and I had been made new as I had walked and I had seen the land like it had been new too.